Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money for.
Example: Cards Against Humanity started as a bit of a gag game between a small group of friends and eventually became something that has pop culture relevance.
Example: The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade. I like to think that he did this out of spite, and that Christmas letters to his old professor must've been fun.
How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal).
Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive".
Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for this). But there aren't leaps and bounds. Critically it keeps pushing things forward, refining and improving.
But then there's those in the long tail. They fail most of the time and are the "least productive". Sometimes never doing anything of note their entire lives. But these are also the people that change the world in much bigger ways. And sometimes those that appeared to do nothing have their value found decades or centuries later.
Not everyone needs to be Newton/Leibniz. Not everyone should be. But that kind of work is critical to advancing our knowledge and wealth as a species. The problem is it is often indistinguishable from wasting time. But I'm willing to bet that the work of Newton alone has created more value to all of human civilization than every failed long tail person has cost us.
In any investment strategy you benefit from having high risk investments. Most lose you money but the ones that win reward you with much more than you lost. I'm not sure why this is so well known in the investment world but controversial in the research/academic/innovation world.
Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fred-smith-told-yale-professo...
There is a deeper hurt in the tech world, which is that we have all been conditioned to crave greatness. Every employer tries to sell us on how important what they do is, or how rich everyone will become. We can't even vacation without thinking how much better we will perform once we get back. That struggle with greatness is something every human grapples with, but for workers in tech it is particularly difficult to let it go. The entire industry wants us to hold onto it until we are completely drained.
Anyway the result is sentiments like this, where having fun, exploring and learning can't just exist for the inherent rewards.
These examples are one justification for why we should embrace these kinds of hobbies, and not the desirable outcome for these kinds of hobbies.
Today, we think of "leisure" as merely free time from work or recreation, something largely done to "recharge" so that we can go back to work (in other words: modern "leisure" is for the sake of work). This is not the original meaning. Indeed, etymologically, the word "school" comes from σχολή ("skholē"), which means "leisure", but with the understanding that it involves something like learned discussion or whatever. (Difficult to imagine, given how hostile modern schooling is, resembling more of a factory than a place of learning.) The purpose of work was to enable leisure. We labored in order to have leisure.
What's also interesting is that unlike us, who think of "leisure" in terms of work (that is, we think of it as a negation of work, "not-working"), the Greeks viewed it in exactly the opposite way. The word for "work" is ἀσχολίᾱ ("askholíā"), which is the absence of leisure. The understanding held for most of history and explains why we call the liberal arts liberal: it freed a man to be able to pursue truth effectively, and was contrasted with the servile arts, that is, everything with a practical aim like a trade or a craft.
This difference demonstrates an important shift and betrays the vulgar or nihilistic underbelly of our modern culture. Work is never for its own sake. It is always aimed at something other than itself (praxis and associated poiesis). This distinguishes it from something like theory (theoria) which is concerned with truth for its own sake.
So what do we work for? Work for its own sake is nihilistic, a kind of passing of the metaphysical buck, an activity pursued to avoid facing the question of what we live for. Work pursued merely to pay for sustenance - full stop - is vulgar and lacks meaning. Sustenance is important, but is that all you are, a beast that slurps food from a trough? Even here, only in human beings is food elevated into feast, into meal, a celebration and a social practice that incorporates food; it is not merely nutritive. Are you merely a consumerist who works to buy more crap, foolishly believing that ultimate joy will be found in the pointless chase for them?
Ask yourself: whom or what do you serve? Everyone aims at something. What are the choices of your life aiming at?
Aristotle famously developed the Greek concept of εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia), which dovetails into what you wrote. Roughly, the concept translates into "human flourishing" or "living well". While Aristotle's conception of what best constitutes this differed a bit from more ancient Greek concepts passed down through their oral tradition, and definitely differs from what we may consider today, it bears investigation. I definitely think that education and personal research fits into my conception of it, but tastes differ. Nietzsche gave what I considered some excellent responses to Aristotle, especially when it comes to finding / making meaning in our lives with respect to the modern world. The Transcendentalist school, in particular Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, also provided some interesting flavor.
I think that your questions should be asked continuously. We should all adjust our life trajectories based on our own flourishing, in ways that challenge us and lead to growth. There aren't clear answers to these questions. In fact, they should lead to a bit of discomfort, like sand in one's clam shell. Much as this sand will eventually form a pearl, these questions should drive us to better ourselves, little by little.
I went from C# to embedded engineering and reading clock and wiring diagrams because there was a job that needed doing and I was the one there at the time.
I went from embedded programming to running my own startup based on Javascript and React (technologies I'd never used) because I had an idea I wanted to share with the world.
Just go out and try to do things, you may be surprised with what you are capable of!
And then, having given up on his dreams to follow the risk-averse path, he got fired.
Jim's words on the subject were like "well, he gave up on his dreams and still failed, so that's why I decided to pursue acting".
In fact, the gap is so large that it can be really hard for a person on one side of it to understand how people on the other side think.
The so called geniuses seem to have rather lax lifestyle, like free evenings to really make their homework. When you constantly think you're in hurry you've pretty much lost the game. You're just trying to get by and learn very little.
My experience: I often thought that I didn't have the time to learn (hard) things, only to find out sooner or later that I actually did, and still do.
At work, this usually meant that I was giving myself tighter deadlines than they needed to be, or that I was putting too much effort into tasks nobody cared that much about. Over time, I learned that it's OK not to put 100% of energy into the assigned task. Sometimes, it's even encouraged to use that extra energy to learn.
Arguably, I did have the privilege of starting out in salaried European office jobs, where there are more robust boundaries and opportunities. It's obvious how precarious physical work discourages this kind of learning. And reading comments like yours, it's clear how lucky I was to have managers and environments that didn't exploit my eagerness to put pressure on myself.
But if you do have an opportunity to make adjustments, I'd suggest putting less pressure on performing like an athlete, and channeling that energy into learning opportunities instead. Rarely will anyone carve out time for your learning, but they may be responsive to your request or boundaries.
I did it for a while until I was considered a "senior" dev and one of the VP's pulled me aside and said it reflects poorly on me when I'm not using proper grammar. He said as a senior dev in the org, I should hold myself to a higher standard. At which time, I started using proper grammar.
Always puts a smile on my face when I see this is still a thing in certain circles. Nonconformity isn't quite dead - and that's a good thing.
Performative non-conformance might be e.g. helpful to nurture a culture of critical thinking, but if it is just performative, then it is worthless.
(I write this with no intent to criticize you, burningChrome, or Jyn. You might very well do just that.)
(Also, I'm aware that the ability to push back is very unevenly distributed. I'm addressing those that can afford this agency. And also, non-conformance is spectrum: You can also push back a little without choosing the specific point to be the hill to die on. Every bit counts.)
[1] https://idiallo.com/blog/hostile-not-enshittification
[2] https://www.404media.co/heres-a-pdf-version-of-the-cia-guide...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...
I guess, these days, also a "not typing this on a phone" Shibboleth.
now i do it because i am considered a seniorish person, and i need to deal with many coworkers that have gone beyond fear of picking up a phone and are now seemingly afraid to even type messages and i want to show them that it's okay to bring a little bit of yourself to your communication
- X is typing indicators turning on/off/on/off for 5 minutes
- X finally sends an obviously llm inspired 5 paragraph argument that on the face of it looks well structured but has all the mental nutrients of a bag of cheetos
- the message is stuffed with at least six emoji to somehow preemptively control the emotional state of the recipient
all to say "please take a look cuz i think you forgot to add unit tests for y?" and i have neither the stamina to engage with nor the desire to conform to this milquetoast inauthentic fluffy overly uptight way of communicating
I didn't think twice about it in the article. But I don't read all lowercase as "friendly." It reads curt. Like you didn't have time. Which makes me not want to ask you for help. It's what my boss does when he has 12 seconds to help people, and it discourages people from messaging him.
It also makes it hard to read where a sentence ends.
I'm a little surprised to see so many people not just say this is a better way to write, but that merely capitalizing your sentences is the corpo propaganda way of writing.
Back in the 1337sp43k days in my internet circles, typing in all lowercase other than acronyms was the opposite of TYPING IN ALL CAPS. We used it to infer a whisper type connotation to the text.
function f(n){n.childNodes.forEach(c=>{c.nodeType===3?c.textContent=c.textContent.replace(/(^|[.!?]\s+)([a-z])/g,(m,s,l)=>s+l.toUpperCase()):c.nodeType===1&&f(c)})}f(document.body)also, it has it's own voice. a little less serious.
I can correctly capitalize if I wish, but I like I like the less formal take on text.
But you do care. You care so much to project your appearance of being cool and that you don't even care that you go through extra trouble to keep it up, even though paradoxically it would be LESS effort to not do it.
Of all fatuous nonsenses I've heard from design "geniuses" over the years, that might take the prize.
We don't look at spoken words, we listen to them. We add audible prosody (both pauses and intonation changes, in particular) to segment our speech. If we were to optimise our spoken language for lip-readers, we might very well choose to add some extra visible segmentation to compensate for the intonation being mostly undetectable.
You could validly claim that capital letters are superfluous given the presence of full stops (and I would disagree and we could debate that), but this argument that capital letters are bad because we don't speak "big sounds" is absurd.
We don't speak big sounds? We also don't speak commas and full stops, but those are still an important part of writing. Trying to get some of the suprasegmental features of speech into low bandwidth text.
As I remember there was no singular reason; not having to pinky-press shift was definitely a factor.
More importantly, tech literate folks in here are tuned to ignore such writing styles as they can figure out writing styles that are from scammers, LLMs and impersonators from dodgy domains.
So, you’re right to question this and I find this trend immature and I assume anyone using it to be in the realm of satire and of unserious character.
learning about Lojban and its punctuation probably also swayed me (it marks the start of the sentences with punctuation, which makes a lot more sense).
why do you think it's "pretentious" to be too exhausted to bother hitting the shift key
who friggen cares? why can the president diddle kids, but a random internet user has to have perfect grammar to be taken seriously?
the poster of this article could probably not care less if you "take them seriously"
i actually interact with ideas, not grammar. Especially in a fun personal blog post like this
On top of that, keep your day job. Or have enough wealth to not need it. Otherwise fun may cease gradually, then abruptly. Keep the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid well-maintained.
I have unfortunately failed at that :(. The fun sure does go away slowly, then all at once
To add a cliche, according to Mark Twain, "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life". Or may I add, you probably not going to retire anytime soon.
Now I am in a very different area of practice. Partially because I got tired of being good. Making young professionals give talks to factory floors about things they can't relate too, getting hired because it would look good for an acquisition, etc. it's draining and makes it hard for colleagues to realize they are your equal or even more exceptional at many things than yourself.
I actually worked with Jyn, though we don't keep in touch I will say they were great. Made strong contributions, learned new things quickly and was genuinely curious about everything. It's cool to see them on here. Nothing but good wishes for them and I hope they are enjoying whatever they are doing now. Come to think of it, I feel that way about all my former colleagues.
I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.
They'll grow out of it and one-day look back and cringe, as we all tend to do eventually.
It's really hard to read. There's "text-transform: capitalize;" which puts things in Title Case but unfortunately that is also hard to read for body text. ( That Was a Trend Too For a While If You Remember. ).
I down vote it every time I see it.
oh, this is a really good way of putting it! that’s exactly what happened :)
I don't know about Android but on the iPhone you have to go out of your way to remove the capitalisation.
Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase will only grow worse.
what have they done, other than essentially nothing, to reading comprehension?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...
My understanding is that it’s basically just a newer fad.
Me too. Sometimes when I tell people I spent the day on the computer, I get responses like "oh that's sad" or "you're going to burn yourself out".
Would they say the same thing if I told them I spent the day painting in my studio? Or playing the guitar? Or writing a piece of music? The computer is my paintbrush.
> "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept."
Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it.
MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.
Can AI do it faster? Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is having fun.
The analogy I keep going to in my mind is chess. A computer can play chess on my behalf, or I can play chess myself, but only one is fun.
For now, do what interests you in a way that interests you.
Whether its martial arts or writing assembly or vibe coding a mobile app if you approach it like that you are going to succeed.
I get what this post is talking about. I'm just having fun, that comes in a lot of different flavours. I can try a lot more ideas out, that's fun. I can quickly learn if an idea won't work, sometimes that can be disappointing but at the same time learning why it won't work can be quite fun. When the AI utterly fails to do something it lets me develop an idea in my mind about the strengths and weaknesses of the models. Oftentimes the failures are not just fun but outright hilarious. I enjoy seeing models fail sometimes because they reveal an assumption that I have internallsed to the point of being unaware of it's presence. It reveals to me something about myself when something I didn't feel worth mentioning is actually quite important to communicate. Some of the failures are outright hilarious.
I do find it a bit tiring to use AI for long periods, because lazy thinking produces poor results. You have to maintain a clear idea of what it is you are trying to do. Quite often an idea can seem simple in your head because you have glossed over a number of complicating details. I find it a challenge to keep mind at a level where you are aware of these things before you request an AI to make something intrinsically flawed.
I don't have a problem doing things without AI just for fun either. I make animated images in a tiny stack machine bytecode. I do game jams, and code golfing, like dweets.
I also enjoy playing chess, computers pased my ability to play chess a long way back. I don't mind playing even when I know a computer can do better.
Unless you are the best in the world at a thing, there's always someone who could do it better, every attempt to do the best thing ever in a field will fail. On the other hand you can try and do better that what you yourself have done. Even then that's just the target to reach for. The real goal is to enjoy the reaching. It's the challenge at the limits that is fun, not the success or failure of the end result.
All of the fighting with the LLM to refine the results sounds tiresome. No thanks.
If it's fun for you, or it unblocks you, or whatever... Go for it. But it doesn't sound fun for me, so nope. I'll keep banging on rocks to write programs until that's not fun anymore. :p
i mean, if you want it, then do it. if not, then there's nothing to be sad about.
IOW,
"I am I, and you are you. I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. If by chance we meet, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped." — Fritz Perls (1893–1970), 'The Gestalt Prayer' (rephrased)
Sometimes a lighthearted piece is all you need to remember to release. What's the saying? "The sea of bitterness is vast. Turn back, and you may yet see shore." I still love what I do, even if it got tougher than expected for a moment.
I see this in the analytics space constantly. Everyone rushes to clone Plausible/Fathom with minor tweaks because that's the "validated" approach. But the genuinely interesting problems - like real-time 3D geospatial visualization or AI-driven anomaly detection across behavioral patterns - require months of tinkering with WebGL, spatial databases, and ML pipelines before you know if it's viable.
The counter-argument is that "fun" can turn into perfectionism and never shipping. I think the balance is: have fun building the core innovative piece, but be ruthlessly pragmatic about everything else. For Prysm, I had fun building the real-time Globe visualization with Three.js and Supabase Realtime, but used boring proven tools (Next.js, Stripe, Resend) for auth/payments/email. Ship the fun part, commoditize the rest. That's how you avoid the "two years building in stealth" trap while still doing creative work.
Damn, that’s powerful.
I’m sorry for not taking your terminal emulator serious.
Your comment on the red site resonated.
> I have a perpetual chip on my shoulder because I'm also in the camp of doing things primarily motivated by having fun, but people in and out of my life repeatedly not taking it seriously. You can have fun and also consider your work serious (or, have it actually be serious by various metrics).
People like this make me hate everything to do with software. Software should be an engineering field, which exists to help humans, not as some personal art project for your self expression. I do not want to interact with these people at all. If you derive your identity from being a programmer you are actually harmful and I hope that I will never have the misfortune of having to work with you.
And yes, if you do not capitalize properly, then I do not see you as fully human. And if you keep swearing you sound like a twelve year old.
Well, the people that code for fun (and profit) think you, the men in suits, ruined everything so at least the feeling is reciprocal.
>suits
shirts was what I said. Not suits.
why mandate compartmentalization to this extent? what is so harmful about software as art (or expression, etc.)? if i write a weird personal project, what "misfortune" would i bring to you as a coworker, lol
it makes me sad that you see these things as somehow in conflict with each other :(
Whatever beauty exists in engineering comes from the purity of it. A fighter plane or a microchip looks beautiful, not because it was designed to be so, but because of the purity of the functionality, the harshness of the requirements. If you turn a fighter plane into an art project, then it will be inherently ridiculous. It will make a mockery of its own purpose, looking at it will be like looking at a cripple.
Instead of obsessing with my rating on I just turned on Zen mode in lichees and hid all the numbers.
The game became fun again — Just "oh that was a cool tactic, let me try this weird opening, what happens if I sacrifice my knight for vibes?"
Turns out the rating was a distraction from the actual game.
Same energy as your point about "fucking around" being the point.
The elo was just making me miserable; removing it made me better anyway.
That magenta PR? Fetch.
> i mean, in some sense if you work as a professional programmer it is a competition, because the job market sucks right now.
1. To contribute to the world's spiritual growth"
...damn, there go (out) most computer jobs!
Could you, HackerNews reader, imagine yourself writing something like this? No? It's because you're not a narcissist.
That's the beauty of communication and the free internet, what a joy to learn about someone elses way of thinking, add a little colour to my world view.
One of the things I miss most about the days of IRC chat networks, the personalities were big, broad and diverse, all mixing together. If someone is a narcissist, so be it, they still have value, knowledge, opinions to share. Online discourse these days can verge on corporate approved, totally empty. Apologies for the tangent.
Maybe in more optimistic times. "Just have fun" is a top luxury nowadays in 2025.
It would be narcissism if the author didn't have talent or ability. That doesn't seem to be the case here.
> if i can't feminize my compiler, what's the point?
I remember when people saying things like this would be considered strange, because it is strange, along with all the other bizarre and often fetishistic references in both the blog body and various screenshots. Same for the bizarre pull request screenshot referring to "the gay people in my phone", which is also devoid of grammar.
It's one thing to act stupidly, it's another thing to act stupidly write a self-important blog about it and how much you enjoy pissing people off (back in the day we called that trolling, believe it or not, and it was largely considered a negative thing). I eagerly await the paradigm shift when people stop condoning and supporting bizarre behaviour like this and I won't need to create proxies and extensions explicitly for filtering this kind of nonsense out.
I find the worst thing about this not the blog post itself, but the fact that the majority people on here see no problem with it and those who agree with me are being flagged to death.
I do not understand the desire for everybody else in the world to act exactly like you. Variety is the spice of life.
> I do not understand the desire for everybody else in the world to act exactly like you. Variety is the spice of life.
I don't want people to act exactly like me. I greatly appreciate the existence of people different from me with differing points of view and differing nations with differing cultures. This doesn't mean I have to like one specific archetype that I feel acts obnoxiously.