> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers.
This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI for it, it automatically boosts the floor of your taste, but not your skill. And you end up never slowing down to make mistakes and learn, because you can just do it without friction.
chatmasta · 6h ago
This is exactly why I’m wary of ever attempting a developer-focused startup ever again.
What’s not mentioned is the utter frustration when you can see your own output is not up to your own expectations, but you can’t execute on any plan to resolve that discrepancy.
“I know what developers want, so I can build it for them” is a death knell proportionate to your own standards…
The most profitable business I built was something I hacked together in two weeks during college holiday break, when I barely knew how to code. There was no source control (I was googling “what is GitHub” at the time), it was my first time writing Python, I stored passwords in plaintext… but within a year it was generating $20k a month in revenue. It did eventually collapse under its own weight from technical debt, bugs and support cost… and I wasn’t equipped to solve those problems.
But meanwhile, as the years went on and I actually learned about quality, I lost the ability to ship because I gained the ability to recognize when it wasn’t ready… it’s not quite “perfectionism,” but it’s borne of the same pathology, of letting perfect be the enemy of good.
ido · 47m ago
a developer-focused startup
I'm sorry to tell you it doesn't just apply to developer-focused startups!
gsf_emergency_2 · 4h ago
>letting perfect be the enemy of good.
My attempt to improve the cliche:
Let skill be the enemy of taste
2 issues here. Neither can be developed (perfected?) in isolation, but they certainly ramp up at different rates. They should probably feed back into each other somehow, whether adversarially or not
whatevertrevor · 2h ago
The issue as the article points out is you can grow taste much much faster by only engaging in consumption, which leaves skill in the dirt.
gsf_emergency_2 · 1h ago
I've heard that one way to pace is to... only consume your own stuff (aka dogfooding :)
More grown-up way to do it is to consume your mates' stuff?
(Trying to go from where TFA left off)
furyofantares · 6h ago
I'm confused. I often say of every genAI I've seen of all types that it is totally lacking in taste and only has skill. And it drastically raises your skill floor immediately, perhaps all the way up to your taste, closing the gap.
Maybe that actually is what you were saying? But I'm confused because you used the opposite words.
phi-go · 2h ago
To me the argument also only makes sense as you understood it.
theshrike79 · 2h ago
This is Rick Rubin pretty much. He has 100/100 in taste, but almost 0/100 in skill.
He can't really play an instrument, but he knows exactly what works and what doesn't and can articulate it.
benreesman · 2h ago
I don't know much about Ira Glass and I'm not going to be a 5 minute wikipedia expert about it, so maybe I'm missing out on very relevant philosophy (I hope someone links the must read thing), but those would be very intentionally inverted meanings of the taste/skill dichotomy.
LLMs are good at things with a lot of quantity in the training set, you can signal boost stuff, but its not perfect (and its non-obvious that you want rare/special/advanced stuff to be the sweet spot as a vendor, that's a small part of your TAM by construction).
This has all kinds of interesting tells, for example Claude is better at Bazel than Gemini is, which is kind of extreme given Google has infinite perfect Bazel and Anthropic has open source (really bad) Bazel, so you know Gemini hasn't gotten the google4 pipeline decontamination thing dialed in.
All else equal you expect a homogenizing effect where over time everything is like NextJS, Golang, and Docker.
There are outlier events, like how Claude got trained on nixpkgs in a serious way recently, but idk, maybe they want to get into defense or something.
Skill is very rarely the problem for computers, if you're considering it as district from taste (sometimes you call them both together just skill).
Loughla · 8h ago
This is the disconnect between proponents and detractors of AI.
Detractors say it's the process and learning that builds depth.
Proponents say it doesn't matter because the tool exists and will always exist.
It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.
ants_everywhere · 6h ago
I usually see the opposite.
Detractors from AI often refuse to learn how to use it or argue that it doesn't do everything perfectly so you shouldn't use it.
Proponents say it's the process and learning that builds depth and you have to learn how to use it well before you can have a sensible opinion about it.
The same disconnect was in place for every major piece of technology, from mechanical weaving, to mechanical computing, to motorized carriages, to synthesized music. You can go back and read the articles written about these technologies and they're nearly identical to what the AI detractors have been saying.
One side always says you're giving away important skills and the new technology produces inferior work. They try to frame it in moral terms. But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete.
bluefirebrand · 3h ago
> But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete.
I won't deny that there is some of this in my AI hesitancy
But honestly the bigger barrier for me is that I fear signing my name on subpar work that I would otherwise be embarrassed to claim as my own
If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it
armada651 · 2h ago
> If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it
This of course isn't just a moral concern, it's a legal one. I want ownership of my code, I don't want to find out later the AI just copied another project and now I've violated a license by not giving attribution.
Very few open-source projects are in the public domain and even the most permissive license requires attribution.
benreesman · 1h ago
I think you're very wise to preserve your commit handle as something other than a shift operator annotation, not everyone is.
I think I'm using it more than it sounds like you are, but I make very clear notations to myself and others about what's a big generated test suite that I froze in amber after it cleared a huge replay event, and what I've been over a fine tooth comb with personally. I type about the same amount of prose and code every day as ever, but I type a lot of code into the prompt now "like this, not like that" in a comment.
The percentage of hand-authored lines varies wildly from probably 20% of unit tests to still close to 100℅ on io_uring submission queue polling or whatever.
If it one shots a build file, eh, I put opus as the meta.authors and move on.
add-sub-mul-div · 3h ago
Unfortunately the majority don't think like this and will take whatever shortcut allows them to go home at 5.
Shorel · 1h ago
> But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete.
Unless I can become a millionaire just with those skills, they are in a limbo between economically adequate and economically obsolete.
jchw · 7h ago
> It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.
It's important to realize this is actually a general truth of humans arguing. Sometimes people do disagree about the facts on the ground and what is actually true versus what is bullshit, but a lot of the time what really happens is people completely agree on the facts and even most of the implications of the facts but completely disagree on how to frame them. Doesn't even have to be Internet arguments. A lot of hot-button political topics have always been like this, too.
It's easy to dismiss people's arguments as being irrelevant, but I think there's room to say that if you were to interrogate their worldview in detail you might find that they have coherent reasoning behind why it is relevant from their perspective, even if you disagree.
Though it hasn't really improved my ability to argue or even not argue (perhaps more important), I've definitely noticed this in myself when introspecting, and it definitely makes me think more about why I feel driven to argue, what good it is, and how to do it better.
ninetyninenine · 5h ago
>It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.
There's actually some ground truth facts about AI many people are not knowledgeable about.
Many people believe we understand in totality how LLMs work. The absolute truth of this is that we overall we do NOT understand how LLMs work AT all.
The mistaken belief that we understand LLMs is the driver behind most of the arguments. People think we understand LLMs and that we Understand that the output of LLMs is just stochastic parroting, when the truth is We Do Not understand Why or How an LLM produced a specific response for a specific prompt.
Whether the process of an LLM producing a response resembles anything close to sentience or consciousness, we actually do not know because we aren't even sure about the definitions of those words, Nor do we understand how an LLM works.
This erroneous belief is so pervasive amongst people that I'm positive I'll get extremely confident responses declaring me wrong.
These debates are not the result of people talking past each other. It's because a large segment of people on HN literally are Misinformed about LLMs.
whatevertrevor · 2h ago
I couldn't agree more, and not just on HN but the world at large.
For the general populace including many tech people who are not ML researchers, understanding how convolutional neural nets work is already tricky enough. For non tech people, I'd hazard a guess that LLM/ generative AI is complexity-indistinguishable from "The YouTube/Tiktok Algorithm".
And this lack of understanding, and in many cases lack of conscious acknowledgement of the lack of understanding has made many "debates" sound almost like theocratic arguments. Very little interest in grounding positions against facts, yet strongly held opinions.
Some are convinced we're going to get AGI in a couple years, others think it's just a glorified text generator that cannot produce new content. And worse there's seemingly little that changes their mind on it.
And there are self contradictory positions held too. Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists...
simianwords · 1h ago
This is not what Ira Glass meant by taste gap. What he rather means is that taste is important. It’s what gets you into the field and what makes you stick around. Happy to be corrected on this.
milkey_mouse · 7h ago
If anything it's the opposite, except maybe at the very low end: AI boosts implementation skill (at least by increasing speed), but not {research, coding, writing} taste. Hence slop of all sorts.
No comments yet
cl42 · 10h ago
In the spirit of July 4, John Lewis Gaddis explores a similar theme in "On Grand Strategy". This is one of my favourite explorations, where he compares Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams:
> Compare Lincoln’s life with that of John Quincy Adams. Great expectations inspired, pursued, and haunted Adams, depriving him, at critical moments, of common sense. Overestimations by others—which he then magnified—placed objectives beyond his reach: only self-demotion brought late-life satisfaction. No expectations lured Lincoln apart from those he set for himself: he started small, rose slowly, and only when ready reached for the top. His ambitions grew as his opportunities expanded, but he kept both within his circumstances. He sought to be underestimated.
The point -- being too ambitious can slow you down if you're not strategic.
MichaelZuo · 8h ago
It almost seems like a tautology.
e.g. By definition the 99.9th percentile person cannot live a 99.999th percentile life, if they did they would in fact be that amazing.
cantor_S_drug · 9m ago
Can we invoke a version of 80-20 rule here, that 0.1% people will easily capture success of 80% while subsequent marginal capture takes increasingly more investment and luck?
thrwwXZTYE · 1h ago
Significant part of what separates 99.9th (or even 90th) from 99.999th percentile is ego management.
In particular IQ is not associated with better life outcomes after you have "enough", and that "enough" isn't Mensa level.
majormajor · 8h ago
> e.g. By definition the 99.9th percentile person cannot live a 99.999th percentile life, if they did they would in fact be that amazing.
This seems far too deterministic and I think is contrary to what you're replying to.
It sounds more like a 99.999th percentile person[0] that constantly reaches too far too early, before being prepared, will not have a 99.999th percentile life. A 99th percentile person who, on the other hand, does not constantly fail due to over-reach, can easily end up accomplishing more. (And there are many other things that might hold them back too - they might get hit by a car while crossing the street.)
[0] in whatever measurement of "capability" you have in mind
MichaelZuo · 7h ago
Well the critical thing is that we can’t determine who is at what percentile until after the fact. So for example an early bloomer genius type, who is 99.999th percentile among everyone in the same birth year cohort, could suddenly crash back down towards the average.
There’s no practical way to determine that looking forwards in time.
jahewson · 1h ago
John Quincy Adams was arguably such a 99.999th percentile person though.
strogonoff · 5h ago
To be strategic, you think hard enough how to get somewhere and carefully plan and eliminate unknowns until you reach a point when getting there is no longer interesting.
Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore. It’s just a lot of trivial typing and package management and it might not even be all that impressive when it is done.
Your idea is not at all a path well-trodden, but it is a path down which you’ve sent a high-resolution camera FPV drone so many times that you doubt you will see anything new in person.
What might happen then is that you try to keep it interesting by making it more impressive and raising the bar, by continuing to think and plan even harder. Why not write it in Rust? Why not make it infinitely extensible? More diagrams, hundreds more of open tabs…
It can absolutely lead to cool ideas with strategic and well-defined execution plans. Unfortunately, it is also difficult to break this loop and actually implement without an external force or another mind giving you some reframing.
andoando · 54s ago
[delayed]
astrobe_ · 1h ago
> It’s just a lot of trivial typing and package management and it might not even be all that impressive when it is done.
> What might happen then is that you try to keep it interesting by making it more impressive
This feeling is something that immediately sets off an alarm in my head.
IRL every time I tried to impress someone, I said or did stupid things. These experiences are now part of cringe memories about myself.
In software, the paradox is often that making something simple is difficult, but easily reproducible and unimpressive for most people. It is kind of like the engineers' version of when people say that their 4yo kid could do the same drawings as Picasso.
Just go through the last 90% and finish the thing. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, perfection is reached not when there's nothing else to add, but when there's nothing more to remove.
Then put the V1.0 tag on it and move it to maintenance mode. Then move to the next project, which very well might be about covering a different set of needs in the same area.
raynr · 2h ago
> Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore.
The article gave me a vague, off-topic sense of unease but your comment crystallised the feeling for me.
I really wish less emphasis is placed on this kind of blue-sky, "strategic" thinking, and more placed on the "chores". Legwork, maintenance, step-by-step execution of a plan, issue tracking, perspective shifting etc. are all, in my opinion, critically important and much more deserving of praise and respect than so-called "strategic" thinking.
Which, IME, most people can't do anyway! After they've talked their big talk you suggest that there's a practical, on-ground problem and they look at you accusingly, like you're sabotaging their picture. And I'm like, no, my friend; reality is sabotaging your picture, it's just the two of us here and you're not losing any face by me pointing that out, and also if you were an actual strategic thinker you'd have taken my on-ground problem into account already...
gizajob · 12m ago
I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy the article from the title, but it turned out to be bang on the money with regards to creativity.
nilirl · 13m ago
Let's be honest, this is us taking a few terms from a few neuroscience and cognitive psychology papers and running with it.
There are two claims in this post: Initial goals get adjusted as we discover operating constraints, and it is easier to work with fewer variables to pay attention to.
I didn't like these sentences in this post:
- "I see this in wannabe <people trying>..."
- "Here's what happens to those brave enough to actually begin ..."
Here the author was brave enough to put themselves on a pedestal; like a true wannabe profound.
wrs · 10h ago
I’m very good at one thing (thank goodness), but I do some other things that I’m not good at, to remind myself how nice it feels to just do something without the pressure of having to be good at it.
I also think being a beginner at other things reminds me that failure is what learning feels like, which gives me some perspective when my “real” job feels difficult although I’m supposedly so good at it.
When I look back at big things I’ve done, they’re all the result of just “doing the thing” for a long time and making thousands of course corrections. Never the result of executing the perfect crystalline plan.
scuol · 5h ago
If this sounds like you, I highly recommend reading "The Problem of the Puer Aeternus".
You can definitely skip a lot of the tedious bits where the author essential copy-pastes other books for analysis, but this is a very common pattern where people tend to hold themselves back because doing the unambitious, rather pedestrian next step forward requires one to face these preconceived notions about oneself, e.g. "I should've done this long ago", etc.
joduplessis · 1h ago
If you consider any creative endeavor as a burden, I suggest you relook at why you're doing it. You have to love the process (not just the outcome), and in this case, that "gap" Ira Glass refers to usually acts like fuel on the fire.
kretaceous · 7h ago
The first two sections reminded me of an observation I've made about myself: the more I delay "doing the thing" and spend time "researching" or "developing taste", the more I turn into a critic instead of a creator.
> Your taste develops faster than your skill
> "the quality group could tell you why a photograph was excellent"
They are critics now. People with a huge taste-skill gap are basically critics — first towards themselves and gradually towards others. I don't want to generalize by saying "critics are just failed creators", but I've certainly found it true for myself. Trying to undo this change in me and this article kind of said all the words I wanted to hear. :)
It's both dense and beautifully written. Feels like every paragraph has something profound to say. This kind of "optimizing-for-screenshot-shares" writing usually gets overdone, but since this actually had substance, it was amazing to read.
(See how I turned into a critic?)
al_borland · 7h ago
For those who haven’t run across it, I like the man in the arena speech from Theodore Roosevelt to put things in perspective when I turn into a critic, or get harsh feedback from a critic.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
There's the flip side to it too... I'm just waiting for an overly ambitious non-technical colleague in what should be a technical management role to overreach in terms of role and promotion.
pedalpete · 10h ago
What is "too ambitious"?
Are there dreamers who overthink and never get anything done? Absolutely!
Are there also people who do what other people regularly say is impossible? Also an absolute yes.
Ambition has nothing to do with it. There are doers and there are talkers.
GianFabien · 9h ago
The word "ambition" comes with a variety of connotations.
>There are doers and there are talkers.
There are those who use their ambition to define a goal and then work tirelessly to achieve it. Think of the mountaineer who plans and trains for decades to eventually ascend Mt Everest.
Then there are those who share their ambition by talking about it. Seeking recognition, etc for "being ambitious". Staying with the mountaineer theme, those who refuse to climb a lesser mountain as not being important enough to expend their precious talents upon. It is these folks that if they somehow make enough money in some form, end up chartering a helicopter and sherpas to climb Mt Everest.
lo_zamoyski · 7h ago
The word “ambition” is indeed vague, and this is unfortunate, as there is a rich vocabulary full of distinction we ought to be using. (You see the same thing when people use “passionate” as a virtue, such as in job postings when what they mean is “enthusiastic”. Taken literally, you certainly don’t want passionate employees!)
In the strict sense, ambition [0] is an inordinate love of honor.
Perseverance [1], OTOH, is the ability to endure suffering in pursuit of a good. Both effeminacy (refusal or inability to endure suffering to attain a good) and pertinacity (obstinate pursuit of something one should not) are opposed to perseverance.
It seems that ambition is therefore opposed to perseverance, since it can either be effeminate (the ineffectual daydreamer that makes big plans that he never realizes) or pertinacious (the person who bites off more than he can chew).
Prudence [3] involves the application of right reason to action, which itself presupposes right desire. An inordinate love of honor is therefore opposed to prudence, because it involves an inordinate desire. Furthermore, prudence presupposes humility [2], which involves knowing the actual limits of your strengths and qualities (it is not the denial of the strengths and qualities you actual have, which is opposed to humility and a common misconception!). Humility allows us to moderate our desires. In that sense, ambition as an inordinate desire for honors beyond one’s reach lacks humility.
Griffith from Berserk is "too ambitious" but yeah they got things done I guess.
thrwwXZTYE · 3h ago
This syndrome is called "eternal child" (puer aeternus) in psychology.
You were destined to great things. You were exceptional as a child, you learnt to associate your great potential with all the good in yourself, you built your identity around it. You were ahead of your peers in elementary school, whatever you applied towards - you exceled at.
So you value that potential as the ultimate good, and any decision which reduces it in favour of actually doing something - you fear and avoid with all your soul. Any decision whatsoever murders part of that infinite potential to deliver something subpar (at best - it's not even guaranteed you achieve anything).
Over time this fear takes over and stunts your progress. You could be great, you KNOW you have this talent, but somehow you very rarely tap into it. You fall behind people you consider "mediocre" and "beneath you". Because they seem to be able to do simple things like it's the simplest thing in the world, while you somehow can't "motivate" yourself to do the "simple boring things".
When circumstances are just right you are still capable of great work, but more and more the circumstances are wrong, and you procrastinate and fail. You don't understand why, you focus on the environment and the things you fail to achieve. You search for the right productivity hack or the exact right domain that will motivate you. But any domain has boring repeative parts. Any decision is a chance to do sth OK in exchange of infinite potential. It never seems like it's worth it, so you don't do it.
You start doubting yourself. Maybe you're just an ordinary lazy person? Being ordinary is the thing you fear the most. It's a complete negation of your identity. You can be exceptional genius with problems, you take that any time if the alternative is "just a normal guy".
wordpad · 3h ago
Oh God
So, what is the lesson here?
Gotta let go of pride and risk it for the biscuit (ship something)?
thrwwXZTYE · 1h ago
There's no lesson. It's hard. Your brain will search for the silver bullet to skip the boring self-improvement work and feel good NOW. It'll likely detach your current self from your past self (I was bad, I discovered this, now I'm great, exceptional and heroic again). Then you'll again avoid the boring day-to-day work (becaue you feel exceptional again) and fail again.
Everything you know is material for your brain to make excuses and rationalizations. So no lessons work.
What works is retraining the part of the brain that distorts the reality and directs all your thoughts towards these patterns.
It's a lot like debugging. There's a callback in your brain that is harmful. It triggers every time you have to sacrifice some future potential for uncertain reality. It is subconscious. Put a breakpoint in that callback. Try to notice every time it triggers. At first just notice it, notice what it urges you to do.
When you have it nailed down - try to change it. At that point you'll realize the urge and where it comes from. Then it's a matter to making the decision and committing to sth, no matter what. It doesn't only have to be big things, it can be small things unrelated to work. It's the same "code". If you do it every time - you'll retrain it eventually.
At least that's the theory, I'm not there yet.
bn-l · 51m ago
> Put a breakpoint in that callback. Try to notice every time it triggers. At first just notice it, notice what it urges you to do.
Damn I love this advice phrased like this.
labrador · 10h ago
Being lazy is a clever form of productivity
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
― Bill Gates
w10-1 · 8h ago
Recognizing delusions is probably the highest form of wisdom. It can help us avoid entire wasted lives.
That said, "Do-learn" sort of begs the question, and it's only a half-step. How do you know when you're polishing a turd? Who's to say this cycle is virtuous or vicious?
The second part is that after you drop your self-centered delusion of seeking perfection, you actually start to find and solve other people's problems.
It might not be pretty or fun, but that's what has value.
If you're interested in building companies, the key factor is not the technology or even the team, but the market -- the opportunity to help.
Then it's not really your ambition: it's a need that needs filling, and the question is whether you can find the people and means to do it, and you'll find both the people and the means are inspired not by your ambition, but by your vision for how to fill the need, in a kind of self-selected alignment and mutual support.
SeanAnderson · 10h ago
I find it surprisingly difficult to lower my standards once I feel committed to an idea. I wish this article leaned a little more into ways to address that sort of dilemma.
Don't get me wrong, I agree fully with the article. I put it into practice plenty well in many areas of my life. I've made great progress with my diet, self-care, and physical fitness routines by keeping my goals SMART.
And yet, a few years ago, I got this idea in my head for a piece of software I wanted to create that is, if not too ambitious, then clearly asking all of me and then some. The opening paragraph of the article really resonated with me -- "The artwork that will finally make the invisible visible."
And so, I've chipped away at the idea here and there, but I find myself continually put off by "the gap" - even though I know it's to be expected and is totally human.
Part of me wishes I had never dared to dream so big and wishes I could let the idea go entirely. Another part of me is mad and ashamed for thinking like that about a personal dream.
Anyway, don't know where I'm going with all this. Just felt like remarking on the article since it struck close to home.
P.S. if you haven't seen the Ira Glass video, I'd take a look. It's pretty inspirational. Here's Part 3 which is what the article was referencing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE
thehappyfellow · 9h ago
It's closely related to another truth:
Unconstrained curiosity is a vice, not virtue.
james-bcn · 54m ago
Sorry I don't consider this a "truth" at all.
Unconstrained curiosity is a superpower. Some of the greatest people in history have had immense curiosity. Think Newton, Darwin, Feynman. In fact pretty much any great scientist is great because of their wide curiosity. It's often the crossover between things that seem unrelated where the breakthroughs lie.
It's a joy to have "the pleasure of finding things out" and I pity anyone who lacks it.
jebarker · 8h ago
Especially if you’re a cat. Seriously though, I don’t like hearing this - curiosity about all things is sort of what keeps me getting up each morning.
bGl2YW5j · 8h ago
To you maybe. People get satisfaction and purpose from different things. Unbounded curiosity can often drive tangible outcomes too. You might even have that curiosity to thank for methods and tools you use in your own persuits!
bravesoul2 · 4h ago
Prioritisation! It's very hard. Deciding what to do and therefore what not to do.
fcatalan · 6h ago
This resonates a lot with me. In fact it's a trait that has made me unhappy for as long as I can remember.
I'm seeing a therapist later this month because in a talk with my GP she saw strong enough hints of ADHD to send me there, and the kind of situations and some feelings talked about in the article came up a lot in the conversation.
I size up my oil paints against the old masters, not the old ladies in the atelier. I paint miniatures way better than average but hang around with Golden Demon winners so I always find myself wanting. Can play beautiful Renaissance pieces on my uke, but infuriatingly not at a professional performance level. Can win many sim races, but not against the top 0.1%, yet I size myself against their telemetry and laptimes. I dabble in Chess but being forever stuck around lowly 1300 ELO makes me feel dumb. My dead side projects cemetery has subdirectories approaching 3 figures. I go out and cycle with my brother but I huff and puff while he tops the Strava segments and wins the regional amateur championship again.
So too many days I just sit and do nothing, or just look for something else to enjoy for a few months until I become an unhappy promising beginner at yet another thing, adding to the overall problem.
whatevertrevor · 2h ago
I don't want to psychoanalyze but it seems your sense of dissatisfaction is a little different from what the author is describing? Your dissatisfaction is from not accomplishing the possibly implausible goal of being the very best at something without being a professional competitor, while the author is describing a case of not even getting started on creative projects out of a fear of them not living up to a made up standard in your mind.
They're both arguably unreasonable standards but one is for the end-product (i.e. a novel/album/software project) as opposed to reaching some apparent level of general skill at your hobby. The latter is full of traps because for subjective hobbies like arts, how does one even evaluate that?
gregjw · 3h ago
Scope creep.
r33b33 · 2h ago
LLM written article.
Joel_Mckay · 3h ago
I tend to find if it isn't ambitious enough, than it is just low hanging fruit for competitors... Chances are someone already published something similar.
The market usually doesn't want advanced technology, but rather the comfortable nostalgic dysfunctional totems they always purchased in the past. =)
>Creation is not birth; it is murder. The murder of the impossible in service of the possible.
What a stupid quote. You know why it's stupid. Because murder is creation. It is the creation of death while destroying life.
Just use the word the way it's meant to be used. Don't come up with quotes that sound clever and trick the mind into thinking a statement is profound when really it's just more word trickery.
the_af · 5h ago
I thought the phrase was a whimsical/poetic way of saying something that rings true to me: that all the possibilities in your mind get narrowed down to a single imperfect one when actually materializing/putting them into practice -- in a way getting "destroyed" and replaced with an imperfect but existing version -- and that we sometimes get anxious about this.
It's not the only way of looking at it, but it is one way, and it's not wrong.
dismalaf · 7h ago
I hate the title but actually a pretty decent article.
> We are still the only species cursed with visions of what could be. But perhaps that's humanity's most beautiful accident. To be haunted by possibilities we cannot yet reach, to be driven by dreams that exceed our current grasp. The curse and the gift are the same thing: we see further than we can walk, dream bigger than we can build, imagine more than we can create.
> And so we make imperfect things in service of perfect visions. We write rough drafts toward masterpieces we may never achieve. We build prototypes of futures we can barely envision. We close the gap between imagination and reality one flawed attempt at a time.
deadbabe · 8h ago
Ambition is the enemy of consistency.
alganet · 10h ago
substack considered harmful
Myzel394 · 10h ago
Why's that?
alganet · 10h ago
it rewards viral, vague behavior that only draws clicks but doesn't actually generate knowledge
whatevertrevor · 2h ago
Can you expound? I've heard about some controversy around them not moderating hateful content, which fair enough.
But how does it reward anything if you're not engaging with anything outside of direct article links or newsletters you subscribe to?
IMO your comment is not constructive unless you think the linked article is "viral vague behavior that only draws clicks"
vasco · 10h ago
The windmills are that way
alganet · 9h ago
running into a windmill considered harmful
rvz · 9h ago
considered harmful considered harmful
alganet · 9h ago
One could make a vague substack post about this.
moritzwarhier · 10h ago
headline is enough, rest is probably fluff anyway (haven't clicked, headline sounds thoughtful & reasonable)
afeuerstein · 10h ago
I found this to be a good read, and I can only recommend at least skimming it through.
jebarker · 8h ago
+1 - this resonated with me. For 25 years I have been an aspiring songwriter and it’s a constant battle against perfectionism and learned/imagined standards. I believe the right path is to just write a large volume of songs at a high rate no matter how bad they are, but that is an amazingly hard thing to let yourself do
This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI for it, it automatically boosts the floor of your taste, but not your skill. And you end up never slowing down to make mistakes and learn, because you can just do it without friction.
What’s not mentioned is the utter frustration when you can see your own output is not up to your own expectations, but you can’t execute on any plan to resolve that discrepancy.
“I know what developers want, so I can build it for them” is a death knell proportionate to your own standards…
The most profitable business I built was something I hacked together in two weeks during college holiday break, when I barely knew how to code. There was no source control (I was googling “what is GitHub” at the time), it was my first time writing Python, I stored passwords in plaintext… but within a year it was generating $20k a month in revenue. It did eventually collapse under its own weight from technical debt, bugs and support cost… and I wasn’t equipped to solve those problems.
But meanwhile, as the years went on and I actually learned about quality, I lost the ability to ship because I gained the ability to recognize when it wasn’t ready… it’s not quite “perfectionism,” but it’s borne of the same pathology, of letting perfect be the enemy of good.
My attempt to improve the cliche:
2 issues here. Neither can be developed (perfected?) in isolation, but they certainly ramp up at different rates. They should probably feed back into each other somehow, whether adversarially or notMore grown-up way to do it is to consume your mates' stuff?
(Trying to go from where TFA left off)
Maybe that actually is what you were saying? But I'm confused because you used the opposite words.
He can't really play an instrument, but he knows exactly what works and what doesn't and can articulate it.
LLMs are good at things with a lot of quantity in the training set, you can signal boost stuff, but its not perfect (and its non-obvious that you want rare/special/advanced stuff to be the sweet spot as a vendor, that's a small part of your TAM by construction).
This has all kinds of interesting tells, for example Claude is better at Bazel than Gemini is, which is kind of extreme given Google has infinite perfect Bazel and Anthropic has open source (really bad) Bazel, so you know Gemini hasn't gotten the google4 pipeline decontamination thing dialed in.
All else equal you expect a homogenizing effect where over time everything is like NextJS, Golang, and Docker.
There are outlier events, like how Claude got trained on nixpkgs in a serious way recently, but idk, maybe they want to get into defense or something.
Skill is very rarely the problem for computers, if you're considering it as district from taste (sometimes you call them both together just skill).
Detractors say it's the process and learning that builds depth.
Proponents say it doesn't matter because the tool exists and will always exist.
It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.
Detractors from AI often refuse to learn how to use it or argue that it doesn't do everything perfectly so you shouldn't use it.
Proponents say it's the process and learning that builds depth and you have to learn how to use it well before you can have a sensible opinion about it.
The same disconnect was in place for every major piece of technology, from mechanical weaving, to mechanical computing, to motorized carriages, to synthesized music. You can go back and read the articles written about these technologies and they're nearly identical to what the AI detractors have been saying.
One side always says you're giving away important skills and the new technology produces inferior work. They try to frame it in moral terms. But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete.
I won't deny that there is some of this in my AI hesitancy
But honestly the bigger barrier for me is that I fear signing my name on subpar work that I would otherwise be embarrassed to claim as my own
If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it
This of course isn't just a moral concern, it's a legal one. I want ownership of my code, I don't want to find out later the AI just copied another project and now I've violated a license by not giving attribution.
Very few open-source projects are in the public domain and even the most permissive license requires attribution.
I think I'm using it more than it sounds like you are, but I make very clear notations to myself and others about what's a big generated test suite that I froze in amber after it cleared a huge replay event, and what I've been over a fine tooth comb with personally. I type about the same amount of prose and code every day as ever, but I type a lot of code into the prompt now "like this, not like that" in a comment.
The percentage of hand-authored lines varies wildly from probably 20% of unit tests to still close to 100℅ on io_uring submission queue polling or whatever.
If it one shots a build file, eh, I put opus as the meta.authors and move on.
Unless I can become a millionaire just with those skills, they are in a limbo between economically adequate and economically obsolete.
It's important to realize this is actually a general truth of humans arguing. Sometimes people do disagree about the facts on the ground and what is actually true versus what is bullshit, but a lot of the time what really happens is people completely agree on the facts and even most of the implications of the facts but completely disagree on how to frame them. Doesn't even have to be Internet arguments. A lot of hot-button political topics have always been like this, too.
It's easy to dismiss people's arguments as being irrelevant, but I think there's room to say that if you were to interrogate their worldview in detail you might find that they have coherent reasoning behind why it is relevant from their perspective, even if you disagree.
Though it hasn't really improved my ability to argue or even not argue (perhaps more important), I've definitely noticed this in myself when introspecting, and it definitely makes me think more about why I feel driven to argue, what good it is, and how to do it better.
There's actually some ground truth facts about AI many people are not knowledgeable about.
Many people believe we understand in totality how LLMs work. The absolute truth of this is that we overall we do NOT understand how LLMs work AT all.
The mistaken belief that we understand LLMs is the driver behind most of the arguments. People think we understand LLMs and that we Understand that the output of LLMs is just stochastic parroting, when the truth is We Do Not understand Why or How an LLM produced a specific response for a specific prompt.
Whether the process of an LLM producing a response resembles anything close to sentience or consciousness, we actually do not know because we aren't even sure about the definitions of those words, Nor do we understand how an LLM works.
This erroneous belief is so pervasive amongst people that I'm positive I'll get extremely confident responses declaring me wrong.
These debates are not the result of people talking past each other. It's because a large segment of people on HN literally are Misinformed about LLMs.
For the general populace including many tech people who are not ML researchers, understanding how convolutional neural nets work is already tricky enough. For non tech people, I'd hazard a guess that LLM/ generative AI is complexity-indistinguishable from "The YouTube/Tiktok Algorithm".
And this lack of understanding, and in many cases lack of conscious acknowledgement of the lack of understanding has made many "debates" sound almost like theocratic arguments. Very little interest in grounding positions against facts, yet strongly held opinions.
Some are convinced we're going to get AGI in a couple years, others think it's just a glorified text generator that cannot produce new content. And worse there's seemingly little that changes their mind on it.
And there are self contradictory positions held too. Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists...
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> Compare Lincoln’s life with that of John Quincy Adams. Great expectations inspired, pursued, and haunted Adams, depriving him, at critical moments, of common sense. Overestimations by others—which he then magnified—placed objectives beyond his reach: only self-demotion brought late-life satisfaction. No expectations lured Lincoln apart from those he set for himself: he started small, rose slowly, and only when ready reached for the top. His ambitions grew as his opportunities expanded, but he kept both within his circumstances. He sought to be underestimated.
The point -- being too ambitious can slow you down if you're not strategic.
e.g. By definition the 99.9th percentile person cannot live a 99.999th percentile life, if they did they would in fact be that amazing.
In particular IQ is not associated with better life outcomes after you have "enough", and that "enough" isn't Mensa level.
This seems far too deterministic and I think is contrary to what you're replying to.
It sounds more like a 99.999th percentile person[0] that constantly reaches too far too early, before being prepared, will not have a 99.999th percentile life. A 99th percentile person who, on the other hand, does not constantly fail due to over-reach, can easily end up accomplishing more. (And there are many other things that might hold them back too - they might get hit by a car while crossing the street.)
[0] in whatever measurement of "capability" you have in mind
There’s no practical way to determine that looking forwards in time.
Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore. It’s just a lot of trivial typing and package management and it might not even be all that impressive when it is done.
Your idea is not at all a path well-trodden, but it is a path down which you’ve sent a high-resolution camera FPV drone so many times that you doubt you will see anything new in person.
What might happen then is that you try to keep it interesting by making it more impressive and raising the bar, by continuing to think and plan even harder. Why not write it in Rust? Why not make it infinitely extensible? More diagrams, hundreds more of open tabs…
It can absolutely lead to cool ideas with strategic and well-defined execution plans. Unfortunately, it is also difficult to break this loop and actually implement without an external force or another mind giving you some reframing.
This feeling is something that immediately sets off an alarm in my head.
IRL every time I tried to impress someone, I said or did stupid things. These experiences are now part of cringe memories about myself.
In software, the paradox is often that making something simple is difficult, but easily reproducible and unimpressive for most people. It is kind of like the engineers' version of when people say that their 4yo kid could do the same drawings as Picasso.
Just go through the last 90% and finish the thing. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, perfection is reached not when there's nothing else to add, but when there's nothing more to remove.
Then put the V1.0 tag on it and move it to maintenance mode. Then move to the next project, which very well might be about covering a different set of needs in the same area.
The article gave me a vague, off-topic sense of unease but your comment crystallised the feeling for me.
I really wish less emphasis is placed on this kind of blue-sky, "strategic" thinking, and more placed on the "chores". Legwork, maintenance, step-by-step execution of a plan, issue tracking, perspective shifting etc. are all, in my opinion, critically important and much more deserving of praise and respect than so-called "strategic" thinking.
Which, IME, most people can't do anyway! After they've talked their big talk you suggest that there's a practical, on-ground problem and they look at you accusingly, like you're sabotaging their picture. And I'm like, no, my friend; reality is sabotaging your picture, it's just the two of us here and you're not losing any face by me pointing that out, and also if you were an actual strategic thinker you'd have taken my on-ground problem into account already...
There are two claims in this post: Initial goals get adjusted as we discover operating constraints, and it is easier to work with fewer variables to pay attention to.
I didn't like these sentences in this post:
- "I see this in wannabe <people trying>..."
- "Here's what happens to those brave enough to actually begin ..."
Here the author was brave enough to put themselves on a pedestal; like a true wannabe profound.
I also think being a beginner at other things reminds me that failure is what learning feels like, which gives me some perspective when my “real” job feels difficult although I’m supposedly so good at it.
When I look back at big things I’ve done, they’re all the result of just “doing the thing” for a long time and making thousands of course corrections. Never the result of executing the perfect crystalline plan.
You can definitely skip a lot of the tedious bits where the author essential copy-pastes other books for analysis, but this is a very common pattern where people tend to hold themselves back because doing the unambitious, rather pedestrian next step forward requires one to face these preconceived notions about oneself, e.g. "I should've done this long ago", etc.
> Your taste develops faster than your skill
> "the quality group could tell you why a photograph was excellent"
They are critics now. People with a huge taste-skill gap are basically critics — first towards themselves and gradually towards others. I don't want to generalize by saying "critics are just failed creators", but I've certainly found it true for myself. Trying to undo this change in me and this article kind of said all the words I wanted to hear. :)
It's both dense and beautifully written. Feels like every paragraph has something profound to say. This kind of "optimizing-for-screenshot-shares" writing usually gets overdone, but since this actually had substance, it was amazing to read.
(See how I turned into a critic?)
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Are there dreamers who overthink and never get anything done? Absolutely!
Are there also people who do what other people regularly say is impossible? Also an absolute yes.
Ambition has nothing to do with it. There are doers and there are talkers.
>There are doers and there are talkers.
There are those who use their ambition to define a goal and then work tirelessly to achieve it. Think of the mountaineer who plans and trains for decades to eventually ascend Mt Everest.
Then there are those who share their ambition by talking about it. Seeking recognition, etc for "being ambitious". Staying with the mountaineer theme, those who refuse to climb a lesser mountain as not being important enough to expend their precious talents upon. It is these folks that if they somehow make enough money in some form, end up chartering a helicopter and sherpas to climb Mt Everest.
In the strict sense, ambition [0] is an inordinate love of honor.
Perseverance [1], OTOH, is the ability to endure suffering in pursuit of a good. Both effeminacy (refusal or inability to endure suffering to attain a good) and pertinacity (obstinate pursuit of something one should not) are opposed to perseverance.
It seems that ambition is therefore opposed to perseverance, since it can either be effeminate (the ineffectual daydreamer that makes big plans that he never realizes) or pertinacious (the person who bites off more than he can chew).
Prudence [3] involves the application of right reason to action, which itself presupposes right desire. An inordinate love of honor is therefore opposed to prudence, because it involves an inordinate desire. Furthermore, prudence presupposes humility [2], which involves knowing the actual limits of your strengths and qualities (it is not the denial of the strengths and qualities you actual have, which is opposed to humility and a common misconception!). Humility allows us to moderate our desires. In that sense, ambition as an inordinate desire for honors beyond one’s reach lacks humility.
[0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01381d.htm
[1] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3138.htm#article2
[2] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07543b.htm
[3] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12517b.htm
You were destined to great things. You were exceptional as a child, you learnt to associate your great potential with all the good in yourself, you built your identity around it. You were ahead of your peers in elementary school, whatever you applied towards - you exceled at.
So you value that potential as the ultimate good, and any decision which reduces it in favour of actually doing something - you fear and avoid with all your soul. Any decision whatsoever murders part of that infinite potential to deliver something subpar (at best - it's not even guaranteed you achieve anything).
Over time this fear takes over and stunts your progress. You could be great, you KNOW you have this talent, but somehow you very rarely tap into it. You fall behind people you consider "mediocre" and "beneath you". Because they seem to be able to do simple things like it's the simplest thing in the world, while you somehow can't "motivate" yourself to do the "simple boring things".
When circumstances are just right you are still capable of great work, but more and more the circumstances are wrong, and you procrastinate and fail. You don't understand why, you focus on the environment and the things you fail to achieve. You search for the right productivity hack or the exact right domain that will motivate you. But any domain has boring repeative parts. Any decision is a chance to do sth OK in exchange of infinite potential. It never seems like it's worth it, so you don't do it.
You start doubting yourself. Maybe you're just an ordinary lazy person? Being ordinary is the thing you fear the most. It's a complete negation of your identity. You can be exceptional genius with problems, you take that any time if the alternative is "just a normal guy".
So, what is the lesson here?
Gotta let go of pride and risk it for the biscuit (ship something)?
Everything you know is material for your brain to make excuses and rationalizations. So no lessons work.
What works is retraining the part of the brain that distorts the reality and directs all your thoughts towards these patterns.
It's a lot like debugging. There's a callback in your brain that is harmful. It triggers every time you have to sacrifice some future potential for uncertain reality. It is subconscious. Put a breakpoint in that callback. Try to notice every time it triggers. At first just notice it, notice what it urges you to do.
When you have it nailed down - try to change it. At that point you'll realize the urge and where it comes from. Then it's a matter to making the decision and committing to sth, no matter what. It doesn't only have to be big things, it can be small things unrelated to work. It's the same "code". If you do it every time - you'll retrain it eventually.
At least that's the theory, I'm not there yet.
Damn I love this advice phrased like this.
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
― Bill Gates
That said, "Do-learn" sort of begs the question, and it's only a half-step. How do you know when you're polishing a turd? Who's to say this cycle is virtuous or vicious?
The second part is that after you drop your self-centered delusion of seeking perfection, you actually start to find and solve other people's problems.
It might not be pretty or fun, but that's what has value.
If you're interested in building companies, the key factor is not the technology or even the team, but the market -- the opportunity to help.
Then it's not really your ambition: it's a need that needs filling, and the question is whether you can find the people and means to do it, and you'll find both the people and the means are inspired not by your ambition, but by your vision for how to fill the need, in a kind of self-selected alignment and mutual support.
Don't get me wrong, I agree fully with the article. I put it into practice plenty well in many areas of my life. I've made great progress with my diet, self-care, and physical fitness routines by keeping my goals SMART.
And yet, a few years ago, I got this idea in my head for a piece of software I wanted to create that is, if not too ambitious, then clearly asking all of me and then some. The opening paragraph of the article really resonated with me -- "The artwork that will finally make the invisible visible."
And so, I've chipped away at the idea here and there, but I find myself continually put off by "the gap" - even though I know it's to be expected and is totally human.
Part of me wishes I had never dared to dream so big and wishes I could let the idea go entirely. Another part of me is mad and ashamed for thinking like that about a personal dream.
Anyway, don't know where I'm going with all this. Just felt like remarking on the article since it struck close to home.
P.S. if you haven't seen the Ira Glass video, I'd take a look. It's pretty inspirational. Here's Part 3 which is what the article was referencing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE
Unconstrained curiosity is a vice, not virtue.
Unconstrained curiosity is a superpower. Some of the greatest people in history have had immense curiosity. Think Newton, Darwin, Feynman. In fact pretty much any great scientist is great because of their wide curiosity. It's often the crossover between things that seem unrelated where the breakthroughs lie.
It's a joy to have "the pleasure of finding things out" and I pity anyone who lacks it.
I'm seeing a therapist later this month because in a talk with my GP she saw strong enough hints of ADHD to send me there, and the kind of situations and some feelings talked about in the article came up a lot in the conversation.
I size up my oil paints against the old masters, not the old ladies in the atelier. I paint miniatures way better than average but hang around with Golden Demon winners so I always find myself wanting. Can play beautiful Renaissance pieces on my uke, but infuriatingly not at a professional performance level. Can win many sim races, but not against the top 0.1%, yet I size myself against their telemetry and laptimes. I dabble in Chess but being forever stuck around lowly 1300 ELO makes me feel dumb. My dead side projects cemetery has subdirectories approaching 3 figures. I go out and cycle with my brother but I huff and puff while he tops the Strava segments and wins the regional amateur championship again.
So too many days I just sit and do nothing, or just look for something else to enjoy for a few months until I become an unhappy promising beginner at yet another thing, adding to the overall problem.
They're both arguably unreasonable standards but one is for the end-product (i.e. a novel/album/software project) as opposed to reaching some apparent level of general skill at your hobby. The latter is full of traps because for subjective hobbies like arts, how does one even evaluate that?
The market usually doesn't want advanced technology, but rather the comfortable nostalgic dysfunctional totems they always purchased in the past. =)
"The Man In The White Suit" ( 1951)
https://archive.org/details/TheManInTheWhiteSuit1951_201810
What a stupid quote. You know why it's stupid. Because murder is creation. It is the creation of death while destroying life.
Just use the word the way it's meant to be used. Don't come up with quotes that sound clever and trick the mind into thinking a statement is profound when really it's just more word trickery.
It's not the only way of looking at it, but it is one way, and it's not wrong.
> We are still the only species cursed with visions of what could be. But perhaps that's humanity's most beautiful accident. To be haunted by possibilities we cannot yet reach, to be driven by dreams that exceed our current grasp. The curse and the gift are the same thing: we see further than we can walk, dream bigger than we can build, imagine more than we can create.
> And so we make imperfect things in service of perfect visions. We write rough drafts toward masterpieces we may never achieve. We build prototypes of futures we can barely envision. We close the gap between imagination and reality one flawed attempt at a time.
But how does it reward anything if you're not engaging with anything outside of direct article links or newsletters you subscribe to?
IMO your comment is not constructive unless you think the linked article is "viral vague behavior that only draws clicks"