Latency numbers are written with three significant digits (4.21 ms). I'm curious about the accuracy of the measurement device. If it can measure tens of microseconds, I'm impressed. If it can't, the conclusions in this article should be taken more coarsely.
I prefer «reduces uncertainty» to «reduces ambiguity». The problem isn't ambiguous specifications, it's simply that there are too many unknowns to just do the work at this point.
The author talks about the shaping of the work, so I guess this is implicit.
I agree that mentoring is hard, and I want to read your take.
I wonder if we agree on expert aesthetics or not. You write:
> Experts tend to have an aesthetic preference towards technically challenging work rather than simple-but-interesting work, and I’ve written more about this phenomenon here: expert aesthetics.
When I read the passage the first time, I thought you meant "experts prefer to work on hard problems in order to arrive at simple solutions". But that's not what you're saying!
> I would love a language that has this gradual evolutional abstracting as a core concern. That makes it easy. Where you can start from simplest imperative code and easily abstract it as the need for this arises.
This is about how I write Clojure.
I start out with some code that does the thing I want. Either effectfull code that "does the thing" or functions from data to data.
After a while, I feel like I'm missing a domain operation or two. At that point I've got an idea about what kind of abstraction I'm missing.
Rafael Dittwald describes the process of looking for domain operations and domain entities nicely here:
Consider sending him an E-mail, he responded when I thanked him for exactly this book a few years ago! There's an "E-mail me" link on the left sidebar at http://www.catb.org/~esr/.
If you mash together two ideas, is the new composite idea yours?
I'd say it's yours. In that frame, there are lots of ideas.
Lets assume there are 10 000 known ideas. Then there's 10^8 combinations of two ideas, and 10^12 combinations of three ideas. That's a lot of ideas, even for the internet! I bet not all of them are named. And different people are going to frame ideas differently.
I also believe trying to form your ideas in reference to existing knowledge is a great way to learn existing knowledge.
No, don't summarize. Remix! Write about your own ideas!
Your mind is a living collection of your own ideas, and a history of their significance to your prior life. Not a dead library of pointers to other dead libraries.
Books are great. But you shoudn't outsource your brain. The learning happens when you think for yourself. Reading is good. Thinking about what you've read is even better. But don't stop with the summary! Go further. Apply it to your context. Try it, it's fun.
> The great mistake that this article makes is thinking that people need to be constantly expressing themselves in some unique way that nobody's ever done before. But the world has almost 8 billion people, few things are as unique as you think.
I'd like to riff on this.
People's attention is limited. People's capacity for novel stuff is limited. And things are bound to be commoditized.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Firefox is a tool that just works for me. It doesn't crash and delete my tabs when it visits a random web site. Sure, that's predictable.
But that frees up my attention to go elsewhere. To do /brand new/ stuff, not just mess around with web browsers.
If every airbnb looks the same, perhaps that's just because people get out of the airbnb to do the stuff they actually want to do?
That depends a lot. I live in Oslo now, and have lived in Trondheim and Finnmark near Kirkenes before.
Never used blackout curtains in Oslo or Trondheim, absolutely needed them in Finnmark. I wouldn't say that blackout curtains are the norm in the Nordic countries, especially not Denmark.
But if you're in a place where there's midnight sun, I suggest getting some.