Question: How do I make it natural and yummy to sit down and do programming?
In the same way that it currently feels pretty natural to transition into writing "I have an idea, and I want to write an essay", it feels like it could be natural to "have an idea and transition into implementing it."
One thing is I don't think about "writing" as anything special. It's just a thing that I do sometimes. I think I would need to have a similar attitude to programming?
For one thing, with writing, I will allocate deep work blocks to focus on big writing projects, but I am also often spinning out smaller writing (blog post and twitter threads) that is "in line" with my life.
Like, it can be natural to have a thought that is inspired by the notes that I'm taking in a book, and then develop that thought by writing a thread or a post, over the course of the next hour, and then posting it.
I think I could have a similar attitude to programming stuff: there are some big projects that I block out a full morning for, but most things are little snippets that I can just do right now.
I think that the main thing is that I don't have enough programming affordance to feel like I __can__ just nock it out right now. Sometimes I can do that (I am surprised when I sometime block out a day for a programming project and then finish it in 45 minutes).
I think I need to have more affordance around programming. It needs to feel like painting: I basically have a grasp of the tools and how they work, and can make crude versions of things, even if there is a lot more neuance and detail that is possible.
This is in contrast to how car repair currently feels: there are dozens to hundreds of pieces and I don't know what they do, and I am in over my head, and any time I want to do anything under the hood of a car, I have...
...to do research and build myself up to the task of getting bearings at all.
I think programming could feel like the painting, with occasional moments where I run into problems that I don't know how to solve at my current level, for which I would go get help from someone with more expertise.
But how do I get from here to there?
Or more specifically, what is the fastest and most automatic / least effortful (like water flowing downstream) way to get from here to there?
I think this is largely a psychological blocker: like programming feels "daunting", such that when I consider working on a programming project...I sort of skirt away from it? Put it in the future instead of now?

How do I shift THAT?

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More from @EpistemicHope

7 Apr
This is a first test of writing a twitter thread from Roam, with this integration.

roamjs.com/docs/extension…
Even only two tweets in, this is SOOO much less stressful than using twitter directly. Twitter is slightly laggy on my machine, so there's a low grade frustration of typing with a delay + needing to go back and correct typos.
And writing threads this way is much much easier to edit.
Read 5 tweets
3 Apr
To: Critical Rationalists and other people who point out how induction is impossible,

I'm curious what you recommend, practically, in this 👇situation.

Fred correctly points out that he has a bit of a problem of induction in evaluating who is good at evaluating who to trust.
Is there some way that he can do better in this tricky situation by reasoning non-inductively?

If Fred had the core insight that induction was impossible, would he reason differently in this situation?
Or maybe I'm totally off base here, and the point is that he's already reasoning in a non-inductive way, just like everyone is, all the time.

If so, does that mean that he DOESN'T actually have a problem of induction here?

Am I completely missing the point?
Read 7 tweets
3 Apr
This post caused me to take the claim that @ben_r_hoffman makes in "approval extraction advertised as production", much more seriously.

rationalconspiracy.com/2021/04/01/y-c…
When I first read (Ben's) post a few years ago, I thought that it was probably tracking true things, but over-emphasizing them.
Read 28 tweets
2 Apr
If you've thought enough about the spaceship design and nanotech, and the dynamics of war between advanced civilizations, every battle in Star Wars seems as absurdly stylized as the space ships in treasure planet.
Star Wars: Why do the ships have a clear top and bottom? And why do they all orient on the same plane so that they have the SAME top and bottom?

Why do the starfighters have living pilots? Why are there even starfighters?

Why are the war droids shaped like humanoid infantrymen?
Why even have field armies for ground combat at all, if you can bombard a planet from space?

From a military engineering perspective, none of those choices make sense.
Read 8 tweets
2 Apr
I had a recent, somewhat amusing to me, dream that ties in with this.

I was in some kind of bondage "class" (in new-age-y kind of store in a strip mall?). Being the only man present, there was some assumption that I would have sex with the women.
Two of them in particular had tied their arms to their backs, and were acting as if I would have sex with them in the next segment, I think. This was no big deal for them, I guess, and they liked me?

They were self-assured and friendly.
And in the dream, I was thinking about if I wanted that, and if this was how I wanted to break my sexless "streak" / loose my virginity.
Read 12 tweets
2 Apr
When I was a teenager, I had absent minded daydreams ("fantasy" seems like too strong a word), about women, that my wife knew, gossiping about how I was such a good "catch" / partner.

Like, I wanted to be physically sexy / desirable, and also kind, caring, and devoted to her.
I wanted to be perfect and wonderful, so much so that other women were...not exactly jealous, but wondering how my wife got so lucky.

I wanted to be able to give that as a gift to my partner.
If I were to describe it today, I would say that I wanted to give her the benefits of a partner with a K-selection strategy (raw physical desirability) AND a partner with a r-selection strategy (commitment and intimacy).
Read 20 tweets

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