May Likes TorontoSometimes I see what the super techie folks post, and I wonder if you're just intentionally playing on hard mode.
Not that I understand what you're doing, but I wouldn't put it past you lovely people on Fedi.
alcinnz@mayintoronto Yes, I would say that (at least in regards to what I toot) I am playing on hard mode!
I don't take shortcuts in understanding what our computers are doing.
@alcinnz So a C developer.
@mayintoronto You know? I've dabbled some in C.
And I read a lot of C as I study an entire OS!
I see the appeal, but I quickly find it gets hard to work with. And hard to have confidence that I've avoided all the foot guns.
Jamey Sharp@mayintoronto I feel like "intentionally" implies more foresight than is often warranted. Did I cause my own problems? Absolutely. Did I know how bad it would be? …sometimes!
There's a quip I like, that the programmer's credo is "We did these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy."
@jamey I think most other people would walk away instead of continuing their attempts
@mayintoronto That's because those people are wiser than I am!
More seriously, I think it's good that some people keep working on problems long past the point where other people decide it's not worth it. I think that's true in all fields; for example, public policy questions like civil rights are full of examples.
@mayintoronto Thinking further on this, I want to add that it's often lonely being someone who cares deeply about a niche topic. And I'm definitely talking more generally than tech here, like prison abolition or voting methods or habitat restoration. Many people we see doing things on metaphorical hard mode could probably use a hug, or some cookies or something, right? Even if I don't get why someone cares so much about a topic that I don't understand, I can still sympathize with them and offer some support. That's not an obligation, but I think people often forget it's even an option, and I'd like to see more care in the world.
Corvus@mayintoronto
Definitely not a super techie but I do seem to find the most frustrating time consuming way to do everything. From tech to shovelling snow to making coffee in the morning I ask "what is the most difficult way to do this that requires the most effort?"
Definitely not a super techie but I do seem to find the most frustrating time consuming way to do everything. From tech to shovelling snow to making coffee in the morning I ask "what is the most difficult way to do this that requires the most effort?"
Fabio Neves 🇨🇦🇧🇷@mayintoronto I don’t know who said it first but: “we did this not because it was easy but because we thought it would be easy”
@fabio @mayintoronto I think it's a great quip regardless of the origin but if you want to know who said it first, I believe that was coined by Maciej Cegłowski in https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/761656824202276864
Marty Fouts@mayintoronto I am a retired OS developer and I can confirm that many techies play on hard mode; but I only do that if someone plays me or for a hobby; which is why my PC runs Win10; my phone is on iOS; and my home network is as vanilla as possible.
@MartyFouts That sounds so healthy.
Dawn Ahukanna@mayintoronto it might not be hard for the person posting e.g.
I really enjoy the iterative exploration - forming code that expresses an intention, letting the compiler at it & then considering what options to explore/map next, Al coda
Also know someone who’s playing amateur Rugby well past his 50s because it brings him joy, not because it’s easy to play at that age.
I really enjoy the iterative exploration - forming code that expresses an intention, letting the compiler at it & then considering what options to explore/map next, Al coda
Also know someone who’s playing amateur Rugby well past his 50s because it brings him joy, not because it’s easy to play at that age.
Dylan@mayintoronto sometimes when a Thing (appliance, program, widget, system, flow…) isn’t working properly it causes me physical discomfort. And thus began debugging everything.
And yes, the clash with reality is constant.
John-Mark Gurney@mayintoronto
You're not wrong.
I became as knowledgeable as I am by constantly doing it the hard/stupid way. You break things in unexpected ways and figure out how to fix it/make it work.
Chris Siebenmann@mayintoronto I think objectively I've drifted into playing on relatively hard mode even by Linux standards, but I'm not sure I could call intentional. Every step of the journey to my eccentric desktop environment was the easy step at the time, and here I am with something no one would recognize¹ and that gives me weird problems.
(But when I started from scratch on phones I took the easy way.)
¹ https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/MyDesktopTour is from more than a decade ago but the visible stuff hasn't changed much.