I have super-bad genetics. Not so bad that I have an entirely terrible life, but bad enough that I wouldn't wish them on a child. I know they would hate me, since I am aware of how bad my genetics are.
People who have children think having children is the right choice, generally. They have to, to find meaning in all of the work of having and raising a child. That's understandable. But it is by no means the right choice for everyone.
I had a lousy childhood -- not just because of my genetics. There's no license, no mandatory training for having a child. You can just have one. Many parents are not qualified, by any measure. This keeps therapists well-employed.
Only have a child if you would like to be that child. Only have a child if you feel competent, and able, and certain that when they are an adult they will not resent you -- yes, it's natural to have some resentment for your parents, but this is not the sort of resentment I am talking about.
Do not UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES have a child if you're just looking for 'legacy'. Write a book. Give to charity. But this is a terrible reason to have a child! Don't.
>Only have a child if you feel competent, and able, and certain that when they are an adult they will not resent you -- yes, it's natural to have some resentment for your parents, but this is not the sort of resentment I am talking about.
I don't think it's possible to raise children without them developing some resentment. To be a parent is to be a dictator. It's very difficult to be a perfect dictator especially when every kid is an individual; your kid is only vaguely similar to you but not the same and thus may have totally different ideas about living life (and eventually, parenting).
It's more about making sure you keep the relationship intact when they inevitably lash out and have the "ugh you did everything wrong" confrontation (which could last years). It takes unyielding love and endless forgiveness. I think the parent-child relationships that fall apart are those where the parent thinks of the child as their friend. Your kid is your kid, not your friend. You would never forgive a friend if they hurt you even 10% as much as your kid will hurt you. But your kid also loves you in a way that a friend never can, that's the difference. And vice versa for the kid to the parent. You just have to leave a much wider berth than you would for anyone who isn't immediate family. Cutting off is never the right answer except in cases of extreme abuse.
It is completely wild to me that we have apparently reached a stage where eugenics is such an accepted ideology that people will apply it to themselves.
This is disgusting. You deserve to live, and I'm sorry for whatever experiences made you think you shouldn't.
You deserve to live, but with bad genetics why to ensure your child's struggle in life? Especially now when you can get genetic material from a healthy donor.
On-premming your Internet services just seems like an exercise in self-flagellation.
Unless you have a heavy-duty pipe to your prem you're just risking all kinds of headaches, and you're going to have to put your stuff behind Cloudflare anyway and if you're doing that why not use a VPS?
It's just not practical for someone to run a little blog or app that way.
It's not that much headache, and this isn't necessarily about public-facing sites and apps.
Take file storage: Some folks find Google Drive and similar services unpalatable because they can and will scan your content. Setting up Nextcloud or even just using file sharing built into a consumer router is pretty easy.
You don't need to rely on Cloudflare, either. Some routers come with VPN functionality or can have it added.
The self-hosting most people talk about when they talk about self-hosting is very practical.
I’m at Big tech and our org has our sights on automating product manager work. Idea generation grounded with business metrics and context that you can feed to an LLM is a simpler problem to solve than trying to automate end to end engineering workflows.
> I assume that AI assistance in creative writing is now mainstream, and an accepted tool for most writers.
It absolutely is not. In fact the Nebula awards just banned entries from having _any_ AI use involved with them whatsoever. You can't even use them for grammar correction.
I'm not sure quite how that works. Google Docs will suggest various changes which I take into account or don't. And they certainly correct misspellings. You can choose to decide that's not AI but it's a grey line.
For writing I've sometimes used LLMs to speed up some essentially boilerplate. Never used for something that's not pretty much routine that I could easily do but would probably spend some time doing so.
For anything that might be a Nebula submission, it's hard to imagine LLMs doing anything beyond the copyediting level (which may not be well-defined but seems a reasonable threshold).
Well, they want to preserve a role for the editor; because the editor is not just checking the grammar but also the content, and weighing in with their relative objectivity on the current state of the story, what should be improved, what was good and what didn't work, etc. and if we have AI glazing us continuously we will just produce slop; it may look like good fiction but it will not read like it, and people can tell the difference!
Not even grammar correction? That's lame and kinda evil.
When you submit your manuscript to a big publisher I guarantee they're using AI to check it (now). At the very least, AI is the only tool that can detect a great number of issues that even the best editors miss. To NOT take advantage of that is a huge waste.
It sounds to me like they're just trying to push out independents and small publishers. Because you know they're not going to ask big publishers if they use AI (who will likely deny it anyway... Liars).
FYI: AI is both the best grammar checker ever as well as the best consistency checker. It'll be able to generate intelligent lexical density report that will know that you used "evasive", "evaded", and "evading" too much (because it knows they're all the same base word). They're also fantastic at noticing ambiguities that humans often miss because they're like-minded and "know what you mean." (Our brains are wired like that to improve the efficiency of our repetitive tasks like reading words).
AI tools can help you improve as a writer and enhance your craft in a lot of ways. To not take advantage of that—to me—feels like burying your head in the sand and screaming, "LA LA LA LA! I don't want to think about AI because it can be used for bad things!"
I've chatted with many writers about AI and nearly all of them don't understand the technology and assume it's literally just taking chunks of other writers works and spewing them out one sentence at a time.
I literally had a conversation with a writer that thought you could take ten sentences written by AI and trace them back to ten books.
That literally *is* what they’re doing though, just not at sentence granularity—they’re doing it at both larger and smaller scales. Sometimes they may give you a plagiarized paragraph, sometimes they’ll give you a plagiarized phrase, sometimes they’ll give you a structure that they fill in with “their own” words where the structure itself was taken from something… They do nothing original.
An intersection without power is supposed to be treated as a 4-way stop. An unfortunately high, nontrivial number of drivers last night were not following that rule.
The outrage people would rightly have at Waymo allowing a number of its vehicles to blow the lights would be huge. People running blacked out lights is unacceptable.
https://i2-prod.dailyrecord.co.uk/article1124887.ece/ALTERNA...
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