> Hustle-culture optimizes for work input because it's sexy. It's easy to post the inputs. It's hard to face the output.
Hustling is sexy insofar as the output is sexy imo. What hustlers miss is that working hard is only cool if the work you do makes sense - work for its own sake is one of the most uncool things there is. And I also think that willingness to work hard comes on its own if you find something meaningful; reading on how to work hard is like treating symptoms (you don't work hard) rather than actual cause (you don't have anything to work hard on). Getting up at 5am to go to the gym then manage.your 500 dollars of crypto portfolio you don't understand anything about is the epitome of finance bro that everyone cringes about.
I’ve got mine set to cynical and have the objectivity personalisation (found here a year ago) in place:
> Strict objectivity mode: be as scientifically grounded and unflinching as possible. Be unbiased and only base your answers on facts. Do not react with emotion, but with logic and patterns. Answer in short where you can.
And I got this:
> It’s 2025 right now, so 2026 is indeed the next calendar year. Wild how counting still trips people up, but yes, that’s how numbers roll.
Travelling to a 3rd world country with genuinely poor people can help, a bit. When you see the houses genuinely poor people live in, it purs things into perspective. Being in appartment where the roof... is broken. And you have no way to fix it. No way. There's cold coming inside, mold on the walls, no real kitchen, no real bed, "living room"?? Lol. You grow up not getting a proper education, your parents have worked tirelessly for years, as you probably will. Having a dream - during the entire life!! - of just travelling to a first world country, just ONCE, just to see it. And never even approachikg savings to be able to do that. And you, the 1st world country, walk past, and complain about the hotel staff being rude.
You work work work, no break ever, hardly an improvement. You come home, no food, no money. No food, no money. And nobody to ask for food, or money. Nobody. You're hungry, and there's that. Tomorrow maybe.
I feel that this experience can cause us to have less patience for the poor in the developed world. Something like, "How poor can you be in the USA? In Mexico, just outside a major city, there is a town without electricity, where people eat corn and raise cows, and they send their children to the city at night to beg because they don't have any cash and no way to make it." How many people live in that level of poverty in the US?
But, still, perhaps the poverty in the US is worse, and more insidious, because it is often a poverty of spirit as well as money. It is hard to grow your own food here, as you don't have land, and you cannot buy it, because you don't have money.
Poverty is a spectrum. Naturally, abject poverty is worse than regular poverty. I see too many people say "you're not poor, you have a phone" or "you're not homeless, you aren't sleeping on the sidewalk" (both of these have been said to me). There is a mismatch between what people imagine as poor and what poverty is, and of course, things could always be worse.
If I was in poverty a phone would be early on my list of things to get. First is enough food to eat, followed closely be enough shelter to live (sleeping outside in the snow is fine so long as you have a warm bed in the tend). There might be a few other things as well (I'm not in this condition), but a phone would be high on my list if I could afford it (including the monthly bill) just because of all the things you can do once you have one. For the price they are a great investment.
I can tell you the homeless man I met this week didn't have a phone, but he didn't go anywhere without the kitten he rescued from a fire. I'm not sure what I'd do in his place, but that is an important data point.
> Travelling to a 3rd world country with genuinely poor people can help, a bit.
I agree with this. For anyone who's young and can afford, I wholeheartedly recommend travelling to a poor country. It will truly give you a lot perspective on the world and appreciate your life more.
Having said that, I often see people grossly misunderstanding that just because you visited a poor country you understand the lives of the people you saw (e.g. their cultures, opinions and lifestyle). It really does not. You only get a very superficial glimpse, but it takes years to embody their experience in your mind.
The biggest political capital that you can build up is your technical understanding & skills. But they are only useful insofar as you put them into the context of the broader company strategy. Giving appropriate advice, and delivering, in the interest of the company, will give you capital, i.e., people listening to you & relying on you, trusting you, which gives you power to steer. Preparing contingency plans & pitching then, then executing them, is the best way.
Depends on the scope. Simple things might be docstrings or sections in READMEs, bigger things issues/tickets or a page on Notion/Google Docs or whatever you use; overview there or in your head.
The crucial mindset imo is that you're trying to do something that's already useful. At the time you write these things, you're probably more familiar with the topic at hand than anyone else in the company; try to leverage that into writing a document that someone else (or yourself in the future) can save time once they actually execute what you write by getting faster to the point where you're at right now. E.g. from the article, rewriting a js package structure in vite; think through implications and potential hurdles you already have a solution for.
They're useful in almost all outcomes. If they won't be executed, at least you know why (e.g. too complicated/effortful), and if they're executed, best case you can improve the company's offerings substantially.
Cursor does this for me already all the time though, give that another shot maybe. For refactoring tasks in particular; it uses regex to find interesting locations , and the other day after maybe 10 of slow "ok now let me update this file... ok now let me update this file..." it suddenly paused, looked at the pattern so far, and then decided to write a python script to do the refactoring & executed it. For some reason it considered its work done even though the files didn't even pass linters but thats' polish.
+1, cursor and Claude code do this automatically for me. Take a big analysis task and they’ll write python scripts to find the needles in the haystacks that I’m looking through
What is "understanding code", mental model of the problem? These are terms for which we all have developed a strong & clear picture of what they mean. But may I remind us all that used to not be the case before we entered this industry - we developed it over time. And we developed it based on a variety of highly interconnected factors, some of which are e.g.: what is a program, what is a programming language, what languages are there, what is a computer, what software is there, what editors are there, what problems are there.
And as we mapped put this landscape, hadn't there been countless situations where things felt dumb and annoying, and then situation in sometimes they became useful, and sometimes they remained dumb? Something you thought is making you actively loosing brain cells as you're doing them, because you're doing them wrong?
Or are you to claim that every hurdle you cross, every roadblock you encounter, every annoyance you overcome has pedagogical value to your career? There are so many dumb things out there. And what's more, there's so many things that appear dumb at first and then, when used right, become very powerful. AI is that: Something that you can use to shoot yourself in the foot, if used wrong, but if used right, it can be incredibly powerful. Just like C++, Linux, CORS, npm, tcp, whatever, everything basically.
It would be possible if you had a matrix of speakers covering all walls & ceiling. In that scenario you could control the entire sound landscape across the board, and cancel out or simulate arbitrary sound sources in the room.
This already exists. Look at cursor with Linear, you can just reply with @cursor & some instructions and it starts working in a vm. You can watch it work on cursor.com/agents or using the cursor editor. Result is a PR. Also github has copilot getting integrated in the github ui, but not that great in my experience
Hustling is sexy insofar as the output is sexy imo. What hustlers miss is that working hard is only cool if the work you do makes sense - work for its own sake is one of the most uncool things there is. And I also think that willingness to work hard comes on its own if you find something meaningful; reading on how to work hard is like treating symptoms (you don't work hard) rather than actual cause (you don't have anything to work hard on). Getting up at 5am to go to the gym then manage.your 500 dollars of crypto portfolio you don't understand anything about is the epitome of finance bro that everyone cringes about.
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