<story><title>Working computer made out of Minecraft blocks</title><url>http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/28/working-computer-mad.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>The good: he spent a lot of time learning about logic circuits&lt;p&gt;The bad: he spent a lot of time making a simulation of a logic circuit that has no practical application I can imagine&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s probably a net plus overall, since learning and modeling what one knows is a great way to reinforce it, but one is left with the impression that this is a person who can spend a lot of time on things.&lt;p&gt;I hate to be a prude, and everybody loves a hobby, but we keep seeing these stories of guys who spend hundreds or thousands of hours on these very unusual and detailed configurations of virtual goods -- the maximized Sim City guy comes to mind. Something about our praising this behavior bugs me. I guess it&apos;s not clear to me the difference between unnaturally focusing in on small things - -like in Aspergers -- and just having a hobby. Aside from this guy, who seems wonderfully well-balanced, I wonder if we&apos;re not praising people who might actually need help.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t know. I probably didn&apos;t say that as well as I could.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>Part of me has the reaction you labeled prudish, too.  The other part of me thinks this is sort of a rich-people&apos;s problem caused by a cognitive surplus and a societal decision to subsidize whatever he is doing right now, probably because he is a student.  Yeah, Minecraft might be wasted time, but it isn&apos;t obviously more wasted than time spent acing the heck out of a degree in Studio Art.  [I&apos;m slagging excessively on art degrees.  I simulated logic circuits for my Computer Engineering courses -- built an entire CPU, one line of VRML or whatever it is called at a time.  It &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; has no practical application because it was thirty years behind state of the art, but it was a learning experience.]&lt;p&gt;Besides, the nice thing about students is that they have the rest of their lives to do something important.&lt;p&gt;I mean, personal experience here: to at least some degree, what I will do today is important: I&apos;m helping a company help their thousands of customers help their millions of customers.  Yay.  If you were to flip back five years to the second, I think I was probably in a WoW raid.  And there were spreadsheets for that WoW raid, and a complicated compensation system to maximize participation from 60+ participants (40 on any given night), and political issues, and blah blah blah.  Five years later, does anyone remember that we killed the dragon and got the purple pixels in 3 hours instead of in 5 because of obsessive optimization?  Probably not.  Did obsessive optimization really help me out in the intervening five years?  Oh heck yes.  Is it going to help my client out today?  Oh heck yes, except 5% of &quot;really freaking big number&quot; is better than 5% of what my sales are.&lt;p&gt;Who knows where this kid will be in five years?  He could be an architect.  He could be a project lead.  He could do something &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; important, like being a dad.</text></comment>
<story><title>Working computer made out of Minecraft blocks</title><url>http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/28/working-computer-mad.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>The good: he spent a lot of time learning about logic circuits&lt;p&gt;The bad: he spent a lot of time making a simulation of a logic circuit that has no practical application I can imagine&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s probably a net plus overall, since learning and modeling what one knows is a great way to reinforce it, but one is left with the impression that this is a person who can spend a lot of time on things.&lt;p&gt;I hate to be a prude, and everybody loves a hobby, but we keep seeing these stories of guys who spend hundreds or thousands of hours on these very unusual and detailed configurations of virtual goods -- the maximized Sim City guy comes to mind. Something about our praising this behavior bugs me. I guess it&apos;s not clear to me the difference between unnaturally focusing in on small things - -like in Aspergers -- and just having a hobby. Aside from this guy, who seems wonderfully well-balanced, I wonder if we&apos;re not praising people who might actually need help.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t know. I probably didn&apos;t say that as well as I could.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Volscio</author><text>Maybe you&apos;re on the wrong forum.  Hackers do stuff just because they&apos;re curious.&lt;p&gt;[edit:  he should have a monetization strategy!!]</text></comment>