Programmers are really wizards — poor, ragged characters trying to turn coffee into code. I’m just a magician. My job is to pretend to be more like a programmer than a real programmer.
I’m a total liar, and I’m pretty good at it. I tricked business people into making me a tech co-founder. I fooled engineers into asking me for general AI. My every move was so real that the Department of Justice once asked me how to use Visual Basic to create a graphical user interface (GUI) to track the IP addresses of serial killers.
And here’s my secret: It’s not about what you know, it’s about what you show.
Real engineers are slow and boring because they are overwhelmed by reality. A magician is only limited by his imagination. A magician can perform the most complex scenes at will, and the more exaggerated the scenes, the better. Public perceptions of hackers are shaped by scenes of revelry and blowhards, and if you can exploit public misconceptions to make the unsuspecting see you as their hacker fantasy, you’ll be hailed as a hero.
A great performance requires a well-choreographed stage because it distracts the audience from your lack of depth. In movie Settings, software is often written by stacking three-dimensional blocks on top of each other, or by touching a few holograms. Of course, this is all fantasy. In real life, the closest approach is through a combination of three ancient techniques that were invented decades ago.
First, you have to have Vim, a highly configurable text editor that is extremely difficult to use, and countless developers have inadvertently been stuck with it, wondering how to turn the damn thing off. Once you dare to use Vim, you can improve your standing with your colleagues. You look like a complete myth, evoking epic themes such as sacred editorial wars or Crusades against the “church of editors.”
Second, there is TMUx, a tool that allows you to open multiple panes in a terminal window. This means you can write code in one window, run terminal commands in another, and open completely useless plug-ins (such as audio spectrum maps and oversized clocks) in the rest of the panes. In general, you want to open as many Windows on your computer as possible, and shock the person looking at your screen with a jarred scene. I never close Windows myself, because code that doesn’t work doesn’t slow down the running process.
For example, here are some screenshots of my Deepfake videos:
Finally, it is crucial to master Bash, a scripting language used directly from the command line. Knowing bash maximizes your terminal time — not using it during your “show” is a disgrace to your show, equivalent to turning on the theater lights while the movie is still playing. If you need to calculate something, right? You can write: echo “scale=0; 2 + 2 “| BC. If you need to know your CPU usage? You can write: the mpstat | grep – A 5 “idle” % | tail – n 1 | awk -f “{print $100 – $12} ‘A. Now you’ve got it.
The only thing worse than not using a terminal is not using a keyboard. Because using the cursor just shows you’re incompetent. If you use a desktop computer, unplug that overly ergonomic gadget you want to touch (the mouse). If you use a laptop, stick a piece of sandpaper on the trackpad because you associate using the trackpad with blood and pain.
Nowadays, it is very easy to use a terminal using only a keyboard (not a mouse). To use a browser while still using a keyboard, use Vimium, a Chrome extension that helps you navigate the Web without using a mouse. Vimium represents each link on the site with a key on the keyboard. Pressing the corresponding key is equivalent to clicking on the corresponding link with the mouse to open the desired page. Here’s what it looks like:
To give you a professional tip, please note how I open the terminal while browsing the web. As the playwright John Heywood said, “Half a loaf is better than none.” In addition, a close look at my Chrome TAB shows a mix of arXiv papers and q&A posts on Stack Overflow. It wasn’t an accident. This deliberate strategic layout of the TAB sends a message to the viewer that you are a mature machine learning engineer, interested in both theoretical and practical areas of exploration.
When you have set the stage, the show can begin. Everything on your body should communicate that you don’t use the mouse at all. Try leaning back in your chair with your legs on the table and the keyboard on your lap. I basked in the sun on a beanbag 10 feet from my 40-inch monitor.
As for the show itself, remember to stick to elaborate baroque style, not minimalism. You need to wow your audience with quick finger movements and complex switching Windows. In Vim, you jump from line to line, function to function, so often that onlookers don’t have time to read one line. In their reading speed switching speed, catch up with you to understand what you are talking nonsense – after all, when you have written the code few line contains real efficient code – you only have to switch to another tmux (translator note: terminal multiplexer) pane, then they will be too late to see and want to keep up with your speed.
Whether your show is good depends largely on the degree to which it causes confusion and frustration in the audience. A good show can be disgusting. It can make the audience so sick that they collapse, have seizures and drool.
You may think that such Machiavellian tactics are fake, hypocritical, grandiose and frivolous. You’d rather keep your feet on the ground, focus on your skills, and expect to be recognized for hard, honest work.
Your hard work may pay off, but why waste the best ten years of your life toiling away? Why don’t you just put your feet up on the table and act like a big shot right away? I tell you, it’s better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.