Comment by clay_the_ripper
8 days ago
Doing hard things has always been, and always will be, hard.
Building a static HTML page was “hard” in the 90’s. It took actual skills.
Any piece that gets easier automatically opens up more hard avenues to tackle.
no one is willing to pay you for easy.
I was there in the 90s. I built a few bad static HTML pages. It wasn’t hard. There are lots of stories of non-CS / non-technical people making stuff from the dotcom era.
Making a dynamic page was harder. Integrating with a payment system was almost magical; there’s a reason PayPal became big.
But what was truly hard, and continues to be hard, is building a page, either static or dynamic, that people actually want to visit.
Building static pages that worked in both Netscape and IE 4, and could function well with constrained dial up speeds, may not have been "hard", but it did come with a number of challenges.
I was making HTML pages as a 9 year old in the mid 90s.
It was never hard.
Ahhh that lines up with a thought I had recently: you get out of life what you put into it. I am beginning to believe that there's some kind of metaphysical rule here that is true everywhere, all the time.
So maybe the solution is: find the hardest stuff to do and do the crap out of it.
I really don't think that's true, you can put a lot of effort into a wrongheaded strategy, netting you no or bad results.
Conversely, a good strategy can get you good results without that much effort.
Wrongheaded strategies that net you bad results, often result in lessons and ideas that can be further pursued on their own merits.
The followup thought / concern that occurs: what if the number of hard things is going down?
I would have imagined it's going up while the percentage of people who are capable of doing the hardest things is going down.
Not that I know much of anything.
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The entire pitch of LLM companies is that that’s not true. The LLM does the hard work, and you pay the LLM company for the tokens. So the gate is just, can you afford enough tokens.
Not saying that’s what will happen in reality, but that is the marketing pitch