This reminds me of the father-son scenes in Zen and the Art and of Motorcycle Maintenance. The narrator—the father—reads Walden to his son, who is just at the edge of being able to understand it. That causes a lot of Q&A between father and son that the narrator initially finds annoying. But then he realizes that Walden reads better this way.

This undercurrent of anti-intellectualism has been around for a long time. I would just ignore the naysayers.

I have a similar feeling when it comes to my music collection, some of which includes rare recordings. I ripped everything and have it at my fingertips on my phone, computer, etc, but I often find that I’ve forgotten when I have. When I was younger, I kept it all on a shelf. Browsing one’s music collection (or a friend’s) was always a pleasant way to spend an evening socializing. With apps, that is all gone. I have recurring fantasies about building some kind of physical music player, with cartridges that one could insert into a “player”. The actual music would be stored centrally, but this would be more like a mnemonic device to make browsing more enjoyable. I could imagine a similar thing for ebooks.

Perhaps this is the case, but it is a great loss to civilization if true. The fact is that there are many ideas that take time and length to explain. Read any good scientific paper. These things are not fluff. As the author of a number of scientific papers (at least a couple of which I would humbly claim are good), it is difficult—sometimes even brutal—to fit in all the essential information while also making the paper accessible to _people in my own field_. Moreover, the experience of writing a paper has lead me to conclude over the years that _writing is thinking_. So what you’re advocating for is the outsourcing of thinking.

Sorry, no. Fuck that. I didn’t work hard all those years just so I could have a good salary and standard of living. Those are ancillary benefits. I did it because I love learning, because it excites me when I do something difficult, and most importantly, because I deeply identify as a person who is interested in the world.

The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible. It’s just not my style, man!

Despite being an avid reader, I did not enjoy all of the above. However, now that I am middle aged, I count myself fortunate that my public school teachers forced me to do it.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680124...

I too thought this for a long time. But after watching taxes on consumption basically be a non-starter in the US for a long time, I’m not so sure anymore. Gas taxes are also regressive, which means the people who feel it the most are the ones least able to pay it. Raising the gas tax while retaining one’s elected position is challenging in the US to say the least. In most places in the US, driving is not a luxury.

To be clear, I think we need to move off of fossil fuels to the greatest extent possible as soon as possible. For those with means, it is a great moral failing to continue to drive a gas guzzler and heat one’s home with fossil fuels when there are better affordable alternatives. I’ve been driving an EV for nearly four years; it is now not just more affordable than a gas powered vehicle, it is more convenient. For me, the cherry on the top is that I also do not pay for electricity, because I took advantage of the pre-Trump II era solar tax subsidy and built a massive one.

The tax break was good for me, and it’s a shame that is gone (I paid off that panel in 5 MONTHS with the help of the subsidy), but tax breaks really only help the relatively wealthy. We need an investment in infrastructure for the masses to break their dependence on fossil fuels. I’m not really sure what that is.

By the time I was in my 20s (in the early 2000s), the situation was totally different. The most ridiculous: sometime in 2009, JetBlue had a deal, announced on radio, that you could purchase unlimited flights for 3 months for only $500. As my fiancee had moved to the western US for her medical school residency program, this was a godsend. I visited her every weekend... I don't remember if I took a full 12 trips, but it was more than 10. I would leave Boston immediately after work on Friday and then take a redeye and arrive back in Boston at 7am on a Monday. I haven't seen a deal like that in a long time, and flying has increasingly gotten worse since that experience, but it still is relatively affordable compared to my high school years.

I also worked at a publishing company (for ~6 years) in the early 2000s. While you are right that the pros have some tricks to make the process easier, the fact remains that the process is not easy at all. Unlike in academic publishing, where nothing stands between the author and the reader, at a commercial publishing company (at least one of the majors), there are legions of people working behind the scenes. Editors communicate with authors; editorial assistants help the editors with fact-checking, drafts, basic organization and comprehensibility; copyeditors get all pedantic about formatting and word choice (sometimes resulting in arguments with authors that the editors need to smooth over); production departments that make the books look pretty, contain images whose copyrights are cleared and that can be legibly printed within a reasonable budget; graphic designers who develop house styles or even a custom style for a book and even original cover art; lawyers who negotiate copyrights for excerpts, images, and other ancillary materials; and on and on.

I know all this because I worked on a custom content management system for this company and in so doing I discovered that the process was incredibly complex. One of the major pet peeves of everybody involved was when an author thought they were doing anybody a favor by trying format things in Microsoft Word. Most of that information was thrown away and the real layout was done by people who thought in terms of widows, orphans, kerning, and leading (and so on). Once you know what all the people in a top publishing company do, the difference between an amateur publication and a professional one becomes immediately apparent. So I don't fault the author for getting a bit technical. The SE approach sounds like an epic attempt to make a complicated subject at least somewhat approachable.

Working minimum wage jobs is demoralizing on multiple levels. The jobs are often physically exhausting (I unloaded trucks and stocked shelves among other things). But the worst part is that the entire system treats you with disdain. You walk away with the strong feeling that nobody gives a shit. I knew that I wanted and could have better things but many of my coworkers internalized a different message.

The first part of your response is informative, and I thought "interesting response." The second part is just nasty and I thought "wow, what a **." Do you want the poster to understand or do you just want to score points?

Indeed, in the real world, plenty of people organize to do formerly-skillful tasks together. I have not personally crafted a gear by hand, but I have built a house in a long-abandoned style with a group of people only using hand tools.

There _is_ a danger that society forgets how to do these things. During that house-building exercise, there were many tricks of the trade that, while likely documented somewhere in a book, would have been difficult to reproduce without seeing a demonstration. From the standpoint of “does it matter?” it depends on what you care about. We absolutely do not need cruck-framed houses with scribed joints. Modern construction is faster and cheaper and lasts long enough. But it would sadden me greatly if practices like this faded from memory, because it’s one of those things that makes you gasp “wow!” when you see it. And your appreciation only deepens when you try it yourself.