I also work from home, together with my wife. So even though we have kids, there is no necessity of leaving the house, save for 15 minutes a day on weekdays to drop off and pick up.
The main thing people have to get over is passivity. You want to see your friends? Invite a bunch of people to come out. Nowadays it takes very little time to book a restaurant.
I do this every few months. I just think of three or four other people I want to have dinner with, arrange a time, and then invite everyone else I come across. Dinner ends up being anywhere from 4 to 12 people, out of maybe 20 invites. As for who to invite, just invite your friends, and your "friend seeds".
Everyone has a few peripheral people they know, whose bio seems to fit the template of your actual friends: live near you, studied with you, worked with you. People who in all likelihood have the same values as you, except you haven't hung out together due to lack of opportunity. We all know that guy: you know his name, you know he does what you do, you don't know anything else. So you bring that seed along and you and your existing friends water the relationship.
A more modern way to not be lonely is to play an MMO. This isn't quite like real friends, but it also isn't quite the same as being lonely. The big benefit of course is that you can do this at home.
These games are all about cooperating, sharing knowledge and experience. It's not really all that different from cooking a meal together, you're just in your PJs as you're slaying a dragon. You can also end up learning a fair bit about your online friends from just hanging around. Life stories, that kind of thing, they are a basic part of friendship.
I think there's something to this idea in the article. I remember my childhood well, perhaps because the cast is still somewhat intact, and we all had a good time. The time after finishing school is more blocky: a few years working in certain places, meeting my wife and having kids. My adult life takes up more calendar time, but less "experienced time". My cousin was on a chat last night, explaining that his day is taken up by taking three kids to different schools, then picking them up again. Over and over, but somehow it is one experience. Plenty of people will tell you the same about going to work.
By contrast, you remember things in your youth that happened only once, like spraining my ankle at a crossing with a train oncoming (it was less dramatic that it sounds lol), or going to a music festival, or finishing high school.
One thing that maybe needs to be talked about is that you can simply relive your life. This works best if you had a good time. So the answer to the question is not just that you should look for new firsts, you can replay some old tapes.
I'm lucky enough that I know people from every time in my life. I have a chat group with three other guys that I met when we were 4 years old, over 40 years ago. They sent messages last night. I got a message from my first grade teacher, and my high school English teacher. I have a chat with all my buddies from school, where we exchange messages that are about as mature as when we were teenagers. People I worked with, I keep in touch with.
I have an online photo album that is basically the only data I care to have a backup of. Now and again, I flip through it, and I see what I was up to, and have nice thoughts about that.
It might sound a bit weird for a mid-40s guy to be so resigned to being old. But I was talking to one of the mentioned buddies from nursery, and I turns out the big milestones have happened already. We already finished school, got jobs, had kids. There's a lot of little things to tick off, but they are little things: visiting various interesting sites, going to some concert, and so on.
The cynic in me thinks that people on their deathbed are about as well considered as people are in general: if you ask most people about some ordinary thing, and life regrets are indeed such a thing, they will give you a canned response that is the zeitgeist regurgitated, and they can't explain why they think what they think, or any related opinions they might have thought instead.
Of course nowadays we have memes to help us completely avoid thinking at all. Ask someone what is best in life, and see how far you get!
Only rarely does one get a considered response. That would be a response that
1) Acknowledges existing thought on the issue. "Socrates mentions regret..." "The mongols thought the open steppe was very important for the good life"
2) Adds personal experience. This can be totally banal, since we don't all live exceptional lives. "I met a girl at the bakery in 1975..." But being banal doesn't mean you can't use the experience to reflect on what regrets actually are, and whether you agree with some POV.
With someone on their deathbed I guess it can be a bit jarring to subject them to the full Oxford tutorial grilling, so I can understand why it can end up being a bit bland.
Probably more to do with HN being a tech community, and the US is the largest highly developed country where a lot of kids can learn tech stuff. So you get a disproportionate number of programmers and related professionals who are American.
If Silicon Valley were in the UK I think most HN contributers would still be American.
> I wanted the feature more than I wanted to know how to build the feature
This is exactly what LLMs are great for. For instance, I'm looking at trading models. I want to think about buying and selling. I need some charts to look at, but I'm not a chart wizard. I can make basic charts, but it feels tedious to actually learn the model of how the charting software works. LLM will just give me the chart code for the visualization I want, and if I ever care to learn about it, I have it in a form that is relevant to me, not the form of the API documents.
In general, a lot of coding is like this. You have some end goal in mind, but there's a bunch of little things that need to be knitted together, and the knitting used to take a lot of time.
I like to say the LLM has reduced my toil while getting me to the same place. I can even do multiple projects at once, only really applying myself where there is a decision to be made, and it's all possible because I'm not sorting out the minutiae of some incidental API.
Even in my lifetime, it seems like growing up has become increasingly a sort of highwire-walking. Especially in the educated segment that I find myself in, it seems like you HAVE to do certain things to grow up "successfully". When I was a kid, there were no expectations beyond getting a degree, and even that was a particular quirk in my father's thinking; my uncle did not make it a given for his kids.
Through my old school I know a guy who is also at my old uni, so I compare notes with him. Nowadays, everyone feels like they have to have an internship every year to get a job. Well, to do that, you needed to be at a top uni, getting top grades. To get into top uni, you needed to go to a good high school, and to do that, you needed to go to a good primary school.
I ended up living in this little bubble where everyone in my local area hires a tutor for their kid. The kids do the typical middle-class activities: an instrument or other performance art, a team sport, or maybe an individual sport. Everything is done with the goal of getting into the best senior school, or the best university.
The parents are all of the type who went through this gauntlet. Two lawyers, a lawyer and a doctor, finance and law, and so on. Everyone is spending a hefty chunk to afford to live here, and on their kid's education.
To circle back to the point of the article, these are professions that make a lot of money. They didn't exist in nearly the same scale as they did a hundred years ago, and London benefits from being the world centre of at least one of these formerly tie-wearing professions, so there's enough of a concentration here to make you think your kid could get one of these jobs in a few years.
But the road is long, and not every kid is going to enjoy becoming a lawyer or a banker. But it's also the case that it's hard to see how you could live in your childhood neighborhood without one of these jobs, so the parents steer the kids down the road before they are really old enough to decide.
I wonder if having fewer kids is behind the rat-race atmosphere. With all your eggs in one basket, they need to be well protected. If you had 4 kids, like my uncle, you wouldn't have time to puff them all down the same path.
It's because the gap has widened between the "good paying jobs" and everything else (the "shit jobs"). The former has become more scarce which means you have to hustle more to get them or you're getting the later.
It always bothered me that certain things are not marked to market. It's pretty much the point of financializing the economy, that you can then get a current value for things, instead of being able to pretend everything is fine.
The problem is that if you don't update values continuously, you are surprised when you finally are forced to. Some stock on the public market that isn't doing well goes from 100 to 90, 80, 70... etc, and people thinking about the stock have to make decisions accordingly.
A private loan against that business can sit at 100 until the company decides it can't pay, and suddenly the loan is worth 20.
Mark-to-market can create liquidity crises when coupled with capitalization requirements, though. This can happen in, e.g., bond markets.
Say a bank is sitting on a pile of very safe bonds. If the interest rate suddenly increases, the mark-to-market value of the bonds goes way down. The bank would still expect to get the full value of all the bonds at maturity. But if the bank has to mark-to-market, the current value may be low enough that capitalization requirements force the bank to sell all the bonds in a fire sale. So even though the bank in theory could have held onto the assets and gotten exactly what it had expected from the start, it instead ends up taking a big loss.
I think that's almost what happened to Silicon Valley Bank, except that they weren't required to recapitalize, but all of their customers read their financial disclosures, assumed a mark-to-market loss was an actual loss, and withdrew their money, running the bank.
I've had American colleagues ask me about the London crime wave. They seem to have some sort of alternative news source that doesn't tell them murders have halved from the high point around the millennium.
The main thing people have to get over is passivity. You want to see your friends? Invite a bunch of people to come out. Nowadays it takes very little time to book a restaurant.
I do this every few months. I just think of three or four other people I want to have dinner with, arrange a time, and then invite everyone else I come across. Dinner ends up being anywhere from 4 to 12 people, out of maybe 20 invites. As for who to invite, just invite your friends, and your "friend seeds".
Everyone has a few peripheral people they know, whose bio seems to fit the template of your actual friends: live near you, studied with you, worked with you. People who in all likelihood have the same values as you, except you haven't hung out together due to lack of opportunity. We all know that guy: you know his name, you know he does what you do, you don't know anything else. So you bring that seed along and you and your existing friends water the relationship.
A more modern way to not be lonely is to play an MMO. This isn't quite like real friends, but it also isn't quite the same as being lonely. The big benefit of course is that you can do this at home.
These games are all about cooperating, sharing knowledge and experience. It's not really all that different from cooking a meal together, you're just in your PJs as you're slaying a dragon. You can also end up learning a fair bit about your online friends from just hanging around. Life stories, that kind of thing, they are a basic part of friendship.
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