I like CDs. I just don't listen to music on physical media enough to really justify having a dedicated setup anymore.
My boss, on the other hand, collects the damn things. He's got an entire large bookshelf filled with vintage CD players...
To me, vinyl is a collectible, or at least, a way to show "yes I appreciate this music and want to show off that I enjoy it". If I like an artist/album enough, I'll buy the vinyl if I can. But it usually just sits on the shelf looking pretty. I got lucky and my player (nothing special but it works so long as you have a good cartridge) was from my dad. When I actually listen to said album, it's usually on my phone over bluetooth (earbuds or in the car), or even if I'm listening on the "hi fi" it's streaming.
Not to say that I never play albums on the turntable, it's just not that often.
Now I feel old. I remember the first time I saw and heard a Compact Disc. It was a rainbow colored object straight from the future. It was magical, the whole family gathered around the little boom box like thing playing some classical music CD.
Also, I hope your boss doesn't actually listen to any CD player built before about the mid 00's or so. Maybe mid-90s if you're talking mega-bucks (at the time) like a Mark Levinson or Theta Digital. But advances in DACs in the last ~20 years made everything prior very obsolete. Nowadays you can get commodity chips in the single digit dollar range that are for all intents and purposes faultless.
It's been several years but I also had the pleasure of meeting Rusty down at the studio once. My dad has now made it a habit; he's been to SF for work and pleasure four or five times now, and met up with him each time, I believe.
I have been listening to Soma for at least 15 years. Definitely a great place to have bookmarked.
I've been listening since 2004. Every 4 or 5 years I'll realize how much it's been a part of my life through thick and thin, and write him a gushing email. He always has the grace to reply.
> I'm not sure what this "ton of system administrators that don't understand it" is having difficulty with.
"It's different" is the primary thing I hear. I'm a network guy and I learned rudimentary v6 in college ten years ago. I'll be the first to admit I don't know as much as I should, but give me a day and a good resource and I can easily be back up to speed.
My boss on the other hand....."man, it's just so complicated, I hope we never change".
There are a lot of things that contribute to learned helplessness, but in my opinion one underrated cause (for computers) is lack of security.
Particularly with touchscreens, it's really easy to break settings or delete something if you're doing something fiddly. I think people underestimate how powerful concepts like the recycling bin are, history, etc... in making people feel a bit more confident about experimenting.
How to translate that stuff to completely computer-illiterate people is a big challenge. But my experience is that when people feel like it's really easy to revert mistakes, they tend to experiment more and they tend to be bolder about trying to solve their own problems. And in the opposite direction, as they learn more that computers are dangerous even in specific areas, that can bleed over into other contexts and make them scared of trying things in other programs and with other devices.
When I see people who aren't willing to try and figure out what a URL bar is or who are scared to move files around or organize a directory or bookmarks, I sometimes wonder what the rest of their computer looks like and if they're channeling anxieties with other programs.
Of course, that's only one aspect of the problem though, it's an issue with multiple causes.
> Particularly with touchscreens, it's really easy to break settings or delete something if you're doing something fiddly.
I think this is correct. Turning the steering wheel never randomly creates a bunch of new problems for the user that they don't understand. It works the same way every time over the course of the user's entire life. I've probably made millions of turns of a steering wheel and all it's ever done is turn the wheels.
The "learned helplessness" here is on us, not the users.
> The "learned helplessness" here is on us, not the users.
I think the big problem here is everyone of the big players “giving up” and trying to obscure and abstract as much as possible rather than make things clear.
Most people understand a phone number +[country] (area) (number).
Basic URL parts like (http/https)://(server)/(address) is not that much more complicated, is it really?
Google and Apple have really set the trend here in making it feel more difficult for users. Things like “unified bar” and hiding the address are just two concrete examples in two decades of “making it easier”.
> Basic URL parts like (http/https)://(server)/(address) is not that much more complicated, is it really?
Yes. http[s]://www.facebook.com/my/profile?token=goes_here&other_params and http[s]://evil.co/facebook.com/my/profile?token=goes_here&other_params are very different things, but naïvely presented the visual weight is not on the important parts.
+1 800 555-1234 and +1 900 555-1234 are also very different things, with one being toll-free and the other being pay-per-call, and people seem to be able to understand that
A lot of people don’t, I didn’t even know that 900 means that. But ignoring that, you’re able to verify that the person on the other line almost certainly isn’t who you intended by just having them say anything, whereas evil.co might look literally identical to Facebook. There are security and performance issues that are totally invisible to you when you use http vs https, and the errors you get aren’t just a “that number you dialed is unavailable” but instead some arcane issue about SSL certificates or something, which you didn’t know even existed, whose error page is designed to make you feel literally unsafe. The length of a phone number in a given locality is generally constrained, whereas URIs can be extremely long and complicated, and the effects of a different URI or query parameter are unbounded and differ from website to website based on no consistent pattern, and on top of that as you’re navigating a site you don’t explicitly interact with the URL at all whatsoever, whereas with phone numbers the input pretty much ends the moment you connect your call.
> Turning the steering wheel never randomly creates a bunch of new problems for the user that they don't understand.
Having seen the kind of situations (untrained) drivers get themselves into while looking at a complete loss of how to proceed, I would like to vehemently disagree.
That's why most western countries have something that passes for "training" as an requirement to be allowed to drive.
No such thing with computers.
With this analogy I suppose an omnibar would be like a self-driving car? Or maybe just an automatic transmission?
I do think consistency is also an important part of interface design, so I don't think GP is wrong to bring it up as something that modern software often fails at, but the type of consistency they're talking about isn't what I'm talking about with safety to experiment.
For me, a better car analogy would be something like the fact that your radio controls can't mess with your brakes. You don't have to worry that if you change your radio station that your car suddenly won't start. This means that you probably don't feel nearly as worried about messing with those controls in an unfamiliar rental car. The entertainment system is never going to brick your car and make it impossible to drive (well, in most cars it can't).
----
That's still a kind of tortured analogy though, so I'll dispense with the analogies entirely and just talk technology. When I teach people how to use Git, some of the most important early commands I teach them after the basic data model are:
`git reflog`
`git reset <ref>`
`git rebase -i <ref>` (and importantly, I wire this up to something other than Vim)
I have observed anecdotally that people who have a good grasp of `git reflog` are much more likely to experiment with branching strategies, rebases, and merges, and are much more likely to come up with creative ways to solve their problems. Why? Because they're no longer scared of blowing up their entire repo.
I used to leave those more "complicated" commands out of early conversations with people because I felt like I would be dropping too many concepts on them too quickly, but without that kind of confidence that says "I can undo any Git operation, swap my head to any reference, and reorder, merge and customize any set of commits from any branch", people treated Git more like a set of arcane symbols and they were scared to ever experiment or try to extrapolate to solve their problems, even when their problems could be solved using commands they already knew.
Git could be a lot better about this stuff; the lesson I take is that I want to have very clear designations between dangerous and safe operations, and I want my interfaces to teach people where the undo key is first.
----
You can probably think of other Linux tools that demonstrate this issue as well. It took us a long time to get safety locks around `rm -rf /`. In some ways, the point of those safety locks isn't just to help protect the reckless people who do irresponsible things without thinking. It's also to give more confidence to people who are learning basic terminal commands/Bash that they're not going to accidentally mess up a pipe or regex expression and delete their entire hard drive if they try to experiment a little bit.
We can take that even a step further, one of the best things you can do if you're learning Linux is get a good, reliable hard drive clone pushing regularly to a backup. You'll be in a better position to learn how the low-level system works if you know in the back of your head that you can always just blow the entire thing a way and rewind back a few days whenever you want.
> This learned helplessness scares me a bit... Not knowing is one thing, refusing to take in any new knowledge is another.
As a matter of personal philosophy, I agree - but on the level of "empathy for users" this misses the mark pretty widely.
The 'steering wheel' analogy is not applicable (but funny!) because unlike computers, everyone who drives has been licensed so there's a baseline level of education that isn't there for computing. Also, most people (at least in the US) grew up around cars, so you expect a 20 year old and a 70 year old to grasp what a steering wheel is. But likely the people you are making fun of here did not grow up with computing. They are older folks to whom the computer was presented as a way to solve some specific problem (eg: a series of clicks so I can zoom with the grandkids) rather than a general platform that you perceive it as.
You can still say "well, there's a computer now in your life so you should learn about that" and again personally I agree, but - you gotta admit there are things in your life that you could go deeper on but you simply aren't comfortable or interested in doing so. For example, do you know the anatomy of every muscle in your body? Are you perfectly comfortable with public speaking? Are you able to articulate the nuances of policy difference between two local politicians running for office in your area? These are examples of things that you come in contact with on daily basis, and (if you are like most people) you probably did not go as deep in on as you could (and arguably should). Even if you happen to be good at these specific things you can get the larger point that people don't and can't go "deep" on everything they encounter. It may seem weird to you that to someone that thing is their computer, but those people may know things that you don't, also.
> Also, most people (at least in the US) grew up around cars, so you expect a 20 year old and a 70 year old to grasp what a steering wheel is.
For that matter, the steering wheel the 20 year old is using today is very similar to the steering wheel the 70 year old used 50 years ago. Nothing in computing has been so constant.
> For that matter, the steering wheel the 20 year old is using today is very similar to the steering wheel the 70 year old used 50 years ago. Nothing in computing has been so constant.
That's exactly right, the car industry has done a remarkable job maintaining interface compatibility for over a century despite massive implementation changes.
Someone who knew how to "hit the brakes" on a 1908 Model-T will be able to do it in my 2021 Toyota. Despite the fact that my car has regenerative breaking (and ABS and other things) which means that how the pedal does its thing is totally different.
Even the new additions over the basic interface feel pretty optional. EG, my car has radar cruise control but someone can drive the car for 10 years and not notice that button. If you want to drive my car the same way you drove the Model-T, you pretty much can.
Not to be pedantic, but the Model T has a very different control system than modern cars.
There are three pedals and a throttle pusher on the wheel. The brake is on the right, the middle pedal is reverse. To accelerate, you work a combination of left pedal to select gear, handbrake/clutch, and a pusher for throttle on the steering wheel.
You would need retraining to go from this to a modern car or vice versa.
You got me! I actually knew this but wanted to make my point. Technically my post is correct because I focused on the operation of the brake pedal specifically but it definitely doesn't stand to this level of scrutiny :)
It feels to me like they're scared to try, because they still might not get it, and then what does that say about them? But dammit, if my relatives just tried, even a little bit, things would be so much better.
It's true. What I don't get is the reluctance to seek out learning opportunities. They won't watch a video, attend a class, read a book, none of that. It's like picking up a hobby if you're computer illiterate. They spend all the money on the device and expect what exactly? Yet if they bought a DSLR they would know it's a hobby and they need to learn a thing or two. They'd invest in learning like people do with any hobby.
I guess hobby isn’t the best word. I suppose it could be a chore too. I have to learn all kinds of stuff to DIY pool maintenance. Either way, it’s an endeavor.
It's really because most adults don't have time to tinker like we did, being children and adolescents with computers. When I grew up in the windows xp era, I became the family tech support, and not because I was smart or anything. Just because I had time on my hands, being a child with little responsibilities compared to my parents, to go through the control panel and click every single button and option just to see what it did, so when something did go wrong I had some idea to guess where the fix was to be found. Honestly, I'm surprised I didn't mess things up more often. Fast forward to today, and there is a lot of common software that I struggle with like my parents did 20 years ago because I don't have the time to fiddle like I did 20 years ago. I can't do much of anything on windows anymore, after years of using macos and unix, that knowledge has left my brain and I don't have the time to get it all back.
As self-driving cars come closer to reality, I fear your hypothetical will eventually become a real conversation someone will have to unironically have.
Tech has gone to great lengths to convince people to be illiterate. "There's an app for that" was the worse form of handicap and users were heavily incentivized to seek premade solutions rather than trying to solve their own problems
I promise you it is younger people too. I train bank workers from freshly minted tellers to longtime officers, none of them can navigate to a URL unless it is a clickable hyperlink. The URL is one of the most foundational elements of internet usage, it is the way to get directly to where you want to go. Having a map is nice, but don't you need to know how to walk in order to get where you are going?
Heck, there have recently been articles about STEM students that do not know how to work with a basic file directory.
I've actually been hearing and interesting theory that the younger generation is becoming even more computer illiterate than the generation before them.
The younger generation was raised on iPads and iPhones where everything is easy to use and "just works". They've never had to do anything beyond tap the icon for the App they want.
Edit: Was going to talk about that same article about File directories.
And that's unironically a good thing. To poorly paraphrase Alan Kay, you know a certain piece of technology works when it gets out of the way and becomes second nature.
However we're now encountering one of those pesky questions that we never hear about in sci-fi because it's hard to solve and it's not fun for authors to write about: are we setting up future generations for failure by making technology too easy? And it's most likely "yes". I wonder out loud: are children not getting courses on how to use a desktop computer anymore like they used to in the 90s/2000s? It seems like it. Even if they never encounter having to browse a file system again until they graduate, the fact that it's at least introduced to them while their brains are still terrific sponges would be beneficial.
I've never had to do long division after ~6th grade, but given a few minutes of recall, I can get right back into it because of the rote learning I had.
This is true, the ease of use and proliferation of simplified and straightforward user interface conventions has had the adverse effect of making everyone born after 1998 practically unable to use a computer outside of the 4 major websites and apps.
I have witnessed this with younger people joining the company I work at. Most of them don't seem to have much of an idea how a computer works, why putting the internet between them and their deadlines might be bad or just can't figure out where their files are. I have to do a lot of hand holding for the first few months anyway.
> Heck, there have recently been articles about STEM students that do not know how to work with a basic file directory.
File directories, and the filesystem generally, confuse the hell out of the vast majority of computer users. We nerds forget this stuff because at age 12 we really gave a shit about it and took the time to internalize what it all means, and it's been second nature ever since, but most people haven't had the "a-ha" moment we did about it, so far back we've almost forgotten we needed an "a-ha" moment for something so "simple and obvious".
We get that this over here and that over there "are" the same thing, but that neither "is" the thing it's representing, which may also be represented entirely differently over in this other place. When we search in a file explorer window and it "becomes" something totally different, we get what's happened and that nothing's "gone anywhere". Normal people don't.
I feel like a big part of the problem is that back when computers were newly introduced to the world at large, there were actually good tutorials on how to use them.
Consider the Windows 3.1 interactive mouse tutorial/Windows tutorial. [0] This was designed for an age where both mice and Windows were relatively new and people didn't know how to use them, and it's one of the better designed tutorials out there, I think, allowing the user to interact with the tutorial and instantly see the results of their actions.
However, nowadays if you try to look up a tutorial on how to use a mouse, you're probably not going to find very much. The best I could find was hosted at gcfglobal.org [1], and explained the concepts and how to do things with a mouse, and has relevant interactive parts, but requires knowledge of how to scroll the page (which it does tell you how to do at the top, but there's only so much room there). There was also a set of pages called hosted at pbclibrary.org [2] which goes over the mouse basics and doesn't require scrolling before the concept is introduced, but it's somewhat outdated.
But those two were about it. The rest were mostly non-interactive videos. And in all these cases, discovery is a major problem - most of the time, the only way you're going to be able to get to those in the first place is through someone who already knows how to use a mouse.
We're all assuming that schools are teaching these basics. But what if they're not?
And it's limited to the systems we're exposed to. I grew up with DOS and then windows so I know file structure there no problem, but I'm still not comfortable with how Linux organizes things, and I haven't the faintest clue about Mac.
I think that the fact newer versions of popular OSes (Windows, Android) try hard and harder to hide the filesystem from the users - probably because "they won't understand". But in the long run, hiding it makes the problem even worse.
The transition to mobile computing devalued typing and greatly increased the attraction of icon grids.
There was some series of essays recently that I read (linked from HN maybe) that went into some details about the economic differences between search-based desktop computing and "juicy springboard of icons" mobile computing.
It isn't surprising, really. Computers are wonderful and complicated devices but a lot of knowledge about them is handed down more as an oral history, and it is dense and has had over fifty years of tumultuous growth.
Have you ever thought about even just the jargon you need to know to be fluent today? Not even just the important computer systems terms, but the names of tools, all the acronyms, the context of why things are the way they are.. its huge, and its endless. The stuff we think about as basic really never was, and now it gets hidden behind a slick user interface, and you might reasonably get to your third year in a CS program before getting a handle on how everything sort of fits together.
I see this all the time, with people not understanding where files are or that there is some kind of hierarchical filesystem lurking behind the covers. Thanks for the link.
Family members for me, but they don't understand the difference between the windows search box in the task bar (next to the "start" button), and google. The difference between Chrome and google.com is lost on them as well.
It's a good exercise in patience for me while we go through the steps of describing the differences between searching for things on your computer vs searching for things on the internet, what google is, etc.
They've been using the internet since I was a kid in the 90's.
I'm sure most of us have examples of this in our lives, being the de-facto "computer person" in the family. It is what it is at this point. For whatever reason, if you didn't grow up with computers, it's incredibly difficult to understand them as an adult. Which still applies to huge swaths of the worlds population.
Interestingly, I think we're seeing less people grow up with general purpose computers, and instead just have an iPad or an android tablet, or a chromebook.
At least chromebooks have the capacity to become general purpose computers by installing Linux. But yeah, anyone who doesn't grow up with a Raspberry Pi or the like is gonna have a hard time.
Anecdotally, my grandfather ~78, works very hard to understand how to navigate and use the computer they have, not sure to the extant you would call "technoliterate", but certainly he puts in the effort to learn how to navigate and use the device without asking for much help.
The browser has a search bar at the top of the page; Amazon has a search bar at the top of the page.
Ergo it’s actually bad UX design. Thinking desktop UX if that was an “Amazon app” there would be ONE singular search bar.
To make matters worse, Windows has a search bar in start (usually at the bottom); browser has a search bar (at the top); some websites have their own search bar; file explorer has its own search bar.
You get the point: bad UX design enforced by assumptions made at each layer of the OS/browser/website. Many out of the control of users and developers alike. Nonetheless, it’s overcrowding the UX with redundancy.
Historically speaking, users had an ability to “find stuff” on their system but it was never by an implicit “search bar”; users had to explicitly do something like: file -> find prior to entering search query.
The web browser was the one with the search bar (having one job: entering URLs not search terms) and when websites had a search feature it was typically placed in the middle of site or somewhere else (typically reserved for search terms).
Modern UX can be ridiculous in ways devs put too much emphasis on these “automatic” components. Like the annoying page header that suddenly scrolls with content and takes up 1/3 of the page. Ack! Don’t even get me started.
> The browser has a search bar at the top of the page; Amazon has a search bar at the top of the page.
I assume this is deliberate. Amazon doesn't want you clicking on URLs that don't point to Amazon. A search bar that doesn't do an internet search, but looks like a browser search bar, would seem to fit the bill.
I believe Amazon will fade away, once that bald guy reaches the orbit of Saturn. It's basically just an online shop with low prices - I can't see any USP.
Incidentally, the combined URL-and-search bar (is that still called the "awesomebar"? It's not awesome) in my version of Firefox (93.0, running on Windows 10) doesn't actually let me search, unless I select a search engine. If I search for "red shoes", it tries to take me to "redshoes.com". If I search for "red doctor martens", it says it can't find a site with that name. I have to choose a search engine, even if I only have one search engine configured. I suppose I must have broken something.
This is my mom. Trying to walk her through steps on the phone like logins and lost passwords is a nightmare.
I imagine it would be like a car mechanic trying to walk me through changing the oil over the phone. Since it's not in my interests, I just want it to work, I don't have any desire to learn it.
At the same time, oil changes are more of a hassle that you only need to deal with every year or two. You can get away with not bothering to sort it out (and even if you know how, it might be worth the extra cost to just pay someone to do it faster on those rare occasions).
But if you use a computer to access resources and services on the web, you probably do so much more frequently than you change your oil. I'd liken it more to knowing how the turn signals, headlight controls, and wipers work on a car.
You don't need to know how to repair those items or how exactly they operate. But since that familiarity is something inherent to the operation of a car, you should at least know the basics of usage if you plan to do much driving.
> (and even if you know how, it might be worth the extra cost to just pay someone to do it faster on those rare occasions)
Going off on a tangent:
I thought that this would be the case when I switched to changing my own oil -- if I was feeling lazy, I could always have the shop do it. But I found out right away that when the local quick-change place does it, they tighten the drain plug and oil filter to roughly a zillion ft-lbs. So if I pay them to do it, I am making the job way more of a pain in the butt for myself next time I want to do it, because I'll spend half an hour just struggling to remove those.
I just stopped bothering when it got harder to access the filter/drain and I moved to the city where I park on the street. I'm much less interested in farting around under the car, getting messy, and spending a half hour or more to drain the oil, replace the filter, and refill.
At some point I just decided it was worth the extra cost to be in and out quickly. And honestly, when you add up the cost of replacement filter and oil, the premium isn't terrible when you add in time saved. I like knowing how to do it, but it's been several years since I bothered.
Top-side filters and oil extraction pumps make oil changes almost effortless. The biggest problem for me is disposing of the oil. There are several vehicles in my family, and the old oil just collects in jugs by the garage door. The nearest hazardous waste centre at the landfill will only accept two jugs at a time, and they won't take 5 gallon buckets at all. They will not accept 10 jugs (<2 years' worth), let alone 30. It's like they want me to pour it down the drain or something!
This. I had a similar situation to the GP poster-- years of used oil piled up in jugs in the garage. One trip to a local parts store and the issue was resolved. It was shockingly easy.
Same with my mum. It's really insightful to try to see things through her eyes. For example not understanding context like which app she's currently in blew my mind at first, but totally makes sense.
> I imagine it would be like a car mechanic trying to walk me through changing the oil over the phone. Since it's not in my interests, I just want it to work, I don't have any desire to learn it.
Really?
I don't believe there exists a task I theoretically could perform if I knew the steps, that I would be unable to do if those steps were being explained to me by an expert. Even if it was gardening or cooking (two areas I have extremely little interest in). In my mind, this very concept doesn't parse.
On the other hand, I do know people like this, and I hate helping others with computers over the phone.
I believe this has nothing to do with one's intelligence or familiarity. More like some kind of general intellectual or emotional "closedness" - an instinctive refusal to do things out of one's comfort zone, even if one is guided step-by-step, and refusing to take those steps causes a huge loss. I have no idea how this comes about, as it's totally alien to me, except that I see it in most people.
There are some tasks that require finesse, like hovering a helicopter, riding a bicycle or even balancing a clutch.
Most people can't do those initially no matter how much an expert explains it - until they build up the muscle memory. Cooking and gardening are like that but to a much lesser extent.
Of course typing into a URL bar is nothing like that.
Yup, I've explicitly excluded such tasks from consideration (perhaps not clearly enough). My claim was only about tasks that don't require tacit knowledge or experience in addition to detailed enough step-by-step instructions.
With references to gardening, I meant stuff like e.g. how to correctly replant a flower. I have no first clue how to do it, but I'm confident I could do it successfully if I had a gardener guiding me through the process step by step.
I painstakingly developed a personal script for how to teach people how to split a screen between two chrome tabs.
This is amazingly and surprisingly difficult thing to explain over the phone to “normal” (born before computers were prevalent) people.
Basically I got it divided in two groups: those who have used internet for the first time after 18 years old (hardest group. Have to explain in terms of geometrical figures, like lines and rectangles on top of the screen, where in this rectangle is a good place to click and how to drag, and what a successful drag looks like), and the others (those I can explain how to “drag a tab”, because they already know what a tab is).
The address bar is more easy, I refer to it as the place where you type the site where you want to go (but very often people never type addresses, they open google and start from there, always).
This got me into thinking about getting old, more than once. How can I prevent this to myself (being totally confused and out of touch with current technology when I get older).
I think I’m still doing pretty well with knowing about and even understanding new technology. The thing is, I have a harder time finding it worthwhile. Like social media that seems to have a 5 year cycle just because the younger kids don’t want to be seen using what the older kids use. Do we really need a new IM system and different way of posting short videos to friends every 5 years? So much “technology” change is now just fashion.
I think it's sad whenever I see people that are very proud of just how tech illiterate they are and just how little they understand computers. It's like teenagers who brag about how badly they scored on on their exam. In many aspects it's the same exact situation, change for the better wouldn't require much work, and this sort of behaviour only discourages others from even trying.
> a (relatively) healthy supermarket meal easily cooked on the stovetop in the time it takes to wait in a drive-thru
Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with your overall point....but what drive-thrus do you use?
A home-cooked meal for me takes at MINIMUM an hour. Prep, cooking, eating, cleanup. If it takes less than that, then it's probably a lot of pre-made/processed stuff that isn't particularly healthy in itself.
The only way I've been able to get around it with my work schedule is to meal-prep on weekends. Making stuff in bulk helps, but it's still 3-5 hours of my precious weekend used up.
You're doing it wrong. There's so many ways to cook a quick healthy cheap meal.
I cook 6 chicken breasts at a time, that way I have chicken for today and the next 5 days. It takes less than 5 minutes of your time to put chicken breasts on a sheet pan and then step away for 20 minutes while they bake in the oven. Then one minute to wash the sheet pan when they are done. There's 6 minutes of my time for 6 days of chicken breasts.
Then there's so many ways to use the pre-cooked chicken breasts. One day ill chop one up mix with mayo, and mustard to make chicken salad and apply to some toast. 5 minute chicken salad sandwiches.
Next day I'll chop the chicken Breast up mix with taco seasoning microwave for 1 minute and apply to taco shells with lettuce and tomato. 5 minute tacos.
Next day I'll microwave a chicken breast with some mixed veggies. 5 minute chicken and veggies.
Next day I'll microwave the chicken breast apply to some toast with lettuce,tomato, mayo. 5 minute chicken sandwich.
That was just some things you can do with a chicken breast. There's so many meals you can prepare in less than 5 minutes that is healthier and cheaper than anything you get going out to eat.
I used to cook chicken breasts whole until I discovered that cutting them up and then cooking them turns out way better. You end up cutting them up eventually, whether it's to put in a recipe or eat. But cutting and trimming 6 chicken breasts does take a while. The supermarkets are usually pretty good at removing the fat and icky parts, but there are still sometimes bits of gristle or even occasionally bone fragments. That said, it's well worth the extra effort.
For years I could never figure out how my favorite Thai restaurant makes the chicken in the Basil Chicken dish have such a great texture. Now that I cut the chicken before cooking, I get similar results. Now if I could only get the seasonings right.
But aside from that, your recipe ideas are excellent, and I do a lot of the same kinds of things. Chicken and veggies, usually done as a stir-fry kind of thing (and with a good wok, you don't even need to add oil, although I usually put a little in).
Another item I can't live without is garlic paste. I put that in almost everything, and my wife always gives me a hard time for buying so much of it, but I use it that much. Besides, we've had an agreement for many years: She doesn't like cooking, so I do most of it. And there are few things more satisfying than having your wife just raving about some excellent dish you've prepared (ditto the kids). That alone is enough encouragement for me to keep doing it, but I get to enjoy it as well.
Chicken breast is my go-to for easy meals, but lately I've also been using tilapia filets a lot. They're relatively inexpensive... for fish... and very easy to prepare. For a treat I'll use salmon filets or tuna steaks. I love both, but my wife really prefers the tuna.
I have a number of similar dishes based on ground beef, too, (like chili) but since that's been going up in price more than chicken, I've been using it a bit less these days.
Pork loins and chops are another good protein that's easy to cook, and not too expensive, but chicken often wins because it's the cheapest of all.
FWIW, I don't go out to eat that often. I don't cook much either, except for weekend prep as mentioned. When I don't have something prepped, it's usually wraps with tortillas, baby spinach, and some sort of meat and cheese.
(Long story but I live in a complicated environment with a bunch of people who never clean up after themselves, so the kitchen is basically unusable since I refuse to clean their messes.)
Also, "some mixed veggies". Do you use frozen? I like frozen veggies, but they take a lot longer than five minutes to cook unless I'm just microwaving a steamer bag (and they never taste that good prepped that way). I much prefer fresh (and they're normally cheaper, monetarily, though obviously they take much longer to prep).
I eat 1 ~7oz chicken breast 6 days in a row. I'm currently working out daily and gaining lean muscle. Chicken is high in protein and low in fat. So yes, I consider that healthy. You don't?
The average American is eating corn, beef, french fries, and cheese for nearly every meal every single day.
> A home-cooked meal for me takes at MINIMUM an hour.
It's not hard to optimize for speed. White rice, beans and frozen veggies boil in 10-15 minutes and don't even require attention for the full timespan. Cleanup consists of putting things in the dishwasher. And I don't know why you would factor in eating, going to McD won't teleport it into your stomach. Time can be further amortized by making several servings, putting them in the fridge and warming them up in the microwave later.
We're comparing to fastfood here, not a high end restaurant course.
Get an instant pot (a relatively new "smart" pressure cooker). I've been introducing my in-laws to their instant pot and it's hard for them to comprehend how fast it cooks. Mashed potatoes, steel cuts oats, lentils, all in about 10 minutes. The pot cooks everything.
My go-to lazy meal is 1 1/2 cups of rice and beans, a few cups of stock, a cup of salsa, extra flavoring as desired, whatever veggies and protein I have around, all thrown in the pot for 25 minutes. Then I take out the pot and put it in the fridge. That will last two people a few days. Very little prep for a massive amount of food.
You can also make yogurt overnight for maybe a 75% savings over store-bought.
The other tip with the instant pot I’ve found is to put your food in a glass bowl on the steamer tray in the instant pot. This way you can add exactly the amount of water, and you don’t make a mess of the pot.
Cleanup for me definitely doesn't consist only of the dishwasher; my knives, wok, cast iron stuff to start definitely don't get put in there.
I have optimized what I do quite well, or at least I'm much faster than I used to be. But for example this last weekend, I made some stir fry in a large batch for this week's meals. By the time I left my parents' house (long story but I basically can't cook at the house I live in), I had used up three hours. That was prepping four bell peppers, an onion, garlic, cabbage, broccoli, and chicken, cooking them, and cleaning up afterward.
I'm sure I can speed my prep up even more, mostly with knife skills. But at this point, that's how it is.
I factor in eating because I clean up after I eat. Most of the stuff I make is best fresh out of the frying pan with very minimal resting time.
But anyway, I'm not here to argue. If cooking at home works for you in 15 minutes, fantastic! I can't do that, it never works that quickly. I was mostly wondering how the parent poster's drive-thrus were so slow that they could cook faster because where I live, I never spend more than five minutes in one.
Cooking time heavily depends on the dish. There are recipes optimized for time consumption - if time is a priority, you could use those. Sometimes we just put potatoes in the pressure cooker, peel afterwards, and season with some oil and spice - takes 10m max. That’s the healthier alternative to fries from McD. A keto meal will take longer, but at least in my area there‘s no takeout option for keto anyway.
I feel like this doesn’t optimize for enjoyment. Like shit this is what I ate when I was a broke in college. Are y’all not miserable eating this? At that point in my
life getting taken by my parents out to somewhere mediocre like Olive Garden was heaven.
No we're not miserable. In fact having home cooked healthy meals daily makes me feel better than ever. When I go eat fast food now I feel noticeably worse than I normally do.
You are what you eat. Eat garbage fast food, and you will feel like garbage. And your body slowly accumulates all that garbage.
Traditional dine in restaurants are usually just as unhealthy as eating fast food as well.
It's actually shocking to me that garbage food has been normalized to the point where eating healthy is "what I ate when I was a broke in college." and that we must be miserable eating healthy.
I don't think they are necessarily saying that fast food is healthier, just that you aren't going to get too many people excited by claiming that cooking for yourself from scratch is easy and doesn't take much time. Then you go on to describe a meal that consists of white rice and boiled vegetables.
You're right. Cooking takes a lot of time, and cooking good healthy food that isn't boring can be expensive. I'm sorry, I can't live on vegetables and be happy. I cook plenty of chicken, fish and red meat as well. Although my appreciation for vegetables have gone up considerably in the past couple decades. The first lesson I learned is that canned vegetables are awful. Frozen is much better. Now I feel that frozen is awful (well, for things like spinach, broccoli, carrots and cauliflower anyway, corn and beans are fine). Now I only like fresh veggies (except for corn, frozen corn is fine). But fresh veggies don't keep long. There's a Lotte about 20 minutes away that has about twice as many different kinds of produce as most markets, and at about half the price, but that's a long way to go for every day shopping. I'll get fresh veggies at Giant or Target, but I don't like paying so much more.
I happen to love cooking, so to me it's relaxing. My wife doesn't like to cook, so I do most of it. But even still, as much as I like doing it, there are definitely days when I don't feel like all the work. And if I'm going to put the effort into making stuff, I want to make something good, and often something new, and that takes a lot of time.
And while brown rice is much better than white rice. If you want white rice, go with basmati. It tastes much better, cooks faster, and is hard to screw up. I don't understand why people use any other white rice. There are tons of other kinds of rice that are worth exploring too. They all have much more interesting flavors and textures than plain old generic long-grain white rice.
No, we’re not miserable. That’s just the media environment playing mind tricks on you to get you to buy things you don’t need so you don’t miss out on the montage of joyous people and half-naked bodies playing and frolicking on the sunny ocean beach with refreshing, ice-cold, bubbly, intensely colored sugar water.
Yo that’s super depressing if you’re buying your time back just to watch TV. Do you just assume that people don’t have friends, hobbies, side projects?
Sure, people have those. Friends to go out with to spend money, because that’s the way to socialize. Hobbies that require buying more non-essential things, and places to keep them in. Larger apartments to accommodate everything. Side projects to keep you busy while the world goes to shit.
So are you saying you don't have friends, you don't go out to socialize, you don't have hobbies, you don't do any work besides what your regular job pays you for, and you stay home in a small apartment and eat mostly white rice and boiled vegetables?
I don't believe your assessment of most peoples' priorities in life is helping you very much in convincing them to adopt your worldview and way of life.
Didn't optimizing for enjoyment get the US into this obesity thing in the first place? Maybe let's not do that so much?
Like just season stuff well, even boiled veggies
Unless we are talking about the kind of restaurants that are difficult to get a reservation for, then I think you are confused about what creates status in American culture.
Going through the drive through at McDonalds certainly will not raise your status in America.
This hits home for me. I really enjoy cooking but I’ve basically given up on weeknight meals that aren’t either leftovers from when I cook for fun or something prepared.
Like it is genuinely the most out of touch privileged statement but I have the money and am absolutely willing to buy the time. $30-70/wk (less the cost of groceries) to gain 8ish hours of leisure time and more variety than I would ever bother with is a no brainer experience at this point in my life.
I agree with this if your single, but if your a family every meal outside is 4 times the price and the time to prep the meal at home stays almost the same.
How much time do you spend driving to the drive-through, queueing up at a drive-through, making your order at the drive-through, waiting for your order at the drive-through, receiving the order from the drive-through, and then taking the order from the drive-through home before you eat it?
Add up that time over the course of a week and see how much time you waste on convenience.
You can cook a lot of inexpensive and healthy food in less than an hour. Protein, veg, complex carbs. Get a wok and do some stir fry - you can make a meal in literally 5 minutes then.
> Get a wok and do some stir fry - you can make a meal in literally 5 minutes then.
I own a wok and stir fry is my go to meal- I can’t make meals in 5 minutes. I take the time to cut vegetables/protein, then clean up afterwards. And if you’re going from pre-cut frozen it takes more than 5 minutes to thaw???
I agree that stir fry is a fast easy meal but I really disagree with this exaggeration of its speed. It makes the argument disingenuous.
It's similar to saying fast food is fast because you get served in 5 minutes, but don't count the time you spend in your car on the journey there and back.
People pick up fast food on their way home from work. The time that takes is only the difference in travel vs the most direct route (could be negligible) plus the time spent waiting in the drive thru. On the other hand, a lot of recipes online or in cookbooks completely ignore the time it takes to wash and cut vegetables, meats, and clean up after the meal. Recipes quoted to take 15 minutes can easily take over an hour. Lots of people also don’t know how to sharpen and use a kitchen knife properly so they take even longer for simple prep tasks. It’s fine to say “well they’ll get better if they take the time to learn” but they may not have time between multiple jobs and looking after kids.
I love to cook, and I make home-made meals from fresh ingredients regularly, and it does take a lot of time. I will often spend 3-5 hours on the weekend cooking meals for the family as well, but since I find it relaxing and fun, I don't feel like I'm "losing" that time. Well, usually. I do keep some frozen meals or other similar stuff around because I don't always have the time or sometimes don't feel like making something fancy.
On Wednesday, I made a stir-fry with boneless chicken breast , broccoli, poblano peppers, canned mandarin oranges, canned pineapple, garlic and ginger paste. It took a little more than an hour for this "quick" meal. I should have chopped a couple of onions, but I was getting lazy.
After reading your post, I'm realizing that I spend a _lot_ of time chopping vegetables. I have a food processor from 25+ years ago, but I can't find all the parts to it. I think it's time to find those, or just replace it.
> A home-cooked meal for me takes at MINIMUM an hour
Cut some onions and garlic, some cabbage and perhaps some dried sausage, fry it while your rice is cooking. Dinner done in 20 minutes. Cleanup is done with a dishwasher, because I don't live in a swamp. Forgoing rice, it can be done far faster.
I personally compare cooking time to time to go out end-to-end. Even with fast food, you have to drive to the pickup window, wait for the food, etc. It’s easily 10 minutes and you have to do it 1-2 times a day, so 2-3 hours a week. I’ve had fast food joints take 20 minutes to make the food, too.
I don’t think most people analyze the cost like this and they probably like restaurant food more.
It’s like spending “just 10 minutes” on HN everyday, adding up to something significant by the end of the week.
Yeah cooking is really boring to me and extremely unrewarding as I live alone.
I wish I could simply but healthy meals for a few bucks. I mean I can outsource my laundry for 7€ a bag and get it washed, dried and folded the next day. Why doesn't it work like that with food?
There's takeaway of course but those aren't the healthiest of options. It's more a luxury special thing. I wish I could get a meal service like some old people get :)
Fwiw I do meal prep. The downside to it is refrigerated or frozen cooked food that you eat the same dish of for an entire week. The upside is that I get to cook and eat all kinds of world cuisine (some quite labor intensive), while still being quite alright on time spent cooking. So even though its microwaved leftovers, the very different flavor profiles that I get to snack on every week makes it up for me.
> A home-cooked meal for me takes at MINIMUM an hour. Prep, cooking, eating, cleanup
As you cook more at home, you get much faster at it. Especially for recipes you familiarize yourself with. It also becomes less of a chore as it requires less focus and you can do other stuff (listen to music/podcast, chat with your SO/roomates) while cooking.
My local airport is so small that they don't process security until half an hour before boarding. We have one "gate", and the planes we get can hold 50 people when full.
I have Precheck (always marked on the boarding pass and I assume it shows up on their screen when I scan it), and what happens is the person at the podium notes it and lets his colleagues down the line know. I get a card, and show it to the person handling the body scanner, at which point they send me through the metal detector instead. There isn't much difference when it comes to the bag scanning (if any).
>if you're constantly hard at work on something important, when something else comes up (someone has a question, there's a bug or an outage, whatever), you either have to delay the thing you're already working on, or delay the thing that came up. This tends to have a cascade effect on most kinds of work, locking up all your people resources.
Working in a retail store/break-fix repair/MSP environment, for a small business in a small city, this is absolutely the case. There is nothing more frustrating than having three customer projects on your plate, all of which are important (think "the email server is down"), and then the doorbell or phone rings and you end up spending half an hour walking an old lady through resetting her facebook password. It's an absolutely massive productivity killer, as well as making the day feel longer.
More employees would be the normal solution, but that's not possible here (we've had more in the past, it wasn't financially viable, apparently). Unless of course they started paying commission based on what people actually got done instead of a regular wage, which I'm not a fan of. (Though to be fair, if we did switch to that, the one employee who barely does anything would either get his ass in gear, or leave, so win/win maybe?)
Sadly, from what I've read the commission-based approach often leads to worse long-term results, especially in software engineering. It depends on the kind of work, of course. The metric I use (and in this case I have no idea how others look at the problem) is the number of decisions the person has to make, especially having long-term effects or effects on other parts of the company. It's hard to make the right choice for the org when you stand to make a bigger chunk of money right now from the other option.
> Now, why, when and how it works is a complete mystery.
Even when you're dealing with their non-public products!
Every holiday, Google reminds me I need to check the holiday hours for our business on the Google My Business page. So I do.
Every time, despite being the only authorized user on this page and despite the changes I make being nothing strange (things like being closed on christmas, and not to mention their system asked me to check it)......it sits there saying "pending review" for a week or more.
I don't really know what to think about it when they don't trust the business page's actual manager to get the info correct.
My boss, on the other hand, collects the damn things. He's got an entire large bookshelf filled with vintage CD players...
To me, vinyl is a collectible, or at least, a way to show "yes I appreciate this music and want to show off that I enjoy it". If I like an artist/album enough, I'll buy the vinyl if I can. But it usually just sits on the shelf looking pretty. I got lucky and my player (nothing special but it works so long as you have a good cartridge) was from my dad. When I actually listen to said album, it's usually on my phone over bluetooth (earbuds or in the car), or even if I'm listening on the "hi fi" it's streaming.
Not to say that I never play albums on the turntable, it's just not that often.