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You must read at least one book to ride

ludic.mataroa.blog

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Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#141

Post by shermantanktop »

wiseowise wrote: post #132
shermantanktop wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can become functionally capable in any mainstream programming language with some working examples, newbie hello world tutorials, maybe a debugger, and/or stack overflow. You are unlikely to get past an intermediate level of skill, and you won’t understand the deeper patterns that motivated the language designers, but you can add features and write useful applications. Is that really a monkey with a typewriter?

Absolutely. I deal with people like that on a day to day basis.

I’m betting that all of us operate that way a percentage of the time. I’m not a zsh expert but I have to edit my zshrc file.

If that’s being a monkey, I guess I’m a monkey. But I bet you are one as well sometimes. I have empathy for people doing their best outside their area of experience, because all of us are that person.

If what you are talking about is people employed as professional C++ developers who have a very superficial understanding of the type system, that’s different. But I still don’t think the term “monkey” applies.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#142

Post by yellow_lead »

ludicity wrote: post #97
yellow_lead wrote: post #21

The section about reading "the right books" is important. I tried reading some self-help books in high school, but after reading a few, you'll realize they are mostly "fanfic" as the author says. I noticed some other patterns in these books. 1. Constant self-questioning while reading - "Is this obvious? did I already know this?" 2. Lots of examples or stories 3. Try to turn a simple metaphor/slogan into a complete ph…

(I'm the author) Starting with Taleb at a young age was helpful for me, as he introduced me to the Narrative Fallacy. I.e, the easiest way to convince anyone of anything is to posit a causal chain with some neat story, and 95% of the population will absorb it uncritically (including me, at the time). I'm asked if I read Cal Newport a lot, and I can't stand him because he makes some good points, some trite points, the…

Thanks for the reply and article! I'm glad you like the bullets. There may be some better indicators out there still.

I'll have to check out more taleb, I didn't know about the narrative fallacy.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#143

Post by [deleted] »

strken wrote: post #52
skybrian wrote: post #29

He's a good writer, but I think he underestimates the implicit skills that an experienced engineer has that beginners don't have. Sometimes it just seems like common sense, but it isn't, and the result is often a lack of empathy. To build up that empathy, being around children or the elderly probably helps. Also, helping a relative who is struggling but you're on their side . Also consider the difference between a na…

I started programming at age eight, while my brother started in his 20s. Teaching him to write C was an eye-opening experience because it showed how much I rely on vibe and feelings. He struggled with things I take for granted, like indenting his code consistently, or actually reading error messages from the compiler and using them for debugging. It took him a couple of years to get to the point where he could get a…

[deleted]

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#144

Post by aucisson_masque »

ludicity wrote: post #98
aucisson_masque wrote: post #75

Damn, it feel like you either have to read a book or you’re a looser. I do read book but at the end I would still do things my own way and not follow someone else ‘Best practice’ because life is made of trial and errors. There is value in failing something and getting back to it. It reads like this author is a nerd, for lack of a better word, not someone I would enjoy talking to for extended period of time.

I probably am a nerd, hah. But it sounds like you're doing exactly what I'd do anyway. Read a book to load the brain with some useful concepts and philosophies, then go get lived experience.

My apologies for saying « not someone I would enjoy talking to for extended period of time. ». It’s not possible to know enough from someone to make that judgement by just reading a blog post.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#145

Post by twitchard »

ludicity wrote: post #96
skybrian wrote: post #29

He's a good writer, but I think he underestimates the implicit skills that an experienced engineer has that beginners don't have. Sometimes it just seems like common sense, but it isn't, and the result is often a lack of empathy. To build up that empathy, being around children or the elderly probably helps. Also, helping a relative who is struggling but you're on their side . Also consider the difference between a na…

Thank you for the kind words on the writing! And the implicit skills are important, it's just that reading a book is, broadly speaking, a very strong indicator of ability and a great starting point. The best engineer at my consultancy doesn't really read books due to S-tier ADHD, but has a massive amount of lived experience and has read enough documentation/high-tier blog posts that there's probably some equivalency.…

Let me get this straight: you can be better than 90% of people if you just read a book, but wait, not just any book, it has to be the right book -- and also it doesn't have to be a book, it can also just be "lived experience" or technical documentation, that counts too.

At this point, the thesis is more qualification than statement. Mostly what I drew from the article is that the author feels smugly superior to many of his peers, and wants an excuse ("they didn't even read a book") to morally blame them for their (perceived) shortcomings, while serving up a generous helping of false modesty on the side.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#146

Post by mirawelner »

Every time Nikhil Suresh comes up on hackernews I look at the comments for insults and wait to see how quickly they come up on his 'compliments' page in his blog. So far all 3 of them appear to be there! I don't know how he can be this obsessive about people's responses to him while also running a consultancy.

Of course, you think if he has this much time to respond to insults he would have time to respond to my email where I said hello :(

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#147

Post by ludicity »

twitchard wrote: post #145
ludicity wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the kind words on the writing! And the implicit skills are important, it's just that reading a book is, broadly speaking, a very strong indicator of ability and a great starting point. The best engineer at my consultancy doesn't really read books due to S-tier ADHD, but has a massive amount of lived experience and has read enough documentation/high-tier blog posts that there's probably some equivalency.…

Let me get this straight: you can be better than 90% of people if you just read a book, but wait, not just any book, it has to be the right book -- and also it doesn't have to be a book, it can also just be "lived experience" or technical documentation, that counts too. At this point, the thesis is more qualification than statement. Mostly what I drew from the article is that the author feels smugly superior to many…

You can obviously substitute a book for whatever you want, but a great book is a huge accelerator. And yeah, it has to be good, which doesn't seem very controversial. Fluent Python is a great example of this. I could, with enough effort and time, piece together some of the philosophy underlying the language's design, but someone has already put a huge amount of pedagogical effort into pre-chewing a lot of that food for me. This probably isn't intrinsic to books (I really like Josh Comeau's CSS course, for example, which has book-tier thought put into it) but I do think that books attract authors who are thoughtful, and the form factor makes them pleasant to revisit. Even some of the suspect, like The Mythical Man Month, have some beautiful prose and thought that I think wouldn't appear typically appear in a more colloquial format like a YouTube series.

I do appreciate you taking the time to read my mind for false modesty and vaguely insult me though, thank you!

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#148

Post by ludicity »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #80
anal_reactor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can I build this empathy? I feel extremely frustrated when spending time with people less educated than myself

Spend more time with people MORE educated than you.

I am the author and was puzzling over how to respond to this, but yeah, this is basically it. I still have very little tolerance for a certain level of incompetence (don't work at a hospital if you're going to crash prod repeatedly, sorry, this isn't adult day care), but most of my readers are better software engineers than me, and every day I have to humble myself and ask one of them how to do something stupidly simple, like "Is there a better way to develop pipelines than watching GitHub Actions fail, tweak the code, repeat?"

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#149

Post by ludicity »

mirawelner wrote: post #146

Every time Nikhil Suresh comes up on hackernews I look at the comments for insults and wait to see how quickly they come up on his 'compliments' page in his blog. So far all 3 of them appear to be there! I don't know how he can be this obsessive about people's responses to him while also running a consultancy. Of course, you think if he has this much time to respond to insults he would have time to respond to my emai…

The joy of not having many clients yet, haha. Also sorry that I haven't responded to the email. :( I currently have 451 from readers and have had to accept that I can't get to all of them.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#150

Post by ludicity »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #144
ludicity wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably am a nerd, hah. But it sounds like you're doing exactly what I'd do anyway. Read a book to load the brain with some useful concepts and philosophies, then go get lived experience.

My apologies for saying « not someone I would enjoy talking to for extended period of time. ». It’s not possible to know enough from someone to make that judgement by just reading a blog post.

No harm, no foul. :) You might very well be right, but I chose to interpret it literally (there are lots of people that are otherwise pleasant that I don't get along with and that's fine) rather than as an insult.

I actually had a huge laugh about it, because I was reading R.A Salvatore's Starless Night which is peak nerd material and not even a good book, I read this trash literally because it's D&D. Doesn't get much nerdier than that!

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