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."
Please read up on his life. Mainlander is the most extreme/radical Philosophical Pessimist of them all. He wrote a whole book about how you should rationally kill yourself and then he killed himself shortly after.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Mainl%C3%A4nder
https://dokumen.pub/the-philosophy-of-redemption-die-philoso...
Max Stirner and Mainlander would have been friends and are kindred spirits philosophically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_philosophical_...
[1]: https://www.jocrf.org/how-clients-use-the-analytical-reasoni...
Thoughtful retorts such as this are deserving of the same esteem one affords the "rubber v glue"[0] idiom.
As such, I must oblige.
0 - https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/I%27m+rubber%2c+you%27r...
for "Thinker" brain food. (it still has the issue of not being a pragmatic use of time, but there are plenty interesting enough questions which it at least helps)
> Yes, I blame AI for this.
> I am currently writing much more, and more complicated software than ever, yet I feel I am not growing as an engineer at all. [...] (emphasis added by me)
AI is a force multiplier for accidental complexity in the Brooks sense. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet)
I'm starting to wonder if we lose something in all this convenience. Perhaps my life is better because I cook my own food, wash my own dishes, chop my own firewood, drive my own car, write my own software. Outwardly the results look better the more I outsource but inwardly I'm not so sure.
On the subject of furnishing your house the IKEA effect seems to confirm this.
Hard Things in Computer Science, and AI Aren't Fixing Them
Contemplating the old RTFM, I started a new personal project called WTFM and spends time writing instead of coding. There is no agenda and product goals.
There are so many interesting things in human generated computer code and documentation. Well crafted thoughts are precious.
Some commentators dismissed this trend towards photography as simply a beneficial weeding out of second-raters. For example, the writer Louis Figuier commented that photography did art a service by putting mediocre artists out of business, for their only goal was exact imitation. Similarly, Baudelaire described photography as the “refuge of failed painters with too little talent”. In his view, art was derived from imagination, judgment and feeling but photography was mere reproduction which cheapened the products of the beautiful [23].
https://www.artinsociety.com/pt-1-initial-impacts.html#:~:te...
"[I]f a scientist proposes an important question and provides an answer to it that is later deemed wrong, the scientist will still be credited with posing the question. This is because the framing of a fundamentally new question lies, by definition, beyond what we can expect within our frame of knowledge: while answering a question relies upon logic, coming up with a new question often rests on an illogical leap into the unknown."
One of the reasons Barry Lyndon is over 50 years old and still looks like no other movie today is because Kubrick tracked down a few lenses originally designed for NASA and had custom mounts built for them to use with cinema cameras.
https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa...
> Popular and highly acclaimed games not at crap because they didn't write their own physics engine (Zelda uses Havok)
Super Mario Bros is known for having a surprisingly subtle and complex physics system that enabled the game to feel both challenging and fair even for players very new to consoles. Celeste a newer game also famous for being very difficult yet not feeling punishing does something similar:
https://maddymakesgames.com/articles/celeste_and_towerfall_p...
> or their own game engine (Plenty of great games use Unreal or Unity)
And Minecraft doesn't, which is why few other games at the time of its release felt and played like it.
You're correct that no one builds everything from scratch all the time. However, if all you ever do is cobble a few pre-made things together, I think you'll discover that nothing you make is ever that interesting or enduring in value. Sure, it can be useful, and satisfying. But the kinds of things that really leave a mark on people, that affect them deeply, always have at least some aspect where the creator got obsessive and went off the deep end and did their own thing from scratch.
Further, you'll never learn what a transformative experience it can be to be that creator who gets obsessive about a thing. You'll miss out on discovering the weird parts of your own soul that are more fascinated by some corner of the universe than anyone else is.
I have a lot of regrets in my life, but I don't regret the various times I've decided I've deeply dug into some thing and doing it from scratch. Often, that has turned out later to be some of the most long-term useful things I've done even though it seemed like a selfish indulgence at the time.
Of course, it's your life. But consider that there may be a hidden cost to always skimming along across the tops of the stacks of things that already exist out there. There is growth in the depths.
It's a carved wooden dragon that my dad got from Indonesia (probably about 50 years ago).
It's hard to appreciate, if you aren't holding it, but it weighs a lot, and is intricately carved, all over.
I guarantee that the carver used a Dremel.
I still have a huge amount of respect for their work. That wood is like rock. I would not want to carve it with hand tools.
There's just some heights we can't reach, without a ladder.
Those types of developers on the enterprise dev side - where most developers work - were becoming a commodity a decade ago and wages have been basically stagnant. Now those types of developers are finding it hard to stand out and get noticed.
The trick is to move “up the stack” and closer to the customer whether that be an internal customer or external customer and be able to work at a higher level of scope, impact and ambiguity.
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
It’s been well over a decade and 6 jobs ago that I had to do a coding interview to prove I was able “to codez real gud”, every job I’ve had since then has been more concerned with whether I was “smart and get things done”. That could mean coding, leading teams, working with “the business”, being on Zoom calls with customers, flying out to the customers site, or telling a PE backed company with low margins that they didn’t need a team of developers, they needed to outsource complete implementations to other companies.
I’ve always seen coding as grunt work. But the only way to go from requirements -> architectural vision -> result and therefore getting money in my pocket.
My vision was based on what I could do myself in the allotted time at first and then what I could do with myself + leading a team. Now it’s back to what I can do by myself + Claude Code and Codex.
As far as the first question, my “fun” during my adult life has come from teaching fitness classes until I was 35 and running with friends in charity races on the weekend, and just hanging out, spending time with my (now grown) stepsons after that and for the past few years just spending time with my wife and traveling, concerts, some “digital nomadding” etc
Phillip G. Armour The Five Orders of Ignorance https://www.researchgate.net/publication/27293624_The_Five_O...