thr0wawayf00

Personally, I think it's pretty hard to make that kind of comparison accurately without having professional experience in both fields. One could also argue that it's as intellectually stimulating as being doctor, but how do we actually know that?

I've cleaned toilets professionally, and I'll say once and for all: writing software, no matter how monotonous or boring, is nothing like cleaning toilets. And I'd be willing to bet that someone trying to make such comparisons has ever had to do that kind of work.

> Nowadays when it's just gluing frameworks together and configuring AWS services... it doesn't really feel any different intellectually than cleaning toilets.

Comparing your six figure white collar job to basic janitorial work is pretty damn cringe and pretty objectively untrue.

> The SEC has already hinted at this, while the CFTC has indicated that only bitcoin is likely to be regulated as a commodity.

I think any token that gains enough prominence in the market is going to eventually fall under government purview. Why? Because when financial crime happens, victims want the government to go after the criminals and recover their lost funds. Crypto fans can't have it both ways: if their goal is to create a financial system that lives entirely outside of government control, then they shouldn't reasonably rely on the government to go after the criminals bringing the entire crypto space down.

The reason that the government winds up stepping in is because the chaos and instability created by this completely unregulated side-chain financial system winds up threatening the Federally backed system as well. Market contagion is real and collapses in one sector or market often reverberate across the entire system.

We're seeing it happen in banking right now: a bunch of banks made small business loans to miners that are now underwater because the price of crypto tanked and the GPU market cooled, so their revenue and equipment value has tanked at the same time.

> it’s your choice, but you’re definitely missing out on something special.

I totally forgot to mention the patronizing attitude that so many people come to this conversation with. Thank for you for heads up.

Not to mention that this represents a very median case, whereas a lot of parents want to pay for higher status schools and real estate to get access to higher status education, it's a never-ending keeping-up-with-the-joneses pi*-ing contest. To raise kids around my peers, a child could easily cost $500k+.

> But deep down I get it. Babies are a huge opportunity cost. Financially speaking, they are like winning the lottery but backwards. You can't even think of having one without cancelling your subscription to a good night's sleep. And if you take into account inflation, economic recession, and the rest of the news cycle's highlight reel, even a one-child family can seem to have one too many mouths to fish Lego pieces out of.

Every time I visit family for the holidays, I see this in real-time and it reaffirms my decision to not have children. I have an incredibly comfortable lifestyle saving for retirement, traveling and buying real estate. The moment I become responsible for another human, that all goes away.

Saving for college? Yeah right, state schools are gonna cost $100k per year by the time my kid would going off to school. Retirement? Inflation is already killing my parents' retirement so I've got to bank that I'm still probably not saving enough right now anyway.

More power to people who want that in life, but I can't tell you how many coworkers or family members I've met that had kids and just seemed like shells of themselves afterwards.

> That means they will need to find a business model that will afford it, and those business models might be pretty terrible in the short term.

I think AI is going to enable spammers and scammers in ways that we haven't seen before. Once spammers can fully integrate these chatbots into their email systems, it's going to put pressure on email providers to find new ways to detect spam. Thinking in the purely cynical, nefarious case, scammers are going to make fortune robbing people with this stuff.

Maybe this is what will force us to acknowledge and address that using the internet for social interaction isn't scalable from a content moderation standpoint.

It's hard to have sympathy when their "foolishness" involves undermining the existing financial system because they don't like the government and they believe taxation is theft.

The irony is that they now have no problem going to the government (specifically the courts) and asking for help to get their money back. It's only government waste if it's not directly helping them.

But how do you know that you're talking to a human? This question will become much, much more difficult to answer pretty soon.

These models are capable of generating high quality discussion on a variety of topics. I think the days of human-only text-based forums are numbered, especially as AI model trainers look for high-quality content to train their systems with.

The thing that concerns me about this perspective is that it completely ignores human connection and our need to connect as beings.

Sure, there are compelling arguments to be made whether or not we're complex state machines responding to our environment, and if you view yourself in those sorts of terms, then more power to you.

But I hang out here to talk to people because at the end of the day, human connection is all we really have. I believe the day that we consciously choose to supplant human connection with AI-generated input is the day that we no longer care about the existence of our kind.

> Do you honestly still think that anything is ever genuinely "trending" on Twitter? On YouTube? On Reddit?

No, I never put much stock in those aspects of social media because I've always found those curation features to be somewhat limiting. This feels entirely different because I'm beginning to question if I'm even talking to a human right now. Sure, companies have done all kinds of things to look more legitimate on the outside, but this is very different. This upends the fundamental assumption that you are communicating with another human when you have a direct conversation online.

I'm personally not as interested in understanding the synthesis involved in the AI. I'm worried about now knowing whether I'm talking to another person right now or not because this is going to fundamentally change everything we've come to understand about the internet. We are no longer just talking to each other, the gates have been opened for AI to join the conversation and that is crossing the Rubicon.

It absolutely matters. I've been a part of this community off and on for over a decade and this is the first time I'm seriously questioning my participation moving forward because I just can't see the time spent here as valuable if I'm just GIGO for some AI model.

Welp, it's been fun HN.