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I like this, but also on some level I feel like it's nothing more than inspirational "rah-rah" garbage. I wish he would have expanded on it. A great example o

I like this, but also on some level I feel like it's nothing more than inspirational "rah-rah" garbage. I wish he would have expanded on it. A great example of the distinction from my younger days: We had the game GranTurismo2 back when I was 12 or so. We wanted the really fancy "best" car in the game. The right way to get the good cars is to improve your skill and gain access to the higher level races that have bigger prizes. That's the "hard work" part. What we did instead was do one of the easy races over and over and over again for a couple days until we had enough saved up in the game to buy the car. That's "long work" It's stupid and boring and no fun. If you want a fulfilling life, go for the "hard work". Which I guess is also just a stupid "rah-rah" inspirational quip.

umvi 6y ago
There was an MMO game called "Kingdom of Loathing" I played back in 2006. The right way to get more money in the game is to improve your skills/equipment and gain access to the higher level areas that have bigger monsters/better loot. (hard work) What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open market (long work). Eventually I figured out how to create an "autoit" script that automated the process of creating a new account, completing the tutorial, and then sending the goods over to the main account. The main account was getting very wealthy, but I should have known I needed to launder the ill-gotten gains somehow because an admin (Multi Czar) eventually caught on and all the accounts (including the main one) got banned.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- arsome 6y ago
  So does coding bots to do the long work for you count as hard work or long work? Because that's the kind of work I've always preferred.
  - nlbrown 6y ago
    Hard work takes over and replaces long work when innovation, new skills and modalities are center stage and repetitive tasks take a back seat. I'd consider any form of automation hard work.
    - ProZsolt 6y ago
      Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/
- eloff 6y ago
  Reminds me of a high-speed trading empire I built once in EVE Online. I got bored of the long work way of earning ISK, so I hacked the game client and built a network of accounts running in VMs, proxying their traffic through AWS to get unique IPs, all orchestrated carefully and cooperating to pull off the overall trading strategy by my central server. (hard work) It got to the point where I had $200 billion ISK and my fortune was doubling every week. At black market conversion rates that was probably worth $20K a month if you could sell it all somehow. However, at this point I was probably about 10% of the trading volume in all of Jita, so the game mods noticed me and banned me. They didn't get all my accounts, just the main one, proving that my techniques for laundering game currency and using isolated VMs with their own IP was enough to prevent them from being connected. However, at this point I didn't have the patience to do that all again, I went and got a job instead. (back to the long work)
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open market (long work). Haha, this reminds me of the Forum war days of Punchme.com [1], someone on our forum found out a bug to exploit in the gambling game that would 2x your money. After a while raiding on other forums got boring with all the best equipment maxed out, so we realized that selling the upgrades was a way more interesting use of our time, so like 5 of us decided to start marketing the in-game weapons to other forums/gangs for half of what the game charged. The devs eventually found the bug and patched it, but for those of use that still had valid accounts (I opened 10, but most got shutdown due to the scheme) this turned out even better as the demand for weapons just kept going up and I was making over $100/day in passive income at its peak until the interest for the game dropped. The thing that sticks out the most was some kid from Slovakia I sold weapons to him on credit; he 'promised' me he'd send the money once his mom set him up with a bank account and got his paypal account verified--it was all free to me so I did it not thinking much if he didn't follow up. I completely forgot about it for weeks after I lost interest in the scheme due to school and work, so I logged into to my paypal account to buy something online and I saw he actually did send me the funds like a month later. It's one of those few times were no expectations placed but trust and faith are lived up to anyway. 1: https://www.rpg.sg/profile/179/PunchMe https://www.rpg.sg/profile/179/PunchMe
crdrost 6y ago
To be fair the boundaries blur a bit and that is where magic happens. I don't mean magic like JRR Tolkien magic or whatever, I mean magic like David Copperfield magic, Penn & Teller magic. You go to a restaurant, you ask for a thing, magically it appears in front of your very eyes and it is delicious. The secret was a lot of "long work" that went into the situation before you got there, so the cooks could be ready for anything you might order and could assemble it in a short time for you. Magic is very often just a cleverly concealed patience. “How could she have known in advance that I was going to pick the jack of spades? That envelope has been in my hand the whole time and she has not touched it.” Well, if it really mattered, maybe she bought 52 decks of playing cards, filtered out the jack of spades from each one, and assembled a deck which only had the jack of spades in it. You thought you had a free choice, and you did, in the sense that you can get a model T in any color you want so long as it’s black. Of course the concealment takes some skill too, like maybe she unwrapped a different 52-card deck and threw out the jokers and instruction cards pointedly and then shuffled it before your eyes, then used some sleight of hand to switch the decks. But the point remains that the thing which makes it “magic” is the absurd backflips done out-of-sight. David Copperfield surely wouldn't make a Learjet in the middle of a ring of blindfolded people holding hands disappear by going out and hiring a quarter of those people to be stooges, having them disassemble their part of the circle and tow the plane out with a cable, and then reassemble the circle and interview the non-stooges for the camera, would he? OK, but he surely wouldn't go to the expense of building a rotating theater in order to vanish the statue of Liberty though right? If you want to appear magical to others, a lot of it is going to be long work. Funny story, a lot of my physics education was spent in this way. We would get a problem, and my peers would sit there and scratch their heads and say “I wonder, what is the best way to solve this problem” and I would sit there and say “this is _a_ way to solve that problem, it’s not gonna be pretty and it’s gonna be painful but I will grind and grind and get an answer.” Then I would look at the answer and be like “that’s actually profoundly beautiful,” like maybe it’s the sort of answer which suggests that there is a duality between position and momentum space such that you could rotate one into the other, because it involves u x² + v p² for some u, v. Or maybe the answer is something divided by the total energy and I am like “oh maybe multiplying through by the total energy makes this derivation really really simple.” And then since I know the answer I can reconstruct this beautiful argument and then I can write _that_ down as my final answer. Someone else sees this and thinks I am smart. Not as smart as I look! Hah. Then I learned that this is actually the basis for several cryptographic attacks called “meet in the middle;” often if you're trying to figure out the right path through a complex forest to an unknown solution you have to try N paths, but once you know where you are going then you can simultaneously work forwards from the starting point and backwards from the ending point and see which ones end up passing through the same point midway through the forest and you’ll succeed after only 2√N half-paths total because you get the product of (start attempts)×(finishing attempts) for the total number of paths you are trying through the forest.
sharadov 6y ago
But doesn't years of long work lead up to hard work. Early in my career a lot of time was spend learning concepts, theory and practice. After 10 years of this, I started seeing the big picture, recognize patterns and make decisions.
withdavidli 6y ago
I did the endurance race track with a car that I knew could win, set it on auto with the computer to do the 100-200 laps. These days I think you can speed up the auto play by 5-10x. Not a fun way to play when all there is is grind.
underbluewaters 6y ago
On one of the circular courses you could literally duct-tape the controller into the appropriate positions to grind out wins with one of the faster cars. Not a lot of points for these races but if you could set it and forget it. Is that hard-work or long-work? :)
- ian0 6y ago
  You bet me to it. Suzuki Esceudo Pikes peak edition tuned to >1000bhp. Point it into the wall on the speedway and selotape the controller in place. You had a one in n chance of winning a formula one car. I think this is "lazy work" :P
CarbyAu 6y ago
Oblivion. Characters get better at a skill when they "use" that skill. Coming from UnrealTournament I hated the sluggish movement and jumping. I created a keyboard macro to run in a circle, jump a few times. I edited the macro script to do this for hours. After a night of sleep I came back to a character that had leveled up a few times! Cool! And now all the creatures had leveled up. And all I could do was run away and jump because my combat skills were useless...
- NikolaeVarius 6y ago
  Sneak. Start the Dark Brotherhood quest and sneak in a corner in the house. The NPC spends most of its time sleeping and will still give you points so just run that overnight and max it out
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> We had the game GranTurismo2 back when I was 12 or so. Gameshark was the way to do that the real 'smart way,' also worth noting was that even back then you could share memorycard saved data if you had access to it with some clever devices. This was my introduction to 'hacking' culture (soldering mod chips, ripping and burning games into ISOs followed that) and was really interesting to see so many homebrew solutions to challenges like these and kind of made the game(s) the side feature of what was taking place at the time. The new PS5 version of GT, whatever number they're on now, looks more like GT1/2 than all of its later versions but much shinier. I personally disliked the license(s) hurdle just using a controller, I breezed through them easily once we got a steering wheel and pedals and were actually kind of fun.

umvi 6y ago

There was an MMO game called "Kingdom of Loathing" I played back in 2006. The right way to get more money in the game is to improve your skills/equipment and gain access to the higher level areas that have bigger monsters/better loot. (hard work) What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open market (long work). Eventually I figured out how to create an "autoit" script that automated the process of creating a new account, completing the tutorial, and then sending the goods over to the main account. The main account was getting very wealthy, but I should have known I needed to launder the ill-gotten gains somehow because an admin (Multi Czar) eventually caught on and all the accounts (including the main one) got banned.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
arsome 6y ago
So does coding bots to do the long work for you count as hard work or long work? Because that's the kind of work I've always preferred.
- nlbrown 6y ago
  Hard work takes over and replaces long work when innovation, new skills and modalities are center stage and repetitive tasks take a back seat. I'd consider any form of automation hard work.
  - ProZsolt 6y ago
    Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/
eloff 6y ago
Reminds me of a high-speed trading empire I built once in EVE Online. I got bored of the long work way of earning ISK, so I hacked the game client and built a network of accounts running in VMs, proxying their traffic through AWS to get unique IPs, all orchestrated carefully and cooperating to pull off the overall trading strategy by my central server. (hard work) It got to the point where I had $200 billion ISK and my fortune was doubling every week. At black market conversion rates that was probably worth $20K a month if you could sell it all somehow. However, at this point I was probably about 10% of the trading volume in all of Jita, so the game mods noticed me and banned me. They didn't get all my accounts, just the main one, proving that my techniques for laundering game currency and using isolated VMs with their own IP was enough to prevent them from being connected. However, at this point I didn't have the patience to do that all again, I went and got a job instead. (back to the long work)
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open market (long work). Haha, this reminds me of the Forum war days of Punchme.com [1], someone on our forum found out a bug to exploit in the gambling game that would 2x your money. After a while raiding on other forums got boring with all the best equipment maxed out, so we realized that selling the upgrades was a way more interesting use of our time, so like 5 of us decided to start marketing the in-game weapons to other forums/gangs for half of what the game charged. The devs eventually found the bug and patched it, but for those of use that still had valid accounts (I opened 10, but most got shutdown due to the scheme) this turned out even better as the demand for weapons just kept going up and I was making over $100/day in passive income at its peak until the interest for the game dropped. The thing that sticks out the most was some kid from Slovakia I sold weapons to him on credit; he 'promised' me he'd send the money once his mom set him up with a bank account and got his paypal account verified--it was all free to me so I did it not thinking much if he didn't follow up. I completely forgot about it for weeks after I lost interest in the scheme due to school and work, so I logged into to my paypal account to buy something online and I saw he actually did send me the funds like a month later. It's one of those few times were no expectations placed but trust and faith are lived up to anyway. 1: https://www.rpg.sg/profile/179/PunchMe https://www.rpg.sg/profile/179/PunchMe

crdrost 6y ago

To be fair the boundaries blur a bit and that is where magic happens. I don't mean magic like JRR Tolkien magic or whatever, I mean magic like David Copperfield magic, Penn & Teller magic. You go to a restaurant, you ask for a thing, magically it appears in front of your very eyes and it is delicious. The secret was a lot of "long work" that went into the situation before you got there, so the cooks could be ready for anything you might order and could assemble it in a short time for you. Magic is very often just a cleverly concealed patience. “How could she have known in advance that I was going to pick the jack of spades? That envelope has been in my hand the whole time and she has not touched it.” Well, if it really mattered, maybe she bought 52 decks of playing cards, filtered out the jack of spades from each one, and assembled a deck which only had the jack of spades in it. You thought you had a free choice, and you did, in the sense that you can get a model T in any color you want so long as it’s black. Of course the concealment takes some skill too, like maybe she unwrapped a different 52-card deck and threw out the jokers and instruction cards pointedly and then shuffled it before your eyes, then used some sleight of hand to switch the decks. But the point remains that the thing which makes it “magic” is the absurd backflips done out-of-sight. David Copperfield surely wouldn't make a Learjet in the middle of a ring of blindfolded people holding hands disappear by going out and hiring a quarter of those people to be stooges, having them disassemble their part of the circle and tow the plane out with a cable, and then reassemble the circle and interview the non-stooges for the camera, would he? OK, but he surely wouldn't go to the expense of building a rotating theater in order to vanish the statue of Liberty though right? If you want to appear magical to others, a lot of it is going to be long work. Funny story, a lot of my physics education was spent in this way. We would get a problem, and my peers would sit there and scratch their heads and say “I wonder, what is the best way to solve this problem” and I would sit there and say “this is _a_ way to solve that problem, it’s not gonna be pretty and it’s gonna be painful but I will grind and grind and get an answer.” Then I would look at the answer and be like “that’s actually profoundly beautiful,” like maybe it’s the sort of answer which suggests that there is a duality between position and momentum space such that you could rotate one into the other, because it involves u x² + v p² for some u, v. Or maybe the answer is something divided by the total energy and I am like “oh maybe multiplying through by the total energy makes this derivation really really simple.” And then since I know the answer I can reconstruct this beautiful argument and then I can write _that_ down as my final answer. Someone else sees this and thinks I am smart. Not as smart as I look! Hah. Then I learned that this is actually the basis for several cryptographic attacks called “meet in the middle;” often if you're trying to figure out the right path through a complex forest to an unknown solution you have to try N paths, but once you know where you are going then you can simultaneously work forwards from the starting point and backwards from the ending point and see which ones end up passing through the same point midway through the forest and you’ll succeed after only 2√N half-paths total because you get the product of (start attempts)×(finishing attempts) for the total number of paths you are trying through the forest.

sharadov 6y ago

But doesn't years of long work lead up to hard work. Early in my career a lot of time was spend learning concepts, theory and practice. After 10 years of this, I started seeing the big picture, recognize patterns and make decisions.

withdavidli 6y ago

I did the endurance race track with a car that I knew could win, set it on auto with the computer to do the 100-200 laps. These days I think you can speed up the auto play by 5-10x. Not a fun way to play when all there is is grind.

underbluewaters 6y ago

On one of the circular courses you could literally duct-tape the controller into the appropriate positions to grind out wins with one of the faster cars. Not a lot of points for these races but if you could set it and forget it. Is that hard-work or long-work? :)

ian0 6y ago
You bet me to it. Suzuki Esceudo Pikes peak edition tuned to >1000bhp. Point it into the wall on the speedway and selotape the controller in place. You had a one in n chance of winning a formula one car. I think this is "lazy work" :P

CarbyAu 6y ago

Oblivion. Characters get better at a skill when they "use" that skill. Coming from UnrealTournament I hated the sluggish movement and jumping. I created a keyboard macro to run in a circle, jump a few times. I edited the macro script to do this for hours. After a night of sleep I came back to a character that had leveled up a few times! Cool! And now all the creatures had leveled up. And all I could do was run away and jump because my combat skills were useless...

NikolaeVarius 6y ago
Sneak. Start the Dark Brotherhood quest and sneak in a corner in the house. The NPC spends most of its time sleeping and will still give you points so just run that overnight and max it out

Melting_Harps 6y ago

> We had the game GranTurismo2 back when I was 12 or so. Gameshark was the way to do that the real 'smart way,' also worth noting was that even back then you could share memorycard saved data if you had access to it with some clever devices. This was my introduction to 'hacking' culture (soldering mod chips, ripping and burning games into ISOs followed that) and was really interesting to see so many homebrew solutions to challenges like these and kind of made the game(s) the side feature of what was taking place at the time. The new PS5 version of GT, whatever number they're on now, looks more like GT1/2 than all of its later versions but much shinier. I personally disliked the license(s) hurdle just using a controller, I breezed through them easily once we got a steering wheel and pedals and were actually kind of fun.