Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage • Hacker News Board

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#151

Post by dpritchett » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 3:38 PM UTC

worldsayshi wrote: post #143

missinglugnut wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to articulate taste is a skill in and of itself.

Another important skill in this area, or maybe it's a personality trait: Being able to tell yourself that taste is actually really important. You have to kind of double down on following ideas to their extreme, or something like that. Or maybe taking very subtle emotions very seriously. Most of the time when you chase taste you are working on splitting hairs. Or it will look like that to an outside observer.

An uncomfortable thing about skill, taste, and experience is that it’s often easier to demonstrate the superiority of one path over another than it is to explain the differences in a way the audience is prepared to absorb.

I imagine this is a large part of why tooling and language wars are still compelling throughout decades of computing. No amount of lecturing on the joy of e.g. Rails vs. Node will really convince anyone to use an “outdated”, slow, dynamically typed language like Ruby in 2025 — even in places where it’d be a major win.

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#152

Post by zahlman » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 3:41 PM UTC

> The algorithmic machinery of attention has, of course, engineered simple comparison. But it has also seemingly erased the process that makes mastery possible. A time-lapse of someone creating a masterpiece gets millions of views. A real-time video of someone struggling through their hundredth mediocre attempt disappears into algorithmic obscurity.

Honestly, I have found that the most important reason something gets a million views is because it got 999,999 views (so the algorithm likes it more). Lots of popular content doesn't demonstrate that mastery at all; it demonstrates a dumbed-down presentation of relatively little actual content, while the really good stuff is something you only stumble upon by random chance, buried in hundredth-mediocre-attempts.

> I see this in wannabe founders listening to podcasts on loop, wannabe TikTokkers watching hours of videos as “research,”

... Which feeds right into that. It becomes too easy to mistake fluff for content and convince yourself of the value of that research. I think it's something specific to watching video content, too.

One of my own possibly-self-sabotaging ambitions is video rendering software that I would then use to produce my own content. But then, on top of the actual software, I would have to figure out how to actually write the shorter-but-still-compelling scripts that I imagine to be possible. And I would spend the whole time expecting my work to be ignored and despairing over that anyway.

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#153

Post by satyrun » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 3:46 PM UTC

gcanyon wrote: post #127

> At semester's end, all the best photos came from the quantity group. My parents once owned a photography studio. My stepfather often said something like, "A great photographer doesn't only take great photos; he takes many photos of various quality, and never shows anyone the bad ones."

Exactly.

If you look at a book of Picasso's drawings/paintings he has thousands of examples of half finished, complete shit.

The masterpieces are the result of picking the best output.

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#154

Post by dmbche » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 3:48 PM UTC

debugnik wrote: post #121

furyofantares wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. I often say of every genAI I've seen of all types that it is totally lacking in taste and only has skill. And it drastically raises your skill floor immediately, perhaps all the way up to your taste, closing the gap. Maybe that actually is what you were saying? But I'm confused because you used the opposite words.

Closing the gap? I think we're inverting the gap: Many people now have access to a higher skill level than they've developed taste for (if they ever did), which makes them unable to judge their own slop.

Might be unrelated, but I feel like the "boost" that everyone is talking about is cause by translating one medium into text, which most people are more capable at than the medium they are trying to produce in.

While it lets you create something you previously can't, the qualities of the medium are replaced with those of languguage.

I.e. to produce visual images you don't need an understanding of conrtast, composition, tranparency, chroma and all that, you just need to be able to articulate what you want.

I think that's where the lack of taste appears, you have a text-based interaction with a non-language medium.

How when a movie tries to keep as close as possible to a book it rarely will be a noteworthy movie, versus something built from the ground up in that medium

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#155

Post by ethan_smith » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

eleveriven wrote: post #86

I've definitely spent more time designing "the perfect system" than using it. There's a seductive comfort in planning that real execution just doesn't offer because actual work has feedback, friction, failure

The "architecture astronaut" syndrome is particularly endemic in software - we design elegant systems in our heads that would take 10x the time to build than a simple solution that actually ships.

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#156

Post by the_af » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:08 PM UTC

whatevertrevor wrote: post #59

ninetyninenine wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other. There's actually some ground truth facts about AI many people are not knowledgeable about. Many people believe we understand in totality how LLMs work. The absolute truth of this is that we overall we do NOT understand how LLMs work AT all. The mistaken belief that we understan…

I couldn't agree more, and not just on HN but the world at large. For the general populace including many tech people who are not ML researchers, understanding how convolutional neural nets work is already tricky enough. For non tech people, I'd hazard a guess that LLM/ generative AI is complexity-indistinguishable from "The YouTube/Tiktok Algorithm". And this lack of understanding, and in many cases lack of consciou…

> Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists...

I don't think this is self contradictory at all.

One may have beliefs about the meaning of human produced art and how it cannot -- and shouldn't -- be replaced by AI, and at the same time believe that companies will cut costs and replace artists with AI, regardless of any philosophical debates. As an example, studio execs and producers are already leveraging AI as a tool to put movie industry professionals (writers, and possibly actors in the future) "in their place"; it's a power move for them, for example against strikes.

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#157

Post by manapause » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:14 PM UTC

raynr wrote: post #63

strogonoff wrote: post #47

To be strategic, you think hard enough how to get somewhere and carefully plan and eliminate unknowns until you reach a point when getting there is no longer interesting . Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore. It’s just a lot of trivial typing and package management and it might not even be all that impressive when it is done. Your idea is not at all a path well-trodden, but it is…

> Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore. The article gave me a vague, off-topic sense of unease but your comment crystallised the feeling for me. I really wish less emphasis is placed on this kind of blue-sky, "strategic" thinking, and more placed on the "chores". Legwork, maintenance, step-by-step execution of a plan, issue tracking, perspective shifting etc. are all, in my opinio…

I’ve found the best strategies are the ones you can abandon. clearly defined tactics and an appropriate application of people and resources require a quarterback with an ability to audible.

It’s possible to make no mistakes and still lose, it’s when people get offended about something they are wrong about that creates a tolerance for Pyrrhic victories.

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#158

Post by ants_everywhere » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:27 PM UTC

fsmv wrote: post #132

SirHumphrey wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Detractors from AI often refuse to learn how to use it or argue that it doesn't do everything perfectly so you shouldn't use it. But here is the problem - to effectively learn the tool, you must learn to use. Not learning how to effectively AI and then complaining that the results are bad is building a straw-men and then burning it. But what I am giving away when using LLM is not skills, it's the ability to learn t…

If you assume all AI detractors haven't tried it enough then you're the one building a straw man

I said often not always

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#159

Post by Kheyas » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #38

meander_water wrote: post #26

> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers. This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI…

This is exactly why I’m wary of ever attempting a developer-focused startup ever again. What’s not mentioned is the utter frustration when you can see your own output is not up to your own expectations, but you can’t execute on any plan to resolve that discrepancy. “I know what developers want, so I can build it for them” is a death knell proportionate to your own standards… The most profitable business I built was s…

Do you need to ship?

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#160

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 05, 2025, 4:30 PM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #62

meander_water wrote: post #26

> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers. This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI…

This is Rick Rubin pretty much. He has 100/100 in taste, but almost 0/100 in skill. He can't really play an instrument, but he knows exactly what works and what doesn't and can articulate it.

[deleted]