Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn, that's an incredible amount of progress in just 400 days
That is the power of AI.
Don’t sell yourself short!
You could achieve things yourself if you tried!
Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
101–110 of 159 posts
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#102Add flip flopping - undecided on language/engine/toolset for weeks to decades.
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#103[dead]
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#104[dead]
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
And here we once again see an example of misaligned incentives baked into another one of our most hallowed institutions.
The problem is that what the “hallowed institutions” are trying to do is extremely ridiculous: turn the kind of work that scientific geniuses did into something that can be replicated by following a formula. It’s as if a committee of middle managers got together and said, “how can we replicate and scale the work of people like Einstein?”
> The problem is that what the “hallowed institutions” are trying to do is extremely ridiculous: turn the kind of work that scientific geniuses did into something that can be replicated by following a formula.
> It’s as if a committee of middle managers got together and said, “how can we replicate and scale the work of people like Einstein?”
Or are they trying to require enough rigor and discipline so that out of 100,000 people who want to be the next Einstein, the process washes out the 99,000 who aren't willing or able to do more than throw out half-baked 'creative' ideas and expect the world to pick them up and run with them.
There's only finite attention and money for funding research, so you gotta do SOMETHING to filter out the larpers who want to take it and faff around.
I think at this point the system has eaten its own tail a bit, but there's good reason to require some level of "show me" before getting given the money to run your own research.
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked at a chair for 12 years - in that time I've seen a lot of PhD students go through this. If it helps anything at all: It's normal. At this point, you've already proven you're smart and knowledgeable. Now, the universe wants to see if you can also finish what you've started. That's the main thing a PhD proves: That you can take an incredibly interesting topic and then do all the boring stuff that they need you…
> Focus on finishing. Reduce the scope as much as possible again. in my field this would be terrible advice. instead you need to be doing something that your audience actually will give a shit about.
If you’ve spent a significant amount of time widening the scope as far as possible to include everything interesting about your original question, and there is nothing in that whole widened scope that the audience will give a shit about, your topic is unsaveable and your advisor is a failure.
If there is something interesting enough to qualify, then reduce the scope as much as possible. It should go without saying that you shouldn’t throw out the interesting bit.
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, in every team I've been in (only 3 tbf) we almost all followed the "nit" approach for PRs. nit: this could be changed to XYZ vs we should use XYZ here where it was understood nits could be ignored if you didn't feel it was an urgent thing vs a preference.
It's worth noting that this is a kind of different "nit" than something that might be attached to a line of code. Like, someone might "nit" using a bunch of if statements where a switch statement might work, or if someone uses a `for each` where a `thing.map` would do. What I am describing would be something higher level, more like a comment on approach, or an observation that there is some high-level redundancy or o…
I had someone reject my code that improved/regularized half a dozen instances of a domain object we had, where they were showing up in code paths I cared about. He said there’s dozens of these, don’t submit this unless you fix them all.
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#108I try to do the first version in a minimal way to just try the concept. If it works it will be useful and justify an improved version, and will be a good test ground for elements that will go into the improved version.
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#109Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he…
Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts…
This comment is screaming out fot 3 or 4 panels and some stick figures.
Re: Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Day 1: We aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of an existing industrial catalyst in a novel application that has not seen commercial usage, potentially lowering cost of production of precursors for essential medications Day 400: Having thoroughly described a universal theory of everything, we set out to build an experimental apparatus in orbit at a Lagrange point capable of detecting a universal particle which acts…
Damn, that's an incredible amount of progress in just 400 days
Notice: "We set out to build..."