i really feel that the first sentence in that quote is an apt way to sum up a part of how learning and attention work for us as humans. personally i've spent s

i really feel that the first sentence in that quote is an apt way to sum up a part of how learning and attention work for us as humans. personally i've spent some time thinking about how in my life it is very easy for me to pay attention as hard as i can manage and still miss so many things. i feel like things like code review are a great way to work on this sort of thing (attention training, global and contextual awareness, etc.). for example, there is this place that i've been walking by regularly for a couple of years and someone maintains a nice flowerbed there and i pause to take a glance at it and have been doing so for about a year since i first noticed it. but a couple months ago i noticed that there is a companion flowerbed a few feet away that i just had never noticed because i was so focused on the first one. was that companion flowerbed there all along? i suspect that it was! but i have no idea because i didn't even know it existed. i have tried to extrapolate this to knowledge across humanity in general. i suspect sometimes it takes just one person to notice something, to make an observation that informs their behavior, and it begins to disseminate to us all. sometimes it takes several tries and a long time to happen. and i wonder how much low-hanging fruit there is out there that just none of us have noticed yet. and i think about how integrating a simple, fundamental set of best practices already established by others who have been paying attention can improve the low-bar for us all. i think that julia evans touched on this in https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/10/06/new-talk--making-hard-things-easy/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/10/06/new-talk--making-hard-things... which was discussed here recently and so did dan luu in his https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ which has also been discussed here somewhere. and, to conclude, i too have a lot of gratitude for stenberg and all the folks who've worked on curl, and many other parts of our internet infrastructure that i usually take for granted every day.