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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like burnout. The reason you can spend days on end coding is because you're excited about the thing you're working on. If you're coding something that you don't find exciting or that is just a pipe dream, you'll have thoughts about your deathbed. That's pretty natural.
Burnout from doing same thing over and over.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Burnout from doing same thing over and over.
Pretty much. Every project I start, it's the same kind of yak-shaving. Database schema, logging, authentication, display of errors, build tools, CI/CD, backend, front-end. Full-time is not even enough for this for one person. There is a ton of CRUD and mind-numbing tasks you have to churn through to get to the interesting parts, and I have been doing the boring parts for 20 years. The goals barely changed, but how we…
The question wasn't answered. How to fill those gaps? Write.
This essay is very short. Has he given up on writing? Maybe too much Twitter has melted his brian.
Well, I asked GPT-3 to make this longer: One of the surest ways to come up with new ideas is to pay attention to what doesn't fit in. We're used to seeing things in a certain way, and often times it's the things that don't quite fit into our preconceived notions that can provide the best insights. The most obvious place to look for these anomalies is at the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge grows like a fractal; from…
This essay is very short. Has he given up on writing? Maybe too much Twitter has melted his brian.
“I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.” - Mark Twain
Most things are strange, missing, broken for mundane reasons that you can't do much about. The space of new ideas is huge, but almost all new ideas are bad. One strategy I really like is to think of technologies you couldn't build 5 years ago but are just barely possible today. That's where yesterday's bad ideas become today's good ideas. For example, laptops and phones produced 20 years of incremental improvements i…
I think to some extent we are seeing the same thing with the latest AI models, where if you just throw enough parameters and GPU's at a problem, you can get pretty good results.
In a way, I see some parallels to aircraft, in that it was important to study birds as the best example of heavier than air flyers early on, but understanding the nuances of the biomechanics of flapping wasn't necessary to surpass them.
This essay is very short. Has he given up on writing? Maybe too much Twitter has melted his brian.
It’s actually so short, you can read it here. (If you’re like me you head to the the comments section before going to a page…). Here it is: How to Get New Ideas January 2023 (Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. So I asked: What would I have said?) The way to get new idea…
so, 'through the looking glass' by another name?
edit: at time of writing, in wrong hemisphere for summer's day.
When I was in my 20s, I could code for days on straight. I had so much energy and the perception of the bottomless capital of time. Now that I am forty, the cost-benefit analysis is getting tougher. Can I have my big break and retire early? Sure, but the chances of that happening are not that great. Many serial entrepreneurs fail multiple times with nothing to show for it. All I think about now is - when I am on my d…
Sounds like burnout. The reason you can spend days on end coding is because you're excited about the thing you're working on. If you're coding something that you don't find exciting or that is just a pipe dream, you'll have thoughts about your deathbed. That's pretty natural.