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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>You have to pretend to be a neutral reader who knows nothing of what's in your head, only what you wrote. [...] If you make an effort, you can read your writing as if you were a complete stranger, and when you do the news is usually bad.

Disagree on that because of The Curse of Knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

The various attempts at explaining "monads", "web3", "Kubernetes", etc will still leave many smart readers exclaiming "I still don't get it."

PG's own essays (e.g. wealth inequality) have been misinterpreted in HN threads.

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Every time I see some glorious "this explains git in a single image", it's usually an interesting image for someone who already understands git, yet is entirely, 100%, opaque to someone who doesn't yet know git.

[This comment brought to you by a thread [1] from earlier today]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311713

I saw this earlier, and while I’ve been using git for many years, I think this graphic made me understand git less. Maybe because most of my usage is committing and resetting things and not doing the more wacky git commands?

For me this is every youtube math video ... including 3 blue 1 brown. They only really work if you already understand

I'm glad that DevEx is finally a 'coined term' because I've been shouting into the maelstrom for most of my career.

It is so common for someone to try to gently tell someone that their system (or at least the description) is a steaming pile of self-indulgent garbage by saying something like, "I don't think that's a good idea," or "This seems pretty complicated," only for the originator to take this as an invitation to continue evangelizing (aka talking about how brilliant they are).

In the age of everyone working remotely using screen sharing software, there is no excuse for not spending time watching someone try to use the tools or apis that you've ~foisted off~ given them. I wish it were just ignorance but too often it feels willful. Nothing will deflate your ego like trying in earnest to teach someone to do what you do. Or fluff it up, depending on how you choose to process that information.

To repurpose an old aphorism: if you meet an idiot in the morning, you met an idiot. If you meet idiots all day, you're the idiot.

It would help if PG would learn to write clearly. His LISP books are masterpieces. His personal essays are pretty opaque unless you’ve read him consistently. This one reads from the outside as pointless techbro navel gazing.

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