We need more people in this world willing to do their own thing, even if others might find it intimidating or silly. The important thing is to have fun and learn things. Compiler hacking is just as good as any other hobby, even if it's done in good jest.
Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money for.
Example: Cards Against Humanity started as a bit of a gag game between a small group of friends and eventually became something that has pop culture relevance.
Example: The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade. I like to think that he did this out of spite, and that Christmas letters to his old professor must've been fun.
You can't have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm.
How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal).
Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive".
Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for this). But there aren't leaps and bounds. Critically it keeps pushing things forward, refining and improving.
But then there's those in the long tail. They fail most of the time and are the "least productive". Sometimes never doing anything of note their entire lives. But these are also the people that change the world in much bigger ways. And sometimes those that appeared to do nothing have their value found decades or centuries later.
Not everyone needs to be Newton/Leibniz. Not everyone should be. But that kind of work is critical to advancing our knowledge and wealth as a species. The problem is it is often indistinguishable from wasting time. But I'm willing to bet that the work of Newton alone has created more value to all of human civilization than every failed long tail person has cost us.
In any investment strategy you benefit from having high risk investments. Most lose you money but the ones that win reward you with much more than you lost. I'm not sure why this is so well known in the investment world but controversial in the research/academic/innovation world.
> The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade.
Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?
That still feels a bit off, as you are "having fun" because it ultimately is the road to success.
There is a deeper hurt in the tech world, which is that we have all been conditioned to crave greatness. Every employer tries to sell us on how important what they do is, or how rich everyone will become. We can't even vacation without thinking how much better we will perform once we get back. That struggle with greatness is something every human grapples with, but for workers in tech it is particularly difficult to let it go. The entire industry wants us to hold onto it until we are completely drained.
Anyway the result is sentiments like this, where having fun, exploring and learning can't just exist for the inherent rewards.
Josef Pieper wrote a book called "Leisure: the Basis of Culture"[0] - published in 1948 - in which he discusses the meaning of leisure, which is not what we mean by it today, and criticizes the "bourgeois world of total labor" as a spiritually, intellectually, and culturally destructive force.
Today, we think of "leisure" as merely free time from work or recreation, something largely done to "recharge" so that we can go back to work (in other words: modern "leisure" is for the sake of work). This is not the original meaning. Indeed, etymologically, the word "school" comes from σχολή ("skholē"), which means "leisure", but with the understanding that it involves something like learned discussion or whatever. (Difficult to imagine, given how hostile modern schooling is, resembling more of a factory than a place of learning.) The purpose of work was to enable leisure. We labored in order to have leisure.
What's also interesting is that unlike us, who think of "leisure" in terms of work (that is, we think of it as a negation of work, "not-working"), the Greeks viewed it in exactly the opposite way. The word for "work" is ἀσχολίᾱ ("askholíā"), which is the absence of leisure. The understanding held for most of history and explains why we call the liberal arts liberal: it freed a man to be able to pursue truth effectively, and was contrasted with the servile arts, that is, everything with a practical aim like a trade or a craft.
This difference demonstrates an important shift and betrays the vulgar or nihilistic underbelly of our modern culture. Work is never for its own sake. It is always aimed at something other than itself (praxis and associated poiesis). This distinguishes it from something like theory (theoria) which is concerned with truth for its own sake.
So what do we work for? Work for its own sake is nihilistic, a kind of passing of the metaphysical buck, an activity pursued to avoid facing the question of what we live for. Work pursued merely to pay for sustenance - full stop - is vulgar and lacks meaning. Sustenance is important, but is that all you are, a beast that slurps food from a trough? Even here, only in human beings is food elevated into feast, into meal, a celebration and a social practice that incorporates food; it is not merely nutritive. Are you merely a consumerist who works to buy more crap, foolishly believing that ultimate joy will be found in the pointless chase for them?
Ask yourself: whom or what do you serve? Everyone aims at something. What are the choices of your life aiming at?
I joined a compiler team out of college because it seemed like fun and I'd never worked on compilers before.
I went from C# to embedded engineering and reading clock and wiring diagrams because there was a job that needed doing and I was the one there at the time.
I went from embedded programming to running my own startup based on Javascript and React (technologies I'd never used) because I had an idea I wanted to share with the world.
Just go out and try to do things, you may be surprised with what you are capable of!
Yes, but that often breaks down once you have bills to pay and need steady income. Real life tends to complicate things. The risk-averse path is a valid choice too, and often the only sensible one.
I don't work in programming, but "you can do hard things" applies to my work as well. It drives me nuts when coworkers refer to me as really smart when in fact I'm merely curious. "I have no idea how you did that!" You should ask. That's how I learned it.
In my experience, curiosity and intelligence are very strongly correlated. There is a real gap between people with the curiosity and ability to explore and learn, and people without. This is often handwaved as "motivation" but it's more than just that.
In fact, the gap is so large that it can be really hard for a person on one side of it to understand how people on the other side think.
People who cannot learn hard things don't have time, or they think they don't have time. Actually they try to fake their way through because they believe it is impossible or at least too late to sort things out properly.
The so called geniuses seem to have rather lax lifestyle, like free evenings to really make their homework. When you constantly think you're in hurry you've pretty much lost the game. You're just trying to get by and learn very little.
I'm asking this question purely out of curiosity, and not as a snark, is there any particular reason why you don't capitalise the beginnings of your sentences? It seems strange to go to the effort of capitalising STEM and putting a hyphen in college-level without capitalising the letters. Is it something like the push towards sans-serif fonts because some groups of people find it easier to read?
My dev friends used to do this as a sort of inside joke around the office. If you were cool and hip, you wrote emails like this as a way to sort of thumb your nose at the establishment.
I did it for a while until I was considered a "senior" dev and one of the VP's pulled me aside and said it reflects poorly on me when I'm not using proper grammar. He said as a senior dev in the org, I should hold myself to a higher standard. At which time, I started using proper grammar.
Always puts a smile on my face when I see this is still a thing in certain circles. Nonconformity isn't quite dead - and that's a good thing.
For me it made the text way more difficult to read. Periods and commas can be sometimes difficult to differentiate for people with poor sight or just on small screens, so having a capital letter next to the dot character is a very relevant visual cue to confirm it was indeed a period and not a comma.
Gen Z linguistic phenomenon. It's to signify a more authentic or calmer, more personable style rather than an overly literary one. It's kind of nice actually, like talking to a friend about their thoughts.
i do the same, at first naturally because this is how all the cool kids talked on the places of the internet i frequented when i came of age ca. 2000-2005
now i do it because i am considered a seniorish person, and i need to deal with many coworkers that have gone beyond fear of picking up a phone and are now seemingly afraid to even type messages and i want to show them that it's okay to bring a little bit of yourself to your communication
- X is typing indicators turning on/off/on/off for 5 minutes
- X finally sends an obviously llm inspired 5 paragraph argument that on the face of it looks well structured but has all the mental nutrients of a bag of cheetos
- the message is stuffed with at least six emoji to somehow preemptively control the emotional state of the recipient
all to say "please take a look cuz i think you forgot to add unit tests for y?" and i have neither the stamina to engage with nor the desire to conform to this milquetoast inauthentic fluffy overly uptight way of communicating
I have apparently been in a bubble based on the other commenter saying this was a gen z phenomenon.
Back in the 1337sp43k days in my internet circles, typing in all lowercase other than acronyms was the opposite of TYPING IN ALL CAPS. We used it to infer a whisper type connotation to the text.
function f(n){n.childNodes.forEach(c=>{c.nodeType===3?c.textContent=c.textContent.replace(/(^|[.!?]\s+)([a-z])/g,(m,s,l)=>s+l.toUpperCase()):c.nodeType===1&&f(c)})}f(document.body)
When did this writing with no capitalization start to become a thing? I'm seeing it too often now. It's pretentious crap and quickly leads to me thinking that the writer doesn't want to be taken seriously, so why read it?
I started typing in no caps in most conversation around 2013-2016, when I first started playing League of Legends and using Discord. Other people from this same age bracket as me have similar experiences (if they were "chronically" online) and similar behavior patterns. It's not pretentious imo.
This probably has to do with what kind of Internet milieu you grew up in because to me — grown up on IRC and certain late 90s/early 00s web forums — lowercase everything signals a sort of chill, easygoing humility while properly capsing in a casual setting like chat can feel overbearing, pretentious and self-important.
It probably starts with the habit of writing words without using the Shift key or diacritics. Just to be quick. At least, that’s how I’ve noticed this behavior in myself.
It's like xml vs html, some people really like their markup to have explicit closing/self-closed tags, others don't really care and expect the user-agent (the reader) to parse them correctly. Same with semicolons in Javascript.
Most people usually see common scammers writing emails with no capitalization to scam their victims, especially if it is not their first language.
More importantly, tech literate folks in here are tuned to ignore such writing styles as they can figure out writing styles that are from scammers, LLMs and impersonators from dodgy domains.
So, you’re right to question this and I find this trend immature and I assume anyone using it to be in the realm of satire and of unserious character.
In the 1990s, this was called "whispering" and had pockets in BBS/CompuServe/AOL/usenet discussions. Also why I still think of all caps as shouting and can't be convinced otherwise (looking at Microsoft and a few other companies and their designers that keep going through phases insisting all caps is a useful flavor in UI design and not shouting for attention that they don't need).
i started typing no caps at least a decade ago (and i'm 50). the reason was mostly that when i edited a sentence i had to mess around with caps, plus speed and pinky strain.
learning about Lojban and its punctuation probably also swayed me (it marks the start of the sentences with punctuation, which makes a lot more sense).
I think Sam Altman popularized it with his tweets during the height of OpenAI, GPT popularity ~2023. Or maybe it was already trending by then but at least for me he was the first among prominent people to be doing it.
This all is good advice. Don't be intimidated, try new things, have fun.
On top of that, keep your day job. Or have enough wealth to not need it. Otherwise fun may cease gradually, then abruptly. Keep the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid well-maintained.
I definitely worked with people who were limited by how much they were open to just dive one level deeper. You can wait for someone to explain things to you and tell you what to read, or just... go and do it. There's no speed limit in learning. This is even easier now with AI since you can ask "what's this concept called, what am I missing here, what stuff should I read about it" if you're actually blocked.
This is like “draw the rest of the owl” advice. Most people struggle with the earn enough money to afford house in metro with multiple employers step. And earn enough money per hour to have time for other stuff.
The Practice Guide of Computer is really a gem, and the bottom lines sentences are just golden (now I understand what they meant when people mentioned bottom lines) of part D: Rid yourself of the following reasons of being a practioner of computer.
To add a cliche, according to Mark Twain, "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life". Or may I add, you probably not going to retire anytime soon.
I really resonate with it. When I was a teenager I was a burn out. I went to college and became enamoured with a field of study. Everyone thought I was very smart and people would drop the g word and it made me feel gross. I always just wanted to learn everything I could.
Now I am in a very different area of practice. Partially because I got tired of being good. Making young professionals give talks to factory floors about things they can't relate too, getting hired because it would look good for an acquisition, etc. it's draining and makes it hard for colleagues to realize they are your equal or even more exceptional at many things than yourself.
I actually worked with Jyn, though we don't keep in touch I will say they were great. Made strong contributions, learned new things quickly and was genuinely curious about everything. It's cool to see them on here. Nothing but good wishes for them and I hope they are enjoying whatever they are doing now. Come to think of it, I feel that way about all my former colleagues.
Not addressing the content directly but a note on the formatting:
I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.
My take is that it stems from the way we chat with others online, where we might be freer with our formatting as we type out messages in IRC/Discord/wherever. It's meant to convey "down to earth"-ness or speaking plainly, which I find fitting given the content of the post.
It's a signal they want to put out that they don't respect the rules of grammar.
They'll grow out of it and one-day look back and cringe, as we all tend to do eventually.
It's really hard to read. There's "text-transform: capitalize;" which puts things in Title Case but unfortunately that is also hard to read for body text. ( That Was a Trend Too For a While If You Remember. ).
i think it's either the result of a stream of consciousness into one's phone hastily formatted into a blog post, or something constructed to resemble that. the rushed construction slash abrasive rhetorical tool kinda matches the message it's trying to send, imo. it's often that the amount of time i've spent thinking about something (a lot) is totally disproportionate to the time i spend typing my thoughts up (a little). the graphics feel like someone sending an image in between chat messages
I don't find it any harder or easier. Reading is not difficult and hasn't been since kindergarten for me. If anything, the British bastardizations of the Oxford spelling of words like "capitalization" with a z, because Pocket Fowler's Modern English thought the Americans were too crude and wished to emulate a more continental style, makes reading clumsier.
I hate it when people do this. I refuse to write Bell Hooks or E. E. Cummings without capitals. Even though it's vanishingly unlikely, I hope they both read this from beyond the grave and think about what they've done to reading comprehension.
Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase will only grow worse.
I hate that people comment on this. It's a fascinating linguistic phenomenon that bothers some people but signals to others that it's for them, in a way. Linguistics is a descriptive, not a prescriptive, field. Humans have been speaking and writing in a myriad of ways for thousands of years that do not strictly correspond to the current du jour.
> i really, sincerely, believe that art is one of the most important uses for a computer.
Me too. Sometimes when I tell people I spent the day on the computer, I get responses like "oh that's sad" or "you're going to burn yourself out".
Would they say the same thing if I told them I spent the day painting in my studio? Or playing the guitar? Or writing a piece of music? The computer is my paintbrush.
I've recently read the great moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue", and in it he defines a "practice" as:
> "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the
enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept."
Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it.
MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.
I feel like I can't have fun anymore because the AI can just do the thing instantly and you've got people on this website advocating to let the AI do everything while you merely read the code.
Ignore the AI people. In all probability, you were doing something similar before. The Internet is full of developers. Some may be faster at writing code than you are, or maybe they wrote better code, or perhaps they implemented your ideas before you even thought them up. Yet it sounds like you didn't let that inhibit you before.
I think it’s more complicated that. LLMs have allowed me to do things that I couldn’t do before which definitely made programming and hacking things together more fun, and massively increased what I could do in my limited free time. It also allowed me to manually do the things I enjoy while making the less fun parts go faster. On the other hand I recently tried doing a larger project in codex and it wasn’t fun anymore because codex quickly created a system that was way beyond my understanding, it didn’t work, and I had no idea how to fix it. So I guess it just depends how you use it.
It can't possibly do everything; mind reading interfaces haven't been invented yet. Paul Graham goes on about how writing is thinking. Just the act of writing out instructions can be fun.
AI is the latest line of trends. It will pass like everything else. Unless they are offering to buddy up with you for a project, why care about how other people would do it?
For now, do what interests you in a way that interests you.
The rules to being good at something will never change. I like the (overused) Bruce Lee quote "Once you see the way you see it in all things". I always interpreted that as just looping over: Do something mindfully, reflect on your outcomes, do it again.
Whether its martial arts or writing assembly or vibe coding a mobile app if you approach it like that you are going to succeed.
I have been doing a lot of little projects using AI, and don't get this experience.
I get what this post is talking about. I'm just having fun, that comes in a lot of different flavours. I can try a lot more ideas out, that's fun. I can quickly learn if an idea won't work, sometimes that can be disappointing but at the same time learning why it won't work can be quite fun. When the AI utterly fails to do something it lets me develop an idea in my mind about the strengths and weaknesses of the models. Oftentimes the failures are not just fun but outright hilarious. I enjoy seeing models fail sometimes because they reveal an assumption that I have internallsed to the point of being unaware of it's presence. It reveals to me something about myself when something I didn't feel worth mentioning is actually quite important to communicate. Some of the failures are outright hilarious.
I do find it a bit tiring to use AI for long periods, because lazy thinking produces poor results. You have to maintain a clear idea of what it is you are trying to do. Quite often an idea can seem simple in your head because you have glossed over a number of complicating details. I find it a challenge to keep mind at a level where you are aware of these things before you request an AI to make something intrinsically flawed.
I don't have a problem doing things without AI just for fun either. I make animated images in a tiny stack machine bytecode. I do game jams, and code golfing, like dweets.
I also enjoy playing chess, computers pased my ability to play chess a long way back. I don't mind playing even when I know a computer can do better.
Unless you are the best in the world at a thing, there's always someone who could do it better, every attempt to do the best thing ever in a field will fail. On the other hand you can try and do better that what you yourself have done. Even then that's just the target to reach for. The real goal is to enjoy the reaching. It's the challenge at the limits that is fun, not the success or failure of the end result.
Who cares? Just disable or pay no heed to AI. Did you stop correcting your prose because spellcheck or grammarly could do it for you? Sometimes the human thing to do is to be the opposite of the zeitgeist.
I have fun, but I probably wouldn't if the AI was right all the time. Or if I was helpless when it was wrong. But for now I'm still in the centaur zone.
Mostly FUD from grifters and accelerationists. Coding AI isn't useful for producing things that you couldn't have produced yourself, which means you're still important. Fundamentally it's still "just" an autocomplete, whether it's snippets at your cursor or whole files inside your directory. I actually quite enjoy LLMs as a programmer. Contrast this with compilers, which produce machine code that you couldn't have possibly written yourself.
I've not used AI to write code, but everyone who I've spoken to who has says it actually takes a lot of work. It sounds like you get intern level work out of AI, but without the hope that your investment in time results in skills and personal development for the intern.
All of the fighting with the LLM to refine the results sounds tiresome. No thanks.
If it's fun for you, or it unblocks you, or whatever... Go for it. But it doesn't sound fun for me, so nope. I'll keep banging on rocks to write programs until that's not fun anymore. :p
A famous quote by Winston Churchill’s mother on meeting Gladstone and Disraeli is, “When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.” How people make us feel is so important — not only in Leadership but also in life.
What a wonderful article. My stress has been drowning my joy in something I once found fulfilling. While reading this, I suddenly remembered it. Thank you.
This captures something crucial that gets lost in the "validate your SaaS idea in 48 hours" culture. The best products often emerge from deep exploration of a problem space without immediate commercial pressure. When you're optimizing for fun and learning, you make different architectural choices - you experiment with weird ideas that might unlock novel solutions.
I see this in the analytics space constantly. Everyone rushes to clone Plausible/Fathom with minor tweaks because that's the "validated" approach. But the genuinely interesting problems - like real-time 3D geospatial visualization or AI-driven anomaly detection across behavioral patterns - require months of tinkering with WebGL, spatial databases, and ML pipelines before you know if it's viable.
The counter-argument is that "fun" can turn into perfectionism and never shipping. I think the balance is: have fun building the core innovative piece, but be ruthlessly pragmatic about everything else. For Prysm, I had fun building the real-time Globe visualization with Three.js and Supabase Realtime, but used boring proven tools (Next.js, Stripe, Resend) for auth/payments/email. Ship the fun part, commoditize the rest. That's how you avoid the "two years building in stealth" trap while still doing creative work.
I'd appreciate if you can give the LLM generated comments a rest (your entire profile is like this), given that this site is for humans to interact. Thank you.
I like doing goofy things with code. I wrote an s-expression parser using TeraTerm (BASIC-like language). I came up with this generator only recursive descent thing in python. I never did anything with these except to fiddle around and see what was possible. Goofy stuff in code makes me happy.
I’m sorry for not taking your terminal emulator serious.
Your comment on the red site resonated.
> I have a perpetual chip on my shoulder because I'm also in the camp of doing things primarily motivated by having fun, but people in and out of my life repeatedly not taking it seriously. You can have fun and also consider your work serious (or, have it actually be serious by various metrics).
Refreshing, after narration that usually goes along the lines that if you can’t make transistor from sand grains while also knowing all the http details, databases and of course all JS frameworks you are not “real programmer”.
The world was a much better place when engineering was done by men in dress shirts, who saw technical excellence as their professional obligation, but then returned home to their families and could leave their professional life behind.
People like this make me hate everything to do with software. Software should be an engineering field, which exists to help humans, not as some personal art project for your self expression.
I do not want to interact with these people at all. If you derive your identity from being a programmer you are actually harmful and I hope that I will never have the misfortune of having to work with you.
And yes, if you do not capitalize properly, then I do not see you as fully human. And if you keep swearing you sound like a twelve year old.
> If you derive your identity from being a programmer you are actually harmful
why mandate compartmentalization to this extent? what is so harmful about software as art (or expression, etc.)? if i write a weird personal project, what "misfortune" would i bring to you as a coworker, lol
I like it. I've worked with the occasional programmer artist (at least one has an HN account). Not in the "elegant and austere like a suspension bridge" sense, but in the "what the fuck? no! stop reorienting my brain!" sense. They're rare and precious like a delicate orchid, and annoying as hell like a delicate orchid that gives you a rash.
It’s great advice and exactly how I live my life. Programming was a hobby and then a profession, I still use the phrase ‘working’ but really it’s play with outcomes.
Starting a blog like with "it's not a competition" in a capitalist societity is straight up igmorant. Yes it is not as much competition, if you are already so far ahead of others, that it doesn't matter for YOU, right now.
jyn’s advice here is spot on, however it misses an important point: jyn you are exceptional because you do these things. This is what excellence looks like.
If we are maximising our input I should only read things I wouldn't write.
That's the beauty of communication and the free internet, what a joy to learn about someone elses way of thinking, add a little colour to my world view.
One of the things I miss most about the days of IRC chat networks, the personalities were big, broad and diverse, all mixing together. If someone is a narcissist, so be it, they still have value, knowledge, opinions to share. Online discourse these days can verge on corporate approved, totally empty. Apologies for the tangent.
What does your comment mean? Is there some sort of substance to your statement or are you just being a hateful troll?
Did you even read the post? Are you trying to draw some conclusion from a person’s appearance?
I don’t know Jyn Nelson, but I have seen some of their talks. They seem to be a more than capable developer. Their blog is probably one of the least offensive, most down to earth, get shot done type of developer blog I have seen? So again, what the actual fuck.
(I’m not certain if the ‘seven words you can’t say on television’ are actually banned on HN or just frowned upon, but I think my usage is justified)
Starting a blog like with "it's not a competition" in a capitalist societity is straight up igmorant. Yes it is not as much competition, if you are already so far ahead of others, that it doesn't matter for YOU, right now.
I don't know what I expected from a blog written entirely in lowercase but I'm unsurprised it's something like this.
> if i can't feminize my compiler, what's the point?
I remember when people saying things like this would be considered strange, because it is strange, along with all the other bizarre and often fetishistic references in both the blog body and various screenshots. Same for the bizarre pull request screenshot referring to "the gay people in my phone", which is also devoid of grammar.
It's one thing to act stupidly, it's another thing to act stupidly write a self-important blog about it and how much you enjoy pissing people off (back in the day we called that trolling, believe it or not, and it was largely considered a negative thing). I eagerly await the paradigm shift when people stop condoning and supporting bizarre behaviour like this and I won't need to create proxies and extensions explicitly for filtering this kind of nonsense out.
I find the worst thing about this not the blog post itself, but the fact that the majority people on here see no problem with it and those who agree with me are being flagged to death.
I see these blogs sometimes and they smell like Adderal. Have you considered that the thing you’re endlessly tinkering with may not be the thing actually providing the enjoyment you feel?
It's amazing how such a short comment manages to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of stimulants, tinkering, human nature and, implicitly, neurodivergence.
nanolith|2 months ago
Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money for.
Example: Cards Against Humanity started as a bit of a gag game between a small group of friends and eventually became something that has pop culture relevance.
Example: The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade. I like to think that he did this out of spite, and that Christmas letters to his old professor must've been fun.
godelski|2 months ago
How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal).
Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive".
Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for this). But there aren't leaps and bounds. Critically it keeps pushing things forward, refining and improving.
But then there's those in the long tail. They fail most of the time and are the "least productive". Sometimes never doing anything of note their entire lives. But these are also the people that change the world in much bigger ways. And sometimes those that appeared to do nothing have their value found decades or centuries later.
Not everyone needs to be Newton/Leibniz. Not everyone should be. But that kind of work is critical to advancing our knowledge and wealth as a species. The problem is it is often indistinguishable from wasting time. But I'm willing to bet that the work of Newton alone has created more value to all of human civilization than every failed long tail person has cost us.
In any investment strategy you benefit from having high risk investments. Most lose you money but the ones that win reward you with much more than you lost. I'm not sure why this is so well known in the investment world but controversial in the research/academic/innovation world.
xxr|2 months ago
Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?
johnnyanmac|2 months ago
ericmcer|2 months ago
There is a deeper hurt in the tech world, which is that we have all been conditioned to crave greatness. Every employer tries to sell us on how important what they do is, or how rich everyone will become. We can't even vacation without thinking how much better we will perform once we get back. That struggle with greatness is something every human grapples with, but for workers in tech it is particularly difficult to let it go. The entire industry wants us to hold onto it until we are completely drained.
Anyway the result is sentiments like this, where having fun, exploring and learning can't just exist for the inherent rewards.
ant6n|2 months ago
citbl|2 months ago
lo_zamoyski|2 months ago
Today, we think of "leisure" as merely free time from work or recreation, something largely done to "recharge" so that we can go back to work (in other words: modern "leisure" is for the sake of work). This is not the original meaning. Indeed, etymologically, the word "school" comes from σχολή ("skholē"), which means "leisure", but with the understanding that it involves something like learned discussion or whatever. (Difficult to imagine, given how hostile modern schooling is, resembling more of a factory than a place of learning.) The purpose of work was to enable leisure. We labored in order to have leisure.
What's also interesting is that unlike us, who think of "leisure" in terms of work (that is, we think of it as a negation of work, "not-working"), the Greeks viewed it in exactly the opposite way. The word for "work" is ἀσχολίᾱ ("askholíā"), which is the absence of leisure. The understanding held for most of history and explains why we call the liberal arts liberal: it freed a man to be able to pursue truth effectively, and was contrasted with the servile arts, that is, everything with a practical aim like a trade or a craft.
This difference demonstrates an important shift and betrays the vulgar or nihilistic underbelly of our modern culture. Work is never for its own sake. It is always aimed at something other than itself (praxis and associated poiesis). This distinguishes it from something like theory (theoria) which is concerned with truth for its own sake.
So what do we work for? Work for its own sake is nihilistic, a kind of passing of the metaphysical buck, an activity pursued to avoid facing the question of what we live for. Work pursued merely to pay for sustenance - full stop - is vulgar and lacks meaning. Sustenance is important, but is that all you are, a beast that slurps food from a trough? Even here, only in human beings is food elevated into feast, into meal, a celebration and a social practice that incorporates food; it is not merely nutritive. Are you merely a consumerist who works to buy more crap, foolishly believing that ultimate joy will be found in the pointless chase for them?
Ask yourself: whom or what do you serve? Everyone aims at something. What are the choices of your life aiming at?
[0] https://a.co/d/eCd0cJX
com2kid|2 months ago
I went from C# to embedded engineering and reading clock and wiring diagrams because there was a job that needed doing and I was the one there at the time.
I went from embedded programming to running my own startup based on Javascript and React (technologies I'd never used) because I had an idea I wanted to share with the world.
Just go out and try to do things, you may be surprised with what you are capable of!
jckahn|2 months ago
DoctorOW|2 months ago
Aeolos|2 months ago
In fact, the gap is so large that it can be really hard for a person on one side of it to understand how people on the other side think.
ffuxlpff|2 months ago
The so called geniuses seem to have rather lax lifestyle, like free evenings to really make their homework. When you constantly think you're in hurry you've pretty much lost the game. You're just trying to get by and learn very little.
agumonkey|2 months ago
ccapitalK|2 months ago
burningChrome|2 months ago
I did it for a while until I was considered a "senior" dev and one of the VP's pulled me aside and said it reflects poorly on me when I'm not using proper grammar. He said as a senior dev in the org, I should hold myself to a higher standard. At which time, I started using proper grammar.
Always puts a smile on my face when I see this is still a thing in certain circles. Nonconformity isn't quite dead - and that's a good thing.
tirant|2 months ago
satvikpendem|2 months ago
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...
neutronicus|2 months ago
I guess, these days, also a "not typing this on a phone" Shibboleth.
isoprophlex|2 months ago
now i do it because i am considered a seniorish person, and i need to deal with many coworkers that have gone beyond fear of picking up a phone and are now seemingly afraid to even type messages and i want to show them that it's okay to bring a little bit of yourself to your communication
- X is typing indicators turning on/off/on/off for 5 minutes
- X finally sends an obviously llm inspired 5 paragraph argument that on the face of it looks well structured but has all the mental nutrients of a bag of cheetos
- the message is stuffed with at least six emoji to somehow preemptively control the emotional state of the recipient
all to say "please take a look cuz i think you forgot to add unit tests for y?" and i have neither the stamina to engage with nor the desire to conform to this milquetoast inauthentic fluffy overly uptight way of communicating
lovich|2 months ago
Back in the 1337sp43k days in my internet circles, typing in all lowercase other than acronyms was the opposite of TYPING IN ALL CAPS. We used it to infer a whisper type connotation to the text.
tock|2 months ago
NathanaelRea|2 months ago
BugsJustFindMe|2 months ago
Jean-Papoulos|2 months ago
RagnarD|2 months ago
thornewolf|2 months ago
mnsc|2 months ago
einr|2 months ago
minajevs|2 months ago
https://www.bauhaus-bookshelf.org/bauhaus_writing_in_small_l...
feurio|2 months ago
haddr|2 months ago
bnrdr|2 months ago
hiccuphippo|2 months ago
rvz|2 months ago
More importantly, tech literate folks in here are tuned to ignore such writing styles as they can figure out writing styles that are from scammers, LLMs and impersonators from dodgy domains.
So, you’re right to question this and I find this trend immature and I assume anyone using it to be in the realm of satire and of unserious character.
WorldMaker|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
umanwizard|2 months ago
attila-lendvai|2 months ago
learning about Lojban and its punctuation probably also swayed me (it marks the start of the sentences with punctuation, which makes a lot more sense).
andai|2 months ago
stronglikedan|2 months ago
egypturnash|2 months ago
why do you think it's "pretentious" to be too exhausted to bother hitting the shift key
antoniojtorres|2 months ago
AndyMcConachie|2 months ago
cons0le|2 months ago
who friggen cares? why can the president diddle kids, but a random internet user has to have perfect grammar to be taken seriously?
the poster of this article could probably not care less if you "take them seriously"
i actually interact with ideas, not grammar. Especially in a fun personal blog post like this
SilverSlash|2 months ago
nine_k|2 months ago
On top of that, keep your day job. Or have enough wealth to not need it. Otherwise fun may cease gradually, then abruptly. Keep the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid well-maintained.
viraptor|2 months ago
lotsofpulp|2 months ago
johnnyanmac|2 months ago
I have unfortunately failed at that :(. The fun sure does go away slowly, then all at once
teleforce|2 months ago
To add a cliche, according to Mark Twain, "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life". Or may I add, you probably not going to retire anytime soon.
nicepost|2 months ago
Now I am in a very different area of practice. Partially because I got tired of being good. Making young professionals give talks to factory floors about things they can't relate too, getting hired because it would look good for an acquisition, etc. it's draining and makes it hard for colleagues to realize they are your equal or even more exceptional at many things than yourself.
I actually worked with Jyn, though we don't keep in touch I will say they were great. Made strong contributions, learned new things quickly and was genuinely curious about everything. It's cool to see them on here. Nothing but good wishes for them and I hope they are enjoying whatever they are doing now. Come to think of it, I feel that way about all my former colleagues.
BergAndCo|2 months ago
[deleted]
flumpcakes|2 months ago
I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.
msub2|2 months ago
eterm|2 months ago
They'll grow out of it and one-day look back and cringe, as we all tend to do eventually.
It's really hard to read. There's "text-transform: capitalize;" which puts things in Title Case but unfortunately that is also hard to read for body text. ( That Was a Trend Too For a While If You Remember. ).
tonyedgecombe|2 months ago
I down vote it every time I see it.
performative|2 months ago
viccis|2 months ago
strken|2 months ago
Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase will only grow worse.
satvikpendem|2 months ago
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...
Waterluvian|2 months ago
My understanding is that it’s basically just a newer fad.
maplethorpe|2 months ago
Me too. Sometimes when I tell people I spent the day on the computer, I get responses like "oh that's sad" or "you're going to burn yourself out".
Would they say the same thing if I told them I spent the day painting in my studio? Or playing the guitar? Or writing a piece of music? The computer is my paintbrush.
xgulfie|2 months ago
taylorlapeyre|2 months ago
> "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept."
Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it.
MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.
rtewrtjkewrkj|2 months ago
Insanity|2 months ago
Can AI do it faster? Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is having fun.
The analogy I keep going to in my mind is chess. A computer can play chess on my behalf, or I can play chess myself, but only one is fun.
II2II|2 months ago
left-struck|2 months ago
mecsred|2 months ago
muzani|2 months ago
johnnyanmac|2 months ago
For now, do what interests you in a way that interests you.
ericmcer|2 months ago
Whether its martial arts or writing assembly or vibe coding a mobile app if you approach it like that you are going to succeed.
Lerc|2 months ago
I get what this post is talking about. I'm just having fun, that comes in a lot of different flavours. I can try a lot more ideas out, that's fun. I can quickly learn if an idea won't work, sometimes that can be disappointing but at the same time learning why it won't work can be quite fun. When the AI utterly fails to do something it lets me develop an idea in my mind about the strengths and weaknesses of the models. Oftentimes the failures are not just fun but outright hilarious. I enjoy seeing models fail sometimes because they reveal an assumption that I have internallsed to the point of being unaware of it's presence. It reveals to me something about myself when something I didn't feel worth mentioning is actually quite important to communicate. Some of the failures are outright hilarious.
I do find it a bit tiring to use AI for long periods, because lazy thinking produces poor results. You have to maintain a clear idea of what it is you are trying to do. Quite often an idea can seem simple in your head because you have glossed over a number of complicating details. I find it a challenge to keep mind at a level where you are aware of these things before you request an AI to make something intrinsically flawed.
I don't have a problem doing things without AI just for fun either. I make animated images in a tiny stack machine bytecode. I do game jams, and code golfing, like dweets.
I also enjoy playing chess, computers pased my ability to play chess a long way back. I don't mind playing even when I know a computer can do better.
Unless you are the best in the world at a thing, there's always someone who could do it better, every attempt to do the best thing ever in a field will fail. On the other hand you can try and do better that what you yourself have done. Even then that's just the target to reach for. The real goal is to enjoy the reaching. It's the challenge at the limits that is fun, not the success or failure of the end result.
satvikpendem|2 months ago
gweinberg|2 months ago
roncesvalles|2 months ago
toast0|2 months ago
All of the fighting with the LLM to refine the results sounds tiresome. No thanks.
If it's fun for you, or it unblocks you, or whatever... Go for it. But it doesn't sound fun for me, so nope. I'll keep banging on rocks to write programs until that's not fun anymore. :p
nashashmi|2 months ago
iamflimflam1|2 months ago
trostaft|2 months ago
joshdavham|2 months ago
yoan9224|2 months ago
I see this in the analytics space constantly. Everyone rushes to clone Plausible/Fathom with minor tweaks because that's the "validated" approach. But the genuinely interesting problems - like real-time 3D geospatial visualization or AI-driven anomaly detection across behavioral patterns - require months of tinkering with WebGL, spatial databases, and ML pipelines before you know if it's viable.
The counter-argument is that "fun" can turn into perfectionism and never shipping. I think the balance is: have fun building the core innovative piece, but be ruthlessly pragmatic about everything else. For Prysm, I had fun building the real-time Globe visualization with Three.js and Supabase Realtime, but used boring proven tools (Next.js, Stripe, Resend) for auth/payments/email. Ship the fun part, commoditize the rest. That's how you avoid the "two years building in stealth" trap while still doing creative work.
supriyo-biswas|2 months ago
matt_daemon|2 months ago
all2|2 months ago
begueradj|2 months ago
GaryBluto|2 months ago
nektro|2 months ago
hackboyfly|2 months ago
Damn, that’s powerful.
tolerance|2 months ago
I’m sorry for not taking your terminal emulator serious.
Your comment on the red site resonated.
> I have a perpetual chip on my shoulder because I'm also in the camp of doing things primarily motivated by having fun, but people in and out of my life repeatedly not taking it seriously. You can have fun and also consider your work serious (or, have it actually be serious by various metrics).
https://lobste.rs/s/wilmno/i_m_just_having_fun#c_ziuqlv
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
ozim|2 months ago
constantcrying|2 months ago
People like this make me hate everything to do with software. Software should be an engineering field, which exists to help humans, not as some personal art project for your self expression. I do not want to interact with these people at all. If you derive your identity from being a programmer you are actually harmful and I hope that I will never have the misfortune of having to work with you.
And yes, if you do not capitalize properly, then I do not see you as fully human. And if you keep swearing you sound like a twelve year old.
brazukadev|2 months ago
Well, the people that code for fun (and profit) think you, the men in suits, ruined everything so at least the feeling is reciprocal.
FatherOfCurses|2 months ago
mackeye|2 months ago
why mandate compartmentalization to this extent? what is so harmful about software as art (or expression, etc.)? if i write a weird personal project, what "misfortune" would i bring to you as a coworker, lol
jynelson|2 months ago
it makes me sad that you see these things as somehow in conflict with each other :(
guytv|2 months ago
Instead of obsessing with my rating on I just turned on Zen mode in lichees and hid all the numbers.
The game became fun again — Just "oh that was a cool tactic, let me try this weird opening, what happens if I sacrifice my knight for vibes?"
Turns out the rating was a distraction from the actual game.
Same energy as your point about "fucking around" being the point.
The elo was just making me miserable; removing it made me better anyway.
flir|2 months ago
That magenta PR? Fetch.
NicolasCornwall|2 months ago
Weryj|2 months ago
Hendrikto|2 months ago
WorldPeas|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
redscare67|2 months ago
mackeye|2 months ago
> i mean, in some sense if you work as a professional programmer it is a competition, because the job market sucks right now.
the_af|2 months ago
1. To contribute to the world's spiritual growth"
...damn, there go (out) most computer jobs!
d--b|2 months ago
reval|2 months ago
65|2 months ago
Could you, HackerNews reader, imagine yourself writing something like this? No? It's because you're not a narcissist.
ehnto|2 months ago
That's the beauty of communication and the free internet, what a joy to learn about someone elses way of thinking, add a little colour to my world view.
One of the things I miss most about the days of IRC chat networks, the personalities were big, broad and diverse, all mixing together. If someone is a narcissist, so be it, they still have value, knowledge, opinions to share. Online discourse these days can verge on corporate approved, totally empty. Apologies for the tangent.
johnnyanmac|2 months ago
Maybe in more optimistic times. "Just have fun" is a top luxury nowadays in 2025.
shepherdjerred|2 months ago
It would be narcissism if the author didn't have talent or ability. That doesn't seem to be the case here.
BergAndCo|2 months ago
[deleted]
oldpersonintx2|2 months ago
[deleted]
sapphirebreeze|2 months ago
[deleted]
mghackerlady|2 months ago
[deleted]
mrose11|2 months ago
[deleted]
meindnoch|2 months ago
[deleted]
throwaway17_17|2 months ago
What does your comment mean? Is there some sort of substance to your statement or are you just being a hateful troll?
Did you even read the post? Are you trying to draw some conclusion from a person’s appearance?
I don’t know Jyn Nelson, but I have seen some of their talks. They seem to be a more than capable developer. Their blog is probably one of the least offensive, most down to earth, get shot done type of developer blog I have seen? So again, what the actual fuck.
(I’m not certain if the ‘seven words you can’t say on television’ are actually banned on HN or just frowned upon, but I think my usage is justified)
gynecologist|2 months ago
[deleted]
xnacly|2 months ago
missinglugnut|2 months ago
But uhh, your need to put the author down is revealing.
kristianp|2 months ago
[deleted]
redscare69|2 months ago
GaryBluto|2 months ago
> if i can't feminize my compiler, what's the point?
I remember when people saying things like this would be considered strange, because it is strange, along with all the other bizarre and often fetishistic references in both the blog body and various screenshots. Same for the bizarre pull request screenshot referring to "the gay people in my phone", which is also devoid of grammar.
It's one thing to act stupidly, it's another thing to act stupidly write a self-important blog about it and how much you enjoy pissing people off (back in the day we called that trolling, believe it or not, and it was largely considered a negative thing). I eagerly await the paradigm shift when people stop condoning and supporting bizarre behaviour like this and I won't need to create proxies and extensions explicitly for filtering this kind of nonsense out.
I find the worst thing about this not the blog post itself, but the fact that the majority people on here see no problem with it and those who agree with me are being flagged to death.
ChrisSD|2 months ago
I do not understand the desire for everybody else in the world to act exactly like you. Variety is the spice of life.
seethedeaduu|2 months ago
hyperhello|2 months ago
tikhonj|2 months ago
rtewrtjkewrkj|2 months ago
000ooo000|2 months ago
all2|2 months ago