Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I’ve always just been good at print off debugging because one of my first kind of side quest jobs that I got was writing robots for the government when I was still at school. And so I’d kind of do this contractually for so many hours a week. And my boss, Hunter Lloyd, great professor by the way, he just said, “Hey, here’s your computer, here’s the robot, here’s how you plug it in. Here’s how you run the code. Can you write the flash driver, the ethernet driver. Can you write the planetary pancake motor? Here’s some manuals, I’m missing some. Just figure it out, I’ll be back.” So that was government work for me. So I was like, okay, I’ll figure all these things out. And I figured them all out and the only way to really get anything out of the machine was to print. And so it’s like I had to become really good at printing my way through problems. And so that kind of became this skill I guess I adopted is that I can just kind of print off debug my way through a lot of these problems. Obviously I’m not a game developer, probably a different world probably should use… I think John Carmack was on here and talked to how great the debugger is, different world. Because when I was at Netflix, there’s machines that exist somewhere on AWS, I’m not logged into them. I don’t even know how to log into them. I’m not even sure if I have credentials to log into them. They run once somewhere and I have to figure out what happened and why it’s happening. So it’s like I’m going to become… This is what I’ve trained for. I’m a print off debugging champion. So it’s just like I could just run through these things really quickly and figure out why they’re happening the way they’re happening. You’re a special human. I think that’s an incredible skill set to have to be able to drop in into any code base, drop into any situation, and do print off debugging. Meaning you’re in a dark room and you’re feeling around that room to try to figure out what the room is. Well, I had the code so it’s like I can kind of blueprint what’s happening. I don’t understand the services or anything, but you can start guessing pretty quick as to what’s going wrong.…

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