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I'm just having fun

jyn.dev

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Re: I'm just having fun

#61
post #43

Not addressing the content directly but a note on the formatting: I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.

I hate it when people do this. I refuse to write Bell Hooks or E. E. Cummings without capitals. Even though it's vanishingly unlikely, I hope they both read this from beyond the grave and think about what they've done to reading comprehension. Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase wil…

eNGLISH is a lingua franca, so it's prone to morph much more than without the status. do you really think a blogger or 5 will change how upper case exist? maybe we'll signal something with exacerbation by some unicode somewhere at the phrase. maybe we'll type with the help of AI (fuck ai). maybe English will have augmentative and diminutive word forms like Portuguese. maybe grammar will be simpler, so more people can use it and even with a simpler language, like Chinese, you still can express deep stuff, with more words/characters but then, how often your typing or reading something serious? there's a big difference between a blog and a journal from a psychologist evaluating meaningless activities as the precursor/variable of hapiness or satisfaction (or whatever the correct scientific term is)

Re: I'm just having fun

#62

Not addressing the content directly but a note on the formatting: I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.

I don't find it any harder or easier. Reading is not difficult and hasn't been since kindergarten for me. If anything, the British bastardizations of the Oxford spelling of words like "capitalization" with a z, because Pocket Fowler's Modern English thought the Americans were too crude and wished to emulate a more continental style, makes reading clumsier.

Re: I'm just having fun

#63
post #47

Not addressing the content directly but a note on the formatting: I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.

It's a signal they want to put out that they don't respect the rules of grammar. They'll grow out of it and one-day look back and cringe, as we all tend to do eventually. It's really hard to read. There's "text-transform: capitalize;" which puts things in Title Case but unfortunately that is also hard to read for body text. ( That Was a Trend Too For a While If You Remember. ).

hitting upper case on each word doesn't feel ergonomic but rather aesthetical. if we have periods, why do we need upper case? or why we don't have auto-capitalize globally activated in every text-box? as someone who type like this on my blog; i refuse to hit shift everytime i bring a period into any text, as well not using period at the end of any paragraph and not capitalizing "i", because otherwise, i want "YOU" and "WE" and "HE" and "THOU /j

Re: I'm just having fun

#65
It’s great advice and exactly how I live my life. Programming was a hobby and then a profession, I still use the phrase ‘working’ but really it’s play with outcomes.

Re: I'm just having fun

#66

We need more people in this world willing to do their own thing, even if others might find it intimidating or silly. The important thing is to have fun and learn things. Compiler hacking is just as good as any other hobby, even if it's done in good jest. Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money fo…

You can't have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm. How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal). Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive". Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for…

What is the expected value, of some dude at university spinning dinner plates in the cafeteria? What a silly pointless thing to do! Of course, if you're physics Professor Feynman, you get a Nobel out of it, so do the silly pointless things after all!

Re: I'm just having fun

#67

What a wonderful article. My stress has been drowning my joy in something I once found fulfilling. While reading this, I suddenly remembered it. Thank you.

What has been causing you stress? (If you don’t mind me asking?)

It's nothing special. I'm an academic and usually I balance my desire to work / deadlines and family obligations. The last month I screwed up my management and got frustrated at both. I was holding that emotion even after crunch-time had passed.

Sometimes a lighthearted piece is all you need to remember to release. What's the saying? "The sea of bitterness is vast. Turn back, and you may yet see shore." I still love what I do, even if it got tougher than expected for a moment.

Re: I'm just having fun

#68
post #21
post #6

I don't work in programming, but "you can do hard things" applies to my work as well. It drives me nuts when coworkers refer to me as really smart when in fact I'm merely curious. "I have no idea how you did that!" You should ask. That's how I learned it.

In my experience, curiosity and intelligence are very strongly correlated. There is a real gap between people with the curiosity and ability to explore and learn, and people without. This is often handwaved as "motivation" but it's more than just that. In fact, the gap is so large that it can be really hard for a person on one side of it to understand how people on the other side think.

I think part of it is that geniuses gets (or at least feels) rewarded whenever they try learning, while other people might not. For the same amount of effort, the amount of new knowledge gained by other people is fewer than what geniuses can get. Overtime, leaning no longer feels worth it. Thus normal people no longer feels curious while geniuses still do.

Re: I'm just having fun

#70
post #33

This all is good advice. Don't be intimidated, try new things, have fun. On top of that, keep your day job. Or have enough wealth to not need it. Otherwise fun may cease gradually, then abruptly. Keep the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid well-maintained.

This is like “draw the rest of the owl” advice. Most people struggle with the earn enough money to afford house in metro with multiple employers step. And earn enough money per hour to have time for other stuff.
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