Hate Mail and the New Religious Wars in Tech

> Not one person likes to be wrong about the choices we make.

The "pain" of insecurity balances over-confidence to help us find locally-optimal decision points. Like with other types of pain, the usefulness of it in some situations can get misdirected and misused pretty easily now that we're out of the jungles and not interacting with each other face-to-face. The anonymity of the Internet is so different from early human encounters that we have a lot of trouble dealing with it.

> Just remember that all nearly all great discoveries stemmed from questioning what the majority took to be the truth

Then again, a lot of sheep die by straying from the herd and getting picked off by predators. Like most things, cutting the balance the right way and making the best decisions at the right time is really really hard.

If it were easy, lots of animals would be competing with us for dominance of the earth.

> Nah, the cure for this angst is not to care so much about whatever consumer electronics you're using.

I dunno. I see non-technical friends and relatives choose the wrong devices out of ignorance pretty regularly. They waste hours of their weeks fartzing with text messages that are much more difficult to type out, having trouble reading email from people they want to interact with, and spending lots of their hard earned money on other things like external cameras that are mostly unnecessary when you have a decent camera on your phone and learn how to use it properly.

I'm here with my in-laws this week and one of the problems I've noticed is that they paid for the lease of a really crummy wifi router from their ISP. The darned thing doesn't even let them Skype with their grandkids on their iPad unless they're in the same room. To compensate, they have to either go out and spend more of their fixed income on a new router or just not get the benefit of the technology that they've pretty much paid for (but bought the wrong one of).

Like most things in life, knowing when to spend the time and energy to care and when to just make due isn't an easy no-brainer.

What's so bad about replacing the phone every couple years? I'd rather these phone manufacturers moved things forward than worry too much about what the non early adopter crowd think. You don't have to update to ios6, nothing's forcing you too.

You write as though your phone came with some kind of guarantee it would support future software.

Just because you can't upgrade to iosX doesn't make what you have shite.

We end to judge people by our own standards, and exptect them to be like us. This is something I've been dealing with a lot, and have noticed other programmers dealing with it, too.

I always have a problem with smiling. I smile a lot, and am generally a happy person. People hate that. They want me to look down, be depressed, and generally be a party-pooper. But I just cant do it. Have even been called names a work because of that.

My daughter is also like that, and usually gets the same treament yours got. And I'd like to apologize for that lady. Don't let that get in the way of having a great time. Fact is, the most fun I have is when I'm out with my girls (wife and daughter) and we just start having fun with whatever is in front of us. Last time we went to fly kites I found two broken kites, and used both to build one. Everyone was looking a me like I'm a nutjob, and even made some comments. But you know what? I gave my daughter that kite and it was he highest flying kite in the whole park!

Like the internet says: "Haters gonna hate". To which I add: "Let them hate while I have a great time, mate."

:)

He detests Apple products because he feels that Apple users allow themselves to be defined by Apple through their purchasing decisions. So, he refuses to buy an Apple phone -- even going to ridiculous extents to exercise a non-Apple option -- ironically, allowing himself to be defined by Apple products!

If Apple goes left he will go right, if they go up he goes down; he is still deciding his tech choices based on Apple's choices, only he's navigating the whitespace where Apple fans navigate the blackspace. If he were truly free, he would simply choose the best phone for his needs and lifestyle. Instead he is as slavishly bound to Apple as the people he mocks.