Comment by linspace
3 years ago
As you age it permeates every interest you had, because you already have taken the low hanging fruits. Not only computers, also books, movies, food and I bet even sex. Everything reminds you of something you have already lived. Every novelty is harder to find, and of course there are novelties, but they require an ever increasing amount of effort and time to find, and you have less and less time free. When you are a kid you are in a constant state of awe.
Computers... I don't care about a lot of the things I cared about. I cannot extract pleasure any longer for studying yet another random language. Now, if I want to truly get impressed learning Kotlin (to say something, fine language) doesn't cut it, I need quantum computing or dependent types or whatever. But it's much harder.
It would perhaps be wise to try to practice deriving happiness from something other than the seeking out of novelty.
Like picking up an instrument and start practicing more advanced music than the pop song of the day. That's really a long-term game.
Programming can be another such activity. I mostly stopped reading programming books some years ago, but I find that deliberating over the meta-game of programming, i.e. not how do I specifically solve this problem, but more how do I structure my solution, how do I simplify it, how do I reduce the problem itself to its core, how do I write the actual text, variable names etc., in such a manner that it is self-evident what is happening. That is truly a long game too. There's even a skill to the deliberation itself - too much deliberation is counterproductive.
I read somewhere that the philosophy in the antiquity defined being good not as based on absolute moral values of say unselfishness, like giving food to starving children, but on simply being really good at what you do. Perhaps that's from a realization of what actually makes people happy? Like the old carpenter expertly fixing a troublesome door while softly whistling to himself, a human being in inner peace.
This is a good point, and, interestingly, I think the author of the original post would agree. He clearly (in 2016) still enjoys his work, and seeks to be excellent at it. He's just come to the conclusion that he can both do that, and not have computers and operating systems and programming be the sole focus of his life.
> Perhaps that's from a realization of what actually makes people happy?
I just want to comment on the irony of praising a philosophy that focuses more on abstract virtue rather than an absolute metric of goodness, by noting that this increases happiness.
Do you have more on this philosophy of being good? I’m interested
I think that's a reference to the Greek notion of Arete.
To be a good person didn't mean moral good, or excellence in one area like art - it meant being a great as an "all round person who lived their life to the full and exercised all human powers". The art of being a great _person_. You didn't have to be amazing at any one thing but, for a Greek citizen one should able to:
Farm, hunt and cook a good meal
Master a sword or bow
Sail a boat and run a race
Tell a good story, write a poem
Make love well
Climb a mountain
Do math or argue philosophy
Care for the old and young
Tell a convincing lie
You get the idea. Today we are highly specialised creatures, pallid by comparison. We get others (services) to do most of our real living for us, so we can concentrate on specialised wage slavery and use the money to buy back vicarious living under the heading of "leisure".
Notice my last example - which illustrates the this excellence is separate from any moral conceit of the "good person".
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Unfortunately I don't have a direct reference for you, but I'm pretty sure Aristotle talks a bit about this sort of idea in The Nichomachean Ethics. Something like "be a good human in the sense that a tree or a machine is good". To him, contributing to ones community and participating in (Athenian) politics is the highest good for the learned person.
It has been rather long time since I studied philosophy but I remember somehow fuzzily that stoicism is what You are looking for. It has some good ideas about being good (or rather better because they did not believed in absolutes).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdzeSTCCdJo
Welcome to the start of your mid-life crisis. :-)
The other way to spin this is, maybe you've entered a phase in your professional career or technical interest phase where novelty and maybe "climbing the ladder" are potentially less of a motivator for you.
Now you can focus on more important metrics like: shipping products in the best designed way, putting technology stack choice aside for the sake of what works and what is maintainable. Or having a happy team that works together well.
The industry needs more of us measured, calm, and dispassionate middle-aged folks, not less.
I find it to be almost the opposite for movies. Yes, it's rare to find something unique, but after starting watching at least a movie per week, I'm now getting references I would never have gotten otherwise and put the movies in a completely different light.
For example, you're not gonna fully appreciate the latest spider-man movie unless you already watched the whole 3 series.
Or the other day, I was watching Ted (the teddy bear movie) and they recreated the dancing scene from Airplane. If I had never seen Airplane, I would probably still have laughed, but I wouldn't truly have gotten the joke.
Or in the Doctor Sleep movie, there's a story being told, but the Director also tried to reconcile The Shining movie, The Shining novel with the Doctor Sleep novel. You don't truly experience the movie fully unless you've experienced all of them.
I don't know for other media, but I find movie makers tend to be very meta and you gain as much by having seen all the low fruits as you lose by doing so.
I recently watched the whole Marvel Comics Universe series in chronological order. I'd seen a lot of them, but not all, and everything made so much sense when seeing it this way. WandaVision, of course, makes no sense at all without having seen most, if not all, of the movies.
WandaVision goes much farther than referencing MCU movies too. Each episode is a reference to a different decade of family sitcoms starting from the 50's.
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somehow we only experience the superstitious dream of new
learning programming felt exciting but the more I know the more I realize the underlying principles were older than computers (ordering, algebra, physics)
there was nothing really new in learning java, haskell predated it yet I only got to know about it in 2004, people in the 50s did monoidal modeling of computing
"Nothing really new" - or in other deliberately twisted around but I think still valid as a point words "it's always the same atoms only in a different configuration. This universe is so boring".
Your perception of "new" depends on your accuracy of perception. With a very low-res eye a lot of things look the same and boring that a higher resolution perception sees as very different and interesting.
What's true for eyes and visual perception also is true for brains: If differences in reality always map to the same neurological pathways and create the same wave patterns in the brain it does not mean it actually is the same. More likely is the viewer either lacks the detailed perception and/or the detailed pathways for processing and reacting to it.
Too much abstraction can make things look boring and create a wrong impression of sameness. "History always repeats itself" - only that it never does, unless you filter out everything until what is left matches what your assumptions. Which actually also is what the brain does, once you see a certain pattern the brain steers you towards seeing it. For example, there are pictures where you can see one of two different things, and once you see one pattern you have to make a conscious effort to unsee it and see the other one.
So, a large part of it is that you see what yo expect to see. If you already determined things are the same you will subconsciously filter out that which does not fit your assumption.
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In any case, I always suggest to programmers interested in something truly new to go into biology and bio-chemistry. All programming we do ends up on similar von Neumann architecture hardware, so it's not wrong that there is not that much difference between programming languages, compared to quantum computing or "biological computing".
Trying to understand - never mind create your own - biological systems is truly something entirely different and should satisfy the bored aging CS and programmer person. Just to clarify: I'm not talking about brains (although that would apply too), but the much more low level biology.
I suggest edx.org for a starting point. Some very good hig-level but introductory and free classes on biochemistry, biology, genetics, statistics (for life sciences with appropriate examples), etc.
> biology and bio-chemistry
This article completely captivated me last week:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3331698/
(probably old stuff for experts in that domain, but I was absolutely fascinated by the idea)
I was actually digging for chemical computing (which would be a metaphor for massively decouple distributed computing).
Btw, my point about "nothing is new" wasn't trying to step into nihilism. Just to shed some light on the excitement aspect of it.
Have one actually tried programming in “biology”? It is mostly grunt work of moving liquid solutions from one tube to another at different temperature and waiting times…
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When you are tired of learning and being passive, it's time to start making and being active.
There is something special about making things. If they are physical it's even better.
> Computers... I don't care about a lot of the things I cared about. I cannot extract pleasure any longer for studying yet another random language. Now, if I want to truly get impressed learning Kotlin (to say something, fine language) doesn't cut it, I need quantum computing or dependent types or whatever.
I feel similarly. It's not actually a problem though, is it? I haven't looked into quantum computing, but dependent types are quite an exciting rabbit hole.
There is this computer science problem that I keep coming back to even though I have found like a half a dozen working solutions. I even reinvent the same solution with a twist most of the time and yet I can't stop but come back to it.
I don't mind the lack of novelty at all.