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.
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
So what if 99.99% of Internet users won’t find it any more because they use LLMs? Then write for the 0.01%. Those are the people I want to engage with anyway.
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.
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.
Which made it really ironic that your second sentence served to disprove your point and not support it.
As I've grown older, I noticed the cardinal pleasures don't hit like they used to. I also get nostalgic at times about the wonders of youth, experiencing things for the first time, falling in love, getting my heart broken, the little things of life.
I've gotten great pleasure and reassurance knowing that's all ahead of my children. No matter how I progress personally, time marches on and I get to see my kids discover the world. If I do nothing else in my life, I would still feel immensely fulfilled.
I think the recent rise in things like Disney adults and interests around video games or popular media (TV/movies) is a kind of biological response. People are free to do whatever they want of course, but I can't help but think that these people, at least biologically, are drawn to these more adolescent interests precisely because they're not experiencing it through the eyes of their children.
> I also get nostalgic at times about the wonders of youth, experiencing things for the first time
Yeah, I guess at one point I'll feel like that too perhaps, but I still feel young, I feel like I have more energy each day than the previous one, and every month is experiencing new things for the first time, and personally I don't want that to stop and experiencing those things through the eyes of my children, I want to continue having those experiences myself, together with my wife :) I guess that's where the offhand "I'm selfish" sentiment from my previous comment comes from.
> If I do nothing else in my life, I would still feel immensely fulfilled.
Do you think you'd feel fulfilled if you didn't have children? Maybe this is the core differences, I feel fulfilled in my life already, more than ever and more every day, I live exactly the life I want today, and I wouldn't want to change it for anything. Even if I became deadly sick tomorrow, I'd feel fulfilled by the life I have lived.
As I approached 30 I felt what I now understand as anxiety. Nothing crazy but you wake up one day, you're a year old, you take stock of your life and see what you've accomplished. I chased credentials and new jobs, did well but not yet able to retire. Old relationships grew strained and new ones are hard to form. Etc. I was definitely more afraid of death than you are.
I stumbled into children. Met my wife, didn't overthink things and decided to marry her after several years of courtship. She wanted children so I went along with it.
After they were born, the anxiety went away entirely. I just watch them grow older. It might change after their grown but hopefully they'll have children and I'll be able to repeat the process (my parents sure have).
To answer your question, I don't see a way I could have been fulfilled without children. It brings a lot with it as well. Before children the worst thing that could happen to me is dying. After kids you realize there's a whole world of potential pain and sorrow that is now before you. You're also constantly reminded that every kid is a roll of the dice when you see others in a similar spot as you have children with health or behavioral issues. It's terrifying.
But for me life shouldn't be all pleasure. I've always liked exercise because it does feel terrible while you're doing it. But at least you're doing something. I feel that way about children.
My wife and I have been together 13 years and we found out fairly early that we can't have children. It's taken a lot of internal work to be ok with it, good days and bad. Ironically the same 'not over-thinking it' strategy is the most helpful for my well-being. Just focus on what I can do today.
Seems like kids really are the quickest path to meaning making, it takes a lot of active effort to try to get a sense of fulfillment without them, at least for me.
So with that comes the flexibility of not having to worry about any biological clocks :)
Even without children I'll never be alone though, luckily I live in the greatest place in the world!
> Regrets are a thing.
People keep telling me this, but after 35 years on this planet with still zero regerts, when is that supposed to be happening exactly? ;)
Are people living in/moving towards a saccharine utopia tough?
You have to feed them food, medical, clothes, life and anything else. I couldn't afford to have a child in this climate at this time.
Yourself, has to be prepared to sink all in to. You have a secure job for the next 25 years, it's a big commitment.
The world is overpopulated as it is, adopt.
But however, if you can afford all of that and can still support the child then do it, have a kid.
Ae overall children aren't cheap. Easy to produce, but extremely costly to maintain.
However, thought processes like the one you identified above are probably adaptive, as gene lines which spend time trying to find the "justifiable reasons" for breeding were likely eliminated.
Gene lines where "I can raise my kids with like-minded community of peers", "I feel ready for more in life", and "sharing children with my parents, and letting my kids bond with healthy gradparents" (restatements of your phrasings) win out and reliably produce healthy offspring. So those reasons become strong motivators (despite being un-necessary justifications), that may seem irrational at first glance.
The thing people are thinking about when deciding not to have children for climate reasons is climate change on a human timescale, not a geological/astronomical one. There is a very real chance that children born today will live through a wildly different climate than their parents did.
As far as evolution goes, there are plenty of species that will not breed or even eat their young when circumstances are not good enough to raise them. It's not that out-there for people to put off or avoid having children due to environmental stressors like climate change. We, as humans, can just rationalize and understand it over a longer time period than, say, a Spotted Hyena.
Somebody probably gave Trump the same advice, and he took it to heart.
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".
It leaves no escape-hatch to judge that an idea is bad. And bad execution can only be spotted if somebody else does good execution.
Similar to saying a startup needs to get product-market-fit to get success. Success defines that you have product-market-fit.
We are all horrifically bad at thinking about cause and effect, or talking about it.
But yes, I've slowly learnt that doing anything often matters more than a grand idea.
Almost everyone I know "came up with" some startup, ex. Uber before Uber existed, yet none of them did it. I have personally thought of maybe 2 startup ideas that later came into existence.
Come to think of it, people in my circle that have ideas left and right are _still_ not founding companies even with modern LLM's that supposedly solved programming, clearly there is a disconnect somewhere.
The correlation between cost and value can be very complicated, especially in the chaotic world (or chaotic situation).
I was thinking it would be great to have a trusted middle man to use to pay for things that wouldn't expose my own bank card details to every website, or to be able to generate one off transaction numbers.
Who's pushing an agenda and why?
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.
The major fault I see here is that people didn't forsee that the default GPL should have had AGPL's clauses.
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.
No. We don't. Original good ideas are exceedingly rare.
Also, what we really have learned, is that the typical techie isn't interested in pureness of thought and originality, exploration of the beauty of the unknown, but rather making a quick buck.. A good idea will be taken and used without credit.
We'll see whether or not LLMs have original ideas soon I guess. I wonder.
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.
https://dfrlab.org/2026/04/08/pravda-in-the-pipeline/
There is quite a bit of evidence now that state "internet" agencies pump out blogspam and news to influence search results and LLM datasets.
I'm not sure what can be done to counter this.
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.
For some it's demoralizing to know that your work will be broken down and atomized into language model mush, and the credit will go to the computer.
Yes, that was one of the things that I hope happens with the open source software I write.
> Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity whose entire business model is making sure they sit as a gatekeeper between your free work and others who would benefit from your work?
Sure, that's what doing SEO on one's own blog is, isn't it?
> For some it's demoralizing to know that your work will be broken down and atomized into language model mush, and the credit will go to the computer.
I think this is probably the crux: that writing is no longer discoverable because people aren't using search engines any more. It would be interesting to put some hard numbers on that. I reckon writing is still more discoverable (in absolute numbers) than it was when blogs first took off (over 20 years ago?)
When laundered via LLMs whose pretraining destroys all credit, that can't happen.
Ditto for personal blogging and thought leadership pieces. You get drowned out by the volume of AI generated pieces, and any unique ideas you do propose will be presented by the models as their own.
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.
freedom of knowledge and open sourcing should always exist, and if anything, even more important in the AI era.
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.
still, at least the existence of IP laws indicates that there is a need to reward creators for their creations.