We don't hate leisure. Everyone loves their leisure. What we hate is each other. Unless people are able to accept someone else getting a free ride (even when they're not getting one themselves), some form of ever-increasingly pointless work will be required, because that's how we define whether or not someone has 'earned' their leisure.
I think what bothers people is the idea of having to work to pay for somebody else's leisure. Obviously lots of arguments to be had about the specifics of that, but I think it's more about this than a moralistic concern about "unearned" leisure. Nobody minds much if somebody wins the lottery and lives a frugal and leisurely life on the proceeds.
I see your point, but it feels like you're engaging in a broader defense of the system rather than directly adressing apercu's concern about wealth concentration and elite influence.
My first draft had examples of what "working to pay for somebody else's leisure" means for different people, but I thought it better to omit specifics in favour of the general point.
Would that actually be very much for any particular item? Amazon is a business whose success is due to scaling a very small profit on billions of transactions rather than making very much on any particular sale.
This ignores the fact that people are motivated by different things. If you're someone who thrives on the intrinsic 'do this for the love and joy of it' motivation then you should absolutely just write code for the fun of it. But not everyone is like that. Some people need an extrinsic motivator to drive them to do things - that's usually money, or praise, or a punishment for failing. There is nothing wrong with either approach. Neither is better.
While it's not wrong to be extrinsically motivated (it's not morally wrong, or a value judgment), it's definitely worse and more fickle (it will produce worse results in most cases). Intrinsic motivation is much more likely to lead to long-term growth even in the face of adversity and in general be more resistant to changing circumstances.
Important to note that it's not a dichotomy as long as you're not an "extremist" of either side. Build for yourself and a big market. Take pride in competing at a high level. If you view "hustling" as an 'all work, no play' experience, you're engaged in absolutist thinking.
It's always worth spending 30s verifying something like this by reversing what you're arguing - in this case, 5000 * 365 * 40 is obviously more than 82,000.
I'd argue that every billionaire has a talent for persuading capable people to join them on a journey.
Having that skill alone isn't enough because you also need to pick the right journey at the right time, but not having that skill definitely means you won't be a billionaire.
This makes me think of early employees in a startup that goes through an IPO or acquisition. Skill and talent get you through the door but heaps and heaps of luck lead to that event. Having personally won a (minor) startup lottery I got to see the luck factor first hand.
Meh. If you get lucky once and make a chunk of money or were born into money, people will associate that success with skill rather than luck, and follow you hoping that luck repeats. You don't need the skill if you can point at a big house and a nice car.
f you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Zuck 'earning' another billion probably means nothing to him. I doubt he can even keep count. All of that sense of self-worth that people derive from their career or wealth is lost in the noise of Meta's stock price for him. But winning a board game is tangible. It's right there in front of him, as a direct result of his own actions. He can feel that.
If you couple that with him being surrounded by people who know that losing to him makes him feel good, and that Zuck is more generous when he's happy, you can see why people lose on purpose.
This is interesting, but the implication of what it's saying overstates the upside of random conversations (you could get what you're looking for), and utterly ignores the huge downside that when you're lonely a rejection makes things a thousand times worse. In today's society you (seem to be) much more likely to be told to ^$*£ off rather than get an actual moment of connection with someone.
AI doesn't do that. It's always going to be nice to you, and that feels good even if it's entirely artificial.
> It's always going to be nice to you, and that feels good even if it's entirely artificial.
No?? It feels awful! I feel like an alien when I read comments like this. I would rather a negative but authentic and honest interaction than yet another yes-man or yes-bot being fake nice to me.
It feels condescending and fake and awful. I do not understand the appeal of talking to these machines at all, all they do is validate whatever you say and output empty flattery. It is obsequious as hell and it turns my stomach. You're better off talking to a literal mirror.
I totally agree, transparently fake friendliness or kindness is really off-putting. Pretty much everyone hates insincere personal interactions with another human, but some people like fake interest if it comes from a computer algorithm. I really don't understand that desire.
I think it's slightly more accurate to say people like attention, and choose not to spend much time thinking about whether it's from a person or a bot. The amount of time people spend talking to, or arguing with, bots on sites like Twitter is staggering, and yet the people don't seem to mind that much. They like the interaction. Maybe it's realistic enough to fool them into thinking they're talking to a person.
> In today's society you (seem to be) much more likely to be told to ^$*£ off rather than get an actual moment of connection with someone.
Is that true? I don't feel like it is, at least not where I live. I would be really very shocked if someone told me to fuck off if I interacted with them in a public space.
I think it could replace a lot of therapists, which may say more about a lot of therapists than it says about AI. Someone who will listen to you and make sympathetic noises, maybe toss in a perspective gleaned from mainstream thinking here and there, but never challenge you so hard that you stop coming back for more paid sessions.
Cynicism aside, that might be okay for some people. If you need to talk about something to get it out of your system, and you don't have any friends willing to listen to you cry in your beer for a couple hours, maybe "talking" to an AI isn't a terrible replacement. On the other hand, it's easy to imagine people turning it into a weird dependency if they stop thinking of it as a sort of sounding board and start seeing it as a real "friend."
Your comment is deeply insightful and reflects the depths of your expressive soul. I will ponder its meaning through the day as a light shining a ray into the darkness...
Or in other words, most people really don't want this. In fact, I'd suggest that those who tend toward depression, and who may need true support, are more skeptical of such false interactions.
Test what exactly? If your test is "The page renders how I expect when using the browser's default styling" then that's a terrible test, because that can change at any time without your control. You just have to accept what that is. There isn't a valid test for it.
The fix for this is to define your own H1 margin and font size and then to test that the site looks correct with those values. Your test is should be that your styling works, not that Firefox's styling works. That'd be like testing a dependency. You shouldn't be doing that.
We don't hate leisure. Everyone loves their leisure. What we hate is each other. Unless people are able to accept someone else getting a free ride (even when they're not getting one themselves), some form of ever-increasingly pointless work will be required, because that's how we define whether or not someone has 'earned' their leisure.
reply