It's interesting to contrast it with some of the psychological/self-help literature around being your "true self", where the true self is fluid and amorphous and avoids being rigidly defined. Or with Drew Houston's commmencement address [1] - "That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best." Or Steve Jobs [2] - "Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."
Don't ignore your emotions, particularly the niggling feelings that make you do things that seem to have no purpose in your grand plans but nevertheless draw you along. Don't ignore reality either - that'd be putting art galleries online - but oftentimes our subconscious has a better grip on reality than we give it credit for.
I agree, this is a good one. It's a bit rare to get retrospectives like this. Typically they tend to fall into one of three categories: the 'great-man' biography, which are more history lessons than anything else. The very poor and/or very unlucky people, those born into genetic diseases, addicted families, or some bad misfortune. And the middling and very unread section of otherwise perfectly normal people without much to say.
PG here bridges the gap between the 'great-man' and the middling-man. With a fair bit of luck, he manages to become wealthy, but not wanna-be-space-cadet wealthy. It's an under read area and full of very good lessons in that bridge of worlds. I'm not in that bridge, so my take-aways weren't as much. But perhaps with some luck, I'll be able to revisit this in the future for more savoring.
The world is non linear, with discrete inflection points. Some of those points are outside of your control, but some are points where you made an important decision that correctly anticipated a non linear outcome. All positive non linear outcomes take time to compound, however, hence why you can’t connect the positive dots until enough time has passed to look back.
> during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax.
I had a similar realization during grad school about a lot of the popular topics at the time (early 2000s). I even used to call them "the hoaxes of computer science". Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, very different formats of these ideas are what took root: cloud computing and advanced type systems.
> the low end eats the high end: that it's good to be the "entry level" option, even though that will be less prestigious, because if you're not, someone else will be, and will squash you against the ceiling.
I wish every grad student had been forced to memorize this statement. Build something useable, not clever.
Rather than an outright hoax, I like the term "fad". There are fads in technology, some of which are directly inspired by what has become possible and some of which are mutations of of other ideas. Some fads have more worth or more longevity than others -- in the world of clothing, denim jeans are now a foundation on which to build; I might consider object-oriented language features to be similar.
> Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, very different formats of these ideas are what took root: cloud computing and advanced type systems.
The clearest example of this dynamic is probably the "Fifth Generation Computing Systems" initiative, which was described as a "hoax" for a long time but managed to characterize quite closely the way computing would ultimately be done in the 2010s and will probably be done in the 2020s.
Though that particular initiative had some deeply weird focus on using Prolog-derived query languages for everything, which ultimely failed because that whole paradigm lacked compositionality and was not feasibly extensible to concurrent/parallel compute (which was obviously a big focus of FGCS). Functional programming has proven a lot more influential overall.
I don't agree about grid computing. Many scientists got work done with it on aggregations of clusters. LIGO used pyGlobus to transfer large amounts of scientific data.
> the low end eats the high end: that it's good to be the "entry level" option, even though that will be less prestigious, because if you're not, someone else will be, and will squash you against the ceiling.
This happens with jobs too.. especially software jobs. Nobody wants to do software QA, want to know how to get a software engineering job when the market is tight or otherwise inaccessible... software QA.
Without the benefit of hindsight we can't tell which of these building blocks will become the next paradigm. I think your expectation that progress should be a direct line where every step gets you closer is mistaken. It's often guided by a very subjective feeling of interesting-ness which cannot be formalized.
This comment really resonated with me, I found myself in this exact situation at 25, in a "very prestigious and selective place" for AI nonetheless. It took me a couple years to realize the smart people are just playing the game, the unsuspecting losers are "playing it straight" and getting endlessly frustrated. I found my balance by, frankly, taking advantage of a system that is FUBAR. Incidentally, I also took some art classes and because they were not for credit, I just flowed and drew ( https://lingxiaolingdotus.firebaseapp.com/art ). Tbh I felt more alive placing some hasty marks on paper than I ever did doing "research" in a lab.
"I'm only up to age 25 and already there are such conspicuous patterns. Here I was, yet again about to attend some august institution in the hopes of learning about some prestigious subject, and yet again about to be disappointed. The students and faculty in the painting department at the Accademia were the nicest people you could imagine, but they had long since arrived at an arrangement whereby the students wouldn't require the faculty to teach anything, and in return the faculty wouldn't require the students to learn anything."
I fear I'm one of these unsuspecting losers...except I guess that comment makes me suspecting.
IDK, I don't want to play the game but it only gets worse in the corporate world. I wish there was a good solution, where someone could play it straight and get rewarded justly.
>It took me a couple years to realize the smart people are just playing the game, the unsuspecting losers are "playing it straight" and getting endlessly frustrated.
As someone who came out of the same "prestigious and selective place as you", this take hits hard. I will say, part of what you learn doing research is if you even enjoy doing research.
The hardest part is realizing there's an opportunity cost to every decision you make, and it can be anything from another fubar direction or something more meaningful. I've come to think that attempting to find deep meaning in work is a gamble that some get lucky in.
Whether or not it's meaningful, solve some problems and enjoy it. Joy is not the same as meaning and it's less of a gamble to land on it
> "How should I choose what to do? Well, how had I chosen what to work on in the past? I wrote an essay for myself to answer that question, and I was surprised how long and messy the answer turned out to be. If this surprised me, who'd lived it, then I thought perhaps it would be interesting to other people, and encouraging to those with similarly messy lives. So I wrote a more detailed version for others to read, and this is the last sentence of it."
I loved the ending. The essay was primarily for him. It seems that some of the best writing, similarly to the best products, is when you yourself are the recipient.
> One of the most conspicuous patterns I've noticed in my life is how well it's worked, for me at least, to work on things that weren't prestigious.
You might be able to reinterpret this through the lens of the old saying about how, during a gold rush, the people who "made shovels" made most of the money while a few miners got all the press.
We don't usually hear about the folks making provisions or shovels. If you dig into Seattle history, you may learn about how early Seattle was financed in part by providing raw materials after San Francisco's fires (apparently parts of downtown Seattle are fill dirt used as ballast for empty lumber barges traveling back from SF), but things got really interesting after the Seattle Fire. The reconstruction was financed in part from being a jumping off point for the Yukon Goldrush. Most colorfully, by a particularly successful Madame (as in brothel). If you're not a local, you'd never hear and probably never care about such things.
The supply of people who want to go on an adventure is far more reliable than the supply of profitable outcomes for those adventures. Most salesmanship is already about selling a story, not a product, and there are few stories sexier than an adventure you haven't taken yet.
The checks clear whether the customer is batshit insane or on to something great (in which case, you played a small part in that and might benefit from having done so).
I’ve enjoyed many of pg’s essays, but this is my favourite of all time.
I often feel burned out and uninspired these days, even after past successes. It’s wonderful to take a look back at a time when overly ambitious ideas would be naively pursued, unrelated hobbies would prove fruitful in unexpected ways, and to remember that inspiration can be found again many times through the course of life.
> Working on Bel was hard but satisfying. I worked on it so intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there.
I'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for pg. It seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years, and the end result was something which appeared on the front page of Hacker News for one day and then disappeared. I haven't seen it mentioned in any community which are actively working on programming language design (e.g. Rust, Zig, TypeScript). Maybe he's happy with the result regardless of how useful people have found it, but surely it must be somewhat disappointing to see it go unnoticed by?
So a weird thing is happening today. When I was a kid, like Paul, I had to beg my parents to get me a computer ie. spend money on it. Once I got it, I couldn't stop using it and hacking and figuring things out.
Kids these days... :) have everything, I made sure my kids have all good equipment, they have good instruction but they are kind of not interested it all.
If they do something, this is more to please me, as they are good kids, but they would spend all day playing Roblox and watching Youtube.
Not sure if you have some insights that can help me be better parent and support them better.
I think it's important that PG published this essay this week.
And that he included projects that were wildly successful (YC) as well as projects that didn't get the traction he wanted (Bel). To me it shows two things: 1) that some of the most successful people make miscalculations about what the world needs. 2) that a few of them, like PG, are courageous enough to admit that.
Personally, reading PG's essays and then going through YC years later changed the course of my life. That is, the essays are one way to change the world for the better, and they are one he's very good at. I'm glad he's writing them again.
For any one new to tech or startups, they will introduce you to new ways of thinking, and save you from a lot of mistakes.
It’s nice to see even pg goes through phases of “I have no idea what to do next.”
By the way, bel is underrated, and I say that not as a pg fan. The ideas in it are novel, because of its simplicity. The scheduler in particular is elegant.
I suppose I should have taken some notes on what surprised me the most. But, basically, the idea of using a stack as the source of truth for all computation was both ... strange, and obvious afterwards.
The main annoyance is that I can’t flippin’ find a working version of it anywhere. I’ve asked him on Twitter to no avail. The code clearly works; it’s correct in every detail, as far as I’ve found. I implemented most of it, but there was a distinct feeling of “there must be a version he never put out.”
But of course, that’s how you’d feel if you’d been yelled at every time you release things, so I understand why he might not want to show something that isn’t perfect.
This is a very good essay. It feels that pg is more reflective now than he was a few years ago. In particular, he is calling attention to how the dice fell; how things worked out well.
I'd be interested, as a purely personal matter, in seeing a painting show of pg's work. I came to painting long after I came to programming.
I'm almost 40. This statement:
> If you can choose what to work on, and you choose a project that's not the best one (or at least a good one) for you, then it's getting in the way of another project that is. And at 50 there was some opportunity cost to screwing around.
is a true one, and, frankly, has been more and more impressed on me for the last five years or so.
For me the theme of this narrative is that PG always relentlessly pursued what he wanted: AI, art school, Florence, Lisp, etc. He would often find out after pursuing those things that he didn't really want them, but that was helpful feedback. I'm usually stuck wanting things but not pursuing them so I don't know if I would really want them. It seems better to take initiative and go for it.
I had to reread this like 3 times. "per month", "per month"! PG, pay me $100K and I will install some secret video game room somewhere on Yahoo's campus for you to hang out a little longer.
“It wasn't happening in a class, like it was supposed to, but that was ok”
Summary of the college experience even today. You have to go outside the classroom to learn and do the most interesting things. But because those interesting things happen in proximity to a university campus, college is still pretty valuable.
Also relevant: “In other words, like many a grad student, I was working energetically on multiple projects that were not my thesis”
Reading about PG doing things that don't scale (building storefronts for customers), I am reminded of how Commodore became a dominant player in the early computer industry. When they first made the 6502 processor, Chuck Peddle would tour the country and sit down with customers and design devices for them. Super high-touch manual work that made no economic sense. But in the end resulted in the 6502 becoming the basis for so many early microcomputers, including the Apple II.
I'm sure there are many similar stories that illustrate the wisdom of this, otherwise counterintuitive, approach.
Yes. He is a gifted writer, very succinct. Funny that his writing pursuits all seem to be incidental, like the Lisp books (per his own account), and the essays, which certainly played a part in his success.
> My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep.
My thought is a bit of an asides from the main essay content but this applies to real people as well as story characters, just because someone has feelings strongly doesn't mean anything other than that. A few of my strongest feelings about various things are rather mundane and at worst destructive. Doesn't make them deeper than a puddle.
Strength of a thing is a bad proxy for depth, complexity or interest.
> Well, how had I chosen what to work on in the past? I wrote an essay for myself to answer that question, and I was surprised how long and messy the answer turned out to be.
As someone that is largely in the same situation, also actively looking for what's next after years and years of programming and dabbling in various arts, this actually seems like a great exercise. I write every morning when I wake up, have piles of journals I've written, but haven't explicitly sat down to write that journal entry. Thanks for the prompt!
To me his story of going into painting in his twenties, while having never been interested in visual arts before, spending on and off time on it for years and eventually abandoning it in his forties sounds like a story of internal vs external motivation. He WANTED to like painting, because "he could create something eternal", "he wouldn't have a boss", he made himself interested in it, but in the the end his natural proclivity for conceptual/abstract (and not visual) thinking won over and computers and writing completely dominated his creative efforts. They must have been just intrinsically rewarding for him, as opposed to being "good on paper" like painting was.
How does PG recall so much about college. I was a computer science major as well. I made good grades. I went to university similar to PGs.
I’m younger than PG and it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve forgotten that I even took a particular class, let alone recall the professor and certainly don’t recall the small details described by PG.
Just curious if I’m the only person who can’t recall as vividly courses as PG can.
Go have a beer with a college roommate. I bet the memories will come flooding back.
I have a terrible time recalling stuff like this. But then I meet up with an old friend and I start remembering a huge amount of stuff I hadn't thought about in a decade.
I graduated undergrad 25 years ago. I can't randomly recall tons, but there is some random stuff I do remember -- like getting an F on my first test in Numerical Analysis, but then ending with the highest score in the class for the quarter (yes, a lot of people failed every test).
But I still have my old course catalog and flipping through that, a lot of memories jump to mind in classes I totally forgot I had. So I think with some prompts you can probably remember a lot more than you think.
Many of my courses are deeply etched in my memories. Static Fields followed by Dynamic Fields in the EE department. A survey course covering Lisp, Snobol, and Prolog. A C99 class covering engineering traffic flow. My first Fortran course where I figured out how to get the compiler to spit assembly language. A course in General Semantics which vastly influenced my thinking. Linear Algebra course, which was the only college math course that I aced.
The beginning circuits course learning about Kirchhoff's law. A control system theory class. And working with my eventual advisor who was studying control feed back systems that caused the Bonneville Power Administration network to oscillate in frequency.
And there was a lot of non-class stuff that you seem to get just hanging around, like the Marshall McLuhan medium talk, Larry Atkins who wrote the champion chess program that ran on the CDC 6600 (No, he would insist, it is not Artificial Intelligence--just good engineering). Reading Dijkstra's paper "GOTO considered harmful" which was absolutely true in spades for Fortran II. Keypunching jobs for running in the batch processing mode of the CDC 6600. And seriously fun co-op jobs.
PG remembers because he actively tried to remember it to write an essay. If you sat down and tried to write down your college memories, I'm sure you'll remember many things. Your memories are on the hard disk, you just have to bring it to RAM.
Try thinking about data structures, programming language, AI, OS, networking, etc classes you took. You must remember something about the lectures. If not, certainly the projects that you worked on.
It depends on how fondly you look back at that time and if you have academic inclinations/had strong academic inclinations before you went to college (especially if your family has them).
Plus I'd imagine it depends a lot on the intensity of the college studies. I'd imagine folks going to MIT would remember more stuff than people at a random community college.
Besides what the other folks are saying regarding jogging your memory.
I only recall things that I think about a lot, which tend to be when I learned lessons and it had an effect on my life's direction. That and anything I found really interesting I still remember. For reference, I'm 42, so it's been 2 decades.
[+] [-] nostrademons|5 years ago|reply
It's interesting to contrast it with some of the psychological/self-help literature around being your "true self", where the true self is fluid and amorphous and avoids being rigidly defined. Or with Drew Houston's commmencement address [1] - "That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best." Or Steve Jobs [2] - "Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."
Don't ignore your emotions, particularly the niggling feelings that make you do things that seem to have no purpose in your grand plans but nevertheless draw you along. Don't ignore reality either - that'd be putting art galleries online - but oftentimes our subconscious has a better grip on reality than we give it credit for.
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2013/drew-houstons-commencement-address
[2] https://singjupost.com/full-transcript-steve-jobs-stay-hungr...
[+] [-] xapata|5 years ago|reply
Equally plausible is that we only write quotations from the people whose dots serendipitously connected.
[+] [-] Balgair|5 years ago|reply
PG here bridges the gap between the 'great-man' and the middling-man. With a fair bit of luck, he manages to become wealthy, but not wanna-be-space-cadet wealthy. It's an under read area and full of very good lessons in that bridge of worlds. I'm not in that bridge, so my take-aways weren't as much. But perhaps with some luck, I'll be able to revisit this in the future for more savoring.
[+] [-] breck|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canadianfella|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chrisaycock|5 years ago|reply
I had a similar realization during grad school about a lot of the popular topics at the time (early 2000s). I even used to call them "the hoaxes of computer science". Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, very different formats of these ideas are what took root: cloud computing and advanced type systems.
> the low end eats the high end: that it's good to be the "entry level" option, even though that will be less prestigious, because if you're not, someone else will be, and will squash you against the ceiling.
I wish every grad student had been forced to memorize this statement. Build something useable, not clever.
[+] [-] dsr_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|5 years ago|reply
The clearest example of this dynamic is probably the "Fifth Generation Computing Systems" initiative, which was described as a "hoax" for a long time but managed to characterize quite closely the way computing would ultimately be done in the 2010s and will probably be done in the 2020s.
Though that particular initiative had some deeply weird focus on using Prolog-derived query languages for everything, which ultimely failed because that whole paradigm lacked compositionality and was not feasibly extensible to concurrent/parallel compute (which was obviously a big focus of FGCS). Functional programming has proven a lot more influential overall.
[+] [-] dekhn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjg007|5 years ago|reply
This happens with jobs too.. especially software jobs. Nobody wants to do software QA, want to know how to get a software engineering job when the market is tight or otherwise inaccessible... software QA.
[+] [-] visarga|5 years ago|reply
Without the benefit of hindsight we can't tell which of these building blocks will become the next paradigm. I think your expectation that progress should be a direct line where every step gets you closer is mistaken. It's often guided by a very subjective feeling of interesting-ness which cannot be formalized.
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
But then the choice becomes "build something usable, or only work for someone who hired a 'grant writer' that is making 125-250% of your salary"
[+] [-] sdevonoes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xiaolingxiao|5 years ago|reply
"I'm only up to age 25 and already there are such conspicuous patterns. Here I was, yet again about to attend some august institution in the hopes of learning about some prestigious subject, and yet again about to be disappointed. The students and faculty in the painting department at the Accademia were the nicest people you could imagine, but they had long since arrived at an arrangement whereby the students wouldn't require the faculty to teach anything, and in return the faculty wouldn't require the students to learn anything."
[+] [-] totemandtoken|5 years ago|reply
IDK, I don't want to play the game but it only gets worse in the corporate world. I wish there was a good solution, where someone could play it straight and get rewarded justly.
Your art work is beautiful by the way.
[+] [-] sbierwagen|5 years ago|reply
This essay gets linked to a lot on here, but you might be interested in Rao's "Sociopaths/clueless/losers" taxonomy: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
[+] [-] goodmattg|5 years ago|reply
You play to win the game.
Love the artwork!
[+] [-] mkoubaa|5 years ago|reply
Whether or not it's meaningful, solve some problems and enjoy it. Joy is not the same as meaning and it's less of a gamble to land on it
[+] [-] samstave|5 years ago|reply
Would love to see some landscapes, along the lines of japanese / chinese landscapes - as that the feeling I get from your style.
More insects though. :)
[+] [-] fttx_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] probe|5 years ago|reply
I loved the ending. The essay was primarily for him. It seems that some of the best writing, similarly to the best products, is when you yourself are the recipient.
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
You might be able to reinterpret this through the lens of the old saying about how, during a gold rush, the people who "made shovels" made most of the money while a few miners got all the press.
We don't usually hear about the folks making provisions or shovels. If you dig into Seattle history, you may learn about how early Seattle was financed in part by providing raw materials after San Francisco's fires (apparently parts of downtown Seattle are fill dirt used as ballast for empty lumber barges traveling back from SF), but things got really interesting after the Seattle Fire. The reconstruction was financed in part from being a jumping off point for the Yukon Goldrush. Most colorfully, by a particularly successful Madame (as in brothel). If you're not a local, you'd never hear and probably never care about such things.
The supply of people who want to go on an adventure is far more reliable than the supply of profitable outcomes for those adventures. Most salesmanship is already about selling a story, not a product, and there are few stories sexier than an adventure you haven't taken yet.
The checks clear whether the customer is batshit insane or on to something great (in which case, you played a small part in that and might benefit from having done so).
[+] [-] akamaka|5 years ago|reply
I often feel burned out and uninspired these days, even after past successes. It’s wonderful to take a look back at a time when overly ambitious ideas would be naively pursued, unrelated hobbies would prove fruitful in unexpected ways, and to remember that inspiration can be found again many times through the course of life.
Thank you pg.
[+] [-] judofyr|5 years ago|reply
I'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for pg. It seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years, and the end result was something which appeared on the front page of Hacker News for one day and then disappeared. I haven't seen it mentioned in any community which are actively working on programming language design (e.g. Rust, Zig, TypeScript). Maybe he's happy with the result regardless of how useful people have found it, but surely it must be somewhat disappointing to see it go unnoticed by?
[+] [-] desireco42|5 years ago|reply
Kids these days... :) have everything, I made sure my kids have all good equipment, they have good instruction but they are kind of not interested it all.
If they do something, this is more to please me, as they are good kids, but they would spend all day playing Roblox and watching Youtube.
Not sure if you have some insights that can help me be better parent and support them better.
[+] [-] vonnik|5 years ago|reply
And that he included projects that were wildly successful (YC) as well as projects that didn't get the traction he wanted (Bel). To me it shows two things: 1) that some of the most successful people make miscalculations about what the world needs. 2) that a few of them, like PG, are courageous enough to admit that.
Personally, reading PG's essays and then going through YC years later changed the course of my life. That is, the essays are one way to change the world for the better, and they are one he's very good at. I'm glad he's writing them again.
For any one new to tech or startups, they will introduce you to new ways of thinking, and save you from a lot of mistakes.
[+] [-] sillysaurusx|5 years ago|reply
By the way, bel is underrated, and I say that not as a pg fan. The ideas in it are novel, because of its simplicity. The scheduler in particular is elegant.
I suppose I should have taken some notes on what surprised me the most. But, basically, the idea of using a stack as the source of truth for all computation was both ... strange, and obvious afterwards.
The main annoyance is that I can’t flippin’ find a working version of it anywhere. I’ve asked him on Twitter to no avail. The code clearly works; it’s correct in every detail, as far as I’ve found. I implemented most of it, but there was a distinct feeling of “there must be a version he never put out.”
But of course, that’s how you’d feel if you’d been yelled at every time you release things, so I understand why he might not want to show something that isn’t perfect.
[+] [-] pnathan|5 years ago|reply
I'd be interested, as a purely personal matter, in seeing a painting show of pg's work. I came to painting long after I came to programming.
I'm almost 40. This statement:
> If you can choose what to work on, and you choose a project that's not the best one (or at least a good one) for you, then it's getting in the way of another project that is. And at 50 there was some opportunity cost to screwing around.
is a true one, and, frankly, has been more and more impressed on me for the last five years or so.
[+] [-] increscent|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theunixbeard|5 years ago|reply
pg is such an inspiring person. Walking away from $2M per month at Yahoo. To now most likely being a billionaire from personally funding the YC LLC.
And then spending 6 years just painting, coding, writing and raising a family. Living the dream.
Sure Elon Musk is a “cool billionaire”, but in my book pg is even cooler.
[+] [-] breck|5 years ago|reply
I had to reread this like 3 times. "per month", "per month"! PG, pay me $100K and I will install some secret video game room somewhere on Yahoo's campus for you to hang out a little longer.
[+] [-] iainctduncan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zuhayeer|5 years ago|reply
Summary of the college experience even today. You have to go outside the classroom to learn and do the most interesting things. But because those interesting things happen in proximity to a university campus, college is still pretty valuable.
Also relevant: “In other words, like many a grad student, I was working energetically on multiple projects that were not my thesis”
[+] [-] johnyzee|5 years ago|reply
Reading about PG doing things that don't scale (building storefronts for customers), I am reminded of how Commodore became a dominant player in the early computer industry. When they first made the 6502 processor, Chuck Peddle would tour the country and sit down with customers and design devices for them. Super high-touch manual work that made no economic sense. But in the end resulted in the 6502 becoming the basis for so many early microcomputers, including the Apple II.
I'm sure there are many similar stories that illustrate the wisdom of this, otherwise counterintuitive, approach.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|5 years ago|reply
Don't take this as any fanboy stuff, but pg is still good at putting big thoughts in small sentences. Its a sort of mental zip function.
Also this is why I still type into google things like 'rubik solve how-to' instead of my daughter doing "show me how to solve a rubiks cube"
[+] [-] johnyzee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grimm1|5 years ago|reply
My thought is a bit of an asides from the main essay content but this applies to real people as well as story characters, just because someone has feelings strongly doesn't mean anything other than that. A few of my strongest feelings about various things are rather mundane and at worst destructive. Doesn't make them deeper than a puddle.
Strength of a thing is a bad proxy for depth, complexity or interest.
[+] [-] mtalantikite|5 years ago|reply
As someone that is largely in the same situation, also actively looking for what's next after years and years of programming and dabbling in various arts, this actually seems like a great exercise. I write every morning when I wake up, have piles of journals I've written, but haven't explicitly sat down to write that journal entry. Thanks for the prompt!
[+] [-] burntoutfire|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alberth|5 years ago|reply
I’m younger than PG and it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve forgotten that I even took a particular class, let alone recall the professor and certainly don’t recall the small details described by PG.
Just curious if I’m the only person who can’t recall as vividly courses as PG can.
[+] [-] Spinnaker_|5 years ago|reply
I have a terrible time recalling stuff like this. But then I meet up with an old friend and I start remembering a huge amount of stuff I hadn't thought about in a decade.
[+] [-] kenjackson|5 years ago|reply
But I still have my old course catalog and flipping through that, a lot of memories jump to mind in classes I totally forgot I had. So I think with some prompts you can probably remember a lot more than you think.
[+] [-] wglb|5 years ago|reply
And there was a lot of non-class stuff that you seem to get just hanging around, like the Marshall McLuhan medium talk, Larry Atkins who wrote the champion chess program that ran on the CDC 6600 (No, he would insist, it is not Artificial Intelligence--just good engineering). Reading Dijkstra's paper "GOTO considered harmful" which was absolutely true in spades for Fortran II. Keypunching jobs for running in the batch processing mode of the CDC 6600. And seriously fun co-op jobs.
[+] [-] twiceinawhile|5 years ago|reply
Try thinking about data structures, programming language, AI, OS, networking, etc classes you took. You must remember something about the lectures. If not, certainly the projects that you worked on.
[+] [-] munificent|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oblio|5 years ago|reply
Plus I'd imagine it depends a lot on the intensity of the college studies. I'd imagine folks going to MIT would remember more stuff than people at a random community college.
Besides what the other folks are saying regarding jogging your memory.
[+] [-] endergen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earthscienceman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PhillyG|5 years ago|reply