I'm Just Having Fun

In fact, the gap is so large that it can be really hard for a person on one side of it to understand how people on the other side think.

The so called geniuses seem to have rather lax lifestyle, like free evenings to really make their homework. When you constantly think you're in hurry you've pretty much lost the game. You're just trying to get by and learn very little.

All of the fighting with the LLM to refine the results sounds tiresome. No thanks.

Whether its martial arts or writing assembly or vibe coding a mobile app if you approach it like that you are going to succeed.

I get what this post is talking about. I'm just having fun, that comes in a lot of different flavours. I can try a lot more ideas out, that's fun. I can quickly learn if an idea won't work, sometimes that can be disappointing but at the same time learning why it won't work can be quite fun. When the AI utterly fails to do something it lets me develop an idea in my mind about the strengths and weaknesses of the models. Oftentimes the failures are not just fun but outright hilarious. I enjoy seeing models fail sometimes because they reveal an assumption that I have internallsed to the point of being unaware of it's presence. It reveals to me something about myself when something I didn't feel worth mentioning is actually quite important to communicate. Some of the failures are outright hilarious.

I do find it a bit tiring to use AI for long periods, because lazy thinking produces poor results. You have to maintain a clear idea of what it is you are trying to do. Quite often an idea can seem simple in your head because you have glossed over a number of complicating details. I find it a challenge to keep mind at a level where you are aware of these things before you request an AI to make something intrinsically flawed.

I don't have a problem doing things without AI just for fun either. I make animated images in a tiny stack machine bytecode. I do game jams, and code golfing, like dweets.

I also enjoy playing chess, computers pased my ability to play chess a long way back. I don't mind playing even when I know a computer can do better.

Unless you are the best in the world at a thing, there's always someone who could do it better, every attempt to do the best thing ever in a field will fail. On the other hand you can try and do better that what you yourself have done. Even then that's just the target to reach for. The real goal is to enjoy the reaching. It's the challenge at the limits that is fun, not the success or failure of the end result.

Can AI do it faster? Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is having fun.

The analogy I keep going to in my mind is chess. A computer can play chess on my behalf, or I can play chess myself, but only one is fun.

But uhh, you're need to put the author down is revealing.

How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal).

Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive".

Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for this). But there aren't leaps and bounds. Critically it keeps pushing things forward, refining and improving.

But then there's those in the long tail. They fail most of the time and are the "least productive". Sometimes never doing anything of note their entire lives. But these are also the people that change the world in much bigger ways. And sometimes those that appeared to do nothing have their value found decades or centuries later.

Not everyone needs to be Newton/Leibniz. Not everyone should be. But that kind of work is critical to advancing our knowledge and wealth as a species. The problem is it is often indistinguishable from wasting time. But I'm willing to bet that the work of Newton alone has created more value to all of human civilization than every failed long tail person has cost us.

In any investment strategy you benefit from having high risk investments. Most lose you money but the ones that win reward you with much more than you lost. I'm not sure why this is so well known in the investment world but controversial in the research/academic/innovation world.

Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?

Today, we think of "leisure" as merely free time from work or recreation, something largely done to "recharge" so that we can go back to work (in other words: modern "leisure" is for the sake of work). This is not the original meaning. Indeed, etymologically, the word "school" comes from σχολή ("skholē"), which means "leisure", but with the understanding that it involves something like learned discussion or whatever. (Difficult to imagine, given how hostile modern schooling is, resembling more of a factory than a place of learning.) The purpose of work was to enable leisure. We labored in order to have leisure.

What's also interesting is that unlike us, who think of "leisure" in terms of work (that is, we think of it as a negation of work, "not-working"), the Greeks viewed it in exactly the opposite way. The word for "work" is ἀσχολίᾱ ("askholíā"), which is the absence of leisure. The understanding held for most of history and explains why we call the liberal arts liberal: it freed a man to be able to pursue truth effectively, and was contrasted with the servile arts, that is, everything with a practical aim like a trade or a craft.

This difference demonstrates an important shift and betrays the vulgar or nihilistic underbelly of our modern culture. Work is never for its own sake. It is always aimed at something other than itself (praxis and associated poiesis). This distinguishes it from something like theory (theoria) which is concerned with truth for its own sake.

So what do we work for? Work for its own sake is nihilistic, a kind of passing of the metaphysical buck, an activity pursued to avoid facing the question of what we live for. Work pursued merely to pay for sustenance - full stop - is vulgar and lacks meaning. Sustenance is important, but is that all you are, a beast that slurps food from a trough? Even here, only in human beings is food elevated into feast, into meal, a celebration and a social practice that incorporates food; it is not merely nutritive. Are you merely a consumerist who works to buy more crap, foolishly believing that ultimate joy will be found in the pointless chase for them?

Ask yourself: whom or what do you serve? Everyone aims at something. What are the choices of your life aiming at?

[0] https://a.co/d/eCd0cJX

There is a deeper hurt in the tech world, which is that we have all been conditioned to crave greatness. Every employer tries to sell us on how important what they do is, or how rich everyone will become. We can't even vacation without thinking how much better we will perform once we get back. That struggle with greatness is something every human grapples with, but for workers in tech it is particularly difficult to let it go. The entire industry wants us to hold onto it until we are completely drained.

I have unfortunately failed at that :(. The fun sure does go away slowly, then all at once

Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase will only grow worse.

They'll grow out of it and one-day look back and cringe, as we all tend to do eventually.

It's really hard to read. There's "text-transform: capitalize;" which puts things in Title Case but unfortunately that is also hard to read for body text. ( That Was a Trend Too For a While If You Remember. ).

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...

My understanding is that it’s basically just a newer fad.

It would be narcissism if the author didn't have talent or ability. That doesn't seem to be the case here.

That's the beauty of communication and the free internet, what a joy to learn about someone elses way of thinking, add a little colour to my world view.

One of the things I miss most about the days of IRC chat networks, the personalities were big, broad and diverse, all mixing together. If someoneis a narcissist, so be it, they still have value, knowledge, opinions to share. Online discourse these days can verge on corporate approved, totally empty. Apologies for the tangent.

I guess, these days, also a "not typing this on a phone" Shibboleth.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...

I did it for a while until I was considered a "senior" dev and one of the VP's pulled me aside and said it reflects poorly on me when I'm not using proper grammar. He said as a senior dev in the org, I should hold myself to a higher standard. At which time, I started using proper grammar.

Always puts a smile on my face when I see this is still a thing in certain circles. Nonconformity isn't quite dead - and that's a good thing.

now i do it because i am considered a seniorish person, and i need to deal with many coworkers that have gone beyond fear of picking up a phone and are now seemingly afraid to even type messages and i want to show them that it's okay to bring a little bit of yourself to your communication

- X is typing indicators turning on/off/on/off for 5 minutes

- X finally sends an obviously llm inspired 5 paragraph argument that on the face of it looks well structured but has all the mental nutrients of a bag of cheetos

- the message is stuffed with at least six emoji to somehow preemptively control the emotional state of the recipient

all to say "please take a look cuz i think you forgot to add unit tests for y?" and i have neither the stamina to engage with nor the desire to conform to this milquetoast inauthentic fluffy overly uptight way of communicating

Back in the 1337sp43k days in my internet circles, typing in all lowercase other than acronyms was the opposite of TYPING IN ALL CAPS. We used it to infer a whisper type connotation to the text.

  function f(n){n.childNodes.forEach(c=>{c.nodeType===3?c.textContent=c.textContent.replace(/(^|[.!?]\s+)([a-z])/g,(m,s,l)=>s+l.toUpperCase()):c.nodeType===1&&f(c)})}f(document.body)

> i mean, in some sense if you work as a professional programmer it is a competition, because the job market sucks right now.

What does your comment mean? Is there some sort of substance to your statement or are you just being a hateful troll?

Did you even read the post? Are you trying to draw some conclusion from a person’s appearance?

I don’t know Jyn Nelson, but I have seen some of their talks. They seem to be a more than capable developer. Their blog is probably one of the least offensive, most down to earth, get shot done type of developer blog I have seen? So again, what the actual fuck.

(I’m not certain if the ‘seven words you can’t say on television’ are actually banned on HN or just frowned upon, but I think my usage is justified)