161–170 of 402 posts
I just wrote my own blog post thinking about this. I guess alot of us feel kind of weird right now.
Curious to read if you want to share a link. I've been thinking about this too.
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There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.
Sure why not get trapped youself with responsibilities and work your life off making rich people even richer.
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We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c. But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
> We're retiring later and later, working more per week That may be true. But, if somebody offered me a time machine to travel back in time and live at any point in history, would I take it? Hell no. > purchasing power is going down That is not a new thing. > quality of goods is going down Phones are better. Computers are better. Cars, planes, washing machines ... > life expectancy is decreasing On the whole, this is…
This question always implies "to the high middle ages, or to 300CE". Of course I wouldn't. But to the 1990s? Probably I would.
In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is. You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast. Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement jus…
There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.
Rabindranath Tagore
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The programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added." AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.
AI helps you to focus on the aspects that you are interested in. Perhaps you care about database nifty stuff, but you may need the front end to make an end to end solution. You can delegate that part to AI
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Agreed! I'm not sure why the GP comment has a somewhat negative attitude about it, I think it's great for people to realize this and talk about it, every year a whole new year's worth of young adults turn up not knowing it! Insert XKCD lucky 10,000 comic here
Not meant to be negative.
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People who want to be childless usually champion the importance of building strong community through friends and neighbors, just because they don’t want kids doesn’t mean they don’t want to contribute to others’ happiness lol. People wanting FIRE is a lot more to do with the current economy and wealth of useless or harmful jobs than kids
> People who want to be childless usually champion the importance of building strong community through friends and neighbors, This describes all of the childless people age 50 and older than I know. It does not describe the social media r/childfree mindset people I know at all. They have their bubble of friends they keep in touch with only when they feel like it but that's about it. There's a big difference between c…
Do you actually know a lot of those people? I know a lot of people that don't have kids and they all are very normal, well adjusted people. None of them hate kids. Using the word "breeders" as derogatory is weird, bordering on mentally unwell behavior. I've never met anyone that doesn't have kids that's like that. Even for the few people I've met that don't particularly care for children, they just keep it to themselves.
Reddit I think is not representative of real life for the vast majority of people.
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Carpentry has always been an implementation detail for making furniture. They have been able to purchase flat-pack chairs for all of their lives, but for some reason there are people who learn this skill and have fun slowly making things that factories already make at scale. A subset of those people have made lucrative businesses out of the very human craft that is carpentry, and are able to create custom pieces on-d…
This analogy falls flat because a) Carpentry already happens in the real world b) There's a clear problem being solved (you need furniture). Stretching your analogy to fit my point: pretend that programming is manually sanding wood, while AI-assisted programming is using a belt sander. If you're focused on the chair being built, getting a belt sander to help is great! If you're sanding for the craft (?) of it, focuse…
That analogy falls flat, because there is little creative difference between these two modes of sanding. In particular, there is approximately zero variation in what the belt sander does as a function of how you control it. It is a reliable, deterministic, very predictable tool. That’s as different from generative AI as a compiler is.
The moving tiny rectangles framing is interesting, it gets to the heart of why I find all the anti-AI takes so difficult to comprehend. If you never made any effort to connect what you do with what value is added in real life, then it's no wonder better tooling is leaving you lost. Programming (other than code golf) has always been an implementation detail for solving problems IRL.