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The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

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Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#251
post #245

> The trials are never complete. This is not true - one day you will be dead. Hopefully that day is a long way away but it will eventually come around. It is good to keep this in mind and spend some time coming to terms with this. If you do, the problem this article talks about will naturally fall away. Realise and acknowledge the limitations to your ability to act. Then consciously make a choice as to what you spend…

> This is not true - one day you will be dead. Bold of you to assume that being dead also means the trials are complete. I imagine it as the beginning on the next set of trials.

I don’t assume that. :) Just that the “me” facing them will no longer have any care for those the “me” here is facing.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#252
I don't feel the "moral weight" the author mentions.

For one, there are many, many directions you could take at any given moment, but you have to choose only one. You have no choice but to triage. That's not a moral failing, just the nature of agency and existence.

I do have some perfectionistic tendencies, which might be behind some of this. But a long time ago I graduated to a deeper perfectionism...

The problem with simple perfectionism is that you can only achieve a level of perfection in a simple and superficial way, often to the neglect of more interesting goals... after you "perfect" something, you look deeper and inevitably see more problems. You can pursue those, but you then just look deeper again and repeat. At some point you'll realize you're spending a lot of time on something that is only meaningful to an arbitrary standard that exists only in your own head (that you only recently invented).

So I moved on to "perfecting" the balance across the relevant competing concerns and constraints. Since there's rarely a perfect balance, no closed-form answer, and since your attention is certainly one of the factors to balance, real perfection requires that you can find something "good enough" given the circumstance to move on to something else.

Put another way, if you can't find satisfaction of your perfectionist impulse in finding something good enough, you could be doing "perfection" better, and should probably work on that.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#253

Oh wow. This hits hard in the feels. Here's my personal submission for "UI problem that has existed for years on touch interfaces, plus a possible solution, but at this point I'm just shouting into the void": https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3... In short, an interface should not be interactable until a few milliseconds after it has finished (re)rendering, or especially, while it is still in…

It's not just a touch issue. Desktop environments have toast notifications and dialogs that can pop up unexpectedly (neither of which are remotely new problems). You can be trying to click something at the corner of your screen and have it intercepted by a notification or you can be pressing enter and have it activate the default action on a dialog that just popped up. Especially in the dialog case you often just have to hope that it wasn't actually something you needed to see or select a different option on.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#254
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it says 1/(1-np).

That's what it says in the original post. It is also non-sensical. If the probability is 10% (p=0.1), and the number of systems is 11 (n=11), then you get 1/(1 - 11*0.1) which is -10.

I tried working this out, but I think the original was correct.

The cases where the answer is negative correspond to a 'runaway scenario' where every change is expected to cause more than 1 extra change. So the answer is 'nonsensical' (because that is indeed where the formula for geometric series no longer works) but the true answer is infinity.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#255

I have spent some percentage of my life attempting to rewrite all software from first principles up. Software is so spectacularly broken. Applications that don’t let me adjust the position of a little button for my work habits. Why is that impossible!?! A global software and commerce system, where you can buy candy or transfer $ billions, both with cute warnings like “Please, oh, please, sir! Please don’t hit the bac…

If you're looking at really from first principles, it's hard to beat forth systems. You can type in Plankforth ( https://github.com/nineties/planckforth ) in a hex editor ie. this can be built from zero software, by effectively morse-coding it into bare memory. In terms of accessibility though, I'd recommend Forthkit ( https://github.com/tehologist/forthkit ), Miniforth ( https://compilercrim.es/bootstrap/ ), Sectorf…

Forth has been a great inspiration. A demonstration that great flexibility, and low level control, can be had with very low overhead or complexity.

As you note too, Forth is also useful as a counter demonstration of how important abstractions are. Without powerful abstractions (or simple abstractions that can be composed into powerful abstractions), Forth fails to scale, most especially across a team or teams, and for any expectation of general reuse, beyond basic operations.

The first version of Forth I used I wrote myself, which is probably a common event as you point out. Forth language documentation is virtually its own design doc.

Lisp is the other language I began using after buying a book and writing my own.

Thanks greatly for the links! I will be following up on those. Any insight from anywhere.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#256
post #148
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you validate an idea with 1000 paying customers if you don't have a product?

landing page / waitlist / speaking with customers you shouldn't write code until you know someone is willing to buy i'd say somewhere between 20 < n < 100 for B2B makes sense, rather than 1000

So that's where all the fake "coming soon" products that don't actually exist are coming from...

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#257
post #38

I have spent some percentage of my life attempting to rewrite all software from first principles up. Software is so spectacularly broken. Applications that don’t let me adjust the position of a little button for my work habits. Why is that impossible!?! A global software and commerce system, where you can buy candy or transfer $ billions, both with cute warnings like “Please, oh, please, sir! Please don’t hit the bac…

I don't know if this is post-hoc justification, but I see myself as somebody who wants to know what everything is and how everything works - so to me, re-implementing (and always failing to take it to completion) is the means to an end. I think I spent the first 25 years of my life studying, so learning has become the goal itself. Work is there to provide funds to support me while I learn. Re-implementing the basics…

A fellow autodidact!

Yes, implementing things, even those that others have already done, reveals depths that no study of others’ artifacts or solutions ever could.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#258
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're feeling is not laziness. It's the quiet ache of misalignment between your values and your current energy. You love the craft. You want to savor the process. But the weight of “shoulds” — finish the book, learn the language, do it the right way — has turned your joy into pressure. The discomfort of having gaps in your knowledge is not a flaw. It’s a sign of integrity. But perfectionism disguised as discipl…

Damn, not only is this great wisdom but your writing is honestly beautiful... Are you a writer by any chance?

I like it too, but when I looked into their posting history I did come to the conclusion this was probably generated by an LLM. How that impacts your appreciation is up to you but I thought readers would care to know. Readers who want to reach their own conclusions are advised to enable showdead.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#260

This is well-written. I think LLMs can help a bit here too - the other day I was watching a rare, old film with my wife and the subtitles kept de-syncing. I.e. the frame-rate was slightly different as well as a fixed offset. So I explained it to Claude and made it write a Python script where I could manually set a few fixed times and it would adjust the SRT file, and it worked perfectly. I literally paused the film a…

Whaaaaaat…

This same thing happened to me this past weekend, and I used Vercel v0 to fix it. https://v0-captions-adjuster.vercel.app/

Not shilling my solution; this is nowhere near actually good yet, but it was "good enough" to fix the problem for me too. Only posting it as proof that I had the same thing happen to me, and maybe it can help others too.

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