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Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

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Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#51

Post by james_s_tayler »

hinkley wrote: post #42
watertom wrote: post #10

Using his definitions, I hate long work. I avoid long work, I'll take hard work always.

Our jobs revolve around convincing machines to do the long work for us. I don't think I'll ever understand why so many of us are perfectly content doing the same long work over and over again. Do you know what computers are for ?

Never really thought of computers as needing convincing but come to think of it it takes about as many tries to convince my computer to do want I want as it takes to convince my son. Hmm..

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#52

Post by nitrogen »

majkinetor wrote: post #18
hpoe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've found interesting is that the first time I do something related to tech as long as it isn't mind boggling frustrating cough Oracle cough I enjoy learning it. The second and third times it's tolerable, but if I have to keep doing something repeatedly the only way I can enjoy it any longer is by listening to an audiobook while doing it or by automating it. As soon as I set myself to automating I realize…

Oracle isn't even fun when automating.

But seeing a modern ecommerce platform fully integrated with Oracle payments, invoices, inventory, and shipping is pretty satisfying when it's done.

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#53

Post by squibbles »

For those who are musically inclined -- When learning to play a musical instrument (including voice), the distinction between long work and hard work is the difference between spending time and making progress. Long work is mindless practice; hard work is identifying weaknesses and using targeted practice to improve.

For those in marketing -- Long work is spending more on an advertising campaign; hard work is determining what increases the conversion rate.

For those in computer science or mathematics -- Long work is implementing a brute force approach to calculating a specific result; hard work is generalizing the problem and generating a class of results.

For students -- Long work is studying to pass a specific exam; hard work is internalizing the fundamental principles of a subject so you can derive answers regardless of the particular exam questions.

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#54

Post by eloff »

umvi wrote: post #21
war1025 wrote: post #15

I like this, but also on some level I feel like it's nothing more than inspirational "rah-rah" garbage. I wish he would have expanded on it. A great example of the distinction from my younger days: We had the game GranTurismo2 back when I was 12 or so. We wanted the really fancy "best" car in the game. The right way to get the good cars is to improve your skill and gain access to the higher level races that have bigg…

There was an MMO game called "Kingdom of Loathing" I played back in 2006. The right way to get more money in the game is to improve your skills/equipment and gain access to the higher level areas that have bigger monsters/better loot. (hard work) What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open ma…

Reminds me of a high-speed trading empire I built once in EVE Online. I got bored of the long work way of earning ISK, so I hacked the game client and built a network of accounts running in VMs, proxying their traffic through AWS to get unique IPs, all orchestrated carefully and cooperating to pull off the overall trading strategy by my central server. (hard work)

It got to the point where I had $200 billion ISK and my fortune was doubling every week. At black market conversion rates that was probably worth $20K a month if you could sell it all somehow.

However, at this point I was probably about 10% of the trading volume in all of Jita, so the game mods noticed me and banned me.

They didn't get all my accounts, just the main one, proving that my techniques for laundering game currency and using isolated VMs with their own IP was enough to prevent them from being connected.

However, at this point I didn't have the patience to do that all again, I went and got a job instead. (back to the long work)

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#55

Post by Melting_Harps »

war1025 wrote: post #15

I like this, but also on some level I feel like it's nothing more than inspirational "rah-rah" garbage. I wish he would have expanded on it. A great example of the distinction from my younger days: We had the game GranTurismo2 back when I was 12 or so. We wanted the really fancy "best" car in the game. The right way to get the good cars is to improve your skill and gain access to the higher level races that have bigg…

> We had the game GranTurismo2 back when I was 12 or so.

Gameshark was the way to do that the real 'smart way,' also worth noting was that even back then you could share memorycard saved data if you had access to it with some clever devices.

This was my introduction to 'hacking' culture (soldering mod chips, ripping and burning games into ISOs followed that) and was really interesting to see so many homebrew solutions to challenges like these and kind of made the game(s) the side feature of what was taking place at the time.

The new PS5 version of GT, whatever number they're on now, looks more like GT1/2 than all of its later versions but much shinier.

I personally disliked the license(s) hurdle just using a controller, I breezed through them easily once we got a steering wheel and pedals and were actually kind of fun.

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#56

Post by ptidhomme »

devmunchies wrote: post #19

This makes me think of war time vs peace time. During a war, the govt will put engineers and architects into an R&D incubator with all the resources they need. To the engineers, the fact that there is a war is irrelevant, they aren't paying attention to that, they're just focussing on innovation because it's their job. Couldn't this scenario be simulated, even without war? I think of bell labs. It strange that innova…

To the engineers, the fact that there is a war is irrelevant

I'm not sure this is true. In my point of view, engineers would typically outdo themselves on wartime because they know there are big immediate stakes to their work.

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#57

Post by Melting_Harps »

umvi wrote: post #21
war1025 wrote: post #15

I like this, but also on some level I feel like it's nothing more than inspirational "rah-rah" garbage. I wish he would have expanded on it. A great example of the distinction from my younger days: We had the game GranTurismo2 back when I was 12 or so. We wanted the really fancy "best" car in the game. The right way to get the good cars is to improve your skill and gain access to the higher level races that have bigg…

There was an MMO game called "Kingdom of Loathing" I played back in 2006. The right way to get more money in the game is to improve your skills/equipment and gain access to the higher level areas that have bigger monsters/better loot. (hard work) What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open ma…

> What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open market (long work).

Haha, this reminds me of the Forum war days of Punchme.com [1], someone on our forum found out a bug to exploit in the gambling game that would 2x your money. After a while raiding on other forums got boring with all the best equipment maxed out, so we realized that selling the upgrades was a way more interesting use of our time, so like 5 of us decided to start marketing the in-game weapons to other forums/gangs for half of what the game charged.

The devs eventually found the bug and patched it, but for those of use that still had valid accounts (I opened 10, but most got shutdown due to the scheme) this turned out even better as the demand for weapons just kept going up and I was making over $100/day in passive income at its peak until the interest for the game dropped.

The thing that sticks out the most was some kid from Slovakia I sold weapons to him on credit; he 'promised' me he'd send the money once his mom set him up with a bank account and got his paypal account verified--it was all free to me so I did it not thinking much if he didn't follow up.

I completely forgot about it for weeks after I lost interest in the scheme due to school and work, so I logged into to my paypal account to buy something online and I saw he actually did send me the funds like a month later. It's one of those few times were no expectations placed but trust and faith are lived up to anyway.

1: https://www.rpg.sg/profile/179/PunchMe

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#58

Post by ProZsolt »

nlbrown wrote: post #38
arsome wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does coding bots to do the long work for you count as hard work or long work? Because that's the kind of work I've always preferred.

Hard work takes over and replaces long work when innovation, new skills and modalities are center stage and repetitive tasks take a back seat. I'd consider any form of automation hard work.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1319/

Re: Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

#59

Post by Tervis »

martindbp wrote: post #7

I prefer the labels "predictable" vs "unpredictable" work. For example, I've been experience the difference between research and back-end web dev work lately, and the main difference is that for research you don't know if it will pan out, while for back-end work you're almost always making incremental progress towards the end-goal. But I wouldn't necessarily call research "harder", it's just different. It's usually m…

I think the hard part is that unpredictable work has to be done more with discipline. Predictable work often originates from external requirements, and the external interest to the work gives you motivation. However, unpredictable work requires more intrinsic motivation (or discipline), as there is no external interest until you get some results.
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