I tried and failed a couple times before looking at the hint. And then I had to ask ChatGPT to explain the hint because I didn't understand chess notation. But with all of that out of the way, I am now winning 100% of my matches and feel it's not an overstatement to call myself a 1D chess grandmaster.
> Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
I think listening and transcribing is great advice. Careful listening will help to improve your own listening ability and taste. It also helps to demystify why something is great.
But it's also going to be a struggle - especially at first. You have to be prepared to struggle, a LOT. Most people won't be able to keep at it, and that's one of the things that separates the greats from everyone else.
I'm a jazz musician, and my kids are both professional classical players. I've asked them why they don't learn to play jazz. My daughter described pretty much what Glass is saying here. She calls it "fear of sucking." She knows what good jazz improvisation sounds like, and trying to make herself do it is pretty discouraging.
Not that there's anything wrong with loving and playing classical music, which is a factor too.
This may be why it's different when you start very young. You're not conscious of your own sucking, you just play, usually in a setting where everybody's congratulating you. For sucking. ;-)
I started on classical, and got into jazz by accident, as a bassist. It turns out that you can function in a band as a bassist without having to improvise very much, so I was able to learn at my own pace and eventually did. In fact a lot of good jazz players started out in school jazz bands or large ensembles where you didn't have to be a good improviser right up front.
There's a YouTube channel named Sor Hands, and what you've said here is something he has occasionally brought up. He also mentions how he nearly never improvises or plays something that he himself wrote as a result. The comments like this are always in passing, but it does expose his fears to those who notice.
I picked up Violin as an adult, have done recitals, and I suck. Being able to suck and find joy in something anyway even if you're not top nth percentile is a valuable life skill.
Yes, the number of amazingly talented people on YouTube has a way of making it feel like it isn't worth pursuing. But that is a combination of the sheer number of people, and "the algorithm" that allows you to find so many of them at that skill level. It creates a pressure that you feel like you must be equally amazing, or just give up.
The reality is, you're probably better than at least half of their followers. If that actually matters in the grand scheme anyway.
This is so true! I think as kids we naturally don't mind doing something creative and it not working out well, but as adults, we worry too much about seeming competent.
In a career, seeming competent can be valuable, but for learning something new and creative, it often just creates a barrier to getting started.
That's why I enjoy singing so much. Moderate skill good enough as most people can't even bring themselves to do it in public out of embarrassment.
My sister is in a whole different league than me in terms of singing but she also performs live, which I don't plan to do unless it's a karakoe evening.
I am 57M. I started singing less than 3 years back. Had a teacher from Koltaka doing weekly zooms for a few months, but mostly on my own. Started with karaoke, then graduated to a capella bollywood songs. The idea was to improve my voice, I was always shy/introvert but something triggered me to get on camera. With embarrassment out of the way, now it just 1) keep working on it - singing, producing tiktoks, learning editing on the way, and 2) lot more fun since I can hear my voice and enjoy it ... many of the times. Not a great singer, but getting better every single day.
As mentioned in the top comment, or somewhere near that, the first step ... listening to your first botched song, going on camera ... was the hard step. I made a monologue about this, a mix of english and hindi, on my tiktok profile.
PS: I have an alt, or a main. Not sure if that is an issue or not. I opened this account a long time back and then decided I did not want my name to be public so I opened an alt. This discussion made me reverse that decision just for one comment.
I updated my profile to add my social links, and happy to answer any questions from mods/dang about dupe accounts, but in general do not want to comment on AI, politics, corporations or anything controversial where it can be linked to my identity. And this is not trying to get followers or viewers - I have my hands full anyways.
So many things in life are better if you can get past that fear of not being good. Because very very few people can skip the stage where they are not good. (I'd be comfortable saying nobody. But there is always somebody, it seems.)
I think it's pretty frustrating if the songs/pieces you actually want to play are demanding or even at the virtuoso level.
If you really want to play a David Gilmour guitar solo or sing some Led Zeppelin, it better not suck because it won't hit the mark at all.
For me, the reason to pick up the guitar as a kid was to play stuff I liked, stuff that turned out not to be that easy, and every time I play, I feel that gap of where I feel I should be to respect the music I'm trying to play.
Rick Beato did a video about being able to identify guitarists by a single note. David Gilmour was by far the easiest to recognize. It got me wondering how much work would it take to even be able to play a single note as well as David Gilmour. And even then I would still only be imitating someone, not creating something original.
Wow, true. The David Gilmour note is plain as day. Only other one nearly as easy for me was EVH. The Jimi note sounded like Jimi but like the top comment says, a lot of the others sounded like Jimi too.
Jimi and Eddie are the two singularities of guitar, though. Before them it was unimaginable for anyone to sound like that. After them it was the normal.
(Although they're also tones that a lot of players still try to chase for their entire lives and never really reach. There's some magic to them beyond the more obvious steps.)
I've heard two people separately tell me that Yo Yo Ma would start his concert by playing a single long, low note. And they both told me they were immediately hooked.
There's plenty of good stuff that's hard to play, but there's also so much good stuff that's relatively easy.
It's also obvious to me that at this point I'm never going to reach the virtuoso level even if I really wanted to, but so what? I suck, but whenever I manage to play something that I couldn't before it brings me joy.
This is good advice for most human activities. I told my students these exact words (you gotta get comfortable being uncomfortable) countless times when teaching math and physics.
I picked up singing 4 years ago (I’m 42 now), starting from nothing, and I’ve been taking regular lessons. I still suck. But I suck slightly less than I did when I was starting, and what motivates me is the sheer joy that it brings. I just hope it lasts.
Embrace the suck. You don't become great coloring in the lines; that only gets you to the 100th percentile. Smearing the paint creates the 101st percentile, which drops everyone else to the 99th.
this reminds me of when i was 16 and a multi-instrumentalist but in love with the bass i had a chance to go to any music school anywhere that i could get into (top choice was the academy of music in rotterdam) i eventually settled on what i thought would be a rock school (based on the instruments taught) in clearwater by some guy id never heard of named jeff berlin.....lol
I've picked up a couple languages relatively easily and I 100% attribute it to the fact that I have no shame - zero
I will speak in my ugly, broken, American accent and do it til I improve. I didn't read about this technique in a book or anything, I simply mirrored what I saw kids do and IMO a big reason kids do well with picking up language (aside from all the physiological stuff) is that they actual speak it - they aren't concerned about whether it sounds like baby talk or not
A lot of advice feels trite and cliche, like keep trying, etc - but often times it takes repetition and hearing the message in many different ways before it sinks. As a tangent - this is the value i found in therapy too - a great therapist that was patient and consistent in their messaging day in and day out eventually led to some of what they said sinking in.
I also picked up a couple languages as an adult and can attest to this. You have to be willing to talk and know you are butchering the language. Nobody cares either. People are genuinely pleased to hear the effort, especially if you're a guest in their country.
I’m French, this is definitely not an urban legend, for some unknown reason « wrongly » spoken French sounds especially grating to me and all the other French people I know. We might not say it to your face , but it is extremely hard to ignore.
I wonder if it’s the same with other Latin languages, or if it is just some consequence of years of forced standardisation of the French accent.
Weird, I'm French and most people I know are rather delighted to hear foreigners speak French. We have quite a few English pensioners living around where my family lives, and I live myself along the Flanders/Wallonia border in Belgium so we're quite accustomed to hearing "bad French" speakers I guess, but the popularity of foreign speakers singing in French seems to indicate that foreign accents isn't really a problem for many French speakers.
People being annoyed at bad French is stereotypically Parisian to me.
I would assume it's grating for anybody to hear their mother tongue butchered. More so when both sides know they could just switch English and have an adult conversation instead of struggling to buy a loaf of broad and a bottle of water. I always feel the urge to switch and have to remind myself that the other person is making a big effort on their side and that should be appreciated and respected.
P.S. My mother tongue is Spanish and it's many accents are anything but standardized.
I was at a dance hall the other day, and this young lady came floating in. It's hard to describe how she walked - just like she was effortlessly gliding. It looks easy, but anyone else would look like a moose trying it.
It's the result of a lifetime of ballet dancing. Probably 10,000 hours, at least.
It's not just the 10,000 hours, it's learning it very young.
I am an ex-professional ballet dancer, and one of the things I always find interesting is that any experienced ballet dancer can instantly tell who trained as a child and who didn't solely by how they stand (literally not even moving) at the barre. But the thing is, children with only a few years of training under their belt will often show this good form, while I have literally never seen someone who started as an adult, even dedicated adults who take class 4-5 times a week, get rid of that "I started as an adult" posture.
As an example, I was actually quite impressed at how Natalie Portman really managed to "look the part" in her role as a ballerina in Black Swan. Still, she wasn't fooling anyone with training - even with just a simple port de bras (raising of an arm), you could easily tell she wasn't a dancer.
> Natalie Portman...you could easily tell she wasn't a dancer.
Which is interesting, because from what I can tell she studied ballet from a young age, which potentially puts a hole in your theory. Unless you're only taking about professional dancers who started young versus professional dancers who started late, rather than any (i.e. non-professional) dancer.
Natalie Portman "took ballet as a kid", which is probably similar to like 50% of women in the US. From what I found online, it says "she took ballet from age 4 to 12", but there is a collosal difference between someone who engaged in "professional track" training and someone who engaged it as an after-school hobby.
The ballet world even has a name for small neighborhood dance schools, a "Dolly Dinkle" school (it's a little bit of a knock, but not much, as most professional dancers started at one of these places before moving on to professional training).
But for contrast, take a look at the 12 year olds at the Vaganova Ballet Academy. At that point they've only been at the academy 2 or 3 years, and while they have some "child mannerisms" in their dancing, they all hold and carry themselves like professional dancers.
I'm not in the least surprised by that. Bones in children are softer and more malleable, they don't harden up until 16 or so. (That's why young athletes should stick to more reps and lighter weights until 16.)
I've tried emulating those movements, and just look like Bullwinkle.
My partner's also a dance, and this is what's always come across from her, too - that you can tell a dancer from a glance in an instant, even on the street. I have a little bit of an eye for it but only by virtue of being around that environment.
(also: ex-pro ballet to HN? Can't imagine there's much crossover in that Venn!)
> ex-pro ballet to HN? Can't imagine there's much crossover in that Venn!
It's perhaps not super common, but not as rare as you might think. Only a teeny tiny minority of ballet dancers have full careers, meaning they make it to the level of principal (the highest rank in a ballet company) and then retire in their 40s, usually to go on to another career in dance like teaching. Many more are like me, where we trained intensively as children, then made it into a company but saw that there'd be a ceiling on our advancement (meaning we'd only make it to corps de ballet or soloist level based on our ability), so left after a few years to do something else.
Then there are the fascinating outliers like Robert Wallace, who was a dancer with ABT and a principal at Boston Ballet (so the pinnacle of the career), then went to Yale at 32, graduated summa cum laude in economics, and now is CEO of Stanford Management Company where he runs Stanford's $50 billion endowment.
Another incident: I was stepping out of my ride to the airport, and noticed another woman pulling her luggage out of the trunk of a car. I remarked "I bet you're a ballet dancer." She said "nope, I'm an ice dancer!" Funny I could tell just by the way she wrangled the luggage.
Not to counter your point, but you must have never seen moose moving at speed through a forest. They are astonishingly graceful and surprisingly quiet.
My daughter just stopped competitive dancing last year after essentially a lifetime. The impact of all that ballet on her posture is worth it alone. Also she's phenomenal at posing for otherwise unscripted photos; her smile is always perfect.
That reminds me of an interview I heard with comicbook artist Chip Zdarsky. He was talking about how we all love to draw as kids, but eventually around 10 years old or so we start to become aware that what we see in our heads isn't anywhere near what's appearing on the page in our drawings, and that gap acts as a powerful filter discouraging most people from pursuing art any further.
A lot of us don't turn out to be professional musicians, writers or athletes. In between family and work, you start to realize how much these people put in to be at the top of their game. Time and effort you can't really put in if you didn't make the jump and have other life commitments.
I guess that's why a lot of people grow old wondering what life would have been if they would have followed through on whatever talent they appeared to possess in youth.
Stephen King said something similar (but I'm sure I'm misquoting): Every writer begins with one million terrible words inside them. The sooner you get those words out, the sooner you get to the good stuff.
I think another aspect is regarding fundamentals. In order to stay engaged in the early years, you will skip over the minutia. But to achieve the next level, you must go back and drill the fundamentals, unlearning any bad habits in the process. Only then, once you’ve “learned the rules”, can you then surpass/break them.
I get sad whenever I read this quote and know I was one of the people who quit. Not for lack of trying, I had severe mental issues that trained my mind to associate practice with distress. It caused my burnout twice on an optional activity
The struggle is real for all people but in particular I feel robbed of resilience to even do anything. I can't speed up my therapy so the thought of years of practice being lost to time always hits me like a truck
This works for programming as well. I’ve spent countless hours reimplementing things or cloning things just to learn how they work. Sometimes mine is better than the original, sometimes it’s not. But regardless, I learn a lot along the way and occasionally get to teach something as well. It’s a great way to learn new languages, new concepts, new systems.
I always tell people the secret to learning guitar fast is to practice for a minimum of 5 minutes a every day for 20 years. It's simultaneously a gross oversimplification while also literally being the only way to do it.
I just started photography last year and it makes much sense. This and:
- do it with intention, to copy or simulate to learn how to do what you want.
If you just go out and take random pictures you will not learn much. If you go and try to simulate some style, lightning, you learn a lot.
I also think most of my pictures really suck even if i try. But then i look on pictures of someone who has "photographer" in profile with couple thousand subscribers and most of their pictures also suck.
I hope one day to bridge the gap.
Ah yeah I feel this, I've done it as a hobby for a long time. One frustration I would have is how many photos I would take of a framing that I didn't like. I've spent a lot of time getting in my head that unless this is a moving object that focus is gonna be challenge I get ONE picture. Helps me sit with the framing there instead of just clicking away and having to post filter hundreds of photos.
Still have to post filter hundreds of my kids though but it's worth it for some of the shots I get. Too bad they can't sit still.
Taste absolutely can and does evolve the more you play.
It doesn't mean that everyone taste evolves towards one absolute taste, people stay different.
I kinda think it applies to all artistic hobbies. On one hand you learn a practical hands-applying skill, on another hand you learn how to express yourself and/or listen to expression of others in chosen medium. And, well, the more you look at something, the more you see. The more you see, the more you know your own preferences.
What's even more funny, the "detail perception" skill doesn't always sync to your guitar skill. So (for me at least) there are times when I'm thinking I'm the hottest stuff around (because I just mastered something I deemed important), and there are times when I'm down because my detail perception suddenly got better and turns out I would prefer to play with more nuance (but didn't learn how to yet)
I can attest. After 7 years of practising guitar, the gap between my ability and my taste is even greater compared to when I started.
Actually I can say the same thing for programming, I can build most software I would think of building when I started 20 years ago, but there is still a large gap between what I can build but what I discovered later and now would like to be able to build (I'd need to learn lots of maths in addition to other things).
It's been probably 20 years since I played this game. But I still think it's the best Open Source game I've ever played. I had lots of fun, and more than a few late nights, running through some of the campaigns.
I would love to see a Nintendo Switch port of this game, if anyone is interested in making one!
> I would love to see a Nintendo Switch port of this game, if anyone is interested in making one!
I think many would be, but AIUI it's illegal. It would require modifying the source to use Nintendo's SDK which is under NDA. The GPL would require releasing the modified source, which would be prohibited by the NDA. So it's legally impossible without special permission from every single Wesnoth contributor ever.
Unless you mean a homebrew port, in which case it's doable.
> Traditional planners impose rigid boxes and neatly separated days. Gradience Diary rejects that structure entirely.
> Using a soft gradient instead of lines, it allows users to expand or shrink their writing space depending on their schedule. Tasks can flow across days naturally, mirroring how time actually feels—fluid, uneven, and continuous.
That being said, the white text on light gray background feels more like pretentious design than actual useful design.
I was forced to consider the possibility of this being a collection of late entries in an April Fools contest:
A pen that doesn't work properly.
A notepad you have to make yourself.
Grid paper with lines missing.
A device making books hard to read.
A paper stubby holder.
A calendar, but it's difficult to tell the date.
Maybe it is satire. It reads like confected pseudo-intellectual slop. Perhaps it merely demonstrates that the Japanese can have terrible ideas just like the rest of us.
Are there any preconfigured images/installers available for a major Linux distro to turn them a router with safe and sensible defaults?
I know there is OpenWrt, but my experience is that is more geared toward running on embedded wifi hardware than an x86 machine. The x86 install comes with a tiny root partition that's actually pretty difficult to resize, for example, and upgrades are quite brittle compared to standard Linux distros.
And there's also pfSense and OPNsense, but these run on FreeBSD which seems to lag behind Linux for hardware support. There's no support for the Aquantia AQC113 NIC, for example (although it looks like this may finally have been added in the last month or so).
Something like an Ubuntu Appliance [1] would be quite nice.
Modified Ubuntu LTS server image will work, and a minimal Debian kernel will have far less bloat. Note pfSense/FreeBSD is fairly robust, and a mature project.
Keep in mind most network appliances have dedicated hardware hand-off adapters, and so the CPU isn't involved in routing once the connection is setup. It is why people can use a $30 SoC, and still be able to saturate several 10Gb/100Gb ports. =3
Just checked my Amazon history, and in late 2020 I bought two Raspberry Pi 4s with 4GB memory for ¥6,500 JPY (~$62 USD) each. At the time, they were in somewhat short supply and I payed a little over the $55 list price from a reseller on Amazon.
It looks like the current price on Amazon for the Raspberry Pi 4 4GB is ¥18,800 (~$117 at current rates), which is indeed expensive AF. Oddly, the Raspberry Pi 5 4GB is priced about the same, at ¥18,950 (~$119).
Considering inflation and the speed increases over the 4, the Raspberry Pi 5 price doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. But having the price go up well over ¥10,000 definitely takes it out of the realm of impulse buy and more into something I would only buy if I had a specific and urgent need. So I can definitely see this killing off a good chunk of the hobbyist market.
As it stands, my two older Pis are currently sitting unused in a closet, so I would definitely try to use those before buying anything new.
My big regret at the moment is not buying a 4TB M.2 SSD last year when prices were dipping down below ¥30,000. Now they have more than doubled to ¥65,000 or more. I had one in my cart, but decided not to buy it with the rationale that "well I still don't need the space right now, and the price per TB will probably come down even further by the time I do need it". That is, after all, the way that prices on computer component have worked for most of my life.
I bought a pair of 4 TB SSDs for like $300-350/ea two years ago. I don’t remember exactly.
Around Christmas I tried to order one more. They wanted to above MSRP, like $500. Given the price of everything else I decided to just bite the bullet and do it.
After about a month they canceled my order. Whether that’s because they didn’t actually have one and couldn’t get one, or because they just wanted to wait for the prices to go up further I don’t know.
I went looking again two weeks ago. The exact same drive is back in stock. MSRP is now $1000. Amazon has it “on sale” for $900. Other retailers that often have slightly higher prices are asking $1250.
I built a new desktop in 2023 and repurposed my old desktop for my daughter. The old desktop had a couple of smaller SSDs so I swapped them out for a 2TB Samsung SSD. Paid $99 on Amazon.
The exact same SSD is $479 on Amazon today. It's not a fancy super fast NVMe. It's a slow SATA drive. I have no idea why anyone would even consider building a PC with prices this inflated.
> I have no idea why anyone would even consider building a PC with prices this inflated.
I did recently, specifically targeting lower capacities for the components that have been increasing (RAM and storage).
It didn’t seem like prices would be going down for a while and I didn’t have a desktop pc otherwise, so just went for it. We’ll see how it all plays out but I don’t think it was a terrible decision, as long as prices stay high for a couple years it still makes sense to just suffer through the increases
I use Rectangle [1] for window management. I only use three shortcuts: full screen, left half of the screen, and right half of the screen. My editors and Chrome are always running in one of these modes.
But for other apps where interactions tend to be brief like Finder, Messages, Notes, Music, etc - yeah I don't usually expand them to full screen.
Yeah "notorious inconsistency issues in windows corners" almost feels like an oxymoron to me. Perhaps it is notorious among graphic designers, but I'm sure the vast majority of MacOS users will never notice or care.
My colleague update his Mac a while back and I commented on the wild difference in corners between finder and word from across the room. I had to walk round and physically point at them for him to know what I was on about, and then he says "oh yeah, guess they are a bit different"
To my designers eye it was the first thing I saw, to him it was nothing.
I still think it's bad and a sign of a change in apple focus/style, but it's clearly not an issue at all for a lot of people.
Said colleague did get cross when he struggled to resize a window though. Turns out inconsistent corners means inconsistent handles. And that is a real problem.
The more immediate uncomfortable truth for me is that my company is requiring all developers to use LLMs, and laying off developers who won't make the switch. I'm not sure that "LLM-based AI coding agents have no place now, or ever, in generating production code for any software I build professionally" is a decision that most of us will have a choice in.
You're right about that. It's something I should have addressed in the original article, but I don't really have a solution for those who aren't self-employed. Maybe just use up a bunch of tokens on junk tasks while continuing to secretly write the code yourself? It's super wasteful, but do what you have to do to survive until the bubble pops.
A 3dfx Voodoo Banshee was the first graphics card I ever bought. I bought it to play the EverQuest beta, which also would have been around 1999. I remember logging into that game for the first time and it felt like a life-changing experience. And it kind of was.
I remember really liking the 3dfx splash screen[1] for some reason. Maybe because it was the only thing that actually ran smoothly on that card. But still, I was a loyal 3dfx user - probably because of their marketing which someone else mentioned in the comments - and was sad when it went out of business a couple years later.
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