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The happiest I've ever been

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Re: The happiest I've ever been

#221

Post by pvillano »

DonThomasitos wrote: post #25
dgritsko wrote: post #6

These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do…

One part of me tries to resist and tell you that our craft is not becoming an archaic relic, the other half already knows you‘re right. We just can‘t put the ghost back into the bottle and now‘s a good time to re-calibrate your passion.

I am trying to think of it like hand tools vs power tools. As long as I work in construction, I'll have to use power tools. Maybe one day I'll support myself by making fine furniture. I'd like that.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#222

Post by antisthenes »

RGamma wrote: post #78
nvarsj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Childlessness seems to be an increasingly compassionate choice. Degrowth by force.

Quick reminder than you can have (gradual) degrowth with every couple having 2 children.

The extreme mode of 50% of child-bearing age adults going 0 kids is not necessary and will probably end up being disastrous.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#224

Post by anal_reactor »

N_Lens wrote: post #190
throwaway290 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From experience I think 90% of people are really liquid crap. filtering can get it down to 50% or less but it also means you are WAY more lonely

There’s an old saying regarding what you’re saying.

Higher social classes have always despised the lower ones. Imagine going to ancient Rome and saying that slaves should be given full citizenship and treated as equals.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#225

Post by anal_reactor »

rixed wrote: post #215
popalchemist wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is always full of danger. This moment in time is exceptional only in the form of that danger, not in its substance. When those of us with noble traits -- intelligence, empathy, morality and so on -- refuse to reproduce, we do so at the cost of allowing the OTHERS who lack those traits to make up a larger and larger percentage of the population. They WILL reproduce. Food for thought.

Are we back to the beliefs into inherited nobility already?

There are things that aren't true but the wider society must believe to be true in order to maintain social order. Think of religion for example. "We are all equal" is also one of those things.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#226

Post by habinero »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #176
cheema33 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. If given a choice I would rather be born in 1940s. 80 years of relative peace, prosperity, cheap education, cheap housing, only single parent needs to work, stronger community network, less overpopulation, better access to doctors, better wealth equality, and you get to partake in the first…

The monkey's paw curls, and you are born as any of the many many many people who did not have access to any of those things lol.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#227

Post by radlad »

rixed wrote: post #215
popalchemist wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is always full of danger. This moment in time is exceptional only in the form of that danger, not in its substance. When those of us with noble traits -- intelligence, empathy, morality and so on -- refuse to reproduce, we do so at the cost of allowing the OTHERS who lack those traits to make up a larger and larger percentage of the population. They WILL reproduce. Food for thought.

Are we back to the beliefs into inherited nobility already?

This could also be read as a take on the nurture aspect of childrearing.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#228

Post by tokioyoyo »

Aurornis wrote: post #99
nvarsj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles. It's common in some tech and upper middle class bubbles , but outside of some startups and a few VHCOL cities most of the 40+ people in tech I encounter have families. I think the mindset is most popular in internet bubbles like Reddit. Reddit went mainstream a decade ago and many people in their 30s and 40s grew up reading a lot of Reddit. Reddit cleaned up the…

Yeah, everyone I know who doesn’t have a child/not planning to have zero connection to Reddit or anything online. Tldr is, people find fulfillment without children easier nowadays. And as they watch other going child free or 1-2 children, they realize that life is possible nowadays.

Re: The happiest I've ever been

#229

Post by tadfisher »

internet2000 wrote: post #119
tadfisher wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe the disconnect, then, is that you don't consider programming to take place in the real world. I don't share that experience, any more than someone coding batch jobs on punch cards or an author committing chapters via typewriter. Maybe the medium has parts that only have meaning within our minds, but we are real (dammit!) and we punch out those characters with our real hands and we get frustrated and deal with impedance mismatches and want to scream and laugh and cry. There is a piece of us that lives in what we build. It's evidence that we are real.

This ties in with your second point. There are uncountably many ways to accomplish the goal of making a chair or writing a program. And if you are a carpenter working on a one-off matched dining set for a fickle client, the problem might not be as clear as even many software tasks are. Your skill and experience is highly likely to play into the eventual form and structure of the finished work. The customer might not know where you hid the dovetail joints or dominoes, but they can absolutely notice the grain continuity and lack of obvious engineered joinery evident in a factory piece.

If you don't care, then fine! You can focus on the other things that bring you joy. But I hope you can appreciate that some of us want to experience solving these problems with a bicycle for the mind instead of a Waymo.

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