> Perhaps not being able to deal with "yak shaving" is a sign of cognitive decline, but because the truth hurts, we say we don't have time for such things (e.g.

> Perhaps not being able to deal with "yak shaving" is a sign of cognitive decline, but because the truth hurts, we say we don't have time for such things (e.g., I have no time to recompile a kernel! I just want a computer that works, give me a Mac!). In our youth, complexity was fun because we were able to takle it easily. My first computer ran Windows XP. I was 12 years old at the time and was curious about learning how it worked. I messed around, broke the install, fixed it by using the rescue floppy. From my mistakes I learned quite a bit, as one tends to do. About 6 years later, when I started using Linux and FreeBSD, once again I messed around a lot in order to learn about these operating systems and how things worked. And once again I learned from the mistakes that I made. I have now been running Linux and FreeBSD almost exclusively for the past 10 years, and I will keep using these OSes for as long into the future as I can imagine, but... When my systems break these days, it’s a chore. Because when something broke back when I was new to these things, it was an opportunity for learning. But if I render my system unbootable due to an oversight during system upgrade for example, there is really nothing new to learn from that anymore. And that is what it boils down to for me, and why certain things made sense to spend time on before, whereas now those same things don’t. I am willing to put in a lot of hours on something that will either earn me the right amount of money, teach me something new or better yet, both, but really it was always like that — I put in the time on certain things then that I won’t today because back then I still needed to learn about that thing.