tried to read Prince and I assume it is a translation to English from Italian or whatever.
Assuming that translation was done a while ago (100+ yrs?)... It is hard to read. I can understand it if I try. But the phrasing is not current. 100 pages will take double the time at the least.
Almost think AI needs to rephrase it into current English.
Probably has these double negatives, long sentences, etc.
> The existence of people who succeed in pushing for inferior solutions, and managing to leave before it becomes clear
Guess this is just random evolution at play. Some companies will pay a bigger price than others. And not everyone even recognizes it and pinpoint it like you did.
But overall influencing people is on net good skill for the individual. And what is good for the geese is good for the gander??
> Some companies will pay a bigger price than others.
The problem is that typically a large company has one or a few golden geese. They can milk it for a long time because of an existing moat. The moat keeps shrinking, but it can sometimes take a decade or two for others to catch up.[1] That's plenty of time for such folks to make a career of playing politics well without contributing much.
Lots of people at that company left before things went bad and are poisoning other companies.
[1] Just look at Google and search. Or Microsoft and Windows. Or even Microsoft and Internet Explorer.
> have families, real estate, weird funky interests and hobbies
Many people would rather have these^ but stay stuck in cities/downtowns despite knowing it is only delaying the inevitable for them.
If the team mates have a different mindset, they see it as half baked or hacky. And if there is ever some bad feedback, they just use it as a "I told you so" and throw you under the bus.
If your self-esteem is sufficiently resilient, you can exploit the same human tendencies behind Cunningham's Law (the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer). Check your crappy end-to-end proof of concept into the team repository, and your teammates will be so horrified and outraged that they'll fix it faster than any sprint could have planned.
Bad feedback can be more helpful than good and is often the only type of feedback a product gets. And you may not have received that feedback if you didn’t ship. It’s better to get that information early.
I personally agree with the premise to ship early, with some rough edges, etc. But teammates may not be supportive. You need the whole team to have that mindset/culture.
After reading this comment, I feel leaning into the cosplaying will make me more productive/prolific. Many things I do not push thru on are because they seem superficial or a bit fake.
Does not apply to all ppl but maybe there should be phases to cosplay hard. Then reflect and realign.
I am noticing that I am very quick to get excited about a thing and also very quick to lose motivation to pursue that new thing to a meangful level of understanding and mastery.
Yesterday I was excited about something that I wanted to build a proof-of-concept of and blog about proudly. It might take 2-3days of intermittent effort juggling between other things but god was I excited to see it through.
I reaped great dopamine learning the first 30% of the stuff by end of day.
Today I wake up and am wondering what got me so excited yesterday. Of course I knew the basics of that now, parts of it seem obvious even, would anyone be really interested in me talking about it?
If I threw my hat over the fence by cosplaying an active builder and blogger ... maybe I would have seen it through 3 days of commitment?
> SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions
We will arrive on most answers by talking to an LLM. Many of us have an idea about we want. We relied on SO for some details/quirks/gotchas.
Example of a common SO question: how to do x in a library or language or platform? Maybe post on the Github for that lib. Or forums.. there are quirky systems like Salesforce or Workday which have robust forums. Where the forums are still much more effective than LLMs.
The hard part has been to import all the accounts and to categorize the transactions on the 1-2 cards and 1-2 checking accounts that get used a lot. However doing hledger motivated me to simplify things. Either delete cards and accounts. Or barely use them so I can update them once or twice a year. And helps to reduce the number of categories.
I have not made updates for all of 2025 after 3 or 4 years of hledger. ROI diminished once the itch to zero everything wears off and since I have somewhat steady state expenses.
These days, I find it is doable 2-3 times a year. Its a lot of work at one shot but somehow able to catch up so as to review the main spending accounts. The zeroing is what attract me still. I get to see some patterns in my overall spending/categories. And it is side project where there is perceivable concrete progress, so still somewhat easier dopamine.
Simplifying/automating the workflow is a pull. As I type this, I have an idea to stop tracking NW in hledger - it can seem incomplete because money moves from checking to brokerages. That's fine. I only want to see expenses.
Interesting! In a different comment, I took the other side: maybe it’s only worth tracking NW in hledger? Itemizing transactions is heavy duty bookkeeping effort, and I didn’t feel any directional value.
my thinking is that NW does not have to be tracked in a way that the double entries zero out. Every six months, I just open the 3-4 brokerages and banks and make an entry in a spreadsheet for cash/stock/bonds/crypto/others. Where the stocks are mostly ETFs and crypto is less than 5%.
And create a pivot table for totals and %s. And rebalance as needed. This may be too crude for some. But I am only starting to get organized, so this works, esp as you said for directional. Actually this is one of the reasons I have dropped hledger in general.
I just leave notes and comments in the spreadsheet as needed.
that's an interesting point. A echo chamber could lead to fatigue and boredom.
Reels is able to keep me engaged because it is able to surface similar content I would like but from different users. And they have such a breadth of producers these days.
The X home feed algo is not so good apart from it being text only, even for infotainment content. YT shorts also does not work as good as the Insta algo
Assuming that translation was done a while ago (100+ yrs?)... It is hard to read. I can understand it if I try. But the phrasing is not current. 100 pages will take double the time at the least.
Almost think AI needs to rephrase it into current English.
Probably has these double negatives, long sentences, etc.
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