Discipline and grit are perhaps the greatest predictors for success. High intelligence and the foresight to know what to work on, per Hamming, will get you much farther, but with discipline and grit alone your chances of failing completely and ending up in the poor house are much reduced.
The guys who empty our bins have discipline and grit. The same ones turn out regularly whatever the weather doing back breaking work. They work far harder than I do.
I remember one of these sites had an image of a man who was a victim of a failed suicide attempt by "suck-starting a shotgun". The entire lower half of his face had been blown off. He was still alive.
Prompting the imagination (for example, writing prompts) was a thing before generative AI even emerged in a meaningful sense. And it does work.
This is one of the reasons why I do literate programming using org-mode. It's easy to lose track of what I was thinking when I wrote something, and what the original structure and goal was as I continue to write it. Org-mode helps me keep my thoughts in order in English and interlineate code in with them, then mash a key to spit out compilable source. I don't use it for everything, but it sure comes in handy when I do use it.
Unironically, yes, this, Ifsuѧl Bacti1on|, and weird computer shape (extra-thick 3.5"-looking floppy and... what that slot is even supposed to be?) makes it look worse than it should. I get that the value is in other content, and this is just a basic illustration for the sake of having some picture (for aesthetics, I guess?). So it was made with minimum effort possible just to have something, that's cool, effort matters elsewhere.
But it doesn't only look sloppy or hastily made, it also looks inaccurate - and that really makes a bad impression. "Inaccurate" or "careless" are not the words any author should want their reader to think about.
A screenshot from an emulator, showing the same message but formatted as a BASIC program (just a bunch of PRINTs or REMs) - or something similarly simple to make, lacking glaring inauthenticity - would make a drastically better impression.
Jack Henry Abbott was an American prisoner who corresponded with the author Norman Mailer, who successfully got a collection of his letters published as In the Belly of the Beast, which contain scathing critiques of the American justice and prison systems based on his own experiences therewith.
Mailer also successfully advocated for Abbott's parole. Six weeks later, Abbott stabbed to death the manager of a restaurant he was eating at after an argument.
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