Doing hard things has always been, and always will be, hard.

Building a static HTML page was “hard” in the 90’s. It took actual skills.

Any piece that gets easier automatically opens up more hard avenues to tackle.

no one is willing to pay you for easy.

moregrist 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was there in the 90s. I built a few bad static HTML pages. It wasn’t hard. There are lots of stories of non-CS / non-technical people making stuff from the dotcom era.

Making a dynamic page was harder. Integrating with a payment system was almost magical; there’s a reason PayPal became big.

But what was truly hard, and continues to be hard, is building a page, either static or dynamic, that people actually want to visit.

	▲	bdcravens an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Building static pages that worked in both Netscape and IE 4, and could function well with constrained dial up speeds, may not have been "hard", but it did come with a number of challenges.

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elliotbnvl 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ahhh that lines up with a thought I had recently: you get out of life what you put into it. I am beginning to believe that there's some kind of metaphysical rule here that is true everywhere, all the time.

So maybe the solution is: find the hardest stuff to do and do the crap out of it.

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AntiDyatlov 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I really don't think that's true, you can put a lot of effort into a wrongheaded strategy, netting you no or bad results.

Conversely, a good strategy can get you good results without that much effort.

	▲	ahnick 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Wrongheaded strategies that net you bad results, often result in lessons and ideas that can be further pursued on their own merits.

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elliotbnvl 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The followup thought / concern that occurs: what if the number of hard things is going down?

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Barbing 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I would have imagined it's going up while the percentage of people who are capable of doing the hardest things is going down.

Not that I know much of anything.

	▲	pixl97 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We probably need to split apart things like "hard" and "both hard and useful". Just because you're doing something hard, doesn't mean anyone wants it. Just because you're doing something useful doesn't mean you're going to get paid much for it. Just because something is hard and useful doesn't mean someone is going to pay you for the cost of the effort.

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danny_codes 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The entire pitch of LLM companies is that that’s not true. The LLM does the hard work, and you pay the LLM company for the tokens. So the gate is just, can you afford enough tokens.

Not saying that’s what will happen in reality, but that is the marketing pitch