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Comment by allendoerfer | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much further humankind would have progressed by now if "because it can be done" were not such a big motivation for intelligent people.

Edit: Since everybody took this post seriously, I will, too: We would be closer to some local maxima, but would have no chance to progress beyond them.

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I would wager humankind would have progressed quite a bit less personally.

The biggest motivation for me is when people tell me that it can't be done.

Not a motivator for me, but not a deterrent. Some of my best accomplishments were regarded as less than possible by the majority of other operators.

Sometimes the intersection of "because it can be done" & "the most that can be done with the resources within reach" can be applied in the most problem-solving of ways.

Haven't tried the Linux in W10 yet, but at least have gotten DOS to boot to bare metal on a modern PC from a GPT-structured HDD reliably with less monkey business than ever.

From fire and agriculture to airplanes and the moon landing, a huge portion of human development and the entirety of fundamental science wouldn't have happened at all if they demanded some preconceived idea of immediate utility. So, I like to reserve this thing for rare occasions, but straight up fuck you for trying to force your own ideas about usefulness to how other people spend their productive time.

The only way it could possibly result in progressing more would be if perfect foresight were a thing. A lot of what we take for granted today was found/invented/etc. while looking at something else and finding an unexpected result.

They're doing this for entertainment purposes. You could burn out if you're not having fun while working. Perhaps one would just do dumber things, not ones that are more useful?

I wonder how much further humankind would have progressed by now if we knew upfront what's useful and didn't have to try a whole bunch of crazy stuff.

Agreed. and so for Windows I've had to deal with the pain of Cyngin and Putty and its bretheren which adds to the list of me trying crazy stuff when certain commands wont work. Then I remember "doh its Windows"

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