You've misunderstood, I think: if I have something I want to experiment with or build, then I can learn what I need. What I have such enormous trouble doing that I'm nearly incapable of it, is going "I should learn this so I can do something, to be determined later, with it..." and then learning. Making up projects for the sake of learning, when I don't really care about the ends, also doesn't work.

I need the goal first, then I can learn what I need.

I do also learn things just because I want to and for no real purpose, but have never been any good at directing that impulse.

I've never worked with or for anyone who wanted to hire the team of PhDs.

That.

I’ve embraced that I cannot direct which topic my self-directed learning will take up and sustain (almost none of which ends up going toward tech stuff, aside from a span of some years in my teens and early 20s—and all of that was motivated by wanting to accomplish specific things with computers) and rely on assignments to motivate me for career-relevant learning.

I’ll learn whatever it takes to get the job done. Then stop, because I don’t actually care about the tech per se, most of the time, and trying to force myself to learn “just because” does nothing but make me miserable and waste time.

This isn’t even “how I approach learning as a generalist”, it’s how I became a generalist.

My interest in continuing to fiddle with stuff after the job’s done is basically zero.

My experience has been that it takes amazingly little effort to be above-median among practitioners at a lot of things. How many React developers have spent one entire hour reading through the core logic of React itself? How many people working with LLMs have read the Attention Is All You Need paper? How many people read about the disk storage layout of a database they’ve been told to use? It’s way less than half. It takes so very little to stand out.

[EDIT] FWIW I've yet to see anything that makes me confident enough to assign any strong and specific guess about the guy's motivations. I'm confident in "he was very online" and "he played Helldivers a lot, or at least spent a lot of time communicating with people who do" and that's about all I'd feel comfortable confidently asserting if someone asked me for the "TL;DR" on where we're at on that.

[edit] I’m not setting a trap, I actually would like to see it if there’s more than that, I’m not prepping to pounce on anyone who tries to help me out here.

However, any system that just uses age is useless. They’re always excessively cautious, so you may as well just not provide access at all for kids between the ages of 6 and 12 or so, if that’s all you have.

No, block all + allow lists are still where it’s at. Please make those work better.

(If anyone knows the magic to make Minecraft [java] work with macOS allowlist-only network access, I’d love to know what it is. The fucking launcher wants to talk to a half-dozen bare IP addresses to work, and the addresses change seemingly every single launch, from a pool of what must be many hundreds, at least, it’s completely unusable)

Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.

(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)

That was the first big test of whether we were going to enter a new era of normalized political violence, and we (his voters, but collectively we as a country) flunked it. Wave of violence it is, I guess. Reckoned at the time it wouldn’t be much fun, and go figure, it ain’t.

You can’t go in with legal gloves and no hitting below the belt et c. while your opponent is bare-knuckle and going for nut shots and headlocks. You’ll just get your ass kicked, every time, no matter how morally pure you feel about it.

Meanwhile, fixing gerrymandering almost certainly means getting Republican votes to do so. The only way to do that, in this environment, is going to be to make them believe their odds are better without gerrymandering, than with it. That means using it against them, until it’s made illegal.

Not giving enough of a shit to learn about… in some cases, seemingly anything, doesn’t mean you get to later claim “oh I didn’t want this, how could I have known?”

I’ve given a lot of leeway on that stuff over my life, and after this last election, that’s over. Anyone who doesn’t get it at this point has raised stupidity to such an art form that they’ve achieved immorality. That’s aside from the ones who just outright want bad things to happen, which is a lot of people.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of democratic politicians are openly against outright bans and quite a few of them even mean it—Democrats managing to pass even some better version of the extremely-partial AWB is fantasy any time soon, and I very much doubt they’d get half their own people to vote to restrict firearms any more than that. (Setting aside that the courts have recently set perhaps the narrowest scope for allowable gun restrictions in the country’s history, so it might not matter even if they could pass any of this)

I believe there has long been a significant gap between what national-stage elected republicans say and do, and what Republican voters say and want them to do.

Frankly, what Republican voters say they want is often a lot meaner than anything their politicians were delivering. I’ve not only heard “why don’t they just build a wall?” from ordinary not-terminally-online R voters, I’ve heard, many times going back 20+ years, “they should just mine the border”. Kilmeade’s comment about just killing homeless people who wouldn’t accept aid (who cares why they don’t, I guess)? I’ve heard it, that’s not new, what’s new is people that prominent saying it.

R voter sentiment also veers far away from the (Republican-initiated) neoliberal (ex-)consensus on trade. (Incidentally, this also isn’t popular on the left, but both major parties agreed on it for more than 30 years, so it didn’t matter).

Dropping lots of foreign aid? Mass government worker firings? Sending the army in to cities to fight out-of-control crime or brutally quelling riots with the army (that one’s on the “we’ll see” list but if we get four full years, the smart money says we will see it)? Normal stuff to hear on a wishlist from an awful lot of R voters. They’ll just tell you this stuff.

I could go on.

Trump got where he is by exploiting a large gap between what voters want and what parties have been delivering. This gap was huge for the republicans, and there was a little overlap with own-voter dissatisfaction with Democrats. He was able to make voters believe he’d do many of the things they’d long wanted their elected officials to do, but that they weren’t doing, and often weren’t even talking about doing.

One my dad reliably latches on to is “they’re going to take your guns”. Trump used this, I’m pretty sure, all three races. Weirdly there were never even moves toward doing this the time he lost. It’s as if this was just bullshit. But, it gets voters fired up (getting people to show up for you is more important than swaying anyone to your side)

Lots of people voted for him this time for overtime and tips being tax-exempt. Some (especially on the overtime thing) have since come to regret it when the fine print didn’t include them, but it got their vote.

He ran on lots of issues. “Build the wall” echos what tons of Republican voters have been saying for decades. Their politicians wouldn’t do it—hell, Trump didn’t, he just half-assed a little bit of it and called it done—because it’s a really bad idea, but he sold people on the notion that he’d get it done, where “it” was something they’d long wanted done.

Many other issues like that, that did get him votes.

But once that's set up... adding more to it adds basically zero more marginal work, and when everything's in one interface the UX is crazy-better than any legitimate option on the market. So, may as well.

I think any copyright term where a 50-year-old director can't take their own crack at some movie they watched in high school without having to ask for permission, is certainly too long.

I think it’s prodding people to do something dangerous and illegal and a risk to democracy herself, and I’m not really sure what else it could be.

(Why… would Trump hold a rally in DC on that particular day to begin with? And why did he and other speakers choose to say what they did? None of this is mysterious, it’s easy to read, but it still seems to be eluding a lot of folks in ways that it don’t think it would in any analogous situation that didn’t involve partisan politics)