So... it's not just me that see the world as a collection of broken tech/tools that I know how to fix but won't have the capacity to do everything myself and it feels frustrating...! I really liked framing it as "Technical Capability as a Moral Weight"
The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
271–280 of 458 posts
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#272I 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 wi…
A good name for that could be "pragmatic perfectionism". Has a nice little alliteration and everything
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#273> Burnout does not just come from overwork. It comes from overresponsibility. I don't _think_ it is accurate. I think burnout comes from putting energy into things that don't have meaning. Case in point, this article: as you realize that fixing everything is a never-ending game with marginal ROI, you end up burning out. If overresponsibility alone caused burn out, I think that every parent out there would be impacted…
I suspect that if you dig deeper, the underlying cause of burnout being forced to spend a lot of effort over time and not being able to feel that you are living up to your values in return. You are running a marathon but never reach the finish line of the satisfaction of living according to your own moral code.
* That can come from overresponsibility if you have a value that says you should fix things that you see are broken.
* It can come from meaningless bullshit jobs if you have a value (which almost everyone does) that says your effort is meaningful.
* It can come from isolation if you have a value that it's important to be connected to others.
It can probably arise from any other value you might hold as long as you're forced to strive and yet can never reach it.
Honestly, I feel like values are deeply underconsidered in our current culture's thinking around psychology.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#274Oh 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…
Oh man. This makes me want to throw my phone against the nearest brick wall sometimes. The UI is loading, I reach for the button I want to hit, but it moves and a different button takes its place because the app/page is still loading, or worse, an ad has taken the place of the button. This also happens where sometimes the hotbar has three buttons, and sometimes four, and the worst apps are when buttons switch ordinal…
> or worse, an ad has taken the place of the button.
this has happened to me and i even clicked on the ad. It actually made me smile a little bit and reminded me of the "clever girl" scene in Jurassic Park.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#275I've learned through the years that I can't stop for every car with it's hood open.
Sometimes you just need to use it as a reminder to maintain your own vehicle.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#276This just sounds like perfectionism. I believe it is a curse, because I hate working with teammates like this. They'll spin their wheels solving some insane problem no one asked them to do because it's "better" while ignoring the larger scope and goals of the project. I've tried to coach people out of this mindset, because I used to have it very early in my career, til I realized the sheer impracticality of it.
I use this really annoying, poorly supported terraform provider. I've written a wrapper around it to make it "work" but it has annoyances I know I can go to that repository and try to submit a patch for it to fix my annoyance. But why? This is "good enough," and IME, if you sit on things like this long enough, eventually someone else comes along and does it. Is that a good attitude for everyone to have? Probably not, but now it's been a few years of using this wrapper module, I have 2-3 viable alternatives now that didn't exist before that I can switch to if needed.
I could've turned it into a several week project if I wanted, but why? What purpose does it serve? As you grow, you realize there is very rarely, if ever, a "right" answer to a problem. Consider the way you think it should be done is not the only "right" way and you'll open more doors for yourself.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#277Oh 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…
Oh man. This makes me want to throw my phone against the nearest brick wall sometimes. The UI is loading, I reach for the button I want to hit, but it moves and a different button takes its place because the app/page is still loading, or worse, an ad has taken the place of the button. This also happens where sometimes the hotbar has three buttons, and sometimes four, and the worst apps are when buttons switch ordinal…
It's like getting poked hard in its annoyance level, right?
> or worse, an ad has taken the place of the button
That's actually a dark pattern/perverse incentive I hint at towards the end of my blog post about it.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#278This can be difficult in a work context too. Plenty of times in my career where I had to depend on the output of another party even though I could see the mistakes they were making, offered advice/help, but ultimately had to work with what they developed regardless. One of the worst feelings is being right about these things.
Tons of software relies on bodges to get things to work. If you tried to "fix" everything you'd go mad and never be finished... and then someone else will come along and want to "fix" it.
Definitely avoid staring into the abyss.
But like Camus' Sisyphus, we often have to smile in these situations and carry on with our work. Dwelling on the absurdity of it all gets us nowhere.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I did the same and had the same suspicion. If that's actually the case, the ideas and the writing don't change, but it changes how you feel about it doesn't it? Which brings up some really interesting questions. It made me realize that part of why I appreciated it so much was that I felt like I had some level of connection with another person who lived and learned and had shared experiences. But on another level, it'…
As a pretty piece of writing, the authorship isn't super important. The problem for me is that it is purports to be wisdom, distilled experience. But who's experience is it? Did the commenter filter their lived experience through an LLM? In that case, I would still credit it. But if this were coming from the LLM altogether, then it's not distilled life experience, it's distilled stereotypes.
The last line especially chafes at me. An LLM remarking on someone's internal experience and telling them they are seen, that would be nonsense. An LLM doesn't have a life experience to empathize with.
I'm open to verisimilitude in fiction, and I'm open to an LLM providing feedback or criticism. A while back I pointed ChatGPT towards pieces of my writing that were on the web and asked it to critique me, and it did identify some insecurities and such that were genuine. But I'm not really open to hearing from an LLM as if it were a person.
There's a concept in sociology called the magic circle, which governs what behavior is acceptable. We aren't allowed to lie, until we pick up a deck of cards and play BS, in which case we're expected to lie through our teeth. LLM generated text drawing on subjectivity and life experience has, I think, that eerie feeling of something from outside the magic circle.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#280Oh 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…
> In short, an interface should not be interactable until a few milliseconds after it has finished (re)rendering I was a console game developer working on UI for many years so I am deeply familiar with the problem when a UI should be responsive to input while the visuals are changing and when it should not. You might be surprised, but it turns out that blocking input for a while until the UI settles down is not what…
Great point, and I suspected the problem might not be as easy as it appears at first glance. (Because of course it isn't...)
I also considered the case when you're rapidly scrolling through a page- if a naive approach simply made things non-interactable if they've recently moved, that would neuter re-scrolling until the scrolling halted, which is NOT what people want