Imagine if copy-pasting LLM output is the valuable part of human participation in software development. The act of copy-past sounds like drudgery, not problem solving. Another user phrased it best:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42646989

Thank you so much for putting these heuristics into words. My only question here is that a lot of what you wrote seems like best practice from the perspective of a person within the tech industry. Outsiders might call it common sense. So if everyone knows what they 'should' be doing, then why do so few actually follow through?

One answer to that question might be character. Angela Ducksworth has a book called, "Grit". It is a lot like character study, which the OG explicitly expressed their disinterest for. My intuition is no matter how well you can describe the steps for success, success is not replicable. If true, that would explain why there are hundreds of self books, thousands of coaches, and only a handful of people who can consistently excel.

Having said that, I hesitate to say that there are only a few people in the world who are exceptional due to a constraint I would describe as "genuine article". How depressing a thought that would be.

Carpe diem! Floor the gas pedal, and see how fast you can go. Maybe you'll break all expectations and fly into space.

Luck is a massive, massive factor. There are plenty of exceptionally smart and gritty people who fail, and plenty of far less-so who succeed.

Your argument is good if you just follow it to the obvious (if inconvenient) conclusion. Despite so many people “having the answers,” no one can replicate it reliably. And even the ones who can likely wouldn’t be able to if you removed capital from the equation. The clear explanation is: luck.

But of course luck tends to strike when you’re working hard and consistently, so it’s not totally out of one’s hands.

I suspect there are a number of factors that eliminate people from these steps like objectivity, persistence, and other virtues.

The biggest single discriminator that the Y Combinator people talk about, which I agree with, is doing the right things first without regard for scale. Most developers will immediately jump to some framework so that they can prop up some web app in the shortest time and immediately go into promotions and then struggle with scale when they need to scale.

I had this big app that tried to solve for full decentralization of universal file system access from a browser. I wrote my own end-to-end test automation tool and focused all my energy on software execution performance. These things allowed me to prove out new ideas and identify regression in about 8 seconds on a single machine or about 2 minutes on 5 machines talking to each other. Most people won't invest in that. I could perform a massive refactor across dozens for files and hundreds of lines without regression in about 2 hours. At work, at that job at that time, I spending more than 2 weeks for tiny refactors that were littered with regressions and having to clean up other people's messes.

Worse, is that most people recognize when they are not performing well, especially if it is anywhere from 10-100x less well. The normal go to place is either sympathy or an echo chamber. High performers don't do that. They aren't trying to impress people with their awesomeness or seeking sympathy when it falls apart. They just build what they need at great expense because its something they can have that others won't have.

'Dysfunctionally functional' is probably a term that I read elsewhere. It's almost a curse because if things were to fully break, then everyone on earth would consider that a sufficient wake-up call. Instead, we limp along focusing all of our functional resources towards our dysfunction, almost like the most proficient addict who finds new and inventive ways to fight sobriety. It is truly a sight to behold.

Many cells have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contractile_vacuole

It's an organelle that periodically contracts to expel water from inside the cell, out. This prevents the cell from absorbing too much water through osmosis and rupturing.

Even the individual cells are bailing water, as if from a sinking life raft. Always have been. Life itself is a process of dysfunctional function. Actively resisting death. It makes sense that we see this reflected at all scales. It is not a disorder, it is the natural state of living in a universe with entropy.

Good observation! But then what do you call cancer? Life cannot happen without cell growth. So what happens when the normal functioning of cells turns malignant?

All kinds of different cancer, but the point is that the cells keep living and reproducing when they shouldn't. Which I think is very life-y. What's more surprising is the existence and generally reliable nature of apoptosis. The scales across which life exists are really staggering. All kinds of opportunities for weirdness in the abstractions.

It's the ups and downs from believing those ideas that people live for. They're all chasing a feeling, which is the basis of all addiction.

I would be curious to compare Google search statistics of 'shrek' vs 'raves' over time. Obviously, causation can't be established but maybe correlation can be.

For a good time, call Raydiation.