alt Hacker NewsEven with thick desires, I sometimes find myself day-dreaming about the state when I have mastered a skill or understood a topic deeply. At the same time, I know from experience that the process never ends. Even when one does master a skill, one is deeply aware of what one doesn't know or understand or what one is not good at within that domain.
What helps me is to focus on today. If I can spend even an hour on a topic and get lost in it or even get frustrated by it, it is time well-spent. I was going to say "it is progress" instead of "time well-spent" but even that's a trap. Progress implies moving forward in a preferred direction. While I can't say I don't want to make progress, I am training myself to care less about it. It is really the time spent engaging that's most valuable (at least to me).
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Oh yeah decades in I still feel I know f-all about programming. Doesn't help the field keeps expanding expintentially. E.g. I look most things up. I am basicially a slow LLM!
If you didn't daydream like that would you have the motivation to pursue it? Are not those daydreams your kind encouraging you? "Look how great it'll be, this is why you'll put in the hard work now". You can get trapped in the dreams, of course, but they're useful too
David Epstein calls this "desirable difficulty" in the book Range.
Interestingly he recently discussed how using LLMs tends to remove this desirable difficulty: https://davidepstein.substack.com/p/a-risk-of-cognitive-conv...
This means that the results (both of the task and of the learning by the student) are lower if the student uses an LLM first, but slightly improves if they use it second
You might find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up%C4%81d%C4%81na and https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/bhavatanha