All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it

People under-appreciate (or have forgotten) that a lot of happiness is is related to anticipating as opposed to getting. I think if more people focused on the journey or the process (or the (present) moment), versus the goal, there'd be more joy/happiness around.

My 7-year-old son (who by the way loves math) always wants to go there. I can't help but explain that the payoff is horrendous from any point of view, and he understands and doesn't argue against it, but he still insists. Sometimes I convince him by offering alternatives, but sometimes I have to cave because he seems to like it so much. But man, spending euros on that stings, I have the feeling that the people who run the stall must be laughing at all the suckers who fall into the trap.

> Adults hate them

This is absolutely not the case.

I wonder if it's true that people don't remember. People maybe remember but don't want to talk about it. It is such a cognitive dissonance.

You really may want to think about if you are around people who are genuinely good for you and your children.

I’m not surprised though, over the years I have noticed a notable shift towards the controlling and narcissistic spectrums of parents. I’m not totally sure why that is, but it seems to be definitely happening and it’s also rather clear to me that it’s a rather “American” toxic nature, probably due to the sick and perverse obsession with besting, outdoing, greedily wanting and needing more and shinier things than “the Joneses”, the obsession with celebrity and fame and money. It all contributes to the diseased state of society and “culture”, if you can call obsession with corporate outputs that.

But anyways, just let kids have their moment of fun, people, their identity and soul will be crushed by the “American” indoctrination and propaganda machine soon enough and they will become like the drone adults. Let them be human for at least a couple years of their lives.

This is truly one of life's under-appreciated little pleasures!

So it's not that only children appreciate life, it's just that adults have to deal with that whole money problem, while children don't.

I think the impulse to use AI to replace human effort in cases where it's not drudgery, like art, math, etc is the issue, more than the fact that AI isn't human. Let AI do AI things, and humans do human things. I honestly hope that when everything shakes out we have a lot more room in the world for people doing things that are uniquely human, or amazing new collaborations that let humans do things they've never been able to do before.

You can make this case for pretty much anything? Are cars human? Are excavators human? The universe does not exist to cater to the human experience, it just is. Not everything we do in it has to be for the greater enlightenment or whatnot, sometimes you just need to get something done.

Not really. The point of life is successful reproduction. Because without it, we cease to exist. It wasn't that long ago when humans spent their entire lives struggling to live and protect their children.

To do all those things, I need money.

Excerpts:

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling, for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted. Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

...

The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective. the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free to sell themselves to the highest bidder and to enter the best paying prisons in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies, which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects, which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress, to the completed sale, to the signature on the contract, which was to clear the way to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home would ever get there now, for every remembered place had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.

Every place had been displaced, every love unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant to make way for the passage of the crowd of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless with their many eyes opened toward the objective which they did not yet perceive in the far distance, having never known where they were going, having never known where they came from

I think it's hilarious that they just let me play with a £150k Nexus 9000 stack at work, like it's fucking Roblox or something.

"Here you go EB, figure that one out, all it's doing is connecting our core network with our VM servers and SAN, no pressure! Documentation? Naaah, we never had any of that..."

I look at my cohort who I schooled with, and they are all so terrifyingly sober and adult, and take themselves so very seriously. They toil, they spin, they die.

Me… I don’t really know what happened. As a child, the more I was told to be normal, the more I dug my heels in, not out of contrarianism but out of a still indefatigable conviction that all of these people were wrong.

And the proof lies in the pudding. I am in my 40s, still a child, still stop to explore incessantly, still enjoy poking things with a stick, still finding joy, still being told to just for the love of god be normal, when will you get a proper job, settle down and become a banker or a lawyer or a doctor, and all that jazz.

Maybe it’s just the (until recently undiagnosed) ADHD talking - maybe I have been graced with a surfeit of good luck - but I’m pretty content with how being a cast iron weirdo panned out.

On the remembrance of childhood, much of it is clear to me - and now that I have a toddler of my own, I so often find her doing X or Y and going “good god, I remember being that kid”. Her other doesn’t remember her childhood at all, and struggles to relate - whereas I’ll gleefully fill my pockets with sand and run around hooting Yankee Doodle at full blast. It’s fun. People don’t have enough fun.

As a child I played RuneScape and I recently got into Oldschool RuneScape. It's clearly the same engine and it's a lot of the same content but it's very much not exactly the same, as they've rebalanced everything, added new content, and shifted all the metas. But it has the same feeling to it (unlike RuneScape 3).

Or how about this - I used to play with Lego Technic, but now I can build full-scale things by screwing together metal extrusions and wooden planks and beams and other parts. Make sure to sweep/vacuum up metal shavings from your floor immediately - learned that the hard way. Sawdust isn't as bad.

Learning Go felt a bit like learning BASIC again - I just banged out code and the computer did what I wanted - although I wouldn't recommend it as a first language because of all the "if err". You need some pre-existing experience to not ignore your responsibility to write "if err" everywhere.

Today I'm going to make a pasta dish, with tomato, olives, bell peppers, onion, and fresh picked parsley. Haven't made a dish like that in ages, and I've never bought a live parsley plant from the supermarket before. It's a little thing, but it's still neat. I'm aware that it probably tastes exactly the same as dried parsley.

First time I ever went to a big outdoor music festival was completely overwhelming in a good way. Second time was pretty good. Third was alright. Fourth was boring. Maybe that wasn't the exact progression but you get the picture.

We'd call it the "hedonic treadmill" when it comes to music festivals but we don't really use that term for cartoons.