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Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

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Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#201

Post by jmfldn »

ridaj wrote: post #171
jmfldn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You also need tenure, more than anything else." Sadly yes. An argument that the current uni system should be changed to make this not so.

The uni system couldn't afford to give tenured professors freedom to follow their fancy without the "underclass" working hard to make it possible in the first place — graduate students and untenured staff do the high-volume work needed to make profits: churning out tens of thousands of undergrads per year, paid for by fed-backed loans, and definitely not all of them taught by Feynman-type professors. I don't know if…

Sure. I just wonder if there is some sort of middle ground? Does it have to be zero sum here between tenured and non-tenured in this regard? I'm not sure what the answer is but other setups are possible unless you consider this one optimal (perhaps some do!).

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#202

Post by pbronez »

CalRobert wrote: post #98
schindlabua wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah sounds like you described me perfectly. But I do have to say, ever since I'm programming full-time I seem not to be able to just code for fun anymore. I used to program all day long.. and I guess I still do, but now it's for work, and after 8h of work I'm just done, you know? The "stuff I want to look at" list is growing longer and longer and there's no hope of me ever catching up. (I can't imagine how it is for…

Dad of two - we basically don't, if I'm honest. I've had to give up on an immense number of things and while lots of people tell you "having kids is expensive" very few will tell you that the most expensive part is the opportunity cost. I have so many things I want to do and it hurts, almost physically, to watch other people doing them because they could hack on stuff after work while I had to deal with making sure a…

I’m right there with you man. Same ages even.

The first few years of kids were infuriating and terrifying. I built my career by constantly exploring and learning after hours. Kids made that impossible, and that made me frustrated (because there’s SO MUCH I want to do besides diapers) and scared (because how can I maintain my career without learning).

It’s somewhat better now. I’m seeing them grow and can believe that this stage of life won’t last forever. I’ve managed to keep up with work by increasing efficiency during core hours, though I still look forward to getting back on the wagon with side projects when I can.

Here are a few beliefs that have helped me build & maintain a positive mind set:

- An engaged parent is priceless to a child. They desperately need you and you are irreplaceable. There is huge value in showing up for them, it’s just very different from your prior experience.

- COVID is terrible and we’re all struggling to get by. You must ruthlessly prioritize where you spend mental, physical, fiscal and chronological resources. Nobody expects you to maintain the same pace as before; we are all suffering through this together.

- Family and Profession both benefit from strengthening your mind, body and habits. Level up your time management game to improve exercise and diet. When the kids get easier, you’ll have more capacity for professional endeavors than before.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#203

Post by Uehreka »

goodpoint wrote: post #140
Netcob wrote: post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

> I don't want to spend my leisure time fighting with tools, debugging build processes that break all the time, make sense of docker's tagging system Now that CV-driven development is the standard, we are forced to learn new bloated "devops" tools and services every year. This type of knowledge expires very quickly. Also these tools and services do not develop communities: business users drop last-year tools like hot…

People on HN are always deriding the “tech hedonic treadmill”, but I find it interesting that this meme seems to have reached maturity in 2015, and the list of things they point to as “the new trendy thing this year” has been the same ever since: Some combo of Node.js, React, webpack, Docker and Kubernetes.

I think this meme was still fairly true then: Node was at risk of splitting into Node.js and IO.js, React was still new-ish and people were (rightfully) panicking over the drastic changes coming in Angular v2, Docker was still new-ish and there were arguments over whether Docker Swarm or Kubernetes was the future. But nowadays Node has stabilized, React and webpack have been comfortably dominant for years, Docker’s model of containers won out a long time ago and Kubernetes is there if you need it, but is mostly useful for people building a PaaS.

If people don’t want to learn these things, then fine, but I do wish the overall mood here would update to reflect the fact that we are now living in a much more stable time than when these memes were created.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#204

Post by bserge »

saalweachter wrote: post #94
nicbou wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned my trade by playing. I suspect that many other people on HN also did. Now I do something very different, and that also came from playing, as did many of the skills that made it possible. I still write code, but it's entirely for fun. It's a completely different experience from closing tickets in an office. I do many other things that aren't very cost-effective, just because they're fun. They might not pay t…

You can't really make a learning system that doesn't play. Physical play is how we train, develop and calibrate our bodies; mental play does the same for our minds. If we one day build AGI that doesn't skip and dance and draw and make up silly stories for the fun of it, that will surprise me a lot more than the other way around.

It wouldn't need to skip and dance, though. Mental play is just randomly trying to piece together different information and see the results (physical play is simpler, a subset of mental play, basically continuous calibration).

It's like having 12 puzzle sets and just taking pieces from each, trying to fit them with others and seeing the results. Sometimes something interesting shows up.

Our brains do it constantly, all the time, 24/7. Most often the results are garbage and discarded, but sometimes something interesting/useful comes out, so it's tagged as such and stored for further processing.

The data used for such play is everything we have stored in memory, recalled either randomly or, more often, based on current circumstances/needs/wants.

An AGI would only play with what it has. And what it has available would be up to the creators.

If it's built to imitate a human, it will have to be loaded with the same data as a human. And I mean all of it, everything from birth to current age or death (that varies a lot by individual, by the way).

Basically, you'd have to recreate a whole human life's experience for this hypothetical AGI. Otherwise it won't be even close to a human.

But such an advanced AI would most likely be built for specific purposes, which would save a lot of resources. It can play all it wants with that limited data, improve it and create new stuff. But it won't be able to do things like applying information from bird flight to car building, because it will simply not have that data.

Just my musings.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#205

Post by jmfldn »

mmcnl wrote: post #128
jmfldn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. I think most people can benefit from a bit of this at least. Ie. Speaking of software engineering, at work our 10% time is for us to do as we please. A lot of good things come from that. Maybe 50% time would be too much for most though. Google's 20% is probably the maximum I'd opt for if I were a CEO.

For me setting 10% aside as "do as you please" feels like a restriction on creativity as well. It's hard to "plan" creativity. I think culture and trust is much more important than setting a number.

I agree about culture and trust, both crucial in this regard. I think something like 10% time can play a part too, it at least gives people the feeling they can do what they want for a fixed period of time.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#206

Post by dizzy3gg »

swat535 wrote: post #137
Netcob wrote: post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

This is exactly why the more I think about it, the more I just want to git-push-heroku-goodbye and be done with it. I don't care about setting and maintaining AWS instances, docker containers and jenkins. The older I get, the more I realize how precious my time is and now I have very little patience for anyone or anything that wastes it. This is also why I've basically cut off all social medias from my life (except H…

Ditto, recently moved from AWS to render.com It's like a cheaper Heroku, it's been stable so far. I do use GitHub actions to run a small pipeline on projects but its a far cry from Jenkins.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#207

Post by bserge »

egberts1 wrote: post #15

Applying a real world observation toward something not related is called cross-domain technological transfer. I did the same with fishing at a lazy brook in 1983. I observed how the river get all bendy shape of the letter “S”, how the banks are shallow on inside curves, recalled a geostat photos over decades and finally noticed how these increasingly curvy S finally touch the other curve to a point of making a new wa…

It's an amazing ability humans (and maybe other animals?) have.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#208

Post by cannabis_sam »

iamgopal wrote: post #122
cannabis_sam wrote: post #120

You get a couple of lines in, and it’s painfully familiar, since it’s sadly so incredibly similar to my waning love of programming... It’s wildly destructive for society to have these completely devoid of ethics, fascist-style assholes with capital/power, that can dictate what what more useful people than can spend their time thinking about, yet no-one even thinks it’s a problem. Although to be fair it’s just a sub-p…

So the solution is ... ?

Primarily to redistribute capital from clueless geriatrics that can’t separate Ivanhoe from an iPhone...

The bigger problem is of course how we as a society legitimizes destroying young people’s future, just to fund exorbitant pensions for clueless old people who still think 1968 was a “leftist” moment, instead of actually being the starting point of the fanatically far-right fantasy world we live in today. (The next step is of course to dismantle this fantasy world)

(Edit: tldr: let’s stop letting pension funds kill children, okay..?)

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#209

Post by ric2b »

paledot wrote: post #182
Oras wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear hear! I wish one day the dev community will understand that its never about the tools and more about the delivery. The customer does not give a monkey if the backend is node, go or PHP. You do not impress anyone by using React, redux, amber, angular ... etc. All people care about is a solution to a problem they have. However, from my experience, this is not a popular opinion among developers.

Which is why I open my conversational interviews with, "There's an emergency, sales promised a customer a to-do list app yesterday. It's getting shipped out and forgotten, you're doing it on your own, only thing that matters is it's done fast. What do you use?". And then of course I spring the, "Okay, now it's becoming a flagship product. How do you onboard co-workers? How do you pivot to ongoing maintenance? What pr…

That would give me a bad impression as a candidate.

It's like you're aware of the issue (sales doesn't give two shits about the capacity of the engineering team) but you want someone that is good at wasting a lot of time efficiently instead of improving communication with the sales team.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#210

Post by fuzzy2 »

NBJack wrote: post #158
fuzzy2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, it’s different for me. Since at work I don’t really do the Continuous Integration/Delivery stuff (or anything with “real infrastructure”), I find it very enjoyable to fiddle with it at home. There’s no pressure to accomplish anything and I can just leave it alone for months or even years before coming back to it. There’s a nice side-effect, too: The CI definition documents how to compile the project. I recently d…

I would caution against trusting your build process definition to hold up to time. It's definitely better than nothing. Even within the last few years of my job, we've had numerous disruptions to our automated builds due to everything from repo changes to version bumps in our fundamental deploy tools. I've got a self-assigned action to take just tomorrow due to how a change in how secrets management has now disrupted…

It may not run to completion in the future, that’s true. However, if it’s something as simple as a shell script or a shell command list, it’s at least relatively transparent.

Unlike, say, tasks on Azure DevOps. Not a fan of those.

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