RickS
But I've found this particular new-ish lens extremely illuminating, and it hasn't yet entered common parlance, so I post here in the hopes its helpful for others. After many years of hearing "tropes" from all 3 categories and having them only ~kinda feel like they fit, this was the one that made my jaw hit the ground and go holy shit, this is me, this is the thing that, if you understood it about it me, makes all the convoluted fuckery in my life click elegantly into place:
*Pathological Demand Avoidance*, or the more modern "friendlier" backronym, *Persistent Drive for Autonomy*.
Both are accurate, I find the former more accurate, if notably "harsher". But that's just my flavor of inner voice (how apt, for this topic).
Here are some random links I only skimmed, you can find sources that resonate with you in particular.
https://childmind.org/article/pathological-demand-avoidance-...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4820467/
One example of a way this manifests in me personally, and how it relates to the intersection of the 3 things in the title:
I was massively stressed by a partner's attempts to get me to do things like clean out the garage, etc. I'd catastrophisize about the amount of time it would take, and spend the entire time in a sour mood, squirming for ways to get out of it. What ended up helping a great deal was explicitly setting time boxes at the outset, such as we will spend exactly three hours on this and stop at the three hour mark no matter what. Being able to "see the exit" in advance (and trust that it would be honored) pretty much completely resolved the issues.
* It has hints of helplessness/trappedness/persecution avoidance that feel like they could relate to growing up trapped in a house with a violently abusive father.
* It has high seeking for routine, predictability, and certainty that feel like they could be autism-coded.
* The "this genuinely feels in my body like the task will be forever" has time blindness, task-abandonment and followthrough issues that present like ADHD.
What is the actual balance of those 3 things in contributing? IDK, and it's probably different in various situations.
But for me, the PDA angle fits like a glove, and was the first mental model that succinctly encapsulated what it actually felt like in my head.
Couple skills to integrate with an obsidian MD task tracker, small chat interface on the phone made public via tailscale, and bam, a reminder bot you can text from the grocery store.
In particular, the PG essay contains exactly one designed-to-be-quoted pat-yourself-on-the-back really-send-it-home-ism:
> Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.
This entire link is nothing but those. I don't feel like I'm being spoken to, let alone taught to. I feel like I'm being repeatedly poked with a finger that really wants me to know it has punchy ideas. Which backfires, ofc.
Variance in quality on these things is so, so high.
There's really something to be said for greedily signing up for most things and trying to get grandfathered before the zipcuffs tighten.
IRL, though, fuck this. Home depot added flock cams and broad facial recognition, grocery store installed turnstiles, haven't stepped foot in either since. I'm just dropping out of the IRL retail economy left and right.
This reminds me of the way people think of the olden days when stuff was made of real wood and metal as "we had integrity! people built things to last!", projecting intentionality and generosity onto to the same machinery that built agent orange or rube goldberg machines for cigarette smoke to avoid liability for killing millions of people. We didn't build things out of metal because we had integrity, we did it because we didn't yet have advanced petroleum-derived plastics and shit. If they did, they'd have done that instead.
Reminds me of the difference between "peaceful" (capable of harm, electing not to be harmful) and "harmless" (incapable of harm even if you wanted to). I think it's a mistake to imagine the nerds of the past as peaceful. In terms of status, power acquisition, etc, they were harmless. Had you handed them the tools and understanding of today, they'd have acted no different, IMO.
In the few instances I've been able to achieve really joyful flow state, there are usually two simultaneous workstreams, plus or minus one. They're usually working towards a large goal that I roughly know how to judge, in digestible bites.
For example, sequentially modifying the UI in a series of operations towards an overarching goal, where it's easy to tell if a step worked, and what the next step should be, but where you're not sure exactly what you want, so there's some curiosity and discovery rather than just feeding the bot tiny instructions. I try to keep the two workstreams from overlapping. If both streams start fighting over a file they both dirty, things go south fast.
Adjusting your prefs/harness/etc for model terseness goes a LONG way. Context quality is absolutely everything. A good context "seed" can go back and forth for many turns cleanly and with focus, and even compact successfully once or twice. A bad seed will be annoying to work with from the jump, will thrash towards compaction faster, at which point it gets even worse. This is difficult to troubleshoot objectively, but I'll frequently restart conversations if I don't like the vibe of the first couple turns. It's made harder by constant model churn. Until opus 4.8, I ran opus/sonnet 4.5 high for a long time in large part for continuity of intuition, if that makes sense.
There are also many elements of human knowledge management that make a difference. I've found "append only" to be a magic word, generating markdown logs of changes, or learnings, etc. Whatever workflows create visibility and resumability so that you can return from a spell away and get up to speed effectively. Manually keeping your own dev log alongside the session sometimes helps, makes things sticky and ensures you understand what's happening.
But it's hard. Feels incredible when it goes well, but going well feels very nearly random, and whittling towards reproducibility can be very mentally draining, in terms of both energy and morale.
For interactive / code snippets Maxime Heckel: https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/the-study-of-shaders-wit...
Honorable mentions Maggie Applebaum https://maggieappleton.com/ai-enlightenment Marek Chotoborski https://zanlib.dev/blog/number-inputs-in-react/
Line width, sane fonts, avoiding clever shit unless very polished, gets you a long way.
The problems we have with our psychology often involve deviation from the normal or desirable state, so a robot that spits out a cheap reversion to the mean can be really helpful.
My flavor of this is somewhat autism-coded, but it generalizes well. EG people who aren't used to negotiating, valuing themselves, etc. Obviously LLMs output hallucinated dogshit and occasionally dangerous nonsense.
But it must be admitted: a lot of our psychological hiccups can be solved by the thoughtless, typical advice.
38% putting them over professionals is nuts though. I would much rather have the real thing, but it's $200/hr and asleep at 3am.\
That statement is the last 15 or so years.
The "0% product hunt, 100% show and tell" bit is one of the benefits of an ecosystem with painfully high upfront entry costs.
Does anyone know of an active forum of any kind (discord, reddit, phpbb, mailing list, whatever) for people who are building personal applications like this for love of the game, which takes hardline stances about desirable vs undesirable motives and behaviors, and enforces high entry/participation costs in exchange for unusually low quantities of transient grifters and self-interested status seeking by day-old accounts?
This is worsened by ombedzi replying to most of these comments as though they were made in earnest: any person who can't identify these comments as bots is a person whose code I have no interest in running.
gtfo
There's also the distraction factor. Maybe having the bar moving on the left edge competes with moving from line to line, and the general anchoring edge of the F shaped reading pattern.
Total speculation on my part.
They made it genuinely good. It'd been my only map app for years until I downloaded google maps for a road trip and was perplexed by all the squares I didn't ask for telling me about Arby's and Toyota dealers. "People tolerate this?!"
Long enough to be the villain.
I'm not that young, and still and the last 10 years have left me with an absolutely blistering distrust of the 70+ crowd on any matter pertaining to positions of authority. I'd like to see ~67 and ~72 become the other 18 and 21: hard lines beyond which the law progressively rescinds the presumption of total competence.
It's not a pretty solution. There are certainly some 14 year olds who are more deserving of a drivers license than many of legal age. I would welcome a world where we can actually establish and enforce criteria that allow us to move beyond such crude numeric thresholds. But in the meantime, the bulk of us need protection from statistics. Desperately.
I would be excited to read more about this exact set of topics, but only from an author who is not so purposefully snide.
Yikes. This author wrote a thing to make people feel bad and it worked. Logging off for awhile.