maybe not true for all of us but by 2008 i was done developing. 0-12 is basically when you are created as a person -- molded by your environment. crime may have been higher back then but it was a much better environment to be raised in. society has waned quite a bit since then. public schools have waned a lot. all of our institutions. nobody feels like they can speak candidly or help another person without risking being taken to trial. yes, xkcd make a comic where he makes fun of people who say that things have gotten worse. but the crazy, unbelievable reality is that xkcd was wrong shock horror!
did you ever consider the idea that AI is not the same as a calculator? or consider the fact that there is no reason why there couldnt be another quantum leap next year? and another one after that?
exactly correct. millennials decided to sleepwalk forward and ignore reality. millennials are not out there solving societal problems even today. millennials also benefit from being raised in one of the most prosperous and nurturing environments that has ever existed. the only thing millennials ever did was spawn AI in a completely irresponsible and regrettable way. now our kids have to grow up not even knowing whether or not they will make it.
gen z is not going to college like millennials did. and i do think it was a moral failure for everyone to jump on an unsustainable bandwagon... they paid too much for a degree in the humanities and when asked about it they would say "well... its just what everyone does." mindless behavior hurts people and the economy so how is this not a moral failing? people should have stuck up for what they knew was right. everybody knew that the ultimate destination of this bandwagon was a world where everyone has a degree regardless of merit (thereby making degrees pointless and worthless) and the degrees cost half a million dollars for no apparent reason. people were intellectually lazy and they got scraped. big fucking deal.
i think the obvious cognitive dissonance is mostly fueled by denial. it's acceptable for them to believe that the dirty blue collar people will fall on hard times. also they don't want to believe that white collar jobs will be lost because you can't use the "teach the coal miners to code" meme-think on it. turns out reality can be a little counter-intuitive sometimes. sometimes it can even be different from what you see on TV! wow!
i have an idea for a game but i really dont have enough time to implement myself. it would be a MMORPG but with discreet time steps, so every hour or so all the players would get a message that contains a picture depicting the point of view of their player character and a list of actions/options that they can take. rendering the game out of real time would allow hyper-realistic graphics and also physics simulation or environment destruction/modification. it would also allow for many, many more concurrent players in the same game world than other games and would allow for a much larger game world. and taking one "turn" only once every 30 minutes/hour would lend the game a special character that might be highly appreciated by some people in the context of todays popular games. my vision for the game is being able to peer into a vast, photo-realistic world, buzzing with a hundred thousand people trading, mining and fighting, one picture at a time.
when i played HL2 in 2006 or whatever, i had no idea that there would never be anything like that again. we all thought that HL2 was just the beginning... but it was the opposite. i think that we all assumed that the game was made great by its technology. but the more i think about it, the more i realize that it was the people, the sensibilities of those people and that time, and the character of valve at that time, everything besides the technology, that made HL2 so good. and that also explains why it has never been reproduced. if i were going to be sent to another planet in another galaxy to seed another colony of humanity... and i could only bring 2 video games for that entire branch of humanity to know and appreciate... it would be HL2 and MGS2.
havent all the PDs across the country switched to encrypted radio coms? and how is this supposed to be relaxing when you could hear a cop screaming for backup after being shot in his pelvis?
having a lot of money is crazy because there is literally nothing to do. there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. if you sit around all day then people who work at local restaurants will start to know you and people here and there will start to recognize you from wandering around between your haunts every day. its such a weird feeling when you realize that the world isnt as big as you thought it was. before having total freedom, you image that even a single metro like sf bay area is enough to swallow you up. its not. the reason it feels so big is because your are busy all the time. and the same goes for the entire world. theres nothing to do here unless you are busy with something. traveling and gawking at stuff is not going to get you very far. that is the terrible and insane reality of life. that life is an illusion. this is part of the reason why so many people buckle under the apparently feather-weight pressure of having lots of money. the other reason is that your sense of identity and self-worth becomes tied to your money. you find yourself completely unable to ask for a lower price, balk at a price or decide to not buy something if there are other people around. because after all you have the money. except nobody has enough money to behave like that. 60M would evaporate very quickly under someone who did not recognize and correct this effect. this is why so many rich people are so comically cheap. they have to be because you lose the ability to think rationally, to thread the needle. you have to just shamelessly be cheap.
elon musk said "vacation kills." hes one hundred percent correct. when you feel totally free you stop thinking in terms of how to protect yourself and begin to explore all possibilities in an unconstrained way. i dont have to be at work on monday so why not climb a mountain? why not go on safari? why not try this designer drug? logic could save you but without the impulse to protect your fragile life, not everyone is logical enough to sail those waters. i almost killed myself twice before i learned it.
the strange and absolutely unambiguous truth about life is that there is no such thing as not working. you must always be working. it doesnt matter how much money you have. the only way to live a good and satisfying life is to work and have enough at stake that you are afraid of failing. it is better to risk losing your money or even your life rather than stop working.
the appetite for self-destruction is just as big now as it used to be among teenagers. i think people simply dont understand how self-destructive social media is. thats why theyre surprised.