Pseudoprose

People approach things through a lens of familiarity. Programmers are likely relating it to their experience.

NIH syndrome, every day, twice on Sunday.

I see a couple things interacting here to promote this kind of post.

1. The bar is low to call yourself a programmer and have a programmer's blog. Maybe they have a university degree that required them to take courses in a variety of fields to become well rounded. Maybe they just went to a technical school and got good job experience. Maybe they just jumped into a programming job after dropping out of highschool. They might be very good programmers, but not knowledgeable about anything else and not particularly aware of it.

2. HNews has a lot of programmers in it's membership. Earth shaking stuff from a variety of diverse fields gets promoted because programmers have diverse interests, but they also tend to read a lot of other programmers' blogs and post them, even if they are somewhat less than earthshaking.

Every news source has its weaknesses, and the tendency to see low-effort, poorly researched programmer blog posts promoted above genuinely interesting material is one of HNews's problems.

Author here!

I'm 100% guilty of applying to "programmer's brain" to everything. You'd cringe if you saw the alt music notation I've been working on for the past decade. It's an ascii abomination. Seriously, it's got functions and everything is represented in base twelve.

Anyway, I thought pseudoprose was worth sharing because of how LLMs might change the writing process itself. I've been experimenting with using GPT to expand ultra-condensed notes into essays. But I've found that I'm too obsessive over my writing voice to ever let it fill in gaps for me haha

But even without LLMs, I still naturally gravitate to writing with pseudoprose. It's how I've taught myself to structure thoughts. But maybe thoughts don't need structure, and that's just my programmer's brain imposing order on the orderless :)

Am I just reading this blog post completely differently? I don't see anything reductive about it...?

It seems to me like a technique for taking some rough stream of consciousness and have ChatGPT generate a complete, fleshed out document from it. It's more than just "notes", it's a specific format and prompt.

Whether it's of any use to you personally (I don't see myself using it, really) is a separate question. But I also don't quite follow what is offensive about it.

> What's up with programmers and their urge to ignore the rich history of any given subject

Isn’t that just what science, mathematics and rationalism in general has always done? Traditional cuisine to food science, farming to agricultural science, religion to physics etc.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and big advances occasionally come from an outside perspective exploring a field. If a writer came up with a new idea for writing code, I think many people on this site would give it a fair crack of the whip, especially given the history of cross-pollination between linguistics and programming.

I’m more disturbed by your need to rip someone’s work apart for no reason other than it doesn’t line up with your personal philosophy of how writers ought to work. You’ve not graced us with any constructive criticism, just an angry manifesto for why the author is wrong to publish his idea. I put it to you that if you don’t find this idea personally useful, and have nothing useful to add, maybe it’s not aimed at you and you can just skip over to the next article.

"Since I am good at X (coding in this case), my opinion is valuable in all subject matter (no)."

The same goes for movie stars and musicians making statements about politics or tech.

Hmm, I'm not sure why I should be condemning this. The author didn't shit on any pre-existing technology, they just said "I made a thing". As long as the thing isn't, like, the atom bomb or something, I can only celebrate it.

"Become a better writer by learning a conlang" (particularly one that is vague by design) is probably the most HN writing advice ever.

The tools have changed drastically even if the craftsperson has not. The craft adapts, evolves.

This comes across as judgemental and elitist. If you want finer content as determined by some group of gatekeepers of your choice, maybe you shouldn't read random blogs.

(I enjoy programming metaphors like the OP as well. URL on my profile.)

I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise, but I don't really get this take. It feels like when people started to dabble with electronic music and were told it wasn't "real." The OP creating this idea doesn't take writing away from anyone else, and artistic, whimsical people rocking up into the programming world and introducing more creative ideas into that sphere doesn't take away from the rest of us either – it just makes everything bigger and richer.

Apparently I’m the only one here who agrees with you. The author may be a high IQ genius, but this creation is incredibly grating, in that particular mode of an overenthusiastic mega-autist who sets out to dissect and systematize every last part of the universe. Unnerving to say the least.

I see the same pithy stuff in woodworking and software too!

I'm a huge fan of a book called The Inner Game of Tennis. Something I picked up from that book: I think a lot of advice works not because it's correct, but because it causes craftsmen to observe a thing they weren't observing before. "Am I overusing commas?" is a useful but unanswerable question :)

EDIT: The book also makes a strong case against judgmental language, so "overusing" commas is probably not the best word. So instead, maybe, "What do commas make sentences feel like?"

I try not to do it, but I’m absolutely guilty of this. When you start writing, it’s sort of the lowest common denominator topic to write about. You’ll be sitting there thinking what should I write about? So you start writing about writing itself.

Ah! How many of her files has "final" in the filenames? ;-)

Well, there was even a "Git for Photoshop." I think it was LayerVault[1] -- a search brings it up.

Of course, yes, the trick with PSDs and static assets during the early days of the web were the file naming patterns. I did one in my 2nd or 3rd job long back (early 2000s), and when I met the team after 10-years; they were happy that they were pretty much still following the convention/pattern that I outlined.

1. https://www.layervault.com

There's a meme somewhere about how if hackernews laughs at something, it's six months away from a successful product launch and years of profitable sales.

What's funny about that? That sounds like a great idea.

I dunno, it just looks… like an exhibit or something, to me.

Like when a historical figure’s childhood home has been turned into a museum, and each room has been staged to give an impression of what it might have been like while they were alive?

It just looks sterile. Like no one uses it. Real life is so much more cluttered and uncoordinated in my experience.

Or at the very least - my office is an absolute trash heap compared to this.

Glad somebody noticed the joke :) "Use adverbs sparingly" is another I tried to sneak in there