Monday, September 03, 2012

mildly relevant: sometimes we are too smart for our own good.

the following article sounds paradoxical, but i think it's true. for the same reason(s), it's why i like getting up in the morning, making a cup of coffee, and while i'm waking up, start to do maths.

it's a brand new day;
i'm ready to work out the details now!



Why then do we perform our most mentally complex work when the brain wants to sleep and we do simpler tasks when our brain is at its sharpest and brightest?

Because being tired makes us better coders.

.. You’d think I’d work better – so much energy, so much infinite overclocked brainpower. But instead I keep tripping over myself because I can’t focus for more than two seconds at a time.

.. We have too much brainpower for ~80% of the tasks we work on – face it, writing that one juicy algorithm, requires ten times as much code to produce an environment in which it can run.
Even if you’re doing the most advanced machine learning (or something) imaginable, a lot of the work is simply cleaning up the data and presenting results in a lovely manner.

And when your brain isn’t working at full capacity it looks for something to do. Being tired makes you dumb enough that the task at hand is enough.

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