351–360 of 394 posts
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I think it's quite common among programmers. At least, I have always been that way too. I can go week of unproductive time then suddenly several days of immersion.
That's the reason I avoid taking the Ritaline/Amphetamines route. I think it is normal and i wouldn't want to be a productivity machine anyway
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Agreed that you learn much about a work (I've retyped a few articles and books simply to get a usable copy). But copying is not the same as creating --- you'll see the finished product, and may intuit hints as to how it was created, but what you're not getting is the creation process itself : research (especially for nonfiction), structure, plotting and character (for fiction), editing, rewriting, restructuring and r…
> And you don't get this knowledge simply by copying out great works. Well, I think the point is that you may get knowledge, but nt necessarily of the type that lets you make another great work. Doing is an act of learning, whether very small amounts of learning as you do something you've done countless times before, or possibly large amounts of learning as you try something absolutely new, or learning about yourself…
And any learning process which focuses largely on output or product rather than process, shares this deficiency.
To your other point, serendipitous discovery is very much a thing. I find that it is helped by haviing a conceptual structure or mental model which allows slotting new concepts from unrelated areas into a larger whole.
Recent example: moralising pathologies fallacy, in wildfire:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24684652
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/b4bbef90e8c60138513c002590d8e...
"[Hunter S. Thompson] chose, rather than writing original copy, to re-type books like The Great Gatsby and a lot of Norman Mailer, the Naked and the Dead, a lot of Hemingway. He would sit down there on an old type-writer and type every word of those books and he said, 'I just wanna feel what it feels like to write that we'll.'" HST: "If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it's like music…
Writing does not proceed letter by letter, word by word, paragraph by paragraph.
Earlier writing is deleted, moved, revised. Passages are moved earlier or later. Key passages are rewritten.
Etc.
Typing character-by-character an entire novel will likely teach you little about the act of literary creation.
not sure if thats a good way to report a bug but:
one problem/bug i have. as a non native speaker i have my keyboard Layout as U.S International - PC. there is some build of characters involved in that layout for instance to type ä i press the "-key and then the a-key and it gets combined to ä but this means that if i just press the "-key i don't get " i need to press "-key + space but that doesn't seem to work here :<
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I went to my general practitioner (in the US) and got a Ritalin prescription just by saying “I have a hard time concentrating at work”. That’s it. No referral to a specialist or anything. It is a wonder drug for me. I used to spend a majority of my time farting around on the internet at work, then working long hours and scrambling to get my work done before the deadline. Now I am able to be productive more consistent…
Are you a “different” person while on Ritalin? My wife’s a teacher and these days a lot of kids are on Ritalin. She says the kids that “need” it are more manageable when taking it, but it does change their personality. They are less... “lively”.
Amazing idea, really I'm impressed. This intrigued me at first glance as a fun typing exercise, as I've always struggled with typing - I started using computers way before they started teaching typing around here, so my typing is far from the optimal 10 finger method, but I've always found typing exercises mind numbingly boring. However, as I started typing The call of Cthulhu, I'm now much more intrigued by this as…
Have you tried reading books out loud? I found that made a surprising difference to experience of books, even just because I was devouring them much slower. Found it much easier to enjoy the 'craft' of the book too.
Congrats, it's really great! I have a few thoughts/suggestions, but first: Does anyone know of a competitive/practice typing site (as TypeLit, or TypeRacer) where you help digitize books (or any sort of document)? I'm very motivated by TypeRacer's competitions (it's silly, I know), but I would be even more inclined to play if I knew that there was a "greater" purpose...! I haven't looked into Project Gutenberg's proo…
When i noticed that there are only public domain works, I got an idea for an optional mode where you help digitize books by typing from scanned/OCRed works and the results get sent to organizations like the Gutenberg Project or Distributed Proofreaders[0]. In the case of Distributed Proofreaders you could automate the process even by creating a diff of your results with the current draft of the Works being worked on.…
Love the idea! What about something like this but for software? Could be an interesting way to learn a new language/codebase