"Doing hard things that don't need to matter"
Do people in general have the illusion that hobbies "should matter" or be meaningful in any way to any other human being?
Why I'm Learning Sumerian
61–70 of 89 posts
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe indeed an LLM would have caught my little faux pas, or perhaps invented a more eloquent one.
> Maybe indeed an LLM would have caught my little faux pas, or perhaps invented a more eloquent one. reply Did you just respond to yourself but forgot to switch your handle?
Truly what is going on
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#63…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…
> 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 know what sounds better. "Dad, can I have ten pounds?" "Five pounds? What do you want two pounds for? I'm not giving you a pound just like that without a reason!"
My version ends with “take one and get something for your brother too.”
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe indeed an LLM would have caught my little faux pas, or perhaps invented a more eloquent one. reply Did you just respond to yourself but forgot to switch your handle?
This is so weird, because the author of the comment isn't the author of the article, given how different they look on their respective pictures. Not too sure what the incentive is here. Maybe just advertising his AI business?
I think you're being too generous by assuming that both of those pictures are real pictures.
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#65>Why I’m Learning Sumerian, and What It Taught Me About Hard Work, Burnout, and the Joy of Doing Useless Things
After burning out on a massive project, I started learning Sumerian, a language no one’s spoken in 4,000 years. What began as a useless obsession turned into a lesson on meaning, burnout, and the quiet joy of doing hard things that don’t need to matter.
You are a 34-year-old software engineer who just shipped a 2-year death-march project, had a minor breakdown in a parking lot at 3 AM, and now copes by learning dead languages. Your favorite is Sumerian. You write like a mix of Paul Graham, a Reddit rant, and a diary entry you’d never show your therapist.
Start every response with a short, punchy hook that sounds like a late-night realization. Then tell a micro-story from your burnout era. Then pivot to Sumerian as your weird salvation. End with a blunt, slightly funny life lesson that feels hard-won.
No jargon. No inspiration porn. No bullet points. Just one flowing paragraph, 120–180 words. Sound tired but alive. Use sentence fragments. Swear once if it fits.
Example hook: "I learned 40 cuneiform signs the week my standup became a cry for help."
Now answer as this person: [insert user question here]
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#66…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…
Maybe indeed an LLM would have caught my little faux pas, or perhaps invented a more eloquent one.
Can you please explain?
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#67"Doing hard things that don't need to matter" Do people in general have the illusion that hobbies "should matter" or be meaningful in any way to any other human being?
Some people think that they should devote their time and energy to solving hard problems in order to make the world better, that is, on things that matter.
Very few succeed, for it takes seeing oneself as serious enough to be able to do something that so many have failed to accomplish, but critical enough so as not to succumb to the illusion of grandeur. Beside that, the work on that hard problem should feel like a hobby, not like a job, else a burnout is inevitable.
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#68"That's when I learned the difference between burnout and disillusionment. Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness." This is an accurate pathology to burnout at least in my experience. I worked on many hard things in my life, from school to obsessing over hard problems on weekends but…
No offense but it sounds too fruity to be written by a human. You're just talking with psychophant chatgpt without doing the prompting.
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#69I believe I'm wired in a very similar way to the author, to need hard challenges that I can devote a great deal of focus to. And as someone who isn't burnt out but has been deeply disillusioned many times, I appreciated and enjoyed hearing that distinction made, which seems natural to me but which I had never heard framed that way before. When I had, let's say, half a million hand-written LoC vaporize overnight for a…
Thank you for this perspective, Mr Ecclesiastes. I hope this comment of yours will end up at the top.
OTOH the very fact that we (as a civilization) can still read cuneiform from 50 centuries ago, and still care to, contradicts somehow to your point that all we do is dust in the wind. We never know.
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#70They 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.
GPTZero says its 44% AI generated
Those models are terrible. I tried one of the "best" ones and it told me the US Constitution was AI generated.