Haha, agreed. Like I alluded to in my post, many of the best things in my life have come from just being thrown into the deep end. If standing at the edge of a pool and ruminating over whether to jump or not, one may never do it. If the choice is made for you, well, then there's no ruminating.
But we're too old for accidents now, this is going to happen with intention, or not at all. Which is also fine, but I am interested in hearing other people's experiences.
I wish there was a way to make this decision rationally. My wife and I are coming up to the point of no return. We either do it now, or never.
Now let's try to figure this out: Do we have enough money? Yes, probably. We could survive 10 years without making another dime. I don't know what kind of safety net is recommended, but people do it with a lot less. We live in a country with free health care, so illness won't end our lives like it does in the USA.
With that out of the way, let's get to all the other points:
How much do I want children? Personally, I don't get it. If my wife wasn't dead-certain she _must_ have at least one child, I would never, ever consider it. I hate noise and chaos. I even find co-habitation challenging.
I was an only child and I think I'm mildly autistic. To me, 'alone time' and 'quiet time' are sacred and required for my sanity. Well, I know that goes out the window with children. My wife is the opposite: Many siblings, has always been around noise and chaos. Loves giving love. To me, the dog, to anyone. And that is why she seems to have this need. So, the decision is: Do I give up what I want, to make her happy?
Her happiness is about as important to me as my own. So that's a stalemate. She keeps saying how worried she is that it will ruin my life. But I also don't want us to split up over this, knowing that I have 'taken' her fertile years. She won't have a kid except with me. So that's also a stalemate.
I have had a pretty terrible childhood. So I know I'm biased. I don't want to let fear dictate my life.
Almost any occasion where I've stepped outside my comfort zone or done things I didn't want to do out of fear turned out to be things I was grateful to have done.
I can also see how raising children could be very rewarding. Even my therapist said it can be very healing to have children. It's an opportunity to do better than my parents. That's valuable, for sure.
And then I think of the state of the world. Awful. I wouldn't want to bring children into this. I'd even probably say to my own mother 'don't bother' if she'd come to consult me about whether to have me first. But then I spoke to my granddad, who was a teenager during the 2nd world war. He is also probably mildly autistic. He said it was the best thing he ever did. Had multiple kids.
If I look at my wife's family, they are all happy, successful, harmonious people (now). I look at my wife's parents and think "what a blessing". The richness of life they get to experience is just magical. If I could somehow guarantee that it'd go that way for me as well, then I'd have kids already.
But there are no guarantees, just uncertainty. Uncertainty of the "life changes forever, irrevocably" kind. That is brutal and scary.
The last time I made a similar decision was when starting a business. I knew I went down a road that would require stability and dedication. I'm a volatile person who quickly gets bored of things and wants to move on to other things.
Thanks to my wife I've done a bunch of things I never thought I'd do, because they require dedication and consistency. Something I don't really have. Renovating houses, starting businesses. I surprised myself with what I was capable of. All thanks to my wife.
I also think it's basically a crime to not let her raise a human being. I am certain anyone raised by her would be a net positive to society.
But then there's me and my issues. I don't know how I'll deal with it. I don't know what will happen. There's a chance I can't do it. And what then? Divorce? Repeat the cycle of putting children into the world and abandoning them, like my parents did, because they also couldn't handle it?
They were very young and had no money or support. Their relationship was also broken. My wife and I are 'old' and we have money and we have been an unbeatable team for well over a decade. We also have support. Grand-parents are basically next door and dying to help with raising a kid. So we are in a privileged position.
But my fear of taking this step is not going away. And I won't know what it'll be like. Parents look so tired. Many of my friends are parents. They all seem to offer the same advice "it's hell on earth, I hate every moment of it, it's the best thing I've ever done".
Awesome. What am I supposed to do with that? It's useless advice. It seems nobody can really tell you whether to do it or not.
Any people here who were equally fearful and then did it, NOT regretting it? And I mean truly. I don't want to hear the "I love my kids"-mantra. It's an automated thing everyone has to say. I mean truly.
To report back on this, I contacted the various email addresses given in OP's article.
For people with GDPR rights, this link helps make a DSAR (though interestingly the US and many other countries are also available from the country dropdown, maybe they follow these rules everywhere): https://withpersona.com/dsar
This of course brings up the problem of having to verify the ID of the person who's requesting their ID to be deleted from their DB. So I am probably going to stop here.
I also received a separate email stating that my data was already scheduled for deletion if I used Persona through LinkedIn.
I can't edit my comment, but to the people responding here, thank you for adding all this information. It really helped elucidate why VRAM vs RAM is a distinction and also prevents my somewhat naive interpretation from being the only thing people see. Thanks!
> spinning disks have been replaced by NVMe solid state drives with near-RAM I/O bandwidth
Am I missing something here? Even Optane is an order of magnitude slower than RAM.
Yes, under ideal conditions, SSDs can have very fast linear reads, but IOPS / latency have barely improved in recent years. And that's what really makes a difference.
Of course, compared to spinning disks, they are much faster, but the comparison to RAM seems wrong.
In fact, for applications like AI, even using system RAM is often considered too slow, simply because of the distance to the GPU, so VRAM needs to be used. That's how latency-sensitive some applications have become.
How does this work for the myriad banks I've had to prove my identity to in the same way?
I'll be attempting steps 1-4 and see what Persona comes back with.
I'm reasonably sure funding for the arts is globally as low as can be.
If we applied the rule of "it has to be good to be worth it" and money is the main indicator for "good", then what about the myriad products and services that are low quality / terrible, yet make tons of money because they can afford to shove marketing down everyone's throats and thus stay relevant?
Most popular music is downright awful to me. Do I want to take their money away because I don't think they deserve it? No. On the other side of that coin I'd like to see some kind of counter balance. How many artists were considered awful until they suddenly became the biggest deal ever? Often posthumously.
This tiny sliver of funding for some people you may not like won't take anything away from you.
The early internet was so great because it was full of weird things. We've lost ALL of it, due to commercialisation. We stand to lose even more if we don't do something to fund the people who dare to be weird.
This goes right back to the thing Bezos said about how we need to become interplanetary so we can inhabit the galaxy, because if we inhabit the galaxy we could have a thousand Mozarts. I think we could already have a thousand Mozarts if they weren't busy slaving away in Amazon's warehouses.
Once there's a trillion humans in the galaxy and they're still all slaving away in warehouses, we still won't have any Mozarts.
Not everything can or should be quantified by money and economics.
Salient point, regarding the 'no' bit. I agree completely. But since I was responding to a likely troll, there wasn't much point elaborating further.
Thanks for the added information :)
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Honestly, if you just made your profile a day ago to yell overly confident and meaningless statements into the void, like a Mandrill in the jungle trying to shout over all the others, go back to LinkedIn, they like that kind of stuff there.
I even agree that AI has a place in our world and can greatly increase productivity. But we should talk about the how and why, instead of attacking others ad hominem and just stopping any discourse with absolutist nonsense.
Things that can only be used by an exclusive elite don't tend to survive, unless we're talking super-yachts.
AI is only going to work if enough people can actually meaningfully use it.
Therefore, the monetisation model will have to adapt in ways that make it sustainable. OpenAI is experimenting with ads. Other companies will just subsidise the living daylights out of their solutions...and a few people will indeed run this stuff locally.
Look at how slow the adoption of VR has been. And how badly Meta's gamble on the metaverse went. It's still too expensive for most people. Yes, a small elite can afford the necessary equipment, but that's not a petri dish on which one can grow a paradigm-shift.
If only a few thousand people could afford [insert any invention here], that invention wouldn't be common-place nowadays.
Now, the pyramid has sort of been turned on its head, in the sense that things nowadays don't start expensive and then become cheaper, but instead start cheap and then become...something else, be that more expensive or riddled with ads. But there are limits to this.
> People who are cut out to be software developers
You mean the people AI is going to replace? What's the definition of 'cut out to be' here?
Ads, which are the sole reason for the attention-grabbing-at-all-costs society we find ourselves in, are, in my opinion, one of the greatest cancers to ever befall us.
If they'd protected their knowledge from AI crawlers before it was too late, they might stand a chance, but in this climate, they're just adding nails to their coffin.
Broadly, I agree with your sentiment. As soon as some people rule over others, given enough time, things creep towards total enslavement and disenfranchisement of the others. This has been proven over and over.
The question then becomes, how do we organise society instead?
The question is why we have to work 8h a day to begin with. Or why we don't earn more.
If productivity goes up, something has to give. We either work less or we earn more.
If productivity goes up and we work the same amount of time for the same amount of money (and let's not kid ourselves, if anything we'll end up working more time for less money), the social contract has been broken.
I don't care how rich some outlier becomes, so long as it isn't at the sacrifice of our own self-actualisation. But that is exactly what is (and has been since the 70s) occurring. That trend is unlikely to reverse and it won't lead anywhere good.
This is the 'ends justify the means' argument. No matter how ruthlessly power / money was accumulated by a person, the fact that they somehow did it, justifies it.
It's undeniable that some progress happened thanks to Elon, but people like him can't stay in their lane and immediately assume they are demi-gods capable of doing anything.
They start reshaping the world according to their psychotic beliefs and ultimately make all of us worse off. Unchecked power is not and will never be a good thing.
For quite a while, I had to keep using flexbox instead of grids, because grids killed performance, funnily enough.
That seems to have been rectified with modern browsers though, funnily enough.
The question is where this will lead and what, if anything will, should or can be done to put the brakes on this wealth (re-)distribution.
It feels as though over the last few decades, all we have seen is a continuing trend of increasing amounts of wealth being amassed by a smaller and smaller circle of people.
What I find incredibly hard to judge is the point at which the current system leading to this will face violent reorganisation.
We've had feudalism, communism and fascism (and even a few attempts at egalitarian democracies long before that), but they all failed. It is tempting to say they all failed because "they could have never worked". That's easy to say with hindsight.
Once the current experiment implodes, will we all be armchair experts, scoffing at the idea that this could have ever worked also? And if so, why isn't anyone looking at the system and trying to change something?
The other systems usually ended in world wars or violent revolution. Often the ruling class became too comfortable / belligerent, just to then be replaced by the same thing (but maybe with a bit of lag. See the 2nd world war's ending. The middle class thrived up until about the 70s/80s).
Would feudalism have stayed if they'd had the levels of surveillance and AI-powered control we are currently facing? How about communism? Could a planned economy work if that is suddenly super-charged with computers and AI (and the necessary oppression to achieve it)?
Capitalism mixed with strong safeguards ensuring that there is a return for productivity for everyone feels like the best attempt we've made at a system that works for everyone until all the safeguards began being dismantled in the 70s.
Can we return to that system or is regulatory capture irreversible and therefore capitalism will always inevitably lead back to feudalism? And what can be done about it once AI and automation ensure the hegemony can't be touched anymore?