I vaguely think I stopped watching TV, modulo Netflix, around the same time as you. Now when I see it in a trucker's break room or similar, it strikes me as shockingly vacuous, and so filled with commercials.

And now I'm living the irony, driving a truck and hauling all that stuff that the TV is waving in front of us. Just as some of you are living the irony, spending your hard earned educations building the infrastructure that implements the waving.

"Now:" I'm pulling a trailer from Illinois to Ohio, filled with "cereal, dry," from a maker to a big box chain's distribution center. Eat up! Eat!

> I vaguely think I stopped watching TV, modulo Netflix, around the same time as you. Now when I see it in a trucker's break room or similar, it strikes me as shockingly vacuous, and so filled with commercials.

Third'd. I cut the cord years back mostly as a consequence of doing the digital nomad thing. I agree with the shocking vicious part. It reminds me of getting crab cakes on the east coast -- in the 90s it was mostly lumps of tasty crab with a little bread, and now it's mostly bread with a little crumb of crab. TV feels the same -- mostly BS with a few shrinking nuggets of entertainment. No wonder Netflix and other streaming services are going strong.

Talk about it lol.

I'm in the business of lending money to the people who buy all the things you haul.

To digress, I'm curious about your life as a truck driver. What do you do with all the time in the truck? Podcasts? shortwave radio? And what are your thoughts about the industry as a whole?

Gonna have to answer later today, I want to be further on before I relax and think. (And I guess that's the first part of the answer.)

I was a software dev and SWQA since 1988, with a few years taken off in the middle to deal with some externalities.

I rage-quit my last SWQA job, then discovered that a 60+ year old B player ought not to have done that. And so I drive.

What do I do with all the time in the truck? Drive, watch the road, watch out for you all (you all are cray, and are probably gonna die, I'm just sayin'). Watch my time from various perspectives: time/miles to pickup, time/miles to delivery, time left on my allowed driving time, gallons of diesel remaining, will I make it on time, do I have to warn of late arrival, should I pull off and shut down for wind, rain, snow, ice, fatigue, when will the local troopers open the highway to trucks again, am I speeding or following too close, am I holding people up behind me, are you f'ing tailgating me, are my brakes on fire, what's going on way up there (I can see pretty far with my head ten feet off the ground) ...

I don't care what you're doing in your car, and I virtually never look, except once in awhile I'll look at your head (or search my spider sense) to see if you're paying attention. To the road. Not to your phone.

When I'm not doing that stuff: I don't have a CB radio. Sometimes I don't play any audio and just think, or enjoy the scenery. It's an incredibly beautiful and interesting country. Sometimes I chase NPR across the radio. Wyoming is a pretty good state for NPR, because they have translators all over. Once in awhile I'll drive through a college or tribal radio station that really does just play what they feel like, those are good.

Sometimes Pandora. I've been trying to listen to podcasts, but it's not a great experience. I can't seem to manage podcasts via Pandora or Spotify very well. I don't like pre-downloading, I'd like to just listen via a stream (most recently VLC on Android, bluetooth to my radio, but the casts often just end in the middle (lost cell signal?) and go to the next one).

My thoughts on the industry as a whole are, I can only see a tiny sliver of the industry. There seems to be an infinite number of ways to get stuff from here to there, and all I really know is working as a "solo" (not part of a two person team), "company driver" (not an owner-operator) for one of the large truck companies.

When I started two years ago there was a huge trucker shortage. Now some companies have gone out of business, but "they" say that it'll pick up again soon. I believe large companies are still hiring, because industry turnover is huge. Lots of people decide they don't like it. I like it a lot.

It's a really good job for me, as I'm not very sociable. I'll go months without going home (divorced, one grown son). Most long distance drivers take 3 or 4 days a month in "home time." Some drivers are regional or local and they're naturally home more often and more regularly.

I drive a 2017 Kenworth T-680, 15 liter straight-six Cummins engine, 10 speed Eton automatic. I mostly pull "dry vans," the 53 foot closed rectangular trailers that you mostly see. Sometimes I'll pull a "reefer," refrigerated trailer, basically the same as a dry van but you also have to pay attention to the reefer operation and temperatures (multiple compartments inside the trailer).

I typically have about an hour of time at the end of the day, and an hour in the morning. Sometimes a little more. Rarely a lot more, when the company hasn't found any freight for me to haul. The longest I've spent without freight has been a weekend, and that's rare. I only get paid for miles driven in service of an assigned trip.

During my typical two +/- hours/day I eat, clean, read, communicate with the fam. I've written hundreds of emails home, with pictures, and I'm trying to clean some of those up to get them posted at a location to be named later. In my free time.

Here's how I've managed my social:

* Deleted Facebook. Don't miss it one bit.

* Deleted Reddit. I open the app every once in a while, scan what's popular. But not a lot.

* Pruned twitter. I don't follow anyone on Twitter anymore, save my partner. I deleted all my posts, going back to the beginning. I don't read it anymore, but I've preserved my username.

* Kept Instagram. I like following certain people in places around the world I have a travel connection too. And certain athletes in sports I follow.

And so... If there's no benefit to posting -- there's very little inclination to consume. No arguing, no triggering, no pavlov-ian itch.

I post to Instagram, I post a little bit here on YC. This leveling keeps the "push for pellet", or "pull down for more content" habits very minimal.

I don't think there's any particular need to cold-turkey quit watching TV, just to be a little strict with yourself about what you watch.

Similarly with Facebook; I use it but I don't follow friends particularly - I follow pages, mainly a useful local neighbourhood page that mainly seems to concentrate on who has lost a cat and who can recomnend a plumbe. Similarly with Reddit, just select a few decent subs that you are interested in.

I look at Fscebook every couple of weeks. Reddit - too frequently.

There is nothing to cold turkey about TV. I got cable to watch the olympics a few years ago and found nothing else worth watching for months. I used to watch various documentaries on the History channel, but now it’s full of ancient aliens crap. I think my demographic left and they just stopped producing content for US.

I feel the same way. Haven't had linear satellite/cable in years. Gave it up in my teens. Since then I've moved over to science videos and the like (NileRed, Nurdrage, RI Lectures) and metalworking/machining. Things you'd never in a million years see on cable TV.

For all its faults - Youtube has a lot of factual content produced by people who want to share their cool hobbies with the world.

The thing I really want to give up next is Twitter. Or at least my 3,000-follower public account. It started out with finding like-minded friends, but quickly turned into a place where I can't even say "I find WD40 often works better than cutting fluid when machining aluminium" without being jumped on.

If you like NileRed I think you'd enjoy "Applied Science" and maybe "Cody's Lab". "Scrap Science" is pretty good, I felt bad for the guy after spending a year failing to make heavy water. I spent a couple years in a chemistry lab and that guy's "bathtub chemist" techniques make me cringe but it all generally works out, well, aside from failing to make heavy water. The "Hydraulic Press Channel" is very tangential but semi-related, and "Practical Engineering" and "Steve Mould" are a little light weight but enjoyable. "The Backyard Scientist" is mostly "things that go boom" along the lines of turn of the century Mythbusters, but is still kinda fun.

By "RI Lectures" do you mean the channel with the actual youtube name of "The Royal Institution"? If so, I think the across the pond competitor is "MIT OpenCourseWare" although I find it far easier to download MIT OCW videos from archive.org than trying to find and stream them and keep track of which I've seen.

I've had the interesting experience of learning Linear Algebra from Strang's textbooks a long time ago, then watching his lectures to refresh my memory. You can do something similar with Automata Theory and Ullman via a MOOC, or at least you could a couple years ago.

You've more or less posted my entire Youtube subscriptions list there!

Applied Science (Ben Krasnow) is one of my favourites. Cody's fantastic too, for the backyard-science angle. I find Hydraulic Press a bit too "let's break stuff and laugh", but it's fun to watch and switch off for a few spare minutes. Same for Backyard Scientist ;)

Post-Apocalyptic Inventor is good for my scrapyard-challenge-but-real fix.

My real hook at the moment is How To Make Everything. He starts with Stone-age technology and shows the progression from there. It's fascinating to see how we got from "there" to "here" with a series of successive discoveries and refinements.

BosnianBill's Locklab, Locknoob and Lockpicking Lawyer are other favourites (but then, I've always found security tech interesting).

I've got an interest in retrocomputing so LGR, Modern Vintage Gamer, Adrian's Digital Basement and CuriousMarc are on there too.

I do mean the Royal Institution's official Youtube channel, yes. I started watching for Andrew Szydlo's chemistry demos and stayed for the other content!

I've heard of MIT OCW (since the original announcement popping up on Slashdot), but never really looked into what was available. Perhaps I should!

I like how "Applied Science" sends down interesting rabbit holes. One minute I'm watching homemade photochromic glass adventures, next I enjoy three hours of enjoyable clicking thru wikipedia and other internet links.

Yes the Hydraulic Press guys have a lot of "boom ha ha" content but they sometimes have more intellectual content such as "We're going to make homemade particle board out of sawdust" and I'm like, no, you're not, I know its way to complicated, but its fun to watch them try and be partially successful.

If you like retrocomputing, then "Moshix" channel will provide a couple hundred hours of mainframe content. The editing is slightly off, moves too slow during non-interactive content such as watching scripts run, and too fast during interactive content while hand editing JCL and typing sysprog tasks in general. Just because you CAN type 100+ wpm doesn't mean its a good idea during a screencast. The content is very compelling, regardless of editing decisions.

Something I don't like about retrocomputing is stuff I started out doing is now considered retro. Or even worse, stuff that was futuristic when I had a couple years in, is also considered retro. I guess getting old beats the alternative.

Thanks both of you, I've padded my own subscription list today :)

The thing about YouTube vs regular TV is that _I_ chose what to watch not someone else. I also chose the time to watch it.

Slightly OT, but the host of the original Scrapheap Challenge show is now hosting an EV YouTube channel called "Fully Charged Show" :)

LOL sorry for the late post, but you got me, I was thinking you meant Cathy Rogers the combined producer actor, but its actually Mr Llewellyn (who is also interesting to watch).

Ms Rogers was very interesting to watch as she is near prototypical "maker culture" in the sense of artist-trying-to-do-STEM (IIRC she's a successful musician) but technically predates popular "maker culture" by about a decade. Sometimes seems old fashioned or retro in 2020, but was extremely futuristic around the turn of the century.