ludicity

Every single reader on my blog that has sent me high-quality written material of their own has independently gone viral without any signal boosting from me. Off the top of my head, Iris Meredith, Mira Welner, Scott Smitelli, Daniel Sidhion. Usually within a few days of writing whatever the piece was, but sometimes months later.

Some of the posts weren't even remotely optimized for it. Daniel wrote about very nerdy NixOS optimization, Scott wrote a 20K story about the horror of bullshit jobs, etc.

Survivor bias is a real thing, but there's also a real dearth of quality writers out there. I'd encourage anyone who enjoys writing to do it for the love of the game, and as long as you occasionally show it to someone or post it on HN, good things will come.

My life was totally changed around the time I had 100 readers, and that number is extremely achievable. Going beyond that hasn't really helped me that much, as you quickly lose the ability to form deep connections with people.

(However, if you're frustrated by blogging then by all means, give up. I do think that what carries the writers above is that they're in it for the love of the crafts they're writing about in addition to being talented writers. Trying to grind out success sounds dreadful and I feel like it scarcely works.)

I've made this point many times and the only possible answers are:

1. The people promising AGI are lying 2. The people promising AGI don't know what they're saying 3. The people promising AGI are hedging against AGI not eventuating but some intermediate value emerging. This is the most charitable read, but also totally at odds with getting people to invest, since the investment is predicated on AGI achievement

The correct answer is almost certainly "some people are silly, some people are grifting, some people think AGI is coming, but all the investment certainly benefits from people conflating AGI with a very good product instead of a world-changing achievement".

Eric Schmidt imagining AGI and then speculating that people will like, still be churning out apps, as if humans will need to do that sort of menial labour, just blew my mind and made me question many of the stories I had heard about his intelligence.

Oh man, I really, really wish that you hadn't said this and also that you were wrong.

I use em-dashes correctly because a reader emailed me, and I was dreadfully embarrassed. You can actually see them become correct in my writing after the "I will pile drive you" AI thing.

It never occurred to me that doing this correctly might make people think I use LLMs in my writing.

Edit: I'm sure the many typos protect me from that, actually.

I'm the author! I've had tons of corroborating experience, and many readers with it, but I will say that there are two extreme exceptions.

I have two readers with no FAANG experience that consistently find jobs with their CVs at serious companies with no trouble. Both are outside the U.S but in the first world. When asked, neither of them knows why they have such luck, and we've looked at their CVs together and been unable to see anything that distinguishes them, other than obviously being competent and some open source contributions.

(But other people have that too with no luck!)

It definitely took me way more than 25 hours as a kid to beat Pokemon Blue! But I was so young that I didn't understand that "Oak: Hello!" meant that someone called Oak was talking.

The glitched Pokemon you're talking about is Missingno by the way! I remember surfing up and down Cinnabar Island to do the same thing.

I'm Malaysian, and in tech (though I've left the country), and this is all accurate.

2 in particular is huge.

It's super weird seeing my country make headlines, but only in a way where I don't recognize the place they're talking about at all.

No harm, no foul. :) You might very well be right, but I chose to interpret it literally (there are lots of people that are otherwise pleasant that I don't get along with and that's fine) rather than as an insult.

I actually had a huge laugh about it, because I was reading R.A Salvatore's Starless Night which is peak nerd material and not even a good book, I read this trash literally because it's D&D. Doesn't get much nerdier than that!

The joy of not having many clients yet, haha. Also sorry that I haven't responded to the email. :( I currently have 451 from readers and have had to accept that I can't get to all of them.

I am the author and was puzzling over how to respond to this, but yeah, this is basically it. I still have very little tolerance for a certain level of incompetence (don't work at a hospital if you're going to crash prod repeatedly, sorry, this isn't adult day care), but most of my readers are better software engineers than me, and every day I have to humble myself and ask one of them how to do something stupidly simple, like "Is there a better way to develop pipelines than watching GitHub Actions fail, tweak the code, repeat?"

You can obviously substitute a book for whatever you want, but a great book is a huge accelerator. And yeah, it has to be good, which doesn't seem very controversial. Fluent Python is a great example of this. I could, with enough effort and time, piece together some of the philosophy underlying the language's design, but someone has already put a huge amount of pedagogical effort into pre-chewing a lot of that food for me. This probably isn't intrinsic to books (I really like Josh Comeau's CSS course, for example, which has book-tier thought put into it) but I do think that books attract authors who are thoughtful, and the form factor makes them pleasant to revisit. Even some of the suspect, like The Mythical Man Month, have some beautiful prose and thought that I think wouldn't appear typically appear in a more colloquial format like a YouTube series.

I do appreciate you taking the time to read my mind for false modesty and vaguely insult me though, thank you!

Probably because my audience is probably 90% software engineers, and many of them have more experience and technical skill than me. I only really dare to advise people in the first 1-3 years of their tech journey on actual tech topics.

I spend a lot of time talking to non-I.T people due to my partner being a veterinarian and the local improv/music scene. The absolute disdain people have for the idea of sitting at a desk and taking orders from pointy-haired manager is humbling. They're very envious of things like remote work, etc, so we have it pretty cool in lots of ways, but I think there's something to learn for many programmers on the mental health/spirituality front from that contempt.

The happiest psychologist I know is many, many times more content than the happiest programmer I know at a corporate job. The most passionate software engineers I know might be able to claim similar joy, but they have overwhelmingly quit their corporate gigs and fly solo.

I will never recover from this psychologically or financially. My life will be neatly divided into before this comment, and after this comment, and ever shall I long for the former to no avail.

It sounds like you'd be a brilliant developer by most standards, but have the curse of understanding the gap between yourself and a top 0.0001% Linux kernel contributing supergenius. Drop my consultancy an email in case we do enough revenue in 2025 that we want to hire for 2026!

We've been floating the idea of giving everyone on the team Wednesdays off, fully paid, to read non-technical material while they're benched. We haven't done it yet because I pay rent and am worried that maybe we aren't good enough at sales to generate that much surplus... but deep down, I think it'll make a smarter team and that'll pay for itself.

And the only reason that it's non-technical material is that it's just assumed that people are reading every other day, and we thought a break into psychology/fiction/whatever would keep the brain well-oiled.

I studied with some very cool people. One joined my consultancy, and the other won a million dollars in a machine learning competition before we graduated.

Unfortunately, yeah, we were all removed from the workforce in a conventional sense almost immediately. I run my own business and most of our clients are American, my co-founder became an executive within four years, and the last guy went into private consulting for the mining industry.

I know of a local business with a great engineering culture, and they told me that they've run forty in-person interviews to fill a single slot in the past. And their team is really overloaded with Americans that immigrated to Australia for non-career reasons.

LLMs are actually great for book recommendations. Still not quite as good as looking up "HN best book on unit testing" for most topics, but great for niche things.

But, to be honest, my go-to move these days is joining a community and asking a well-regarded expert. I get all my recommendations from readers these days.

You might enjoy this recent article from my friend Adolfo: https://ochagavia.nl/blog/to-broadcast-or-not-to-broadcast/

But yeah, broadcasting has been great for my career. I don't even broadcast maximally employable things (but maybe that's a way to stand out) and am not even trying to get hired, but putting yourself out there does good things.

Yeah, like, these are explicitly bad things. I have no idea how the commenter above thought those were brags, those are self-owns. My Master's thesis took 5x longer than it should have because there were no tests or version control, I absolutely limped through it. I'm still not confident some of the results were correct.

But it's also crazy that like, at no point did a single professor go "Submit a git repository, you morons". I was studying at Monash, which is a well-regarded institute in Australia, and I'm now pretty sure that most of the staff didn't know what Git is.

All four of my employers before I went into private consulting didn't use version control either. It's whacky out here.

Yeah, this is probably a sad truth. Something weird is that, as a consultant now, no one asks me to jump through hoops. They just talk to me, I provide sensible guidance and insight, then we get paid to work.

I have absolutely no idea why companies roughly know how to hire private consultants at a bajillion dollars a day, then basically bully people with Leetcode or lame panel interviews, but they do.

Hah, I wish I could take credit for that, but the writing is pretty explicitly a claim that you can 80/20 a lot of domains (see Dan Luu's writing on Overwatch), then you spend a billion years practicing. I wonder how people are reading this stuff and going "Wow, it's all so effortless for this guy!"

I'm like, extremely untalented at many things and compensate with effort.

Author here! You might like David Whyte's writing on "genius". It's sad when you want to be the best of the best in a specific thing, but almost anyone can blend their natural aptitudes in a few distinct fields to the be "best of the best" in something unique.

I'm an okay programmer, and the general opinion from clinical mentors here is that I'd be an above-average psychologist if I wanted to get into it, but I'd be one of the only professional software/professional psychologists in the country if I multiclassed.

For finding resources, I'm souring on some Hackernews material as I become more skilled and cure some Gel-Mann Amnesia, but generally speaking it's still a great place to look for book recommendations.

Another great tip is to check Goodreads lists from people you admire, or to find recommendations that include other material you find good. For example, I like Taleb's Black Swan. I found Keith Johnstone's Impro from a Reddit comment that that included Black Swan in the list, and repeat that trick ad infinitum.

Author here! Firstly, thank you for the kind words.

And secondly, this is quickly becoming apparent. I'm trying to run sales in Australia, my whole network is here, etc, but most of our good leads are at American companies. I know some smart Australians, but there's less appetite for quality work here, because that would require changing things and that's too much risk for people who just want to tap out and retire.

I'm putting all my work and in-person sales time into Australia, and we're still walking away with American clients despite the timezone differences and other obstacles. In Australia, the line has thus far been "I know we should do better, but no one will ever approve spend when they just want to wait out the clock for a new job". This is probably common in the U.S too (it's common everywhere), but the line with American clients has more typically been "We need this done to a really high standard because we think it's competitive advantage - can you start tomorrow?"

Peter Singer, even though I'm not really a utilitarian, really helped my thinking skills at university. Formal logic and political philosophy were probably the two greatest units I ever took!

We meet again! And yes, I try to keep the reading to 9-5, at least on technical topics. My team is free to read as much as they want when they're benched, and we tend to read in pairs so that we have discussion partners.

Although since we don't know if the businesses is successful yet, we'll see if that's economically rational!

Through the blog I get to meet a lot of people from all walks of life, and this has broadly been the consensus, with some exceptions. "Never try" is maybe unique to I.T, "remain fundamentally incompetent or try incorrectly" is very common.

I was horrified to hear surgeons say that they view their field this way. Lawyers seem to be a bit more optimistic on average, but I still hear horror stories now and then. But yes, the floor varies field-by-field, though the broad point I want to make is that I.T is not uniquely bad.

See: HR, recruiters, real estate agents, etc. I had a friend's birthday party where he and all his guests worked in hospitality, and the stories I heard did not at all indicate that the industry is run sensibly.

EDIT: Oh, and of course, I talk to journalists now and they say the exact same thing once the microphone is off.

I'm the author. I've been meaning to write something about this, but for context, I was a very strong psychology student, completed my degree, learned most of my early computer science/statistics from a clinical neuropsychologist, and can get a clinical license in about two years if I want to do that. I'm like, still deeply into psychology in many ways.

But the epistemology of the median practitioner and academic is ridiculously low. I'm now convinced that they're not actually that worse than other fields though, it's just that clinicians lead a feedback mechanism as obvious as an exception being raised so they never improve to some baseline floor.

Paul Meehl's influenced me deeply on this topic, as did Gregory Francis' critique of Paul Piff's (great name) terribly conducted yet ultra successful work.

Yeah, basically. Although the reason I venerate books specifically is that a great book is just amazing for personal growth. That's true for any great learning resource, but there are things about books specifically that I love, and some of that might just be sentimentality about the role that books have played in my own life. A great YouTube course just wouldn't hit the same.

I never realized how bad I was at Python until reading Fluent Python, hah.