I often resent myself for not being a genius.
Are you depressed because your mind is in shambles, or is your mind in shambles because you are depressed?
I wish Hacker News had an “I upvoted this because the title has keywords that I’m used to seeing on the front page but I honestly didn’t understand the point and the first few comments provided no insight either and I keep telling myself that one day I’ll dig into one of these papers and actually master it you know? I’ll read the requisite books and I’ll write the kernel and I’ll publish the blog post OH I that’s what I need to do I need to pick out a blog theme, that’s definitely step one” button.
My freshman Psychology 101 professor once told our class, “in a later class we will discuss how your generation is not learning information, but learning where to find information.” That lesson never happened, he must have forgot. But I believe him.
Can you go to medical school with a CS degree?
As of this year I’ve been programming for 10 years. What does that actually mean? It means that when I see \r I know it’s a Windows line break and that it breaks things on Unix-based machines. It means I know that bandwidth is like “width of the pipe” and latency is “how long it takes to travel from one end of the pipe to another”—a non-technical friend asked me to explain this to them and it might have been the most good I did for the world in years.
Yeah, I know about half-a-dozen programming languages. Why am I unhappy? I’ve even written Prolog! Maybe I don’t actually know how to do anything important. I have published a paper, found a vulnerability on network security test that the professor was unaware of, and passed a graduate-level cryptography course at an ivy league school. But I don’t remember the construction that turns a psuedo-random number generator into a psuedo-random function. I know what a TLB is I guess, but I’ve never seen one. I’ve never felt one. If I was a genius, maybe I could develop lasting intuition for concepts faster. I won’t understand my computer until I build one, which means I’ll never understand my computer. Maybe if just read nand2tetris! (applause!)
Did we used to do things more discretely? Discrete like the math. Wake up. Get dressed. Eat breakfast. Read the paper. Now it’s wake up, immediately load everything that needs doing into your brain, and never unload it. Minutes fade into hours, hours fade into each other. Before you know it, you’re back asleep. When could you ever have time to go outside and stare at a sunset? What would you do, look at it, think for a bit, then come back inside? No thank you very much, it’s much easier to slide through the day on empty ambition, to let Netflix keep on autoplaying please!
Why do I feel like all of the coders in Coders at Work are burnt the fuck out? One of them writes like code for screensavers or something. I guess that’s pretty close to being a carpenter I guess.
Not writing transitions is great.
What kind of psychopath thinks their words so important important that they should be pushed to their friends, must less internet strangers? Oh wait, I’ve resolved this one: write for the one person you think needs to hear it, and assume that person exists even if that person is you. And assume that what that person needs to know is that there is at least one person in the world that is feeling even an iota of what you are feeling.
Here’s where I’ve arrived. Computer science is a tool, and I am a computer scientist. It’s a cliche but fuck it, what the fuck are we doing. At this point I can justify working on computers and the internet despite them maybe being a little completely catastrophic for the world because some computer science has to reduce how fucked up it is. The assumption here is that it will exist. Is this like spending your entire life specializing in oil to try to minimize how much oil is used? Just don’t burn oil.
I hate endings things on a negative note.
Someone does have to do it—minimize the fallout. Because we wanted this for some reason. We wanted to spend an afternoon as a 14 year old installing Linux on an old computer only to remember that all you use your computer for is playing games. What was the promised land? Here’s the positive note: I know it existed. I know it was there. And it might still be there.
I think that’s worth it.
TL;DR, too late.