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They had the guts and willpower to learn Sumerian. Why, I wonder, had they to use an LLM to write the essay about it? It kind of invalidates the core messages.
I read the entire post, very well written, and didn't suffer from that impression that it was written by an LLM
They had the guts and willpower to learn Sumerian. Why, I wonder, had they to use an LLM to write the essay about it? It kind of invalidates the core messages.
> Captain Holt: Well, this is a total waste of time. Sergeant Jeffords: Sure, but you can still have fun, even if you're wasting time. Captain Holt: That's absurd. Productivity is what makes things fun. That's why humans go to work. Sergeant Jeffords: It is?
It's a hobby though. At the end of the article the author says 'This is why telling burned-out people to "find work-life balance" or "pursue hobbies" often fails.' But this is literally a hobby. Something you put effort into without needing to justify why, just because you enjoy it, is a hobby. It's cool but the author makes it out to be way more profound than it is (ironically, justifying it with a narrative to turn…
If you are going to spend time on a hobby why not pick a hobby that also benefits your career? Win win?
I struggle with that, partly because computer science was my hobby. Then I went to university studying it, and enjoying it as a hobby. Then I started working, still enjoying it as a hobby.
And if I have 10 interesting topics I want to explore on my free time. Why not pick one that will also benefit my work?
After all, I don't have as much time for my hobbies nowadays. So picking one that also benefits and influences my work is more fun and meaningful and also allows me to be paid doing something I would have done for free anyway.
This article highlights the problem with that approach.
Feels like it is very common in our industry. A very high percentage of "Show HN" fits dangerously close to that. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, it is just exposing yourself to the risks mentioned in the post.
When I had, let's say, half a million hand-written LoC vaporize overnight for a gaming platform 26 original games I'd written on it, the feeling was much worse than burnout. Burnout implies you don't want to do the work anymore. Disillusionment - the despair and ennui of seeing something reduced to less than ash, which you spent every waking hour of your life and years of mental output and daily sacrifices perfecting and refining... that's not burnout. You wake up and say "I want to do something difficult again" but how do you even take the first step, knowing that it's all so pointless?
So I think, Cuneiform is a very apt analogy to code. Growing up in the early 80s, my older brother (16 years older) was a CS major. He gave me my first programming books, a Tandy laptop and a tape recorder. He said this:
"Remember: Everything we write as programmers is written in sand." I think he meant to tell me to make backups. But over time it became the truest observation I could make about this life of solving problems which disappear, using tools which disappear, in languages and files and thought loops that disappear.
Maybe doctors or lawyers or detectives, or other professionals who deal with serieses of episodic problems feel this way in the end, too. When a mission they were on peters out. That it's all ephemeral and temporary in a way that makes us small and meaningless...
Anyway, burnout is saying you're not interested in anything anymore. So switching to writing on clay is maybe a horizontal move, but no less satisfying.
Mandatory quote from Brooklyn 99: > Captain Holt: Well, this is a total waste of time. Sergeant Jeffords: Sure, but you can still have fun, even if you're wasting time. Captain Holt: That's absurd. Productivity is what makes things fun. That's why humans go to work. Sergeant Jeffords: It is?
…Sumerian, written in cuneiform, was humanity's first writing system. A language that hasn't been spoken in four thousand years.
The same question circles again: Why am I doing this?
Why am I trying to learn Sumerian, a language that hasn't been spoken for five thousand years?…
…Sumerian, written in cuneiform, was humanity's first writing system. A language that hasn't been spoken in four thousand years. The same question circles again: Why am I doing this? Why am I trying to learn Sumerian, a language that hasn't been spoken for five thousand years?… Watch out reader, by the end it maybe indeed turn out that Sumerian hasn’t been spoken for 10, 20, or 30 thousand years. The LLM just doesn’t…
> Attested from c. 2900 BC. Went out of vernacular use around 1700 BC; used as a classical language until about 100 AD.
So vernacular use stopped roughly 3725 years ago