You know, maybe it was never the case that superficial markers of effort ever meant anything at all. Maybe there never was a way to tell from the envelop whether the letter is worth reading… and it was confirmation bias all along. Maybe there really are no shortcuts to judge whether an idea has any merit…

Because, for sure, some of the real bangers of comments I've posted on HN and similar forums—all my XCompose-configuration aside—have gotten relatively few upvotes!

Same thing with conference talks. The ones with half a million or a million views on YouTube… the real magical ones, I think, are the ones no one seemed to pay any attention to… e.g., https://www.youtube.com/@PyDataTV/search?query=james%20powel...