[execat]

At risk of going off-topic, when I see comments like these, I wonder how the comment author comes up with these corrections (cross-checked, the comment is in fact true)

Did you have the number memorized or did you do a fact check on each of the numbers?

[kragen]

I didn't know the number was wrong, but something about the statement seemed very wrong, because the 565nm number is only 10nm away from 555nm, conventionally considered the absolute maximum wavelength of human visual sensitivity (683lm/W). And you can see that in the photopic sensitivity curves in the rest of the article: both red and green cones respond strongly to light all around that wavelength. So it seemed implausible that 565nm would be nearly invisible.

But I didn't know whether Ha was actually highly visible or just had a different wavelength. I didn't know 683lm/W either, and I wasn't exactly sure that 555nm was the peak, but I knew it was somewhere in the mid-500s. If I'd been less of a lazy bitch I would have fact-checked that statement to see where the error was.

[kragen]

I see that there's a [dead] reply by the kind of person who thinks "tryhard" is an insult and has applied it to me.

When I compare people I know about who tried hard to the people I know about who didn't try hard, literally every single person I would want to be like is one of the people who tried hard. I'm unable to imagine what it would be like to want to be like the other group.

I mean, I don't want to be like Michael Jordan, but I can imagine wanting to be like him, and in part this is because specifically what he's famous for is succeeding at something very difficult that he had to try unbelievably hard at.

So I'm delighted to declare myself a tryhard, or at least an aspiring tryhard.

Completely by coincidence, when I saw the tryhard comment, I happened to be reading https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/things-unlearned/:

> People don't really say this [that intelligence trumps expertise] explicitly, but it's conveyed by all the folk tales of the young college dropout prodigies revolutionizing everything they touch. They have some magic juice that makes them good at everything.

> If I think that's how the world works, then it's easy to completely fail to learn. Whatever the mainstream is doing is ancient history, whatever they're working on I could do it in a weekend, and there's no point listening to anyone with more than 3 years experience because they're out of touch and lost in the past.

> Similarly for programmers who go into other fields expecting to revolutionize everything with the application of software, without needing to spend any time learning about the actual problem or listening to the needs of the people who have been pushing the boulder up the hill for the last half century.

> This error dovetails neatly with many of the previous errors above eg [sic] no point learning how existing query planners work if I'm smart enough to arrive at a better answer from a standing start, no point learning to use a debugger if I'm smart enough to find the bug in my head.

> But a decade of mistakes later I find that I arrived at more or the less the point that I could have started at if I was willing to believe that the accumulated wisdom of tens of thousands of programmers over half a century was worth paying attention to.

> And the older I get, the more I notice that the people who actually make progress are the ones who are keenly aware of the bounds of their own knowledge, are intensely curious about the gaps and are willing to learn from others and from the past. One exemplar of this is Julia Evans, whose blog archives are a clear demonstration of how curiosity and lack of ego is a fast path to expertise.

[bhickey]

In this case I coincidentally spent a few hundred hours of hobby time over the last year designing hydrogen alpha telescopes.