[eranation]

I wish that was the case. Asking people to do something simple, doesn't matter how simple it is, depends on how simple they view it. Changing your own car's oil is actually not that hard, once you know how to do it, most people don't even try. Think of QR codes, people hardly used them for many years, because you needed to download an app for it, small step. It only started to catch up when you had it built in the camera app in most providers. In any funnel, each step, no matter how easy, adds friction, remove the friction and you get bigger adoption.

So yes, everyone could open a file and edit it, also everyone could watch a youtube video on how to do X and yet choose to have someone else do it for them :)

[Normal_gaussian]

> Changing your own car's oil is actually not that hard

It is. Changing oil requires a place where you have sufficient access to the vehicle to drain it; the right equipment; the right disposal solutions. Most people who have cars do not have that. And it takes significantly more time to change your own oil than to have someone else do it as part of other specialist maintenance.

> Think of QR codes, people hardly used them for many years, because you needed to download an app for it, small step. It only started to catch up when you had it built in the camera app in most providers.

Exactly. Using a QR code app required specific knowledge of the app, an internet connection, some time, knowledge of how and when to use it, and something to use it with - the barrier of which surpassed the convenience gained from the QR code.

> So yes, everyone could open a file and edit it, also everyone could watch a youtube video on how to do X and yet choose to have someone else do it for them :)

I'm struggling to find a non-contrived group of people who:

- do not know how to open and edit a file on their system

- do use npm

- would find installing pnpm or running `sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings; curl -fsSL https://depsguard.com/apt/gpg.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/depsguard.gpg; echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/depsguard.gpg] https://depsguard.com/apt stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/depsguard.list >/dev/null; sudo apt update; sudo apt install depsguard` simpler

Of course, cooldowns.dev is a very long winded way of telling someone to run `npm config set min-release-age=3`, which is the simplest.

[jmb99]

Changing oil requires

> a place where you have sufficient access to the vehicle to drain it

Probably the only valid argument for people who park on the street.

> the right equipment

One $5 wrench, one $10 filter wrench (optional). One set of ramps ($40), or jack stands ($30) if you already have a jack. One drain pan, $10 (or free if you're resourceful). Total cost max $65. Cheaper if you look for deals, buy used, borrow from a friend. If you can't afford $65 once to save money in the long run while owning a car, you probably should've bought a cheaper car.

> the right disposal solutions

Every oil change requires a jug of oil to be purchased. You can drain your used oil into this jug and then dispose of it along with your other household hazardous waste. This is not hard.

> Most people who have cars do not have that.

I might believe this for a place to do an oil change, maybe. I struggle to believe most, but I would believe many. Aside from that, if you don't have those things, you are choosing not to have them.

Which is kind of the point. None of these things are hard, at all. The majority of car owners 100 years ago could adjust their own timing, clean distributor points, replace belts, etc. because if they couldn't, they'd be calling for a tow truck every few hundred miles. Those are all harder, and things have only gotten easier with time. If you can't do them, you are choosing not to, because there's an even easier solution - spending more money and getting someone else to do it for you.

[mercurywells]

Good job, you forgot a new crush washer and now your oil pan will leak

[jmb99]

In ~300k km worth of diy oil changes, I’ve yet to change a crush washer, and yet to have a drain plug leak.

I always replace them on friends’ Toyotas, because they seem more important, but on every car I’ve owned it hasn’t mattered. And if you take the least amount of effort to google “how to change oil on ________” (fill in the blank for your year, make, model), some forum or video will probably tell you exactly what steps to take, including whether or not changing a washer is necessary.

[Grimburger]

Costs me 15 cents per washer delivered, why bother risk it? The world doesn't need more cancerous used motor oil on the ground.

After downloading a service manual and doing many things myself it became very apparent that mechanics barely bother to do work the right way despite it coming at virtually zero extra effort.

It's quite rare to see them use a torque wrench on many bolts and if you ask them why "they know it by feel", cool, but why not use a torque wrench to the proper specs anyway? It's not any harder.

[floralhangnail]

My favorite way to do it is in the auto parts store parking lot. They will help you cart your full drain pan back to their oil recycling receptacle and some will even prop the back door open for you to walk it straight there. The bonus being if you do happen to spill a bit you're not stuck having to power wash your own driveway. I've got a process down to where I can pull it off with one pair of nitrile gloves, one rag, and one trash bag, to keep any residue from the drain pan staining anything.

[matwood]

> One set of ramps ($40), or jack stands ($30)

Given the number of SUVs and trucks, many people don't even need these.

[eranation]

That group of people is the loosely affiliated people called "vibe coders". Even to get them to install depsguard is a challenge. I just ask them to point Claude to depsguard or cooldowns and follow the instructions (to save the tokens, of course Claude can figure it what needs to be done on its own)

The issue is that Claude Code also will be super happy to npm install axios / tanstack etc unless you explicitly tell it to add cooldowns.

[Normal_gaussian]

Ha. Yes I haven't calibrated myself well for that form of users. It would seem that telling them to tell their agent to read cooldowns might be the best advice there; they sure as he'll won't read it.

[hedora]

In what way is "edit your .npmrc" simple?!?

The JS ecosystem is really, really complicated, so any non-trivial app is going to use multiple bundlers, node runtimes, native runtimes, etc, etc, etc.

Every one of those has a different opinion about how to spell "cooldown".

On top of that, there's the bootstrapping issue of "I want to install the N pieces of ecosystem sprawl that read the .[p]npmrc that have the cooldown directive in them. How do I do that with a cooldown?" (Where N is unknowable, because of course it is.)

[seattle_spring]

> The JS ecosystem is really, really complicated, so any non-trivial app is going to use multiple bundlers, node runtimes, native runtimes, etc, etc, etc.

This statement makes very little sense to me. I've worked on several of what are likely the largest JS monorepos in the world, and they all define a specific version of a specific runtime and package manager you should be using.

[StilesCrisis]

An extra $15 of labor is well worth the cost of not having to change my own oil. They will do it efficiently and won't break anything. The cost of messing up one time immediately cancels out a lifetime of DIY savings, and they are equipped to do it right.