I've been reading Crawford for quite a few years now, and got into DS9 at his recommendation. I had to skip the last paragraph because I haven't finished his latest game, but I've quietly admired his weirdness and dedication to the craft. Some of his criticisms of storytelling in games have also been frequently opaque to me, but I still believe there's something behind even the statements I didn't understand.
Some of his reflections on growing old, remembering his first crush, and even just noodling about home improvement are incredibly beautiful too.
Those are all asides, but what I mean to say is that his other posts are worth reading.
Yep, I even wrote in to Crawford to let him know how hard it slapped. I watched the whole thing with my brother and I'll treasure the experience forever, haha.
McKenzie's advice has worked for me every single time. I've managed 10% to 20% at every job since graduating (sometimes with leadership bending a lot of rules for it).
This was before I started writing my blog.
There are jobs where I suspect I couldn't get a raise, but they're all roles where I would be unable to differentiate myself from a commodified ultra-scrub engineer (think the cheap labour you get from generic Azure consultancies).
Man, I had almost forgotten how much fun it was to read about ML projects of the variety I studied in university, before all the discourse shifted to plain English prompts.
I know of some government entities in Australia doing similar work, but the effectiveness/quality level of the author's work do make me despair for our government a bit. They're blowing years of Very Expensive Consultant spend and they can't even classify an entire parcel of land correctly, let alone count some little yurt-shaped blobs.
Every single reader on my blog that has sent me high-quality written material of their own has independently gone viral without any signal boosting from me. Off the top of my head, Iris Meredith, Mira Welner, Scott Smitelli, Daniel Sidhion. Usually within a few days of writing whatever the piece was, but sometimes months later.
Some of the posts weren't even remotely optimized for it. Daniel wrote about very nerdy NixOS optimization, Scott wrote a 20K story about the horror of bullshit jobs, etc.
Survivor bias is a real thing, but there's also a real dearth of quality writers out there. I'd encourage anyone who enjoys writing to do it for the love of the game, and as long as you occasionally show it to someone or post it on HN, good things will come.
My life was totally changed around the time I had 100 readers, and that number is extremely achievable. Going beyond that hasn't really helped me that much, as you quickly lose the ability to form deep connections with people.
(However, if you're frustrated by blogging then by all means, give up. I do think that what carries the writers above is that they're in it for the love of the crafts they're writing about in addition to being talented writers. Trying to grind out success sounds dreadful and I feel like it scarcely works.)
Most of them hit #1 on Hackernews or close to it. That's usually between 100K and 300K hits, and they're pretty high-quality hits since it's usually non-trash software engineers, contrasted with the twelve year olds you'd get if it was 200K YouTube hits.
Yeah the average quality is low that any writer even semi competent stands out.
Literally people who can’t even hold five complex thoughts in their mind simultaneously can become notable writers because the bar is on the ground for the vast majority of niches.
Now I am the one that provides the shitty jobs! Back to work, peasants! And don't let me ever catch you not maximizing Jira velocity, or time with your family is being moved to the backlog!
It isn't bad financially, but I make much less money than I did two years ago. If I had taken any of the jobs I was offered, I think it would have been a 30K to 100K raise. Also the number is slowly going up, and unlike a day job, no one will tell me I'm earning "enough". If I hit enough to salary myself 500K one day, there will be no social norms preventing HR from giving me that.
I am way, way happier. I've met some really amazing people from all over the world. I also have access to a level of technical mentorship that has totally changed the way I engineer -- but you get other people too. I've spent a lot of time with the mythical thoughtful CEO (can confirm that they are an outlier and the median CEO is as bullheaded as they appear), gotten the inside scoop on a lot of stuff that used to confuse the hell out of me, and last week got invited to a group of writers in Melbourne that are helping me get a book out! And it's also, for me, a special kind of awe-inspiring to meet people that have produced truly great literature. I'd never had had the opportunity before that.
That's like, roughly what you'll get at 100 to 200 people if you write things that repel the energy you don't like. At a few thousand subscribers it gets a bit hairier because you don't have time to talk to everyone. I'm also definitely someone that leans hard enough into the parasociality that it becomes regular sociality, which might not be for everyone, and perhaps I'll run into a real sicko one day and regret it.
Ahhh I didn't realize it was you I was responding to, I'm familiar with your blog and you definitely deserve your success.
>It was the end of the "stand up", which Valera had graciously been invited to. They did it sitting down, which was her first clue that one of the Chaos Gods was involved.
I still think about this line, it's just too good.
I've made this point many times and the only possible answers are:
1. The people promising AGI are lying
2. The people promising AGI don't know what they're saying
3. The people promising AGI are hedging against AGI not eventuating but some intermediate value emerging. This is the most charitable read, but also totally at odds with getting people to invest, since the investment is predicated on AGI achievement
The correct answer is almost certainly "some people are silly, some people are grifting, some people think AGI is coming, but all the investment certainly benefits from people conflating AGI with a very good product instead of a world-changing achievement".
Eric Schmidt imagining AGI and then speculating that people will like, still be churning out apps, as if humans will need to do that sort of menial labour, just blew my mind and made me question many of the stories I had heard about his intelligence.
I use em-dashes correctly because a reader emailed me, and I was dreadfully embarrassed. You can actually see them become correct in my writing after the "I will pile drive you" AI thing.
It never occurred to me that doing this correctly might make people think I use LLMs in my writing.
Edit: I'm sure the many typos protect me from that, actually.
I'm the author! I've had tons of corroborating experience, and many readers with it, but I will say that there are two extreme exceptions.
I have two readers with no FAANG experience that consistently find jobs with their CVs at serious companies with no trouble. Both are outside the U.S but in the first world. When asked, neither of them knows why they have such luck, and we've looked at their CVs together and been unable to see anything that distinguishes them, other than obviously being competent and some open source contributions.
It definitely took me way more than 25 hours as a kid to beat Pokemon Blue! But I was so young that I didn't understand that "Oak: Hello!" meant that someone called Oak was talking.
The glitched Pokemon you're talking about is Missingno by the way! I remember surfing up and down Cinnabar Island to do the same thing.
Some of his reflections on growing old, remembering his first crush, and even just noodling about home improvement are incredibly beautiful too.
Those are all asides, but what I mean to say is that his other posts are worth reading.
reply