You get older, you get more tired(?), serene(?), you can see the progress towards death as a natural process in your own life.
Also you're around more death. I was with my mother when she died. I can't say it was a pleasant process, but it was very natural. She accepted hospice, and seemed to be at peace with death. The last few months with her a lot of positive memories were made that will stick with me.
I don't _want_ to die, but its clearly something I can feel will naturally come and should plan for.
This is wisdom. I had the same thoughts and experiences with my mother’s death, except she was terrified of death and I had to guide her through it.
I don’t know how old you are, or where you’re at in life, but at some point in your life, you may get some bad news and have your life threatened, where your death becomes really imminently real[1].
If you’re like me, you may go through a whole new level of fear. But, remember what you’ve learned and guide yourself back to that understanding.
I am still afraid of dying slowly and/or painfully, but over the last 57 years I have moved from wanting to live forever to accepting that I will die. Like you, it’s not a wish, it’s simply acceptance. Makes you appreciate the little things in life, too.
Reading The Denial of Death was a particularly interesting experience to me in my early 20's and, honestly, brought a lot of peace of mind regarding my future.
I'm leaning towards the belief we can get rid of it to some extent through tech. I think quite likely an AI assistant version of you and then when your biological body is packing up you can take some meds to pass away peacefully and hand your stuff over to the AI you. Or something like that - it's a bit tricky to see how the future will pan out.
Having lived the first third of my life in the pre internet world, I'm no longer sure I think it's net beneficial in all things. I didn't expect to be this unsure progress works. It's unscientific. Progress by definition is improving surely?
Since in (very small) ways I helped bring it into being, this message is displeasing in several ways.
Progress isn't as linear as you'd think. A lot of times one small improvement can make many more problems appear that people never had to deal with before. But compounded over many years it looks great. In fact, the longer a time period over which progress is assessed the better it looks.
Then you suddenly have a mismatch between what you thought you learnt from history, about how wonderful progress is, and how bad things can get from things that are said to be improvements in your lifetime.
If you look at some really terrible things like asbestos poisoning, that was only possible because of progress. But it took further progress to realize how dangerous a substance that is to human health, and then to take steps to correct the mistakes that were made.
It’s been a let-down to see the core of science (question everything, use the scientific method to learn step by step) get mocked and abused for politics.
It’s also been difficult to see “youth” become more of a priority over reason, capability, and wisdom. Especially as we have navigated the emptiness of the attention economy.
But then, I’ve also seen that these too have been patterns we’ve been repeating for millennia so maybe this is always what actual progress looks like “from the inside” (aka as you live through it’s present day)
I suspect the things built on the internet are a mixed bag more than the internet itself. On the one hand, the possibility to share information and learn more about the world is probably a huge positive, on the other hand stuff like social media is probably as damaging as tobacco or leaded petrol.
I believe it's essentially a major filter, as it requires a certain (relatively low) level of intelligence to develop the internet / mass communication, but requires a much higher level of intelligence to actually survive it without it ripping apart your civilizations.
In my late 20s something activated in my mind where I inverted my woes - that everyone else is fighting a far more exhausting personal war than I am. I don't have the energy to help everyone with their war, but I can respect that the people who are giving their energy to me might not even have it for themselves. I feel like since then my relationships have been deeper, more genuine, often more challenging. I also have to gauge which are worth holding on to - I cull my social garden now, instead of growing it.
Someone said every person is a private universe. You're listening to someone talk and you don't see that universe. Each pause, each sigh, a litany of experience, an era of mistakes.
Life is very short. You can make it to the end and be caught off guard because you were still waiting for it to begin. It can be worth the exhausting questions from time to time - a followup of 'really?' to asking how someone's weekend went can take you off a highway of nothings and onto a forest trail of adventure.
The ability of private citizens to make an impact on our politics. We like to talk about our legislatures or Congress in the abstract, but the reality is you as a citizen can get things moved in the direction you want, and you don’t have to be wealthy to make it happen. It’s not easy, it takes a ton of time, but if you get involved, good things can happen.
I want to believe in upward mobility; that someone born with limited opportunity in the US can get ahead. I shift my feelings on this almost weekly.
The importance of software. Thirty years ago I believed that technology would change our world in positive ways. Now, I’m less certain that software is in many cases necessarily, useful, or beneficial.
Personal responsibility. I’ll counter some of the posts in this thread. Yes, personal responsibility is critical, but there are so many systems working against the average person over which they have no control. You can work hard, get an education, stay off vice, save for a rainy day - and still end up penniless in a gutter, if the wrong hand gets dealt to you. And the system doesn’t give a shit, and your neighbors will spit on you and say you should have taken more personal responsibility for your actions.
> The importance of software. Thirty years ago I believed that technology would change our world in positive ways. Now, I’m less certain that software is in many cases necessarily, useful, or beneficial.
10-12 years ago, at the start of my career, I used to be very optimistic about tech, startups, etc. No I believe the impact of tech since then has been negative in a lot of way. I'm still not sure if there are enough positives to offset this.
IMO it’s capitalism that’s thrown a wrench in the whole thing.
As of 2024 (probly even as of 10 years ago) world-changing software can run for the fundamental cost of pennies a day but then that doesn’t justify cloud services, VC money, thousands of employees, the patent and copyright systems, vendor lock-in, subscriptions, or any of the hundreds of thousands of things that make money for various companies.
Let's ignore politics and religion for now. And only technology in the past ~30 years.
I dont know if change of mind is the right word. But may be proven wrong.
JVM. I was fist convinced JVM will be fast enough, and then it will never be fast enough for lots of things, and right now it is being used for even high frequency trading.
Excel is much much more important than most people are aware of it. When I was young I thought Excel / Spreadsheets or Access were toys. But working in the real world and some years passed I have a change of perspective. Since then I have been constantly calling it the most important software in computing. Far more so than even Windows or Linux.
Hardware Matters, a lot more than Software. This seems counterintuitive when most people would consider software is where the value lies. Especially when I started out as a Hardware Engineer but believed what Bill Gate said some 30 years ago, with Moore's Law all hardware cost will trend to zero. In reality Consumers dont understand software. And they are reluctant to buy software or features. While this works differently in Business, consumer tends to prefer something physical. Hence buying a new computer with free software update rather than paying for software. It is the whole software and hardware together as a "Product", and not one or the other.
Internet, or more specifically web pages. Are not what we envisioned with the Internet Super High Way. The actual network, where we can stream Netflix, or Spotify with 5G is great. But information on the web is, for vast majority of cases a net negative.
Mobile or Smartphone Gaming. Out of the 4B smartphone users, close to 2B are gamers. I never thought of a day that everyone is a gamer. In the old days Games were different. It could be an RPG with great novel and story telling. A simulation game like Sim City, Civ or Age of Empire that you could learn history or how the world works. Modern Mobile Games are a Casino, and the free ones are riddled with Ads. With both Smartphone platform owner have ZERO gaming DNA in them, but only a business person of how to squeeze every single penny out of it.
Everything you imagined with Mobile Gaming didn't happened. Instead we got a Mobile Casino.
Objective-C - What was once thought to be an ugly hacked on top of C Programming languages. Is actually beautiful.
Once I realize that I believe in the existence of laws of physics, and that these laws of physics can be found nowhere physically in the universe, I realized I believe in non-physical realms.
Interesting, it was the exact opposite for me. Once I realized that things only exist physically, many things became clear, especially the nature of souls and lack thereof, and of many elements of religious mythos around the world that were invented purely for pedagogical and eschatological reasons and don't literally exist in reality.
I also don't think you're correct about the laws being found nowhere physically, of course they're found physically, otherwise how would we have observed them? I believe you're falling into the fallacy of ignorance, saying that the laws don't exist because you believe they can't be found physically (even though this part is wrong).
It's a decision of axioms. You are free to believe any set of axioms, because they will per definition be unprovable (Gödel et al.), so the word ignorance doesn't quite apply (arguably).
Observing the behavior of fundamental particles following laws is different than touching the laws themselves. Analogous to observing this website is different than seeing the backend code.
My family was very house poor when I was growing up. We didn't live in poverty, but we were on the low end of lower middle class, living on the fringes of a very upper middle class area so growing up I always felt poorer than we maybe actually were.
It put me in that poverty mindset where I couldn't take breaks or vacations, I always had to work as hard as I could to earn as much as I could, then save every cent
I burned out hard just a few years after I started my career. I was a mess. I was on medical leave for a few months, then I was unemployed. I didn't have much savings because I wasn't actually earning that much and I was living in a very expensive city.
I had a lot of realizations then, about why I chose to live and stay in that city (proximity to my family), what was keeping me there (built in group of acquaintances), and my real career opportunities and trajectory if I stayed. So I left
I don't see my family as often anymore which does suck. I don't miss most of the acquaintances, few of them were real friends anyways, and the few that I do miss would have likely moved on eventually as they started having kids anyways.
I don't work nearly as hard or as many hours as I used to, I make 3x more money, and I have way more free time. I'm also a much more well rounded developer as a result I think
Taking time to yourself isn't optional, you cannot improve if you're constantly exhausted and focussed on just getting the next thing done. You need time to breathe and look at the bigger picture
There’s something I’m seeing here if you don’t mind me teasing it out: as you got older you saw acquaintances as replaceable. I think younger people see their friends as people who will be around for life (and certainly some will) and who can’t be replaced but the reality is that many of them will fade out and be replaced regardless.
In my particular case it was that in hindsight I don't think I was as close to a lot of those people as I thought I was at the time. When I moved away, many of them didn't even really say goodbye or goodluck or anything like that.
I kept in touch with a few of them for a couple of years after I left, visited a couple of times. Then they got married, had kids, and I hear from them much less. My understanding is that many childless people have a similar experience where their friends who marry and have kids move on from them fairly soon after, as their focus moves more onto their kids
Quite a few things actually, but the biggest one is that I believe that [almost] nobody is beyond rehabilitation. Even in cases where the person is beyond, it doesn’t mean we ought to make them suffer for their circumstances.
That isn’t to say we shouldn’t protect the rest of society, but neither punishment nor retribution — especially in the name of “justice” — are justifiable. If anything, such responses only [temporarily] satisfy one’s desire for bloodlust. They cannot undo the harm done and they cannot relieve us of the pain.
Punishment for crime will happen if the culture wants it to happen.
Even if you cannot morally justify that punishment being meted out by the government, the alternative is always individuals taking justice into their own hands — without the constraints of due process, usually with much more rage and cruelty.
I'm the same way, although I think society is going to find itself wrestling with a lot of ethical issues it's not prepared for when suddenly everything about human behavior is modifiable.
What happens when serial child predatory behavior is completely and verifiably modifiable with gene editing and pharmacology, for example? Should someone be punished for the random allotment of genes and circumstances that we can change as a society?
This is all on the horizon and we're not oriented to what's coming.
Sam Harris likes to point out that we tend to pity the UT tower shooter because he was found to have a tumor in his brain — and that just because child rapists don’t have a grossly visible defect in their skulls doesn’t mean that they aren’t suffering equally from bad anatomical luck to some extent.
Readit News
You get older, you get more tired(?), serene(?), you can see the progress towards death as a natural process in your own life.
Also you're around more death. I was with my mother when she died. I can't say it was a pleasant process, but it was very natural. She accepted hospice, and seemed to be at peace with death. The last few months with her a lot of positive memories were made that will stick with me.
I don't _want_ to die, but its clearly something I can feel will naturally come and should plan for.
I don’t know how old you are, or where you’re at in life, but at some point in your life, you may get some bad news and have your life threatened, where your death becomes really imminently real[1].
If you’re like me, you may go through a whole new level of fear. But, remember what you’ve learned and guide yourself back to that understanding.
1. I am okay now.
Since in (very small) ways I helped bring it into being, this message is displeasing in several ways.
Then you suddenly have a mismatch between what you thought you learnt from history, about how wonderful progress is, and how bad things can get from things that are said to be improvements in your lifetime.
If you look at some really terrible things like asbestos poisoning, that was only possible because of progress. But it took further progress to realize how dangerous a substance that is to human health, and then to take steps to correct the mistakes that were made.
It’s also been difficult to see “youth” become more of a priority over reason, capability, and wisdom. Especially as we have navigated the emptiness of the attention economy.
But then, I’ve also seen that these too have been patterns we’ve been repeating for millennia so maybe this is always what actual progress looks like “from the inside” (aka as you live through it’s present day)
The concept is a quaint, 1950s oversimplification.
Someone said every person is a private universe. You're listening to someone talk and you don't see that universe. Each pause, each sigh, a litany of experience, an era of mistakes.
Life is very short. You can make it to the end and be caught off guard because you were still waiting for it to begin. It can be worth the exhausting questions from time to time - a followup of 'really?' to asking how someone's weekend went can take you off a highway of nothings and onto a forest trail of adventure.
I want to believe in upward mobility; that someone born with limited opportunity in the US can get ahead. I shift my feelings on this almost weekly.
The importance of software. Thirty years ago I believed that technology would change our world in positive ways. Now, I’m less certain that software is in many cases necessarily, useful, or beneficial.
Personal responsibility. I’ll counter some of the posts in this thread. Yes, personal responsibility is critical, but there are so many systems working against the average person over which they have no control. You can work hard, get an education, stay off vice, save for a rainy day - and still end up penniless in a gutter, if the wrong hand gets dealt to you. And the system doesn’t give a shit, and your neighbors will spit on you and say you should have taken more personal responsibility for your actions.
10-12 years ago, at the start of my career, I used to be very optimistic about tech, startups, etc. No I believe the impact of tech since then has been negative in a lot of way. I'm still not sure if there are enough positives to offset this.
As of 2024 (probly even as of 10 years ago) world-changing software can run for the fundamental cost of pennies a day but then that doesn’t justify cloud services, VC money, thousands of employees, the patent and copyright systems, vendor lock-in, subscriptions, or any of the hundreds of thousands of things that make money for various companies.
I dont know if change of mind is the right word. But may be proven wrong.
JVM. I was fist convinced JVM will be fast enough, and then it will never be fast enough for lots of things, and right now it is being used for even high frequency trading.
Excel is much much more important than most people are aware of it. When I was young I thought Excel / Spreadsheets or Access were toys. But working in the real world and some years passed I have a change of perspective. Since then I have been constantly calling it the most important software in computing. Far more so than even Windows or Linux.
Hardware Matters, a lot more than Software. This seems counterintuitive when most people would consider software is where the value lies. Especially when I started out as a Hardware Engineer but believed what Bill Gate said some 30 years ago, with Moore's Law all hardware cost will trend to zero. In reality Consumers dont understand software. And they are reluctant to buy software or features. While this works differently in Business, consumer tends to prefer something physical. Hence buying a new computer with free software update rather than paying for software. It is the whole software and hardware together as a "Product", and not one or the other.
Internet, or more specifically web pages. Are not what we envisioned with the Internet Super High Way. The actual network, where we can stream Netflix, or Spotify with 5G is great. But information on the web is, for vast majority of cases a net negative.
Mobile or Smartphone Gaming. Out of the 4B smartphone users, close to 2B are gamers. I never thought of a day that everyone is a gamer. In the old days Games were different. It could be an RPG with great novel and story telling. A simulation game like Sim City, Civ or Age of Empire that you could learn history or how the world works. Modern Mobile Games are a Casino, and the free ones are riddled with Ads. With both Smartphone platform owner have ZERO gaming DNA in them, but only a business person of how to squeeze every single penny out of it. Everything you imagined with Mobile Gaming didn't happened. Instead we got a Mobile Casino.
Objective-C - What was once thought to be an ugly hacked on top of C Programming languages. Is actually beautiful.
Once I realize that I believe in the existence of laws of physics, and that these laws of physics can be found nowhere physically in the universe, I realized I believe in non-physical realms.
I also don't think you're correct about the laws being found nowhere physically, of course they're found physically, otherwise how would we have observed them? I believe you're falling into the fallacy of ignorance, saying that the laws don't exist because you believe they can't be found physically (even though this part is wrong).
Observing the behavior of fundamental particles following laws is different than touching the laws themselves. Analogous to observing this website is different than seeing the backend code.
My family was very house poor when I was growing up. We didn't live in poverty, but we were on the low end of lower middle class, living on the fringes of a very upper middle class area so growing up I always felt poorer than we maybe actually were.
It put me in that poverty mindset where I couldn't take breaks or vacations, I always had to work as hard as I could to earn as much as I could, then save every cent
I burned out hard just a few years after I started my career. I was a mess. I was on medical leave for a few months, then I was unemployed. I didn't have much savings because I wasn't actually earning that much and I was living in a very expensive city.
I had a lot of realizations then, about why I chose to live and stay in that city (proximity to my family), what was keeping me there (built in group of acquaintances), and my real career opportunities and trajectory if I stayed. So I left
I don't see my family as often anymore which does suck. I don't miss most of the acquaintances, few of them were real friends anyways, and the few that I do miss would have likely moved on eventually as they started having kids anyways.
I don't work nearly as hard or as many hours as I used to, I make 3x more money, and I have way more free time. I'm also a much more well rounded developer as a result I think
Taking time to yourself isn't optional, you cannot improve if you're constantly exhausted and focussed on just getting the next thing done. You need time to breathe and look at the bigger picture
I kept in touch with a few of them for a couple of years after I left, visited a couple of times. Then they got married, had kids, and I hear from them much less. My understanding is that many childless people have a similar experience where their friends who marry and have kids move on from them fairly soon after, as their focus moves more onto their kids
That isn’t to say we shouldn’t protect the rest of society, but neither punishment nor retribution — especially in the name of “justice” — are justifiable. If anything, such responses only [temporarily] satisfy one’s desire for bloodlust. They cannot undo the harm done and they cannot relieve us of the pain.
Even if you cannot morally justify that punishment being meted out by the government, the alternative is always individuals taking justice into their own hands — without the constraints of due process, usually with much more rage and cruelty.
He's plainly stated his belief: that no matter what a person did, they should receive sympathy.
Classic case of evil hiding behind the guise of good.
What happens when serial child predatory behavior is completely and verifiably modifiable with gene editing and pharmacology, for example? Should someone be punished for the random allotment of genes and circumstances that we can change as a society?
This is all on the horizon and we're not oriented to what's coming.
I recoil from the sentiment but can’t refute it.