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Passive aggressive is a super weird accusation here. Having read a ton of (and posted a few) "does anyone else" type responses generally, I fail to see why they

by jrm4 5y ago

Passive aggressive is a super weird accusation here. Having read a ton of (and posted a few) "does anyone else" type responses generally, I fail to see why they should be read as anything other genuine curiosity as well as conversation openers, perhaps to tweak said flow.

nickjj 5y ago
> perhaps to tweak said flow. Yeah, that was the goal of my opener. I'm happy with my set up but there's always "unknown unknowns". I use like 50 Vim plugins but never felt the urge to add more functionality to my shell because it feels great as is with just the 2 I mentioned. I was hoping maybe someone would suggest something really useful that I wasn't aware of.
toastercat 5y ago
Personally, I'm more peeved by the "am I the only one" framing.
- jrm4 5y ago
  But why? Again, not unreasonable to start a conversation like this? "It feels like a whole lot of people are doing something in way X, but I like way Y, which seems simpler and more obvious to me?"
xoa 5y ago
Upvoted this and all the others, including OP's sibling comment. I hope nobody downvotes anyone either way, and I should have put that at the end vs in order since it's just my own feeling on the phrase and it wasn't like this post in particular was in any way a particularly egregious example, just one of those straws on the camel's back that happened to get to me. Apologies to nickjj. But I don't agree with you that the phrase can't be read to have those connotations in general, and it feels like it's been becoming more frequent. >"Am I the only one out of billions of humans who does a obviously pretty common thing" (like sticking to default values which by definition are default because whomever set them thought they were a decent starting place) kind of feels irritating the more I see it vs some sort of >"Does the effort in setting this up and number of moving parts/dependencies it adds really justify itself, or is it more for fun/learning? I'm quite satisfied with my [vanilla+ setup], what does this bring to the table and at what point is it worth sinking more into these tools if ever?" or even >"Though this and similar projects are interesting I think most including myself are better served staying as close to defaults as possible." 100% though: this may all be subjective subculture and learning. I can see how it could be treated as an innocent opening phrase, just a form without any deeper meaning. It rubs me the wrong way though anyway, there is a defensiveness about it. Like even, what if you were the only one? So what? You can still be right for yourself anyway. How many other people are that way or not seems both peripheral and distracting (bringing in social pressure) from the meat of it. Anyway, Sunday morning HN procrastinating from fighting with getting some crufty old infrastructure running on a new vm platform! Very genuine apologies as well that picking on that nit clearly irritated a bunch of other people in turn! There was nothing wrong with the question content, it's certainly something I've grappled with and not always well in either direction. In the past I've spent way too much time diving deep into things that I barely ever used later, or conversely cruising along for years without fully learning a tool that could have saved me enormous time by automating stuff I did manually. I know there is advice along the lines of "if you find yourself doing this tiresome manual task for the Nth time now it's time to figure out how to automate it" or even tools that themselves track your usage like the open source ActivityWatch [0]. Run that for a year and see where your time is going. I never learned or did any of that early on though and still struggle with the tradeoffs there. ---- 0: https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch/ https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch/

by jrm4 5y ago

nickjj 5y ago

> perhaps to tweak said flow. Yeah, that was the goal of my opener. I'm happy with my set up but there's always "unknown unknowns". I use like 50 Vim plugins but never felt the urge to add more functionality to my shell because it feels great as is with just the 2 I mentioned. I was hoping maybe someone would suggest something really useful that I wasn't aware of.

toastercat 5y ago

Personally, I'm more peeved by the "am I the only one" framing.

jrm4 5y ago
But why? Again, not unreasonable to start a conversation like this? "It feels like a whole lot of people are doing something in way X, but I like way Y, which seems simpler and more obvious to me?"

xoa 5y ago

Upvoted this and all the others, including OP's sibling comment. I hope nobody downvotes anyone either way, and I should have put that at the end vs in order since it's just my own feeling on the phrase and it wasn't like this post in particular was in any way a particularly egregious example, just one of those straws on the camel's back that happened to get to me. Apologies to nickjj. But I don't agree with you that the phrase can't be read to have those connotations in general, and it feels like it's been becoming more frequent. >"Am I the only one out of billions of humans who does a obviously pretty common thing" (like sticking to default values which by definition are default because whomever set them thought they were a decent starting place) kind of feels irritating the more I see it vs some sort of >"Does the effort in setting this up and number of moving parts/dependencies it adds really justify itself, or is it more for fun/learning? I'm quite satisfied with my [vanilla+ setup], what does this bring to the table and at what point is it worth sinking more into these tools if ever?" or even >"Though this and similar projects are interesting I think most including myself are better served staying as close to defaults as possible." 100% though: this may all be subjective subculture and learning. I can see how it could be treated as an innocent opening phrase, just a form without any deeper meaning. It rubs me the wrong way though anyway, there is a defensiveness about it. Like even, what if you were the only one? So what? You can still be right for yourself anyway. How many other people are that way or not seems both peripheral and distracting (bringing in social pressure) from the meat of it. Anyway, Sunday morning HN procrastinating from fighting with getting some crufty old infrastructure running on a new vm platform! Very genuine apologies as well that picking on that nit clearly irritated a bunch of other people in turn! There was nothing wrong with the question content, it's certainly something I've grappled with and not always well in either direction. In the past I've spent way too much time diving deep into things that I barely ever used later, or conversely cruising along for years without fully learning a tool that could have saved me enormous time by automating stuff I did manually. I know there is advice along the lines of "if you find yourself doing this tiresome manual task for the Nth time now it's time to figure out how to automate it" or even tools that themselves track your usage like the open source ActivityWatch [0]. Run that for a year and see where your time is going. I never learned or did any of that early on though and still struggle with the tradeoffs there. ---- 0: https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch/ https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch/