For me, I think one of the biggest issue is how incredibly boring the startup landscape has become. Who here is seriously passionate about doing SaaS #9001 which will contain a chatgpt wrapper and yet another series of buzzword to attract VC funding instead of actual users?
There's a ton of big, real problems with our world at the moment, and I don't see the startup scene attacking any of those.
I've learned 2 languages to fluency by mostly watching movies. I've learned the linux cli by setting up a minecraft server for my friends in high school. I've learned programming by making IRC (and later Discord) bots for communities I was part of.
All of this was fun, and it worked better than staring at a textbook and hoping that my "effort" pays off.
I think there is some conflation in this thread between "learning" and "practice" which are fairly different things.
As an ADHD person, nothing shovels the dopamine into my neural receptors quite like going from zero to "knows enough to be dangerous" in a new hobby or field of knowledge. That's the fun part. But climbing the experience curve much further than that requires some amount of _deliberate_ study and beyond that deliberate _practice_ and experience in order to become something like an expert.
Chasing questions down rabbit-holes is fast and entertaining but only takes you so far. Deliberate practice (studying) is mostly less fun, even when that thing is your life-long passion and/or career. But necessary if you want to be highly skilled in that area.
I realized this about myself years ago, but I don't (think I) have ADHD.
I have always been able to learn faster than most people. No clear reason why. It appears I was just born this way.
But if the Pareto Principle holds, and I'm learning twice as fast as average (estimating for the sake of easy math), that means when I'm a beginner learning the 20% of the skill that gives me 80% of the results, I'm learning like 32 times faster than somebody learning at an average rate who's in the 80% of work that produces 20% of the results, even though they're better at what they're doing. I look like an absolute rockstar out of the gate.
Problem is that my ego has been tied up in that since I was little. Early life is all about learning high-leverage things as quickly as possible, and since that's also when you're forming your sense of who you are, it's a sticky trap. I have really struggled to build the patience for the rest of the grind, where even if I'm still learning twice as fast as average at the harder level, any average newbie is learning/improving twice as fast as me.
The end result is that I'm moderately proficient in dozens and dozens of things, but I'm not an expert at anything except obtaining moderate proficiency.
> nothing shovels the dopamine into my neural receptors quite like going from zero to "knows enough to be dangerous" in a new hobby or field of knowledge.
Man, this describes me to a T. I love that feeling of the "first 75%" (or whatever percentage it is). Then I tend to lose interest in the long tail.
What was your initial goal? Or maybe you didn't have a conscious one to begin with and had an attraction or something like a curiosity for the subject. Once you covered enough ground you satisfied your curiosity and your interest faded. I think this is a very natural outcome and depending how you approach your learning subject you can achieve different outcomes. Try learning in a class setting where there is a set curriculum and where you could approach your learning in regular and consistent chunks. It may be boring at first but it could get much deeper into the topic.
>I've learned the linux cli by setting up a minecraft server for my friends in high school.
What you've learned was "enough to set up a minecraft server", but definitely not as much as "learned the linux cli", and that's without even touching the obvious question "what does someone mean when they claim they learned the linux cli"?
I fell for this trap too: I watched a tutorial by Nick Chapsas, then made my own ASP.NET Core Web API for a personal project, and thought "Wow I know ASP.NET MVC time to get a junior developer job".
After a few resumes (there's .NET demand in my area) I landed an interview with a startup. The interviewer (who happened to be the cofounder and has 15 years of .NET experience, some working directly in Microsoft) started hitting me with questions like "what kind of objects can get constructed in a using block?", "what's the difference between readonly and const", "how can we identify that a payload comes from a mobile client if the endpoints are shared?", etc.
That's when I realized that I knew enough to make me go "woohoo I have a .NET Core web API" but not enough to get a junior job. In fact, he was honest enough to tell me "you're barely entry level, and this wasn't even the technical interview it's just the screener".
Off-topic but related with the event: I obviously didn't get the job, but he left me with an advice I'm actioning: "Stop jumping around and stick to one language, I don't know if that's gonna be C#, TypeScript, Go, Python, whatever. Deep dive something well. You're only hurting yourself in the long run".
Watching tutorials is exactly what I would consider "not fun", and I'm not surprised it wasn't successful. On my side I had no problem getting into a software engineering career, so my point stands.
Agreed, consistency is more important than doing a marathon session. Anyone who has learned a musical instrument can tell you this, far better to practice 10 minutes a day everyday than 1 hour once a week.
Let’s say because of your genetics, you can enjoy playing basketball, and you do that, and you have fun doing that, you get better at it… but that’s that, it won’t be that easy for you with other subjects or even get to next level at basketball. Then you need to submit to discipline… or are you willing to wait for things to become fun?
> pays off
That’s why it is important to chase things you are curious about, then you don’t need to wait for some return…
Yeah, but Andrej is talking about learning much harder things in much more depth. He's a world class research scientist and engineer.
Practically everyone on planet earth learns a language as a child. Learning how to use some commands in linux and and programming a bot are literally child's play. I learned to play soccer the way you speak of - i'm... ok at it. Messi did a different thing.
I don't have ADD, but I have clearly observed that listening to a YouTube video of people talking while I work increases my productivity.
I think it's because when I lose focus of my code, I will just end up listening to the video for like a minute, without having to even switch to my browser window. Without that, I would have the tendency to open Reddit/Twitter/this site whenever I get slightly distracted.
This of course requires picking videos that are both very long (don't want to go looking for a new one every 20min) and very casual (I don't want to have to actively listen to it).
I often make decisions on background noise with regard to verbal/nonverbal tasks, needing a rhythm, or needing to block out some other distractions.
Try instrumental music when you have verbal/intellectual needs. A good Latin dance channel helps me get in a rhythm for physical housework and stuff. If others are bickering around me, time for earphones or some encouraging spoken-word.
It also had an antecedent; Wizardry was very much like a single-player version of Avatar, an early multiplayer dungeon game that ran on the University of Illinois PLATO system. The cube-like "rooms," displays, and game mechanics were very similar. I don't recall the controls being the same, though, and Avatar was written in PLATO's native TUTOR language, while Wizardry was UCSD Pascal.
> There was a game on the PLATO network (circa '79 or '80) called "Oubliette" that nearly caused me to flunk out of law school. [...] Wizardry was in many ways our attempt to see if we could write a single-player game as cool as the PLATO dungeon games and cram it into a tiny machine like the Apple II.
The CRPG Addict blog has done a great job reviewing the PLATO games from a seasoned player's perspective, and he touches on some of the inspiration for Wizardry.
The original magic system from Final Fantasy 1 (you can only cast N spells per magic level, maximum of 9) is a copy of the system from Wizardry. The only difference you have to type the spell name to cast it in Wizardry, and you get a menu in Final Fantasy.
The FF1 spell list is more directly derived from D&D, though. It even has the Power Words. The sense I've gotten from reading about the development of FF is that the dev team had varied experience with existing RPGs, so the game ended up as a mixture of derivative and original ideas. (The face-to-face side view in combat was apparently inspired by football!)
Dragon Quest (which came before Final Fantasy and inspired it) took inspiration from Wizardry. Most RPG from the 80s were inspired by Wizardry. It had huge influences.
JRPGs especially! Wizardry as a series remained popular in Japan well after its popularity faded in the west. You can see games taking the general first-person dungeon crawling style straight from Wizardry in some late-90s JRPGs like the King's Field series. I think the Wizardry series itself is still going in Japan, as well.
Currently working on game development in Godot. We're making Dice'n Goblins, a dungeon-crawler RPG inspired by classics like Etrian Odissey and Wizardry VII, with a cartoon aesthetic similar to Paper Mario. The twist is that you have to collect and use dice to beat the monsters that crawl inside the dungeon.
There's a ton of big, real problems with our world at the moment, and I don't see the startup scene attacking any of those.
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