20 years ago I thought that we will wait to have kids as “a war will come”. I was overthinking and I am happy now that I changed my mind :)
Is it useful or does it make you happy? Or it might even make some money? Nice. Do it. My life is easier.
There's definitely a risk of over-thinking things. Just do things. You're not likely to regret it.
Agree, in general, people over-think a lot, and aren't "just doing things" enough, the world would be a better place if people acted more, over-think less.
With that said, some decisions are more long-lasting and have a greater impact than others. I'm another child-less person, mainly because I guess I'm selfish enough to enjoy my life with my wife exactly like it is, and she agrees, but also because I know that if we have a kid, then that's not something you can walk back on exactly, he/she/it/them are there, forever now. Very different from me deciding right now "You know, I'm gonna have a joint, grab a book and go to the beach for this entire Tuesday", the types of decisions I think people should overthink less :)
I was reminded of a tactic used by life insurance companies, which are more successful when they show a client a photo of themselves at age 70.
I pictured myself sitting there alone, lonely, perhaps without a wife by then (a 50/50 chance). And would I be calling friends my own age? Or my kids?
Although the likelihood that I won’t get along with them as an adult… you never know; another factor is their future partners…
Well, the kids - plus my wife, who wanted kids - won out.
But everyone has their own life, the best one they can imagine, so this is definitely not some kind of persuasion—just a description of the logical process I went through back then.
Which made it really ironic that your second sentence served to disprove your point and not support it.
I don't think anyone claimed that either.
> Most people go through life never doing it at all.
That's unfair to others, of course they think. They think differently than you, and about different things than you, but doesn't mean they "go through life never thinking", probably no one does that.
Are people living in/moving towards a saccharine utopia tough?
You have to feed them food, medical, clothes, life and anything else. I cannot afford to have a child in this climate.
Yourself, have to be prepared to submit all in to a secure job for the next 25 years, it's a big commitment.
The world is overpopulated as it is, adopt. If you can afford all of that and still support the child then do it, have a kid.
But overall children aren't cheap. Easy to produce, but extremely costly to maintain.
I'll keep publishing static websites, so I don't even have to worry about load and CPU usage. I don't care who reads it, the value for me is in writing.
I still haven't changed my mind on the "shall I have kids" problem :P
Have we yet lost the open ideals of university sharing? The core of open source?
The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.
- E.g. an idea is "Everybody should have cheap housing! Or an even better idea, everybody should have free housing."
- Ok, how exactly in concrete terms do we actually do that? (The very expensive Execution of the idea.)
- "Uh, well, I leave that as an exercise to the reader."
Ideas are easy and execution is hard. That's what jaded people mean when they say "ideas are a dime a dozen".
ideas + execution - not really - (Linus Torvalds sharing his work on Linux and that taking off)
Failure of the GPL? How can you even put those words next to each other? GPL is an amazing success. It took software out of hands of SV / VC / corpo crowd and put it where it should be - users.
GPL gave us Linux, but also gave us Amazon, Google and 2020s Microsoft. GPL is why 90+% of libraries on Github are MIT licensed. GPL gave us OpenAI and Anthropic and this here article.
The less restrictive ~1984 MIT early version of the software license was several years before ~1989 GPL v1.
Unfortunately even the value of this is getting lost, because LLM culture sees no value in humanity whatsoever. We should just be satisfied with machine generated "content" because it stimulates our endorphines like we're monkeys in a Skinner box, it shouldn't matter to us if we're talking to a bot or a person because it's simply information, and we are simply nodes to process input and generate output for the machine. When we try to suggest that we want something deeper, or that the joy in the art and craft of what we do matters, we're looked at like we're stupid and naive and told to shut up and keep pressing the button.
"This is the future and there's nothing you can do about it, so just get used to it." It's fucking depressing. Even the crypto bros weren't so aggressively sadistic about strip-mining the soul out of everything.
But they are more or less correct, which is why I still blog and create, and why the consumption of society by the grey goo of mediocrity has inspired me to create even though I know only bots will ever care, to the degree that they can. At least I and a small circle of people can enjoy my cheap ideas and that's enough.
Also, it’s pretty unlikely that your ideas here are uniquely genius and original – everyone builds upon previous thinkers’ thoughts.
Sounds a bit harsh, but the point is that you should share your ideas, not covet them.
Look at AI. AI companies throw out their models and let the "community" develop the ideas what to do with them. They don't really know what they are capable of. All they do is implement these things that the dev community digs up and creates.
It's a reprehensible tactic. So why give drops of blood to a desert, when there is zero incentive and in the end you will revitalise the desert, but it will turn against you and rob you of your job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_history
https://www.amazon.com/1001-Ideas-That-Changed-Think/dp/1476...
The notion that a philosopher would hoard his ideas because he wants to get money from them is pretty much antithetical to the field.
You seem to be referring to ideas as in, ideas about how AI systems should be designed.
Different scenarios, for sure.
Patents, copyrights, trade marks exist because rewarding people for their insights and inventions matters.
When laundered via LLMs whose pretraining destroys all credit, that can't happen.
he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that.
> he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that.
So? That's not a harm.
I don't understand why that's a downside.
> It's not a direct harm in itself
I don't understand how it's a harm at all.
Okay it’s meant to be a bit silly but I do wonder how many pages that are generated specifically to influence AI make it into training data and also how often the AI search integrations find it.
Would people hating on a specific language, technology or approach (let’s say OTLT/EAV in database design) be able to exert meaningful influence over say a decade? Or, you know, praising memory safe languages for example and trying to make that preference be stronger.
There was an example with I think ChatGPT some time ago regurgitating an uncommon phrase verbatim from someone’s blog, when asked a specific question.
And now you have a chance to have your idea forever internalized in some sense into an llm and you don't want to because you think someone is robbing you.
If we’re going to use human analogies let’s start with human rights for LLMs.