Exactly this. After lots of trial and error I’ve found it easier to build better engines by extracting and abstracting the common elements from my game development process than focusing solely on engine development. Really can’t describe how much my productivity has gone up since I switched my focus by adding constraints to my development process and narrowing my focus to more parochial problems instead of always pondering the general/wider abstractions. It seems that abstractions are the natural consequence of focusing on a narrow and concrete problem, but people instead try to directly jump to the wider abstract space without any bounds or constraints set, and eventually overwhelming themselves.
Lol. Looks more like the first option to me, but I also feel that there is something very very special about these kind of efforts and people who don’t mind spending their time and energy on things like this, precisely because of the fact that the world is filled with the ‘useful-or-not’ types. In fact, I feel we need a lot more of these ‘do-I-find-it-personally-interesting-or-not’ types, so that the rest of us can keep riding the ‘whether-or-not’ bandwagon and when that one off ‘interesting-or-not’ turns out to be useful, in ways we didn’t foresee, we can ask them to join us.
I still don’t understand how this is any different from the notion of problem solving. And I really didn’t understand the human-AI equivalence, is it just the substrate independent nature of turing-completeness? If so, I think we still lack the epistemic toolkit to say anything conclusive about creating an equivalence, or for that matter any form of comparative relationship, especially given that AGI is still not a problem that is well-defined, let alone discussing the solution space. No?
Such an important point that. I would just add that the lack of enthusiasm for paid tools I think is because of the lack of significant developments in the space itself. The fact that we can still use clis and 40 year old tools like Emacs without losing much on the benefits of the modern day tooling system says everything one would need to know. And I don't mean it in a degrading way, but there needs to be a paradigm shift from the HCI side. You can't just throw in a debugger, syntax highlighter, linter, and expect people to pay for it; when I can do all of that and more on Emacs with probably a weekends worth of tinkering.
I feel "Focus" as a function of overwhelming want or overwhelming need is a better proposition than as a function of tips and tricks. I've had times when despite all the raging distractions I've got the work done because I was so invested in it and there have been times when despite being in a perfectly isolated, no distraction environment, I have failed to get the work done because there was no real urgent need for it to be done, intrinsic or otherwise.
I would say work on things based on constraints, that are beyond the artificial boundary of productivity tricks, like an overwhelming desire for action or an imminent deadline from an external enforcing agent; differentiate between want, want-to-want, and have-to-want; and mainly rest well, for energy management is key in working well.
Agree on one level, but on the contrary, if we give the medium its due, it is much more conducive to memorialization than the pre-digitized/non-digitized world. I think this question might help future "anthropologist-like" professionals to go about understanding the developments much better than what we can do today. This is to say that there is significantly better contextual returns when asking this question in a digitised environment than in a non-digitized environment like in-person physical conversations and other similar events.
'Hard vs Easy' is probably one of the worst dichotomies to invoke when you are trying to get people interested in something that you think is hard.
And more importantly, no one ever who does hard stuff thinks to themselves that they are doing hard stuff. Almost every inch of such work is a combination of interest and constraint i.e., you want to do it or you have to do it.
Secondly, you want emotions helping you here. Emotions evade this trap tactfully by being abstract in their appearance. Every person I know who works on hard mathematics is either a romantic who does it because of their love (interest) for mathematics or a foot soldier who does it because they have to. There is no way you can articulate your way into anything if there is no emotional vector involved(negative or positive). Hardness is just a detail that can be abstracted if you are emotionally aligned.
Copy pasting my answer from "Don't offer a free plan":
When it comes to B2C, prescriptions don't apply uniformly, or for that matter scale. Beware.
My only suggestion would be that be honest with the value proposition of your product. Know that your electron-based note-taking tool is not the same as the entire g-suite or ms office.
And finally, remember that no one is more emotionally invested in your product than you are. So let the suggestions trade.
When it comes to B2C, prescriptions don't apply uniformly, or for that matter scale. Beware.
My only suggestion would be that be honest with the value proposition of your product. Know that your electron-based note-taking tool is not the same as the entire g-suite or ms office.
And finally, remember that no one is more emotionally invested in your product than you are. So let the suggestions trade.
Good point, but I think the problem is almost always with the parsing of the advice. Receiver's perception and experience uniquely determines the degree of deviation in the interpretation. For eg. "Write short sentences" can be easily perceived as a dichotomy between fixed length vs variable length sentence, especially if you do not see the two categories, long and short, separately. Adding rhythm is merely a byproduct of noticing the recurring pattern and adjusting one's sentences. This is to say that the argument you make towards "short sentences" can also made towards your argument of writing "easy sentences".
