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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 28 Dec 2019
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      I will admit I hate doing handyman shit now. Used to be proud to be able to do basic stuff as a teenager but jeez it’s high effort, low (psychological) reward. I’d get bored to tears if I had to do full time handyman work like minor maintenance and repairs in a building all day.

      12 replies 3 retweets 77 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 28 Dec 2019
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      What makes blue collar work different from white collar work is not manual labor vs information work. Both are 70-90% information processing. It’s just the low inductive generalizability of the information work. Blue collar work is human big data work.

      4 replies 1 retweet 28 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 28 Dec 2019
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      The last lightbulb I changed was on a Toyota Corolla. This one was a Volvo S40. Very different. Iirc on the Corolla I had to change both left and right and the procedures were slightly different on the 2 sides because of asymmetries under the hood. Meatspace is all corner cases.

      2 replies 0 retweets 18 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 28 Dec 2019
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      Now I know why I’m also increasingly tired of building and running my own websites even with low/no code Wordpress. It’s digital blue collar work. You spend hundreds of hours on this shit and learn nothing interesting besides how to do the shit.

      2 replies 4 retweets 77 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 28 Dec 2019
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      Any romantic sentimentality I had about hands-on tinkering on such things is long gone. Gimme the turnkey SaaS thing and the Uber/lyft apps. Tinkering is only fun when there’s a good chance of unreasonably leveraged inductive generalization ahas.

      1 reply 1 retweet 30 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 28 Dec 2019
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      The more mature a tech stack, the lower the chances of breakthrough upsides from tinkering. I’m not going to invent a new spark plug by replacing lightbulbs and wiper blades. I’m not going to invent blogging 2.0 fiddling with theme CSS. Need advanced conceptual knowledge for that

      1 reply 4 retweets 34 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 28 Dec 2019
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      Never trust anyone who waxes eloquent about the poetic spiritual joys of working with your hands. They’re crazy. The goal is not to achieve enlightenment fixing your shit. The goal is to pay the other guy to achieve enlightenment fixing your shit.

      11:32 AM - 28 Dec 2019
      • 6 Retweets
      • 34 Likes
      • rupertcooper Captain Meowmori Tim Converse Nate Lounsbury Fellow Conspirator Bombadil Brin Dev Chhatbar Sagar Dubey Γνῶθι σεαυτ
      5 replies 6 retweets 34 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 28 Dec 2019
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          Not saying you should be contemptuous of or entirely avoid such work, but you shouldn’t fetishize or romanticize it, or develop a reactionary suspicion of leveraged conceptual-symbolic information work. You should try to minimize and automate it and level up as much as you can.

          3 replies 0 retweets 25 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 28 Dec 2019
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          Try to work at the highest abstraction level you’re capable of without becoming authoriritarian-high-modernist legibilist about lower level stuff. Retaining that connection doesn’t take much. Watching someone changing a lightbulb can be as good as doing it yourself.

          4 replies 5 retweets 41 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jan 24
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          Another fabulously unsatisfying maintenance chore done. One more left for tomorrow. And backlog for brave new world of dumbass digital maintenance stuff to take care of.

          4 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jan 25
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          List of things I’d have been excited to do as a kid but now just found tedious and annoying and wish had a butler to do: replace car battery 🤬 socket wrenches

          2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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        6. End of conversation
        1. Bombadil Brin‏ @bjorn_daporn 28 Dec 2019
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          Replying to @vgr

          Zen and the art of paying the Los Altos bike mechanic...

          0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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        1. lyto‏ @no_harm_ 28 Dec 2019
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          Replying to @vgr

          It depends on exactly what kind of tasks you mean, but I find that a work rhythm of splitting logs or working a lathe is more relaxing than those of coding or writing, which for me can be pretty frenetic or anxious. Agreed that household maintenance is not the highest calling.

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        1. Misha Saul‏ @misha_saul 28 Dec 2019
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          Replying to @vgr

          E.g. Levin from Anna Karenina 🤮🤮🤮

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        1. Brandon Hudgeons‏ @bhudgeons Jan 25
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          Replying to @vgr

          It is kind of nice to do something, finish it, and actually be done with it. My information work is never finished.

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