good things take time go | zig | rust Looking for opportunities in Distributed Systems and Databases git: https://xitter.cf/t.co/E22e9rNh8H
Joined November 2024
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amgh retweeted
Pain is information
As a child, you touched something hot, and it burned you. That pain gave you a piece of information: be careful touching hot things.
When you sign up to run a marathon, you are signing up for pain. But whether or not you keep running is up to you. In Haruki Murakami’s words “pain is inevitable but suffering is optional”. You can choose pain without choosing suffering.
Pain is information, and information is painful. Rewiring your brain is not a frictionless process. Some knowledge can only be discovered the hard way.
The sooner you can convert pain into knowledge, the sooner you can experience the next useful pain. Don’t put yourself through the same pain too many times. To access new information you must experience new pains.
They say “knowledge is power”. If pain is information, then pain can be converted to power. To do so, you must learn to control your suffering, accept that scars are beautiful.
If you felt pain, ask what information it gave you. If that information was useful, seek the next pain. You are learning.
ALT As a child, you touched something hot, and it burned you. That pain gave you a piece of information: be careful touching hot things. When you sign up to run a marathon, you are signing up for pain. But whether or not you keep running is up to you. In Haruki Murakami’s words “pain is inevitable but suffering is optional”. You can choose pain without choosing suffering. Pain is information, and information is painful. Rewiring your brain is not a frictionless process. Some knowledge can only be discovered the hard way. The sooner you can convert pain into knowledge, the sooner you can experience the next useful pain. Don’t put yourself through the same pain too many times. To access new information you must experience new pains. They say “knowledge is power”. If pain is information, then pain can be converted to power. To do so, you must learn to control your suffering, accept that scars are beautiful. If you felt pain, ask what information it gave you. You are learning.
amgh retweeted
Oh, to be clear, I will very happily keep making videos long past when LLMs can generate clear explainers. I hope people have found value in my videos because they explain things clearly, but that's not even the highest-order bit for what makes a video land, in my opinion.
amgh retweeted
The critical thing here is that AI, in its current form, can't give you solid foundations. So far all interesting non-slop success stories with AI that I've seen is where all the strong core was already in-place, and AI was following the patterns without being able to screw much.
Which, I want to stress it, doesn't mean that AI can't help you with optimization work. It's just when you optimize a turd you'll get optimized turd, and if you don't know what you're doing you won't even know that you have a turd.
when I started writing my engine, my expectation was that it would take 4 to 5 years to get it to a level where everybody could use it.
instead it took 18 months, and that's because I only even started using AI code in July, after Fable 5.
the actual core runtime of a game engine (the part that actually matters), can be written by hand by an experience programmers in a couple of months give or take.
the problem is the sheer amount of glue code you have to write to make it usable: editor code, serialization code, supporting different graphics features per platform, refactoring systems to make sure everything works together without impacting performance, the list goes on.
that kind of code is neither fun to write nor an exercise in technical thinking, and it made up 70% of the work before.
now we have automation for a big part of it. not for the thinking part imo (Fable knows every trick in the book but it seems to struggle with deciding what to do with it), but for the manual work that came after it.
this will simultaneously unlock incredible progress, and incredible disruption. programming doesn't look the same, jobs don't look the same, running a company doesn't look the same. we will have to figure out the new normal in the upcoming years.
do I miss writing code? every day. I went through rough times this year trying to come to terms with this new reality. part of me wants it back, the other part is excited about what the future will look like.
amgh retweeted
I'd like to make software that advances the state of the art and improves the lives of millions around the world :)
amgh retweeted
This is just clankerslop, e.g. no constraints that weren’t expressed to the clanker with automated verification that those constraints are solved for. To form the full set of such constraints, you’d need to exhaustively imagine the program and rigorously build the set of constraints for all program behavior, implicit and explicit. That assumes they are even testable via automated verification systems, which is not true for many things, especially UI, workflow, and psychology related.
amgh retweeted
Are you becoming a master craftsperson?
Growing in understanding, putting in the hard work to hone your skill, day in day out, becoming the best you can be?
It’s fine to answer no, but a few years of working at your craft (with intention) will compound.
amgh retweeted
The thing I learned this year is that when engineers say they like working on “hard problems”, they actually don't. What they like is puzzle solving, and having a repertoire of patterns that they can pattern match onto traditionally hard problems, usually involving databases or something with scale, etc. And they know that the industry used to pay you a lot for how deep and broad this repertoire was. Unfortunately, in 2026, well, you have a cheat code machine that has infinite breadth and depth for pattern matching. So the question is, do you actually like hard problems? Because there are now hard problems that are a complection of engineering, product, society, culture, politics, and they are fairly intractable, probably unsolvable! Because if you do want to work on those actually hard problems, there is so much money that people will pay you for it. But you’ll have to face that truth about yourself first.
amgh retweeted
Drop the ego and then curiosity, exploration, and discovery emerge. The best part of technology.
"What if?"
It's better now than ever before.
amgh retweeted
DHH thinks grinding is dumb.
What he told us on My First Million:
- "I often hear entrepreneurs talk with such pride in their voice. Yeah, I grind. This is why I'm working a hundred hours a week."
- "I don't want to do that. My life is far too interesting to waste it grinding."
- "Grinding is the stupid shit you do in World of Warcraft when you're a peon."
amgh retweeted
We live so much of our life in negatives, in fact G.K. Chesterton referred to this as the second fall of man.
> don't drink because its bad for you.
> exercise or you will die early
> staying up late will harm your thinking
Everything is viewed through a negative. We no longer have the knowledge of good and evil, just evil.
Here is my good focused driver that I think about regularly
> Having joy in the craft drives you to action
You get to build what your brain can come up with. No where in the history of man has the imaginations been so thoroughly realized. What a time to be alive. Even better? You get to ask in english to explain a technical concept and out will come a (hopefully) accurate description!
I want to build something I love. Love fundamentally requires sacrifice. I want something that I cared for, worked hard for, and am proud of. My goal is not simply just the outcome. The finished product. The approximation of my idea manifested through a series of loops and prompts. My goal is not simply IKEA furniture, its discovery and joy and hardwork and being thoughtful and considering how to tame the behemoth. Ultimately, I want precisely the idea and ideal overlapping in the thing i craft.
amgh retweeted
Sometimes I run out of steam, sometimes I go down the wrong path, and some other times I deliberately take detours, but nobody can trick me into mistaking lesser stars for my true destination.
kristoff.it/blog/north-star/
amgh retweeted
Andrew is relentlessly building the world’s most powerful systems programming language (and toolchain).
He has my full support and trust (and frankly, sheer gratitude for holding firm on quality).
Props to @jetbrains for putting together a terrific interview.
