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The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

notashelf.dev

351–360 of 458 posts

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

#351
The wheel of dharma - suffering as the misalignment of the self with the world - has both compressive and tension aspects (for things happening to you and things you do respectively) each with aversive/grasping aspects (depending on your taste).

The post describes grasping tension, the blessing and curse of the powerful.

Grasping tension highlights the value of work -- the difference between the end/telos model and the actual - or "execution" in business -- and the fundamental priority of time as a value: opportunity matters most. Yes, you do need skill and resources, but they're useless without opportunity.

So, at a minimum, stop polishing turds.

But the main thing about opportunity is that it's a value to someone else. Yes scratching your own itch might end up helping others, but that's incidental luck.

So the solution to this curse might not be perfecting your own craft or impedance-matching your emotions, but really to focus on solving other people's problems.

The really nice thing about this solution is that it enables you to work with a lot of other people. So long as they're acting in good faith to solve the same problem, you'll minimize any coordination costs and enjoy all their strengths without having to do it all yourself. And when your work is needed by others, there's no time or need to worry.

Is that not happiness, to make yourself useful?

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

#352
I cannot emphasize how much I relate to this

It’s gotten better but in the past I would :

- happily spend weekends exploring what possible with QMK (consistently tweaking and re-programming my keyboard; diving into the depth of QMK docs)

- spend hours building various neovim tools for myself and playing around with different configs

- building various bash scripts

I’ve recently quit my software dev job to pursue building online products and my friend said something that sometimes being an engineer going into business can be a detriment - because you feel that you can build anything…and you can end up building forever. Whereas a business person would leave it at a “good enough to sell” state and move on

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

#353
post #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 wi…

I don't know if this is what the author meant, but the "moral weight" appears for me when someone starts relying on my stuff. This is why so many open-source maintainers burn out: they create something that people find useful and suddenly, almost inadvertently, incur the obligation to keep users happy. That is both the best part and worse part of creating software.

> the "moral weight" appears for me when someone starts relying on my stuff

Yeah. These feelings of guilt are terrible. I once threw something out there and forgot about it. Woke up one day and realized users had found it somehow, they even built new stuff on top of it. Someone asked for help on how to use the thing and I didn't even notice because I had notifications turned off.

In these situations I repeat the license terms to myself like a mantra. The software is provided "as-is", in the hope it will be useful, but without any warranty.

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

#354
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reader mode is a thing, but if you can suggest a better (ahem) medium to repost it to, I'd be happy to! (Honestly, I'm sort of with you on the medium thing, but I posted this years ago now...)

Maybe substack?

Or Ghost.

The reading experience was so good on Medium a couple of years ago.

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

#355
This essay is (painfully) apt, and it reminds me of where I was when I finally switched, to my great relief, from being a Maximizer to a Satisficer*. It was all just Too Much, and I was feeling overwhelmed with responsibilities.

And my drive to Solve All The Problems was not making me happy. At all. It was just a way to exert control over a difficult life, and by being terminally distracted by the easily-solvables, I was avoiding the big problems I genuinely needed to confront.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

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

#356

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…

I yell into that very same void at least once each and every day.

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

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote is meaningful. In a similar context, Bruce Lee said about martial arts that "martial" is to discover the dangerous animal within us, and the "art" is to be able to tame that animal.

> the "art" is to be able to mate that animal. I'm assuming (hoping?) that this was supposed to be "tame"? If not, I've got some questions about Bruce Lee.

[deleted]

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

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this chasing windmills? Yes. Well, "tilting at," jousting specifically. The figure relates to the comical pointlessness of such an act; the windmill sail will in every case of course simply remove the lance from the rider and the rider from the saddle, and turn on heedlessly, as only a purblind or romantic fool could omit trivially to predict. > You just don’t see as many romantic technological catastrophes like…

> I miss the innocence of the time, however amply undeserved. But I was young myself then. I see things slightly differently. Big failures whose practical and theoretical lessons and new wisdoms are then put to use, more carefully, ambitions unabated, teach things, and take technology to unexpected places. But big failures, institutionalized as big failures, become devastating craters of resources, warding off furthe…

The abatement of American ambitions is something the world has long, not to say desperately, awaited.

Not that Americans should not aspire; indeed, the world has long loved us best when we dream most generously the utopias of which we forever will dream as long as we call ourselves Americans. It's only that generosity, not the reverie, of which we've lately lost the habit.

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