After reading this post, I decided to send a message to Gurkenglas.
This was the best decision I made. I have been developing a mobile software for the last 120 days, and this is my first experience developing something this big. Sharing my screen on Discord, he was able to:
- Completely change my debugging workflow, which is likely to save me hundreds of hours in the long-term
- Teach me a new testing ritual
- Make it easier to identify useless pieces of code
- Refactor hundreds of lines with simple intuitions and good regex
- Teach me dozens of useful keyboard shortcuts and IDE features
- Give me some useful career advice
I wasn’t expecting to level up that fast, but in retrospect it seems obvious that accepting a group invitation from a more experienced player would allow me to level up much faster and learn new tricks. Great learning experience.
LessWrong warned me two months before it occurred here. The suggested preparedness was clear and concise, and I felt the power on my hands. I had valuable info no one on my tribe had. I alarmed my mom and she listened me, stayed home and safe, when everyone was partying out (carnival). I long-talked with friends, and explained to them what I believed it was happening and why I believed that. I showed the numbers, the math, the predictions to the next week, next week came, and reality presented its metallic taste. Week after week, the light was getting brighter and brigher until it turned really hard to refuse to see it, or to believe on the belief that everything was just fine.
One thing I learned is that it doesn’t matter if you just know something really valuable, but can’t convince those that do matter for you. I tried to explain my 50 years experienced physician father that he should listen to me. He blamed my low status. But even after weeks, police at the streets forcing citizens to stay at home, he could not believe. He was in denial and my incompetence to change his mind made him to the hospital, 16 days and he isn’t still back. Don’t worry, he is getting better and I am just babbling around. Father of a cousin died. Brother tested positive. Stepmother obviously got it too, but tested negative. You know, I really tried, not just tried to try, not even planned to try, I really did it right way. Successive failures. It wasn’t enough. I don’t have anything valuable to share more than ‘you have to learn ways of convincing your most loved ones’ urgently, if you don’t have this tool, but I don’t know how to do it yet, I am struggling to find a way, and I would ask you to share when you get one. Things as simple as “there is food over there” or “there is a lion coming to you”, on level 1 talk. Maybe the dark arts could have helped me when level 1 failed, but not sure. But I feel very happy for a lot of peers I helped along the way, and all is due to LessWrong, I am thankful for this community, and I changed the behavior of some people I know on the right moment of the outbreak. This simple text forum saves many lives and I am on the path to contribute too on larger scale.
I know I am not that new on the forum, I don’t remember exactly when I started here, but I believe it was on the last months of the last year, but I still think I am noob, but learning. Don’t upvote this comment, but do comment if you wanna say something.