I did this. I cashed out in my 20s, bought a $2m home in the middle of nowhere (that goes a long way out here), and live out my days in my workshop surrounded by singing birds, bees, wildlife, trees and gardens, with views across lakes and plains.
And some cosmopolitan wants to tell me, as they cram another million people into gridlocked high-rises in their smoggy grey hellhole, that we in the country are bad for the environment? Or that the soulless crowds you have to navigate through every morning and evening are friendlier than the neighbours and strangers who wave and chat everywhere I go?
If you're able, get out of the cities. Especially if you have children. You have no idea what you're missing.
> as they cram another million people into gridlocked high-rises in their smoggy grey hellhole, that we in the country are bad for the environment?
Uh yes, if you shove a million people out in the middle of nowhere, you have to cut down all the nature, remove the wetlands, pave a bunch of really wide roads, and now all of a sudden your paradise is a bland soulless sub-urban hellscape that is no longer environmentally friendly.
As for gridlocked, I can walk to multiple bakeries, grocery stores, and parks. The vast majority of my driving is to places that are less than 15 minutes away.
My rural friends talk about taking a quick trip that's only 90 minutes away. 90 minutes there 90 minutes back, shit, that's 2.5hrs extra spent driving compared to my 30 minute round trip commutes. If I go over the last 5 or 6 months I haven't lost a total of 2.5hrs to gridlock.
> Or that the soulless crowds you have to navigate through every morning and evening are friendlier than the neighbours and strangers who wave and chat everywhere I go?
Why do you think people in the city are soulless? Cities are bastion of art and creativity.
I say high to my neighbors all the time, we get together for drinks and we swap baked goods. This is made all the easier by how close we are together.
Indeed, once I moved into the city, meeting people became easier, and the people around me are friendlier. (And I'm in Seattle, literally the worst city for meeting people in!)
If anyone proposed housing a million migrants here, we'd sooner build gallows for the genius with that idea than to break ground on high density housing. It's a wildly controversial idea, but you could just stop letting so many people into your city...
Cruising through the countryside at top speed to a larger town with the windows down and the radio up for an hour on the rare occasion I need something urgently is a pleasure compared to sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic to and from work, or crammed into a train with everything around me being suspiciously sticky and slightly smelly twice per day. We have what we need. You'd be surprised how little you miss the overwhelming number of choices and conveniences you have in the city. Anyway, I'm not that remote - I do most of my shopping online so everything is delivered to the door (albeit a day or two later than for you).
It's the look in their eye, or their nature and priorities implicit in their choices. Cities are utterly bereft of soul, spirit, meaning, purpose, culture, etc. Whatever they do have in these respects seems to me like a cynical parody of their true form. They will convene a meeting for consultants to identify an urban area in need of beautification, commission an agendered hippie to plonk some monstrous perverted multicolour sculpture there for millions of dollars and boast about it like this isn't an insult to everything pure, and decent, and good in this world.
The baked goods trading sounds really wholesome, I'm genuinely glad you have that.
Still, there's a good reason city-folk come out here for rest and relaxation while I dread going into the big smoke and get the hell out as soon as I'm done doing what I need to do.
What's interesting to me in so many of these discussions is how the core issue turns out to be the commute, more than any other factor. Here we see this happen in a conversation about pros and cons of city living. We also see it in WFH discussions: many staunch WFH proponents focus on doing away with their miserable commute.
All of this is kinda foreign to me, because I've never had a "bad" commute. Right now I'm 14 minutes from work one-way, no traffic in my direction.
This is rambly, and I think you're both making a solid points about something that is fundamentally subjective. So I'll just say that I feel sorry for all of you guys that are hating life during your commute.
Funny thing is I live so much closer to friends in a city than I did in my rural upbringing. I can walk to at least half a dozen friend's places inside 10 minutes right now - in my rural hometown, it was a 20 minute walk to the nearest, and anyone else needed a car.
> If anyone proposed housing a million migrants here,
I never said migrants, I was talking about what happens if a million city dwellers take your advice and decide to move to the country. It'd be an environmental nightmare!
> compared to sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic to and from work
Again, I rarely have bumper to bumper traffic, when I do, it is for a handful of minutes.
> You'd be surprised how little you miss the overwhelming number of choices and conveniences you have in the city.
In a given week, all less than a 15 minute drive:
Gym class with my son
Swimming classes with my son
BJJ classes
Weekly library visit
Weekly shopping trips with my son
Weekend choices are the Zoo (15 minutes away) Aquarium (an entire 20 minutes away!), or parks (plenty to choose from in walking distance). Heck there is now an indoor ice skating rink (less than 20 minutes away).
All of these are things I do every week. (Except for ice skating, I'd fall on my arse).
Of course there is plenty more. Just because I'm in a city doesn't mean I'm stuck in the city, in under a 2 hours drive I can reach the following:
1. Multiple ski resorts
2. An almost uncountable number of incredible camp sites
3. Countless small ocean side towns
4. Multiple amazing mountain day hikes
A bit further away there is an actual honest to goodness rain forest (3.5hrs) or I can go play on an active volcano (3.5hrs)
Lake Washington is just a handful miles away, everything from renting a boat for the day to seasonal hydroplane races to lake side picnics.
If I'm bored, I can go down to a local comedy club, hit up a poetry reading, multiple books clubs, or just go see a live concert. Seattle of course also has a huge sports scene, not my style, but between Football, Soccer, Baseball, and Ice Hockey, people who do like sports are pretty well entertained.
I was not expecting any of this when I moved to the city. I did not realize how pleasant live is here. I'm not living in Manhattan or London. The city isn't smog covered. If you ever fly into Seattle you can look out the airplane window and see how green everything is.
> Cities are utterly bereft of soul, spirit, meaning, purpose, culture, etc.
I mean, grunge, punk, and even multiple sub-genres of EDM, all sprung from cities. If you want to be incredibly elitist, plenty of classical music (and art, and paintings!) came from urban areas as well.
Saying cities don't have purpose or spirit is silly. I've travelled to multiple world cities, and each one has a completely different spirit. You may not like the spirit of a given city, and that is OK, but saying they don't have spirit isn't being honest. Given the site we are on, we can likely agree that the spirit of the Bay Area is technology at any cost, hustling and selling your ideas and trying to go big or die trying. Someone can say that spirit sucks, but no one can deny that it exists!
> commission an agendered hippie to plonk some monstrous perverted multicolour sculpture there for millions of dollars and boast about it like this isn't an insult to everything pure, and decent, and good in this world.
So ignore the civic stuff? The problem with public art pieces is that they have to not offend anyone, so after every interest group in the world has filed their objections, the artwork often ends up being super boring.
Meanwhile, plenty of cities have entire blocks set aside for street artists to make incredible murals. Local artists have open workshop days where you can come in and talk to them about what they are making. Guerrilla art exists. One time some friends and I stumbled across a tiny gallery hidden in an unlabeled building that was open at 10pm! Just, walking around, boom, art gallery.
> while I dread going into the big smoke and get the hell out as soon as I'm done doing what I need to do.
If you are going to the downtown part of a city, yeah, it is stressful and it sucks. Likewise, if I go into a rural area and head to a rendering plant, or a tire factory, that also sucks, but it wouldn't be fair for me to highlight the worst part of rural living with the best part of rural living!
Or the time I was staying in a NYC AirBnB and I woke up one morning to a food festival outside my door.
The amazing and talented buskers in Mexico City.
The great street food that is available almost everyplace except in American cities (ugh).
And to be with all of this, I'm not saying rural living has no advantages. As a child I used to spend every summer down with family by the Russian River in California, and even to this day I have friends in rural places that I go to visit, dropping in for a day or sometimes a week.
I totally understand what the nice parts of that are, but I didn't understand the nice parts of city living until I moved from suburbia into a city.
Oh I didn't say it was unpleasant. It's bad for the environment. High CO2 cost, requires interfering with the local ecosystem, poor land use etc. I don't see why this upsets people so much. It's just an honest accounting of the costs. Living inside a US National Park would be both lovely and bad for it.
This sort of trade-off between pleasantness and damage is common. For instance, I like traveling the world and in first class you've got half the seat-density of economy so the environmental cost is massive. But it's really nice and there's no way I'd prefer not to do it. It's just also bad for the environment.
My wife and I just returned from a two-week long vacation in Patagonia. It's a stunning place and you'll be surrounded by unbelievable natural beauty. But the same lovely glaciers I mourned the melting of, I contributed to the melting of by flying there. Both things are true.
Some people, like me, prefer the stimulation of cities to the quietness of the countryside. And city dwellers have a lower environmental footprint than rural people (in the West), because of efficiency in transport, recycling/treatment and land use. It's not a mystery, you can find dozens of sources in a second work your favourite search engine.
Exactly. Living comfortably in the middle of nowhere is a luxury and that's why all the rich do it. Everybody else needs to be close to the rat race otherwise they can't afford to eat.
Just want to say, appreciate the discussion about the environment. Never actually thought about what is better towns (rural areas) vs cities.
And I am sure the answer is not as simple as it sounds. But my guess, there are too many people in the world, and living in the house in that sense is a privilege.
Eh, I grew up in one of the most rural parts of the UK. It's overrated. The scenary is nice and it's a safe, quiet place to grow up, but if you had ambitions beyond local teacher it's a maddening place. And it's the filtering effect - the kind of people I get along with don't move to random farming villages in the middle of nowhere, so while I had friends, I never had that uber-close "I get you" thing. Since moving to London, it's happened a lot more.
I assume you're implying they meant she's Chinese.
From GP's text I assumed she's not Chinese but for whatever reason (parents worked there, she was adopted as a grown-ish kid, something else) she spent most of her formative years there.
Maybe we're both wrong but on its face what GP wrote doesn't strike as odd at all to me.
One day I discovered "Record Macro". That was handy to automate some simple tasks.
Then I discovered I could make a clickable button, that would activate one of my macros. That was great.
Then I discovered I could double-click (iirc) the button and there, in front of my eyes, was the code. A whole world opened up to me.
I made gigantic programs. Thousands of lines of code. Horrific code. I didn't understand variables or arrays but I had cells and columns! Imagine that.
I became the automation guru at my job. God I hope those Excel files no longer exist. I would die of embarrassment. I built automation tools in my own time. In Excel, of course. Before long I was making enough to quit my day job. Thanks, Excel.
I found out that unifi plug in doorbell chimes use an esp32 this way because I saw one on my devices table, before it had booted fully and handshook as it's real Identity
Do you mean the non-PoE version? I have the PoE version sitting in a box somewhere and I'm a ESP32 enthusiast so I'm wondering if that's what I'll be doing today. Surely they're using it just as a WiFi coprocessor? Or...?
>Building my offline smart home took the better part of a weekend
Yeah, right.
Nobody in their right mind should be making their home "smart" for the convenience or efficiency. It's a hobby. A frustrating, inconvenient, burdensome, potentially expensive, challenging, neverending hobby.
It's actually easier now then ever before. Buy smart bulbs for cheap off of temu. They all integrate with alexa or google home automagically.
I now never touch a light switch.
"Computer dim lights to 40%." I never bother touching a light switch. This guys set up is too complicated. The easy way to do it nowadays is to buy smart devices that integrate with the google or alexa echo system and you just talk to alexa or google to get it to do what you want.
I'm always amazed that everyone seems okay with this, and will even say so when pressed on it. But those same people will get a look in their eyes as if they're going to shit their pants, if someone else picks up their unlocked iPhone and starts scrolling.
I'm amazed that people are afraid of a home assistant in their living room, yet carry a cloud connected microphone+camera around with them all the time (with the added feature of sending GPS tracking data back to the manufacturer, carrier, and apps that you granted location permission to, like a weather app).
If you trust that your phone isn't listening when it's not supposed to, why don't you trust the home assistant (even if it's made by the same manufacturer)?
It's because they have sexts on their phone. A recorder is not as big of a deal. Especially if I'm fully aware that the entity listening to the recording is listening to billions of people and couldn't care less about my one voice.
With the microphone switch turned off they don't send audio to the cloud but they're also no longer smart devices. The only words they can detect using local processing are their limited set of wake-words. But using Alexa or Google Home is literally the opposite of an offline smart home system if that's your goal.
Even if you create tasks that can function through a button press or something they still rely on the cloud.
Voice control locally is really hard though. Or at least it used to be. I thick OpenAI Whisper is available for local/offline usage if you build your own wrapper around it? I tried adding (local open-source) voice to my home system about 8 years ago, and again 3 or 4 years ago and it was very rough. It might finally be feasible with the current state of local AI.
For an example, my home robot was named "Marvin" (from H2G2) and the local detection was so poor, this is my list of "matching" wake words.
Agreed, but Alexa fails hard if you have no internet, and my understanding is that Google Home also becomes mostly inoperable.
I've tried Home Assistant but could never get it to work reliably. HomeKit is great and works offline if you have a home hub (an Apple TV, a HomePod, or an iPad).
> Agreed, but Alexa fails hard if you have no internet
It also fails hard with Internet. I’m sick of being on my living room asking Alexa to turn on the light just to get the bedroom light turned on (each room has its own Alexa/Light pair, so there should be no confusion).
If they're assigned to the same room as the lights there shouldn't be, but check in the (awful) app which of your Alexa devices picked up your voice.
Walls reflect sound, and things like curtains muffle it, and you might be surprised which device picks up your voice best in different positions.
I had to adjust placement etc. to prevent the Alexa in my son's room from regularly picking up my commands from my room better than the Alexa in my room when the doors are open.
Yes, I had interference at one moment and moved the devices to the farthest points on each room, so that doesn't happen now, but the problem I mentioned before (turning on the wrong light) still happens.
I forgot to say that the problem mostly occurs when I ask Alexa to set the (unspecified, but hopefully the one belonging to the room the corresponding Echo is) light's brightness to X. Sometimes, in that case, it turns on the light from the other room.
I didn't check the audio transcript when this happens though, that's a good one, thanks.
That's an odd one. Not seen that. Lots of aggravating little quirks, though. Annoyingly so many of them would be trivially addressable by users if we just had a way of adding simple rules.
E.g. "this request on this device refers to X", or more generally "when you hear X it probably means Y".
As an alternative, I've spent more time than I should passive-aggressively repeating the same instruction and then flagging every single failure in the app. I have no idea if it makes any difference, or if the things I've done that with that have improved were due to general improvements to their voice recognition, but it gives me some limited satisfaction (I now wonder what the financial tradeoff is of fixing the reported issues vs. any benefit potentially gained by just having the reporting function but sending it straight to the bin to make people feel like they're being heard...)
One of my goals for this year is to experiment with HomeAssistant or similar to at least start to replace or supplement my Alexas.
hah, I've been doing the same, purposefully calling commands I know will fail so I can flag them, even adding a swear word or two so it also gets flagged on their side and, perhaps, someone can then take action. But in the end, the smarter choice (despite being talking about smart devices), was to change my commands to accommodate Alexa’s quirks.
I’ve installed home assistant recently too for the flexibility, but until I get a zigbee stick I still depend on Alexa as the interface with the lights.
It's still pretty dumb, though. For example, it'll often misunderstand "turn all the lights off" as turn the lights off or worse, turn the lights on (even though they're already on).
I did this. I cashed out in my 20s, bought a $2m home in the middle of nowhere (that goes a long way out here), and live out my days in my workshop surrounded by singing birds, bees, wildlife, trees and gardens, with views across lakes and plains.
And some cosmopolitan wants to tell me, as they cram another million people into gridlocked high-rises in their smoggy grey hellhole, that we in the country are bad for the environment? Or that the soulless crowds you have to navigate through every morning and evening are friendlier than the neighbours and strangers who wave and chat everywhere I go?
If you're able, get out of the cities. Especially if you have children. You have no idea what you're missing.