alt Hacker News> It was a gamble against your own time and patience.
At this point, what do the words even mean? Your own patience and available time are always completely random and fairly distributed across a large enough data set?
> Maybe I'd waste hours down the wrong rabbit holes trying to find a library that worked for my use case. Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. Maybe I'd have to redo my entire approach because of some factor I hadn't considered.
Our ignorance isn't random chance. As we research and experiment, we reduce the problem area.
> At this point, what do the words even mean? Your own patience and available time are always completely random and fairly distributed across a large enough data set?
Predicting the time a task will take is impossible. Something that sounds like a 5 minute script can turn into a month of banging your head against unknown unknowns. I lose my patience when the afternoon I allocated is getting overrun by nonsense and I'm missing out on other things I wanted to do or household maintenance.
> Our ignorance isn't random chance. As we research and experiment, we reduce the problem area.
Every thought we have has random chance to be wrong despite our conviction that it's correct. Descartes' Evil Demon plays his tricks on all of us. How many times have you typed some line of code only to realize it was obviously wrong afterwards? Even for simpler matters we "hallucinate" all the time. I was deep in thought trying to help someone come up with an acronym the other day and felt convicted that "Goal Oriented Augmented Retrieval" worked for GOAL until I said it aloud.
Our thoughts and actions are consistently wrong some portion of the time because our meat computers are not perfect positronic brains running prolog. We put cereal in the fridge and say "you too" to the waiter. Every thought we put down or action we take is a gamble on the soundness of the thought or action.