I've come to exactly that conclusion about my family. I love them but frankly their concern for me translates into very little benefit for anyone. Also their criticisms were largely born of themselves and served primarily to limit me.
I believe your notion of "belief" is false. Empirically in fact. As evidenced here. I would suggest that you ask yourself if your current idea of "belief" is actually serving you. If you did that you might see why you're failing to persuade me to adapt that belief.
Why: "While the unexamined life may not be worth living, life cannot be comprehensively examined." I have chosen to believe that I am more finite than life. Further I believe that I can only examine a subset of each passing moment. I currently believe that the invention of seamless Virtual Reality is inevitable. Also that with it we will actually create a whole new modality of ignorance. I also believe, as Nietzsche did, that society will increasingly trend towards nihilism.
You can choose to believe that there is meaning in life or that your relationship with it necessarily generalizes to all other human beings. It's just sort've annoying.
I consider myself to be a nihilist and suspect you may misunderstand it. The full scope of nihilism subsumes the smug and misanthropic blackhole that people seem to relate to it. It's just, as you put it, another robot executing a program. The fundamental belief is in fact that you have agency over this mechanism. You get to choose what to believe. You alone are responsible for your semantic relationship to reality. You can toil in the adaptation of harmony between your desires and an apparently meaningless world. You can get a pre-optimized strategy from your local minister. It's just an expression of a new degree of freedom. It's more of a meta-philosophy than a philosophy. It's intended to describe a lack of meaning and not to prescribe it.
Nihilism often goes unidentified. Anyone who has ever changed beliefs has acted momentarily as a nihilist. A person who is open-minded is a partial nihilist. A complete nihilist being someone who has developed a core belief that none of their other beliefs are certainly true. They simply recognize each as subjectively and temporarily optimal. Notably this evaluation changes, for every existing belief, every time you change any single belief. At it's extreme nihilism can be anxiety inducing. There's always that sneaking suspicion that your core belief is no longer subjectively or temporarily optimal. That and no way to test your suspicion but to maintain your core belief. You can get sort've stuck in an anti-dogmatic loop frantically evaluating philosophies. This doesn't have to be your experience of nihilism. You can simply adapt beliefs to manage this problem.
Sure there is. A person of enough collective benefit becomes valuable enough to the surrounding world that they can be ignorant of their own selfish needs. They will simply be satisfied. You needn't be sacrificial about it. That wouldn't be altruistic. It's just a strategy that can become sort of a fetish. I wouldn't call it a fantasy. It's just got some blind spots that promote a pleasant state of mind. If you're not aware of your own envy for such a state you might not notice yourself contriving reasons for it's absurdity or invalidity. It's really more of an ignorance. While the unexamined life may not be worth living, life cannot be comprehensively examined. You will always be ignorant. To be so affronted by your own ignorance that you only conceptualize it to immediately and compulsively destroy it is a gross limitation. You have the opportunity to accept more ignorance in yourself such that you can then optimize it.
We practice a strange perversion of meritocracy. Sure. But there are a number of egalitarian ideals we do subscribe to. We're really a culture built on self-enhancement. Unfair advantages take people out of a self-enhancing mode. They just start seeking advantages. We don't like that.
I love these sorts of negative assessments of greatness. I fucked over so many kids in math growing up. They came to believe they'd never be good at it because I worked ahead and they didn't realize it. Maybe I can't make up for the output I squashed. I'll never know. :(
Lol. This was a fantastic comment. I love the ending. We really are living in strange times. It's as if everyone is utterly intent on working but can't find the time to figure out what they ought to do. Everyone seems increasingly scared. I may be projecting or just increasingly aware. It's like they know they don't know but can't face it or resolve it. They just keep doing the bullshit until they embrace it. Our potential is so ripe. It's sad.
I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm very pro-globalization. It's an engineering problem and that's the right solution. But I do fear this world order.
The degree to which kids get fucked with before they're even allowed to enter society necessitates people like that exist. Working at a school isn't exactly esteemed. You were both smart enough to see through the situation and to... Not work at a school. We just keep putting the wrong people in the right place to exacerbate a negative feedback loop.
Maybe I'm not familiar with enough of the backstory. Where he has landed is fame. Not indie developer fame. Fucking fame. He very apparently wasn't ready for it and is making it worse by visibly floundering now. I feel fucking bad for him.
I feel bad for him. I might not tell him for fear my pity might incent such a state. It's still sad to see him essentially ejected from his life and otherwise incompatible with the social strata in which he's landed.
Isn't that mostly an artifact of deeply nested callbacks? With promises, generators, and what not I've been seeing a lot of new Javascript going back to 4. Is there a pragmatic reason for 2 going forward? I realize it's mostly trivial but I have a much easier time visually parsing 4 vs 2. I also sort've appreciate that it pressures me to reduce indentation.
Right, I agree. Towards the end of my comment I tried to express that there is some value in not having one. Like entirely in addition to the benefits of, what I believe is, a superior education and lack of student debt.
If you're actively involved in doing this stuff you're going to be able to find the work you want. It's easy. You just contact the people working on it and tell them what you're going to do for them.
In my personal experience a solid work history is much better than a degree. Once you have it the value of a degree decreases significantly. Its almost entirely redundant. The only problem is you often need the degree to get the work history.
I've also noticed as I start working with people who have their Masters and some with PHDs that people take me seriously. It's like... I must know what I'm talking about. How else would I still be here?
It's a generation with a deeply internalized notion of opportunity cost. That and given most people care primarily about the actual music the ratio in effort to ship/rip a cd versus download a torrent is enormous.
If micro transactions break into public awareness it might get significantly better. There could be a joint meter app like mint to track usage. You could just sort by a few things like recent cash flow and trivially manage your transactions at scale. Transactions should be tied directly to user level constructs like playing a song or a period of time in a game. These should have consistent costs so that the user can form reasonable expectations without needing to sign off on every transaction. You don't think about how much water costs every time you use the faucet but you're aware enough not to just leave it on. That's the only mental cost that's ultimately necessary.
I'm young so this may get better with time but I've had a hard time finding environments that support the slower style. It's often derided as being the "waterfall" method.
Sure I pretty much entirely agree with you but the caution I stated earlier is the notable one for that mindset. There's always a step where you have to decide what the data means.
The amount I have to think about is considerably less. All the complexity just melts into Functions and Objects. There's similar stuff happening in React with inline styles. Mixins, variables, custom-properties, state-dependence, automatic-prefixes, and more are available without language extension when styles are expressed as Objects of css properties. Whether or not they're satisfactory, there are occasional efforts to derive more functionality from fewer abstractions.