[BoorishBears]

> Why?

Well one might start to excessively think like a computer!

For example, most humans can account for the imprecise nature of language and understand that "for anyone" doesn't necessarily mean every individual human on earth, but rather a sizeable portion of people. And "isn't good" is speaking relative to the poster's ideas rather than them claiming to have determined an absolute measure of the term "good".

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But a computer struggles with such fuzzy constraints and falls back to the most literal interpretation of any statement.

At which point the GPT-3 model the computer is running might regurgitate some overreaction by jumping from someone essentially saying: "everything in moderation" to interpreting it as an attack on hard work and good work ethics.

[adamisom]

This is an unfair attack. Choosing "for anyone" instead of another phrase does indeed carry meaning. You're both finding more meaning than is justified. A little wobble in imprecision from martin led to a bigger one in systemvoltage, led to a bigger one in you.

(A better ending sentence from martin might've been "We don't want to incentivize 100-day streaks." But that has its own, orthogonal downsides--oh, GitHub's in the business of setting incentives? Uh oh... So all in all, I think I understand his choice of phrasing.)

[BoorishBears]

This would be unfair if they didn't springboard into:

> The current social bandwagon can be summarized as: “Work is bad. Hard work is toxic. Perseverance is not healthy”. HN is just reflecting r/antiwork ethics. Complete and utter social non-sense. People have just stopped thinking for themselves.

This is generally not even-keeled behavior.

"Everything in moderation" dates back to 6 BC. This was clearly an reinterpretation of that basic idea. No reason to hop into a tirade into the death of hard work or something.

[systemvoltage]

I’m just generally fed up of antiwork culture here. We are teaching youngsters to never persevere and push themselves to the limit, ensuring they’ll never realize their full potential and spiraling downwards in a low quality life of lethargy and resentment towards those who succeed.

I thought this is “Hacker News”. The tone here has slid significantly in last 5 years. Folks like Martin apologizing indirectly.

[WarChortle]

> We are teaching youngsters to never persevere and push themselves to the limit, ensuring they’ll never realize their full potential and spiraling downwards in a low quality life of lethargy and resentment towards those who succeed.

I think you vastly misunderstand the entire point of antiwork. Its not saying go sit on a couch all day. Its to recognize you have a life outside of work and its okay if work isn't your driving factor in life.

You can learn to persevere and push yourself many many ways. Work is not the only way. Not excelling at your job does not mean you are lethargic and resentful.

Success is measured many different ways, by many different people. You seem to measure it by how hard you work, that's great. Doesn't mean everyone has too.

[systemvoltage]

No, it’s just a toxic destructive culture that’s destroying lives. I’m not convinced, I tried to see the best in what you’re saying.

[WarChortle]

How? If I do what is asked of me and no more, then go spend my free time with my family, or go hiking, or do a million other fun, fulling things I could enjoy. How is that destructive?

[systemvoltage]

I meant what you’re saying is normal and great; but that’s not the antiwork culture and does not describe it accurately. I have an extremely cynical view of it and I’m convinced that’s people don’t have the best intentions. Not a single comment on HN in last few years encourage hard work and mentally exhausting yourself. Your brain is far more capable than the current zeitgeist tells you. We are raising a generation that will revel in lethargy and smoking weed all day.

[lanstin]

I have been programming for decades, and I have never had a time of outstanding productivity without times of times of much less activity. Creative activity, for many people, is non-linear and not a recipe based activity. Sure, writing the fourth app in a framework, you can crank it out, but coming up with a great framework for the type of applications rhat your business and technical environment requires something else, a metaphorical walk around the park, while the various possible pieces od solitions kind of simulate themselves in your muttering only half conscious imagination. The sort of solutions that achieve the agile manifesto imperative to maximize work not done. You find interfaces that simplify the problem space so much that so much possible code becomes unneeded.

I find too many people mistaking velocity for progress to be an almost insolvable organization problem. if you want to end up with mega lines of code that are all part of a useless of incomprehensible solution that is certainly a job, but might fail as a life's contribution.

I am no longer an eager youth, but when i was, the thing that hooked me to push on past limits, was my excitement and joy about solving real problems, at scale, with software, with a simple yet powerful idea. It was not any history of frequent commits or risong to rhe 95th %ile or the barren useless of a streak. It was having an idea born out of real needs and made simple enough to need almost no comlexity to implement. Having that novel simplicity go into production and be used was motivation for a lifetime of work.

I certainly have periods of stillness and more restful learning than prodigious output, but they are, for me at least, completely necessary. they may be fairly lethargic as well.