111–120 of 464 posts
> Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps. It is incredibly easy to get onto untrodden ground just by stepping off the main path a bit. You’re fighting with a lot of smart people to have a new insight about pi and e. But if you focus on application of theory, it’s very easy to do something new. Application…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe hard work has gone out of style? Yesterday I poured over two companies documentation. About 200 pages of their API docs only to find: Dozen of typos. Errors in versions. Conflicts in examples. Broken examples. I barely invest in this much reading but this time I did because I was trying to deliver and sure enough I'm able to benefit our entire product because of this effort.
By the way, and only because your comment suggests you care about detail and will find this valuable: it’s “pored over” unless there was a liquid you were dumping on them.
"Follow your interest/passion" - is such an easy advice. However in some societies / economies, it's simply not possible. Where I'm from (India), where a majority of my generation has to lift their families from money problems, there's no option of following passion. There's only "learn/do what makes money". It's not entirely a bad thing though. For example people here just jump into doing something and then eventual…
As usual, this is both interesting but also so generalizing as to get frustrating in places. But it’s clearly well-meaning and earnest, which makes it easier to tolerate some of its annoyingly breezy certainty. Then there’s this: > Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in it…
As usual, this is both interesting but also so generalizing as to get frustrating in places. But it’s clearly well-meaning and earnest, which makes it easier to tolerate some of its annoyingly breezy certainty. Then there’s this: > Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in it…
I used to interpret PG's self-assured tone as wisdom. Over the years though, I've come to realize what it actually is: hubris.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe hard work has gone out of style? Yesterday I poured over two companies documentation. About 200 pages of their API docs only to find: Dozen of typos. Errors in versions. Conflicts in examples. Broken examples. I barely invest in this much reading but this time I did because I was trying to deliver and sure enough I'm able to benefit our entire product because of this effort.
By the way, and only because your comment suggests you care about detail and will find this valuable: it’s “pored over” unless there was a liquid you were dumping on them.
Let's change this. That's disgusting. Literally.
> Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps. It is incredibly easy to get onto untrodden ground just by stepping off the main path a bit. You’re fighting with a lot of smart people to have a new insight about pi and e. But if you focus on application of theory, it’s very easy to do something new. Application…
I don’t know man, farming in most of the world is a totally risky activity.
I can't help but feel this essay is literally 100x longer than it needs to be for the point it's trying to make. This sort of long-winded, redundant writing seems to have gone out of style a long time ago.
Maybe hard work has gone out of style? Yesterday I poured over two companies documentation. About 200 pages of their API docs only to find: Dozen of typos. Errors in versions. Conflicts in examples. Broken examples. I barely invest in this much reading but this time I did because I was trying to deliver and sure enough I'm able to benefit our entire product because of this effort.
Sounds like the law of small errors to me:
https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_4_00.html
As usual, this is both interesting but also so generalizing as to get frustrating in places. But it’s clearly well-meaning and earnest, which makes it easier to tolerate some of its annoyingly breezy certainty. Then there’s this: > Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in it…
Traditionally, footnotes are straightforward explanations of terms or passages. Tech writers, in their grandiosity, have perverted them to contain randomass tangents that no one really cares about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Traditionally, footnotes are straightforward explanations of terms or passages. Tech writers, in their grandiosity, have perverted them to contain randomass tangents that no one really cares about.
I like footnotes, or in this case maybe we should call "endnotes". David Foster Wallace was known to use them a lot, sometimes he would put footnotes in footnotes.