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.
Conversation
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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stuff involving soldering and components that i was pretty jazzed about as a kid is now like "ah, fuck, gotta break out the fucking soldering iron, lets get this over with"
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soldering is also such a low skill ceiling activity, especially if you do not decide to do robot-work like soldering SMT crap by hand
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guess what everything you want to solder now should never be soldered by a person unless you're doing it as a kind of sport
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