I miss thinking hard

>>jernes+(OP)
This March 2025 post from Aral Balkan stuck with me:

https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080

"Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine."

>>gyomu+v4
Eloquent, moving, and more-or-less exactly what people said when cameras first hit the scene.

>>Camper+H8
> Eloquent, moving, and more-or-less exactly what people said when cameras first hit the scene.

This is a non sequitur. Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the inference. Instead, they serve only to be an additional medium for the same concerns quoted:

  The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you 
  towards understanding what you actually want to make, 
  whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning.

Just as this is applicable to refining a software solution captured in code, just as a painter discards unsatisfactory paintings and tries again, so too is it when people say, "that picture didn't come out the way I like, let's take another one."

>>AdieuT+Qd
Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the inference.

You wouldn't have known that, going by all the bellyaching and whining from the artists of the day.

Guess what, they got over it. You will too.

>>Camper+Xd
>> Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the inference.

> You wouldn't have known that, going by all the bellyaching and whining from the artists of the day.

> Guess what, they got over it.

You conveniently omitted my next sentence, which contradicts your position and reads thusly:

  Instead, they serve only to be an additional medium for the 
  same concerns quoted ...

> You will too.

This statement is assumptive and gratuitous.

zlacker