I was gonna say. I did it with French some years ago and it worked like a charm.
Later I became obsessed with Argentine tango. Unfortunately, I thought, "comprehensible input" won't work with dancing, especially not a couple's dance. Nevertheless, unable to dance every day due to my local scene being quite small, I instead consumed a boatload of YouTube videos during my spare time. Instructional content, performances, class summaries, and what have you. And I progressed super quickly.
First off, as a leader, it is good to have seen competent dancers with good musicality and how they choose their steps to fit with phrases of songs. That much fits in parallel with input-based language acquisition techniques. But I also think I gained a good amound of intuition about how to move my own body. Not perfect intuition, but more than nothing, which was very much my starting point.
Watching lots of Doom videos on Youtube helped me learn some aspects of the game surprisingly fast. I can't control Doomguy as fast and as precisely as the best Doom youtubers but I can read a situation in the game about as fast and as good as they can and often come up with the plan they eventually follow faster than they do.
I get it! Years ago my obsession was Classic Tetris, and it was common knowledge that watching skilled players at work would improve your own stacking and strategy. A lot of the pros openly admitted to watching their competition while starting out in order to get good
I wonder how the indie/entrepreneur space is doing nowadays. I tried to do it myself but never really got anywhere this was back in 2016. Whenever I go on sites/subreddits around this topic a lot of the posts just seem to be about generating clout/some fake revenue numbers/screenshot of earnings. It's like entrepreneurs selling to each other.
I suppose nowadays it's probably around LLM wrappers, photo generation, video generation services... there were those niche ones in the past like the teacher with her bingo cards maker
It's still in my mind as I don't like waiting for a paycheck, just wondering how the space is doing nowadays
quite sad, the space had inspirational stories. & IndieHackers brought those stories to the masses to inspire.
but later 'fast money / influencers' entered the space. It has become a mini ponzi sell a starter pack / template to wannabe indiehackers, sell a course to wannabe indiehackers.
For solo founders I guess if you wanna get all meat no bones stick to MicroConf
It's doing better than ever! LLMs offer the equivalent of $500k+ in outside funding if used correctly, so there's a huge uptick in # of new bootstrapped startups.
In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.
For post-product-market-fit hires or scale-up engineering teams, the interview process could skip LeetCode and instead test how well candidates can identify and debug issues introduced by LLMs. Less binary trees, more LLM bug-hunting
I don't want to use the word "grift", but it really seems like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to new ideas for products a lot of the time. Go and read this month's HN "Who is hiring" thread for an example. It's all either fintech crypto crap that never seems to come to fruition for anything normal people want to use, weird microloans, and products for extremely small niches like using AI to help with gift-giving and so forth.
It's honestly hard to imagine wanting to work 12 hour days to advance some of these interests. We're seeing some of the greatest minds of our generation lost to these kinds of ephemeral, short-lived projects that flame up, consume VC, and mostly burn out uselessly, having created a bunch of IP that is shelved never to be seen again. What's the point?
Maybe we really all ought to just get drafted. At least I'd be able to explain to my kids what I do for a living.
Forced conscription sucks, at least a difference between real war and something mandatory like 2 years of reserves equivalent (I'm not talking about US)
There is a book called "Talent is overrated" it essentially says, you need to 1) invest time, 2) do targeted practice, and 3) have a mentor, who helps you in targeted practice. Practice alone is not enough, it must be targeted at 1) what is relevant and/or 2) where your biggest weakness is at the moment.
> The difference between being good and being great isn’t talent or formal training, but the invisible practice that happens when you're just living life.
Pure nonsense.
Necessary != sufficient, and honestly neither are demonstrated in the anecdotes.
It's possible to be great at something simply by practicing, assuming normal capabilities. But great here just means "better than virtually everyone". Being mediocre among people who practice regularly it makes you immediately better than basically everyone who has done it once or twice. By most definitions that's "great".
Median daily StarCraft ranked player? You're great at StarCraft.
Second, if you start young enough, you get the compounding effects of time. You're now "pretty good among lifelong daily players in their prime". That's Olympic/ world class.
Like that guy who had kids just to make them Chess masters. He did so by making chess part of the family life, so integral it wasn't working it just was. The guy from the original post actually.
So it's tempting to say things like TFA posits, and while I'm not sure it's 100% true, it's definitely not 100% false or pure rubbish.
How is IndieHackers doing since being independent? I used to use it quite a bit but it seemed like recently it's focused more on articles, similar to Starter Story I guess, which makes a ton of money so I can't blame you for going that route, than the forum (which I can't even figure out how to get to anymore). But then again, the forum had quite a lot of promotion and spam that got boring to read after a while.
This article might be interesting, and I'm not against AI use. I am not interested in AI slop though, and I immediately lost interest in the banner photo with nonsense text in it.
AI polarization is a little interesting. The AI generated image prompted the parent to not even consider whether the content was on topic. This might be a decent heuristic, but it's bound to throw out a lot of potentially useful stuff as well.
Thanks for the change, sorry if I came off as too aggressive. I've seen some uses of AI that were very similar that strictly made the article worse and it would have been better to simply delete it. I'll concede that I simply didn't get it, and that's a me problem here. I'll give the article a more fair chance when I have some time later :)
This article is quite shallow. It's essentially saying, in order to excel at something it needs to become a part of you.
There's some truth there, but Charles Bukowski said it much better and more succinctly with, "Don't try." [1]
1: https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer
Good read, a summary:
When you become obsessed with A, your whole life becomes a practice of A.
Or, you can live a balanced happy life with relationships and touching grass where you are "in the moment", and not always distracted.
being passionate about something is not a distraction
Being passionate and obsessive are two different things.
> Turn idle time into mental rehearsal
Any psychologist would bash your head with a book for following this.
This is the same thing that AJATT (All Japanese All The Time or something) recommends to learn a new language too.
I was gonna say. I did it with French some years ago and it worked like a charm.
Later I became obsessed with Argentine tango. Unfortunately, I thought, "comprehensible input" won't work with dancing, especially not a couple's dance. Nevertheless, unable to dance every day due to my local scene being quite small, I instead consumed a boatload of YouTube videos during my spare time. Instructional content, performances, class summaries, and what have you. And I progressed super quickly.
First off, as a leader, it is good to have seen competent dancers with good musicality and how they choose their steps to fit with phrases of songs. That much fits in parallel with input-based language acquisition techniques. But I also think I gained a good amound of intuition about how to move my own body. Not perfect intuition, but more than nothing, which was very much my starting point.
Watching lots of Doom videos on Youtube helped me learn some aspects of the game surprisingly fast. I can't control Doomguy as fast and as precisely as the best Doom youtubers but I can read a situation in the game about as fast and as good as they can and often come up with the plan they eventually follow faster than they do.
I get it! Years ago my obsession was Classic Tetris, and it was common knowledge that watching skilled players at work would improve your own stacking and strategy. A lot of the pros openly admitted to watching their competition while starting out in order to get good
I wonder how the indie/entrepreneur space is doing nowadays. I tried to do it myself but never really got anywhere this was back in 2016. Whenever I go on sites/subreddits around this topic a lot of the posts just seem to be about generating clout/some fake revenue numbers/screenshot of earnings. It's like entrepreneurs selling to each other.
I suppose nowadays it's probably around LLM wrappers, photo generation, video generation services... there were those niche ones in the past like the teacher with her bingo cards maker
It's still in my mind as I don't like waiting for a paycheck, just wondering how the space is doing nowadays
quite sad, the space had inspirational stories. & IndieHackers brought those stories to the masses to inspire.
but later 'fast money / influencers' entered the space. It has become a mini ponzi sell a starter pack / template to wannabe indiehackers, sell a course to wannabe indiehackers.
For solo founders I guess if you wanna get all meat no bones stick to MicroConf
It's doing better than ever! LLMs offer the equivalent of $500k+ in outside funding if used correctly, so there's a huge uptick in # of new bootstrapped startups.
In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org chat.
I hope this is a parody post and not actually the real exhultations of an actual founder.
For post-product-market-fit hires or scale-up engineering teams, the interview process could skip LeetCode and instead test how well candidates can identify and debug issues introduced by LLMs. Less binary trees, more LLM bug-hunting
I don't want to use the word "grift", but it really seems like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to new ideas for products a lot of the time. Go and read this month's HN "Who is hiring" thread for an example. It's all either fintech crypto crap that never seems to come to fruition for anything normal people want to use, weird microloans, and products for extremely small niches like using AI to help with gift-giving and so forth.
It's honestly hard to imagine wanting to work 12 hour days to advance some of these interests. We're seeing some of the greatest minds of our generation lost to these kinds of ephemeral, short-lived projects that flame up, consume VC, and mostly burn out uselessly, having created a bunch of IP that is shelved never to be seen again. What's the point?
Maybe we really all ought to just get drafted. At least I'd be able to explain to my kids what I do for a living.
Is it better or worse than when the greatest minds of our generation were lost to increasing user engagement by any means necessary?
Forced conscription sucks, at least a difference between real war and something mandatory like 2 years of reserves equivalent (I'm not talking about US)
This is new level of snake oil. When you're not selling your own snake oil, but trying to piggyback off of other people.
Burn out speedrun 101.
If you want to keep your sanity, you need to find your own passion, not try to emulate others (especially with crazy routines like the examples).
There is a book called "Talent is overrated" it essentially says, you need to 1) invest time, 2) do targeted practice, and 3) have a mentor, who helps you in targeted practice. Practice alone is not enough, it must be targeted at 1) what is relevant and/or 2) where your biggest weakness is at the moment.
> The difference between being good and being great isn’t talent or formal training, but the invisible practice that happens when you're just living life.
Pure nonsense.
Necessary != sufficient, and honestly neither are demonstrated in the anecdotes.
Two things.
It's possible to be great at something simply by practicing, assuming normal capabilities. But great here just means "better than virtually everyone". Being mediocre among people who practice regularly it makes you immediately better than basically everyone who has done it once or twice. By most definitions that's "great".
Median daily StarCraft ranked player? You're great at StarCraft.
Second, if you start young enough, you get the compounding effects of time. You're now "pretty good among lifelong daily players in their prime". That's Olympic/ world class.
Like that guy who had kids just to make them Chess masters. He did so by making chess part of the family life, so integral it wasn't working it just was. The guy from the original post actually.
So it's tempting to say things like TFA posits, and while I'm not sure it's 100% true, it's definitely not 100% false or pure rubbish.
How is IndieHackers doing since being independent? I used to use it quite a bit but it seemed like recently it's focused more on articles, similar to Starter Story I guess, which makes a ton of money so I can't blame you for going that route, than the forum (which I can't even figure out how to get to anymore). But then again, the forum had quite a lot of promotion and spam that got boring to read after a while.
This article might be interesting, and I'm not against AI use. I am not interested in AI slop though, and I immediately lost interest in the banner photo with nonsense text in it.
Author here. Good feedback: the text isn't nonsense, but it requires background knowledge that the man on the right is the rapper Eminem.
I lost interest when I got to the email address box to subscribe. Interrupts the flow and makes me skim the rest.
That was my first reaction, too, but it’s not actually nonsense - it’s a depiction of Eminem practicing rhymes in a casual conversation.
It’s valid feedback for the author, though. I had to read the article to understand the image.
AI polarization is a little interesting. The AI generated image prompted the parent to not even consider whether the content was on topic. This might be a decent heuristic, but it's bound to throw out a lot of potentially useful stuff as well.
Yeah, it would probably work better if that image were positioned after the reference to Eminem thinking of rhymes all day.
I'm an Eminem fan and didn't get that reference FWIW.
I thought it was some "Silicon Valley bro" that wanted you to drink kelp, and build your biceps or something
Gotcha! Shame on me. Just slapped a "Slim Shady" label on his hoodie. Won't fully stop the bleeding but at least a few more people will get it.
Thanks for the change, sorry if I came off as too aggressive. I've seen some uses of AI that were very similar that strictly made the article worse and it would have been better to simply delete it. I'll concede that I simply didn't get it, and that's a me problem here. I'll give the article a more fair chance when I have some time later :)