FaceTime with My 19-Year-Old Self | Hacker News Reader

FaceTime with My 19-Year-Old Self

davidtran.me

4 pointsrickyyean4 comments

It's easy to talk yourself out of doing things when you know a little too much. Sometimes, it's good to get back into the mode where you knew nothing and do things for their own sake, just to get the engine started again.

Do you think LLMs make this process of starting the engine easier or harder? They make getting started much easier, but it might be harder to feel a sense of momentum since our expectations of speed have changed, and the learning moments have changed as well.

The bug is in the software in our heads, if anything. We learned a little too much, that we're thinking further ahead than we would have when we first started out. So you need to purposefully shut off that part of your eval, so that you get started on anything at all.

If you design with the LLM, then it can make this easier by prompting it to help you not talk yourself out of things.

I found that gstack's /office_hours to be good about encouraging, while being firm. I've only done one of the modes, but it didn't dismiss my pushback when it was just based on my intuition. It took it as a baseline, and tried to evaluate it by taking it seriously. If that's any indication, the other modes for side projects should be just as supportive.

I think LLMs can make it easier to be more ambitious. Non-techies are blown away by being able to build web pages? I'm blown away that I was able to root my 1st gen Kindle Fire to repurpose it as a remote terminal to ssh into my laptop to talk to claude code. I've been trying to root the thing for years and could never find the right instructions to make it work.

Author here. The FaceTime is a reference to the J Cole lyric in the footnotes.

I actually dug up a video from a class project when I was 20 and created a voice clone in ElevenLabs (and also gave it current voice samples with prompts to make it sound younger), but hearing it didn’t add anything to my introspective experience, so I stopped before creating a video clone in Tavus/HeyGen/Simli to do a call via Pipecat/Daily.

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