[throwaway1183]

Okay, so going by your definition, I am a loser. Your first attempt put me in a derogatory way saying, "Stay far away from my companies.... barf"

Then you stick to the idea of calling me a loser from your point of view. I don't know what you are trying to prove but I was just asking a question on a way to genuinely get by in life.

We do not live in the same world. So what rule applies to you doesn't apply to me. Yet still I asked this question because being an average has a statistically better chance (as the law of large numbers holds). I wanted to get a realistic view of average people and what they do. If you look at other comments of mine, I am not against learning. I am against the definition of learning which is phony. It is one thing to know something, and it is a different thing to learn. I have seen many so-called learned ones struggle with the applications of their knowledge. At that point, how do you know if the person has actually learnt anything? People can grow beyond their limits. There is multiple dimension in life. And learning doesn't necessarily mean always learning the next hype stuff or yada yada. That is practically useless.

I humbly request you to point out the number of situations in your life where you applied second-order partial differential equations to solve anything that you are doing. (If that rings a bell, that is.) Or heck even used some esoteric algorithms to improve some heuristics. Bet you still use the fundamentals you learned in college and apply them. Did you ever truly learn new things? Are you apt to catch up on all the buzz that is going on in the AI, dissect everything and teach to a high school graduate? Can you learn the graphics and say implement Gaussian splatting on your own system? Or even write your own transpiler to do something? I do not know your background. I do not understand why you are so offended here to think that I am a brainless person who burts or whines without thinking.

There are multiple thoughts and stages of thoughts before admitting something. You make it sound like I never tried. Trust me, I have. I have done more than you. It sucks to be blocked when I can't show any physical result of learning because of limitations from financial stuff. Then if someone would fund, there is a lack of confidence. The guilt that I may expend their resources over nothing.

The only reason I want to be average is because I know I am slightly above average say (51%). It is just easy for me down there to work in an average way. It is more relaxing. I don't have to challenge myself or pull out my hair. Then eventually I hope to find something else in life.

We have a different perspective on life. You think in your own way, to rise above mediocrity. I think of embracing it. I just want to know what are the options so that I can make some life choices.

I regret choosing a hard path in life. It never gave me anything. Now I want to stop pursuing it. Stop spinning in the wheel.

[Exuma]

Answering in order:

First of all, YOU are not a loser, but your viewpoints are. That is a large difference, as at ANY point you can have a moment of introspection to change your mind and beliefs, to be better. That's one of the greatest things about life is you can choose to be whatever you want to be, simply by doing it.

Tough love never hurt anyone, I find the best answer is the answer which resonates the truth. I personally don't prefer to be coddled and told "im a good boy" when my work fucking sucks. I want someone to tell me my work fucking sucks. This is the SHORTEST path from A->B (improvement), and if you respect your own time/energy, and care about efficiency, then it makes sense that this is a good approach.

Your third paragraph I don't even understand. Personally I learn for around maybe 1-6 hours per day depending on what I'm doing. Each morning starting at 5am I wake up, make coffee, and spend the entire morning getting in the right headspace learning about vastly different subjects through experiential learning. For example, an app I built recently that is doing well involves a large amount of statistics, and while I learned bayesian stats/linear algebra for a previous project/algorithm, I now have to re-learn a lot of things that I forgot. So I wake up, do that for hours, and I enjoy it, every second of it. All the things I'm learning I utilize in my own work. Another example: Ive spent the last 40 days converting/optimizing my 10+ year vim config to neovim, so for that I had to learn Lua (easy), how neovim works, etc etc. I've spent maybe 100+ hours on that alone over 40 days, ALL of that was learning. I have maybe 50 forum posts/IRC questions where all I did was learn for some purpose. Nowhere in here did i mention "hype stuff". Literally nothing in my day is concerned with hype. The vast amount of my time, 10-15 hours a day is spend coding on any one of my companies, learning all I need to for them (I am a solo developer on all of them with no tech employees).

> I humbly request you to point out the number of situations in your life where you applied second-order partial differential equations to solve anything that you are doing

I once spent over a year developing an ad network bidding optimization algorithm, and while it didn't involve differential equations it did involve a large amount of advanced statistics topics + machine learning topics, in essentially how to perform billions of ad auctions to optimize X with hundreds of input variables. I did that completely alone in my own bedroom. Ad network bidding mechanisms are black boxes because no one wants to expose how their X-priority pricing optimizations work, so I basically had to learn everything myself entirely from scratch, only scraping the bottom of the barrel with multi-year old white papers on ad network optimization. After some time doing this myself, just spending hours and hours each day doing this, I showed my work to the #2 developer at the largest mobile ad network at the time who developed their algorithm, and he told me that he was extremely surprised to see I got that far as a single person in the time I did, and mentioned it took their whole team to come up with something similar in a longer amount of time. And yet....... I didn't go to school for computer science. I literally went to college for the arts. Everything I have ever known is 100% self taught. I've never had mentors, classes, or anything. I dont even REMEMBER the things I learned in high school or college. Regarding graphics... one time I wanted to learn how rendering engines work so I learned all the math behind how to make a spinning 3d cube using different projection matrices etc, and then learned all the math that goes into that, and WHY it works. I'm horrible at math, btw. That took about a week, and I got to make a 3d cube, that had proper lighting etc, simply by just lots and lots of learning and reading. I have a HUGE amount of examples like this, literally hundreds over the many years.

I am not offended, I'm more disgusted, as anyone who personally sets their own goal posts far lower intentionally to "get by in life", has a repulsive mindset to me. It's literally "repelling". Notice I said the mindset, not the actual PERSON. I personally aim to be the best I can possibly be, in every manifestation of everything I do. Every single thing I partake in, I optimize/improve it, I try to be the absolute best at it. I'm not saying every person has to be like that, as obivously they are not, but they should not SEEK to be average, they should spend energy introspecting what blocks them. For me personally it feels organic, natural. Nothing to do with ego, and only to do with what "makse sense" in the most blinding way possible. We are put on this earth with free will, and the ability to grow, so why should the "grow" subprocess not take priority, as long as health and joy are balanced along with it. I find the actual process extremely rewarding and joyful.

It sounds like you should try to be an entrepreneur perhaps, where you will learn all of that on your own and actually do what you will. If you are smarter than average, then start utilizing it to its fullest potential. There are hundreds of millions of dollars to be made when you stop working for other people and work for yourself. That advice isnt good for most people though, but if you feel like you want to challenge your mind and USE the things you are better than average at, then do it. Theres literally so many avenues in tech that you can do that with, and they DONT involve........ startups, funding, or even other developers. I have worked with the same business partner for many years, and we have built countless very hard technical things that have absolutely crushed. I am not the smartest in the room (my last comment was an IQ test I took that was ~125, so nothing spectacular), but I am absolutely the best at integrating intelligent design with execution, in a way non-technical people can understand, while also getting my hands dirty with the most complex technical aspects, even if it means learning an entire part of a field to do it. This to me is the sweet spot.

What is your exact thing you are stuck on, if you had to distil it down into a single problem? Is it that you can't find a way to convert your above average intelligence into dollars?

[badpun]

> The vast amount of my time, 10-15 hours a day is spend coding on any one of my companies

This is the key. Vast majority of people can maybe code for 20 hours a week, and not 60-100 like you can. If you're blessed with such genetics, your mindset makes sense, as it will actually generate good payoff for you. However, bear in mind that regular ("average") people play in a different, much lower league.

[Exuma]

Your replies sound good on the surface, but also enabling. I don't buy it. The vast majority CAN do that, when they're not sedated with TV, drinking every weekend, smoking weed every day, etc. The mind of course is a muscle, and it must be built up like any other muscle.

I've helped ... maybe close to 70-100 people over the years, some for only a day, some for months, some for a year. (helping them with coding, business stuff, etc). I have a lot of solid reference points of what all different wakes of life are capable of.

Take ADHD for instance... my first business partner had extreme ADHD and also used it effectively to earn a net worth over several hundred million. He started by selling drugs and poor (just to diffuse any ideas he was born rich like your other comment). He just had a bunch of ways to deal with it effectively and channel it.

My other business partner mainly does jujitsu a lot, and has a lower innate focus level, but he's done all sorts of combinations of activities and sleeping patterns and supplements and whatnot to generate the best possible method for focusing, and has done it. We both work together all day long. For example he has to work in silence, or have certain music playing.

I also have 2 half brothers that are not from the same dad (where I get my mental genetics from, as I am identical to my dad). My one brother works at a dispensary and has never worked his brain harder than literally pushing 5 buttons in order on the screen, was JUST talking to me about this extensively. I took him on a 'deep dive' coding session with me over the period of 6 hours and did that multiple days in a row, and he had a panic attack (sort of) about how intense it was. He felt bad for several days because of the stark realization how he's never used his brain that hard in his life (hes wanting to know code, and I brought him right in on a screenshare where I made him program extensively on deep parts of the app, diving right into the deep end, where he got total information overload). His reality in a sense was shattered, and he had literally an "awakening" of sorts because it made him realize where he's at, and what he's been doing, what he's NOT been doing, and gave him a reference point SO far outside his comfort zone that it caused all his remaining reference points to "recalibrate" to encompass that outlier. I didn't talk to him for a week to let it digest, and he later said he naturally started watching videos on his own and said it felt "really good" to use his brain like this. He's been doing it more and more, flexing it more and more.

This is the process through which one can do that, of course you're not going to do 15 hours of coding right away, but just by flexing it repeatedly and having moments of self awareness and self clarity, is it possible. I KNOW it's possible because I've seen many people do it (not to the level I do, but absolutely to the level where you can achieve great monetary success).

The problem is, most people will never GET that moment of self clarity becuase they don't have someone like me being harsh and telling them they're a loser and it's time to wake up. Everyone around them is an enabler telling them its in their genetics that they can't do it, that the other person is "lucky", or hand holding and coddling them into a continued sedated state of self deception.

[badpun]

I'm a good counterexample to that story though. I've started coding when I was nine, have Masters in Computer Science, have worked in software for roughly 15 years (most of that coding). I've taught myself linear algebra, 3d computer vision/vSLAM from scratch, computer graphics (incl. more advanced concepts like PBR, Mesh Shaders etc.), statistics and machine learning, and probably other things I'm forgetting now.

However, in the end I chose not to do anything with that knowledge and that interest, and work relatively simple back-end jobs. Why? Because, no matter how hard I try, I can't put in more than 15-20 hours of hard focus per week. If I try to push myself harder, I just crash (sometimes even after two days - I get intense headaches on day three and my experiment is concluded). I've tried it probably dozens of times, and the results were always similar - if anything, it got worse with age (I had more energy in my twenties than now in my fourties).

[throwaway1183]

You are really literally like me because you did the things I did. I have also dabble with them. I have also experimented with it. Only thing is I never made anything valuable. I guess I only did it for sake of learning and being happy.

Conversation with Exuma has made me realize he only learns when he absolutely needs to, while I learn when I feel like learning.

Then I can't also put focus. Because of inefficiencies in other aspect of life. I can't optimize because I am just paranoid on most things. I would love to work for myself but I do not come from a background (because of work, energy and time) where I can sustain it. Maybe I should think of ways to do it and try to find ways.

However, do you think putting 2 hrs a week on a single project for extended time will take me to places?

[badpun]

> However, do you think putting 2 hrs a week on a single project for extended time will take me to places?

What places? Getting a job in the field? I think it could do it, unless the field is very hard to get into (e.g. 3d computer vision/vSLAM is considerably harder to get into than computer graphics, machine learning research is much harder to get into than applied machine learning (glorified data science) etc.). A good approach is to talk to some insiders in the field to get a feel of how hard would it be. If you don't know anyone, topical subreddits are not the worst place to ask this.

I went through exactly this path, even got some interviews, but learned that the jobs that would interest me the most are hardest to get into, and would mean a large pay decrease (I was making a ton in my current area of expertise). The nail in the coffin was chatting with some guy from Facebook AR (I met him on reddit) team who had my dream job and who said that, in my position, he'd prefer to just accumulate money and FIRE in 5 years, instead of starting a new career.

[Exuma]

To add small amount of context, I do also enjoy learning when its not a 'tool' but its a very narrow margin of the medium. For example, i've probably watched every single 3blue1brown video on youtube there is, yet I won't really use any of that. I watch them while I'm eating and any time they come out, as well as a few similar channels.

But this sort of learning is more about the purpose of stimulating my mind with challenges rather than acquiring knowledge.

80% of my time learning is when its a tool, 20% of the time its for stimulation, 100% of the time it is for some meaning other than it being satisfying to collect knowledge and facts, which is 0% of the time.

[Exuma]

so 3 hours of focus per day? That sounds like a medical problem to me, so if it really is that then it is understandable. But thats not the vast majority of people like you mentioned (although the vast majority does suffer from focus problems).

Have you tried fasting or other things to help try to narrow down the cause of your headaches? Have you had extensive blood panels (a full panel, not a simple one your doctor will give you... I think you have to order the FULL full ones online). A lot of my business partners and people I work with do that biohacking stuff where they try to find out every way to augment their body. They do weird stuff like fly to mexico to get stem cell injections, etc. Ive never been into that, I just take a multivitamin, but it's possible there is something you're deficient in that could be found out? I'd be almost certain there is SOME combination of SOME THING on this earth that would fix whatever it is, even if it's not well medically documented.

I know a number of people with severe neurotic issues, like TRUE neurotic issues, and fasting is really the only common denominator of what has helped them more than any medicine. People have thought fasting was fugazi woo-woo for the longest time but I believe medical science is now catching up as to the benefit (harvard studies, etc). Ive fruit fasted for 45 days once and healed my gall bladder after the doctor couldnt explain what was wrong with it and their only option was to cut it out.

[badpun]

My mother is similar. We both don't have that much energy and seem to tire quicker than most people. I've tried some things over the years, done paid blood panel (not the most fancy one you could get), fixed my sleep, excercised etc. I think it probably comes down to below average genes.

The headaches themselves are from coffee (ab)use. But, without the coffee, I would succumb to fatigue earlier.

Right now, it doesn't matter that much. Luckily, through some smart choices (always aggresively going for the highest paying work I could get) and through frugal living, I've FIREd and now live a life of leisure, which seems to fit my disposition quite nicely. Not everyone was made to be a star.

[throwaway1183]

Arguing with you has been quite productive! Thanks for writing the detailed response. It shows me the perspective of where you come from. I am baffled and in awe at what you can achieve with one correct process and routine. I still have some opinions but those are useless because you have a proven track of the things that I exactly wanted to know.

1. How do you get the confidence over time? I am sure I can also do what you can but will take me 3x or heck even 4x the effort. So, it feels a bit sad to know by the time I am done, it will be worthless despite enjoying the process.

2. I liked how you admitted you forget things too. So this process of relearning for the nth time, does it make the experience enjoyable? For me, I find it tiring to know that I have to do the same thing over and over and some people just get by. It feels kind of disheartening. And more to it, now it's AI that can do it better.

3. I have tried different things big or small. Did quite a few interesting things but nothing remarkable at all. I like engineering/design and making usable things. However, whatever I do is never enough for "others" while it is really okay for me. Now this is the source of all issues. Once I finish a project, I move on to the next project or venture. There is no introspection from what I built. I just like building but not pushing. Consequently, they do not look impressive because they are just replicas nothing more. I get the illusion that I am learning things, but once I blindfold and try to recreate it, I can't. It is disheartening too.

4. I actually come from a disadvantaged background. English is not my primary language. Thus, I put in extra effort whenever I do something to compensate for the lack of communication. It has helped me. Now not everything can be communicated when there is no remarkable portfolio to show. As you have proven yourself, things take time to build. The problem here is I can't afford the luxury of time because of other aspects of life. I get an hour of free personal time at max.

5. The whole idea of finding an average job was to finish it within 4 hours (because I don't have to put effort) and later use the remaining time for myself. This is the only way in which I believe I can make substantial progress in self-improvement.

6. Answering your final question. I am poor in terms of background, skills, and execution (time management). I can do enough to get by but not enough to impress or get other people interested in me for opportunities. This is why I am direly seeking a position where I can get by and still get a chance to improve. I thought college would give that, but it didn't. I thought a postgraduate would give that, but it didn't. I want something easy because I am genuinely tired.

So, I am not living up to my potential, I am not getting hired because I don't have "experience" for entry-level positions in the field I am interested in. (Idk why it's called entry-level). Consequently, I just want to get through life, find easy tasks, get things done, and then carry on from there.

[Exuma]

These are good question, and the first one of which is especially poignant for me, far more than you would realize. I have in past talked about intuition based learning (me) vs ... what I'd say 90% of developers are which is a practical/observational based learning. For me ESPECIALLY it's poignant because in my internal model of the world, I do NOT rely on things I've achieved previously to "carry me" through future interactions, or confidence in speaking. I simply don't think like that. Instead, it feels a like an silent void where every situation is infinitely complex with multitudes of different variables from every other experience in my life. I don't think many people are like that. I talk a lot more about this elsewhere if you actually are interested. It was months back let me find it... in it I talk more about my version of "confidence"

Ok I found it, start here: https://i.imgur.com/o3xT5Jh.png and then my reply here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36693161

I have no idea if you are like that or not, but don't cut yourself short thinking it takes 3-4x the effort.

Let me think about your questions throughout the day, as my mind has a lot layers of interconnected fibers, and I want to distil them all down into the most meaningful/impactful statements.

[throwaway1183]

Sure, take your time!

After reading your reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36693161, it resonated with me because I am this type of learner. I need to break things fast, reach the wrong answer, and get stuck so that I can see examples and learn from them. It is really good at getting what is out there. But being in academia surrounded by people who learn from abstraction and words, I can't get any confidence to speak about myself. It feels like I have seen the other side and now I am constantly evaluating myself with that.

I always thought this way of learning was fake learning because everything relied on intuition and most of the time my intuition was wrong. I had to go back re-read and attempt again. Once I fixed it, I was done with it and next time I had to restart from scratch because to me, it's a completely new situation. This made me feel like I never learnt anything in the past and I was actually someone who cheated the system because I knew exact things to be said in the right way. Like an incantation of a magic spell.

But after reading your reply, I will now dive a bit deeper into this kind of learning and see how it resonates with my internal world and learning! Thanks for sharing it!

> The downside is always when I’m around strong people of the other type I get the sense they don’t respect this style of learning sometimes. It comes through in their words, tone, subtle body language cues.

This is also one source of in-confidence. Everything started with the introduction of LLMs. It just punishes the person like me because I have a unique way of doing things. I claim this because I rapidly process information, try to understand behaviors and execute it. In any case I can't do it, I resort into finding other sources who has done it. I can understand the solution as long as it is written in clear way. It can be research paper, books, equations, code, blog, even just some random discussion as long as it hints into certain direction to trigger a spark. After that I try to use whatever I think is the best.

Simply put, I can give a solution, not just the best one but one to get 80% job done.

[Exuma]

It's absolutely not fake. I still haven't replied yet but I did want to say this one thing while you're waiting... A lot of people dislike MBTI by saying its "not scientific," but this to me is irrelevant as I am an extremely introspective person who has dived to the ends of the earth to understand myself. I've spent what must be 100,000+ hours introspecting and for most of my life there existed many many paradoxes that I just COULDNT ever explain, let alone even begin to understand. They existed as complex webs of phantoms in my own mind, where I'd go to speak it and it would "collapse" in meaning to "not actually what I meant". It wasn't until I discovered my MBTI type (INTJ) and how my cognitive function stack operates that I had about 1000 epiphanies that blew my mind. It was one of the most profound introspective moments of my whole life, because it made about... maybe 20 or 30 paradoxes Ive never been able to understand all click right after another after another after anohter.

2 things:

1) MBTI is most effective when looking at the cognitive functions, NOT just the overall "type" which is more generic. You really have to research about each function type, and what your function stack is, to get the most value.

2) I don't think MBTI is a perfect solution for every type, but I'm one of the lucky types (maybe intuitive introverts) who I feel benefit the most. For my type specifically, it describes me SO WELL that its scary. Far far more accurately than a 'random' or non-scientific theory could describe me.

I watched this video about myself and it says things that no person has ever understood about me, at a level so deep its like touching the heart of my soul: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKKzX-D2-GM

You could look more into taking this test to narrow down what your function stack is https://sakinorva.net/functions

If you resonate at all with what I said in that post you might be something similar.

When I understood these things, I stopped seeing them as me being "broken" per se... I mean I never thought I was broken but I would be very frustrated why my mind was always "empty" when other engineers seem to always have a neverending objective stream of concrete ideas.

Over time, as I read more and more and more about functions, I started to see and relate to people much better and differently, and also see how the parts of me I used to be confused at are actually huge advantages. And the areas where I am weak at (extremely in-depth domain knowledge) I can interact with those people and lean on them for that.

[sokoloff]

> it describes me SO WELL that its scary.

There are only 16 types. While that's a few more than zodiac signs, does it seem likely that 16 categories would describe people in a specific enough way to be falsifiable? I see them as 16 categories with overwhelmingly positively biased descriptions, making people prone to seeing themself in the category description.

I'm not saying the underlying axes are completely wrong, but if you read the 4 descriptions which are one letter off of your MBTI type, do at least 2 of them also resonate with you?

https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/the-16-...

[throwaway1183]

I did these tests some times ago! If I fall into INTP/ENTP because I think of myself as an ambivert and my introvertness is a spectrum that varies with my emotions.

Thanks for pointing a out functions! Will definitely check it out.