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points by drummojg 15 hours ago | 0 comments

I would never drag pico. I wrote software that's been packaged in Linux distros in pico. And I lost the urge to be The Smartest Guy In The [Room/Mailing List/Forum] a long, long time ago.

[–] Natfan 15 hours ago

what's really the point in being the smartest person in the room? you'll never learn anything!

[–] majorchord 13 hours ago

Not only that, but you constantly feel like Idiocracy is playing out in real time, and that everyone else around you is closer to monkeys than a rational empathetic human... it's exhausting, lonely and debilitating. Then you realize there are people much smarter than you, and you wonder how they must feel.

Reminds me of that House MD episode where the delivery driver was a secret genius who was abusing DXM to dumb himself down just to feel happy.

"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."

[–] metchio 15 hours ago

sometimes humans do irrational things / have illogical behaviour just to glorify their own ego. it happens also to the very best sometimes

[–] MonkeyClub 15 hours ago

Yep, whenever you find yourself being the smartest person in the room, you need to find yourself a smarter room.

[–] vinceguidry 15 hours ago

Or just learn how to teach.

[–] aleph_minus_one 14 hours ago

> Or just learn how to teach.

Most people don't want to learn (in particular not learn sufficiently hard to really improve).

[–] lioeters 13 hours ago

True, many a junior dev I've had to work with was convinced they're the smartest person in the room, good at what they do but so full of themselves they're unable to adapt, acquire new knowledge or consider new paradigms.

Learning requires some amount of humbleness, to accept you don't know everything.

[–] vinceguidry 13 hours ago

Motivating students to want to learn isn't rocket science, just a rare skill to see.

[–] aleph_minus_one 5 hours ago

If it is not rocket science, how does it work?

[–] marssaxman 10 hours ago

I used pico or nano as my everyday unix coding editor for something like fifteen years, starting in the late '90s. It was just fine. I couldn't stand vi and didn't see the point of emacs; I type faster than I think, so I never found that text-editing was enough of a bottleneck to make sophisticated automation worth the effort.

I only stopped using pico/nano after writing my own editor, which blatantly stole pico's interface design.