Attention Hackers - Work on Yourself

Hackers are particularly good at one thing: Hacking. But hackers are particularly bad at another thing: Sports.

\ Hackers who invest physical effort into their well-being are the minority. They use their bodies to perform organic duties, everything else falls into a clearly defined role model between brain and brain-container.

\ The image of a pale, over-sugared and anti-social loner who invents Bitcoin at night in a disused factory in front of a fap station with 16 screens corresponds to the hacker’s ideal, but one thing usually becomes a problem with the hacker’s ideal:

\ That the goal is to make the structure-porn that circulates in the hacker’s brain a reality, but structure-porn rarely succeeds on the first attempt. For structure-porn to get delivered successfully, many manual repetitions are necessary, and hackers hate repeating themselves.

\ Hackers usually work with a puzzle-solving approach. The puzzle is considered as finished as soon as it has been solved. Solving the puzzle a second time is stupid because it has already been solved.

\ I asked myself: Couldn’t a new approach be to solve the puzzle over and over again? To repeat the puzzle in an endless loop, like a bodybuilder in the gym works through his training program over and over again and builds up physical wealth, while hackers almost never build up physical wealth and become weaker and weaker under the increasing weights of technological progress?

\ Maybe I’m a bit crazy, but with the staggering progress of large language models, Devin AI, and inference with increasing levels of education, I like to think that a Shaolin approach could countermeasure weak codebases. That is: Write the same piece of code a million times.

\ I suggest an approach that I stole from the gym. The approach is called Repetition and goes like this:

1. Write code.
2. Delete the code written in Step 1.
3. Repeat.

\ We learn through repetition. The same principle applied in machine- and deep learning: the learning curve moves towards the optimum by Gradient Descent, in literature often represented by a ball rolling into a valley. The ball starts on a slope and will roll down the slope due to gravity. At the bottom of the valley, the ball has reached its optimum. It converged on the best possible configuration of its available resources.

\ When we put our intentions into action, we create momentum. If we keep creating momentum in a repeated manner, our cognition will gradually converge to the best possible configuration.

\ Millions of repetitions later, and the novice has become a master. Because this “essay” is about hackers, I prefer to say: wizards with cognitive abs. This is not an attempt to force you to go to the gym; I’m just forcing you to remember the motivations that inspired you to choose excellence.

\ Delete what you have achieved and achieve it again. And again, and again, and again.

\ Maybe your bachelor’s thesis is still lying around somewhere? Rewrite it. Bill Gates hates this trick, but it might work.

\ Bill Gates said in an interview that he looks for lazy engineers during the recruiting process at Microsoft. His statement really excited the lazy engineers. In programming classes, we repeated the D.R.Y. mantra hundreds of times - in computer science classes, as well as in professional literature. “Don’t repeat yourself,” they said. “Abstract, refactor, but keep your points of truth on a short leash,” they said, but I think there is a bit of delusion in this. Most coders out there have swallowed the blue pill, so they prefer to code the easy, 3rd-partied way. I see the cause of modern software degeneration to be exactly here.

\ The IT industry has always been driven by competition. Netscape vs Microsoft, Playstation vs XBox, Windows vs Linux … Not to mention the many thousands of start-up entrepreneurs who try to win every year. And while global climate policy melts the ice of Antarctica into mush layer by layer, the skillset of contemporary software development is melting into mush as well - layer by layer. As if the competition eats itself just for the sake of staying competitive.

The modern programming style treats libraries and APIs like first-class citizens. I sometimes find myself wondering whether what I am developing is still my own work or just a Lego technology meta-object cobbled together from 3rd party software.

\ We computer people call it Abstraction. It means something like “standing on the shoulders of giants” and claims that it is wiser to build on existing technology rather than reinventing the wheel every time. This implies that the modern IT landscape stands on a foundation that it does not understand.

\ This one Adonis guy in the outdoor pool with abs and a 1-to-n relationship between himself and the ladies accumulated his physical wealth through repetition. He climbed the train again and again because pains -> gains. I think we lost the connection to painful programming, and therefore, the stamina to finish groundbreaking endeavors.

\ Regain it.