Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

The right way to get more money in the game is to improve your skills/equipment and gain access to the higher level areas that have bigger monsters/better loot. (hard work)

What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open market (long work).

Eventually I figured out how to create an "autoit" script that automated the process of creating a new account, completing the tutorial, and then sending the goods over to the main account. The main account was getting very wealthy, but I should have known I needed to launder the ill-gotten gains somehow because an admin (Multi Czar) eventually caught on and all the accounts (including the main one) got banned.

Coming from UnrealTournament I hated the sluggish movement and jumping. I created a keyboard macro to run in a circle, jump a few times. I edited the macro script to do this for hours.

After a night of sleep I came back to a character that had leveled up a few times! Cool!

And now all the creatures had leveled up.

And all I could do was run away and jump because my combat skills were useless...

I don't mean magic like JRR Tolkien magic or whatever, I mean magic like David Copperfield magic, Penn & Teller magic.

You go to a restaurant, you ask for a thing, magically it appears in front of your very eyes and it is delicious. The secret was a lot of "long work" that went into the situation before you got there, so the cooks could be ready for anything you might order and could assemble it in a short time for you.

Magic is very often just a cleverly concealed patience. “How could she have known in advance that I was going to pick the jack of spades? That envelope has been in my hand the whole time and she has not touched it.” Well, if it really mattered, maybe she bought 52 decks of playing cards, filtered out the jack of spades from each one, and assembled a deck which only had the jack of spades in it. You thought you had a free choice, and you did, in the sense that you can get a model T in any color you want so long as it’s black. Of course the concealment takes some skill too, like maybe she unwrapped a different 52-card deck and threw out the jokers and instruction cards pointedly and then shuffled it before your eyes, then used some sleight of hand to switch the decks. But the point remains that the thing which makes it “magic” is the absurd backflips done out-of-sight. David Copperfield surely wouldn't make a Learjet in the middle of a ring of blindfolded people holding hands disappear by going out and hiring a quarter of those people to be stooges, having them disassemble their part of the circle and tow the plane out with a cable, and then reassemble the circle and interview the non-stooges for the camera, would he? OK, but he surely wouldn't go to the expense of building a rotating theater in order to vanish the statue of Liberty though right?

If you want to appear magical to others, a lot of it is going to be long work. Funny story, a lot of my physics education was spent in this way. We would get a problem, and my peers would sit there and scratch their heads and say “I wonder, what is the best way to solve this problem” and I would sit there and say “this is _a_ way to solve that problem, it’s not gonna be pretty and it’s gonna be painful but I will grind and grind and get an answer.” Then I would look at the answer and be like “that’s actually profoundly beautiful,” like maybe it’s the sort of answer which suggests that there is a duality between position and momentum space such that you could rotate one into the other, because it involves u x² + v p² for some u, v. Or maybe the answer is something divided by the total energy and I am like “oh maybe multiplying through by the total energy makes this derivation really really simple.”

And then since I know the answer I can reconstruct this beautiful argument and then I can write _that_ down as my final answer. Someone else sees this and thinks I am smart. Not as smart as I look! Hah. Then I learned that this is actually the basis for several cryptographic attacks called “meet in the middle;” often if you're trying to figure out the right path through a complex forest to an unknown solution you have to try N paths, but once you know where you are going then you can simultaneously work forwards from the starting point and backwards from the ending point and see which ones end up passing through the same point midway through the forest and you’ll succeed after only 2√N half-paths total because you get the product of (start attempts)×(finishing attempts) for the total number of paths you are trying through the forest.

Gameshark was the way to do that the real 'smart way,' also worth noting was that even back then you could share memorycard saved data if you had access to it with some clever devices.

This was my introduction to 'hacking' culture (soldering mod chips, ripping and burning games into ISOs followed that) and was really interesting to see so many homebrew solutions to challenges like these and kind of made the game(s) the side feature of what was taking place at the time.

The new PS5 version of GT, whatever number they're on now, looks more like GT1/2 than all of its later versions but much shinier.

I personally disliked the license(s) hurdle just using a controller, I breezed through them easily once we got a steering wheel and pedals and were actually kind of fun.

Not a fun way to play when all there is is grind.

Innovation is a rebellious act which is why it typically only happens in small startup environments. Occasionally a larger company will set up a "skunkworks" where it can be temporarily tolerated by hiding it from the view of the rest of the organization.

In war time the reason there is so much focus and emphasis is because a country is fighting for its survival, it forces efficiency and results in a brutal manner, because if you don't succeeded and out think and out maneuver the enemy people die.

In the Cold War the same tension and feeling of fighting for survival was present.

You'd think that the workload dropped, but it increased greatly. But this kind of change needed hospital leaders and politicians on board putting it as a high priority. Change is difficult, and most of the time people don't care enough to.

The book Peak Performance summarized that growth = rest + stress. Without the stress of a war, the system doesn't put innovation at a high enough priority, and you get an effect like the US faces, where universities and R&D departments are just a bottomless sink.

I'm not sure this is true. In my point of view, engineers would typically outdo themselves on wartime because they know there are big immediate stakes to their work.

As soon as I set myself to automating I realize that I like it again because now I am interacting with it in a new way.

Producing the same exact thing can be thought as insufferable hell or unstoppable desired moment depending on the context.

I also think it's crucial for society and humans. Unless most of us are wired to seek sadomasochism.

But I think there are more dimensions to it, as the article points out sometimes we shy away from hard work, because it's uncertain and your identity is on stake, you can fail, and I agree it takes that leap.

I'd say it is a leap of faith, because sometimes you don't know if it is hard work that is relevant, and worth, or not, I've never been an academic, but I guess many PhD feel that way ?

If by 'energizing' you mean morale-boosting, yes. But hard work is generally taxing. You are paying for long-term happiness with short term pain. Having slain a dragon on Thursday, you are likely to be in high spirits on Tuesday. But for the rest of the day and possibly tomorrow, you're may be sitting here doing menial tasks or reading documentation.

I don't think I'll ever understand why so many of us are perfectly content doing the same long work over and over again. Do you know what computers are for?