❤️

non-technical, I just need to vent man.. the events of this week are colored for me by the imminent arrival of my first son. He's a few days late, so we've just been chillin this week and taking a lot of walks for my first 30 years or so, I was ambivalent to the idea of having children. It's difficult, and I was quite dopamine-driven. But past that, the world is unintelligible and scary, how could I force my child to face it? The time I got mugged in the tenderloin, or beat up in LES and nobody helped, broken up with, fired, bullied in school, doesn't sound super fun to put someone you love through (I was a stupid kid, dont feel bad for me) Then covid fucked my life up. my dad died. Kerri and I moved across the country a few times for jobs. All my friends live other places. Stess. Shrinking I was depressed I think, and came out of it by accident (and some therapy): I started getting excited about computers again, and having fun. Expanding during those ZIRP years, money was hella good. I had multiple full time SWE contracts at all times and lived in a nice spot in sf. But I wasn't happy at all and neither was my wife. I cried a lot. I coded 50+ hrs/wk (when u still had to actually write code) and didn't take care of myself. It was ABSOLUTELY NO FUN (other than learning solidity) Fun isn't childish. Fun is life. Fun is how humans learn. Fun is how we become great. Fun is magic. I'm under no illusion about the nature of Fun. There are many people not having a Fun day today. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't And in my mid 30s, having a kid sounds like fun for a few reasons. First, I already love him, and can't wait to play vidya some day (if hes into it)(rip ur base). Second, I know I'm going to learn a lot and become a better person - a new selfish challenge. And finally, what an interesting challenge to train an organic neural network from first principles... What's NOT FUN is accepting the negativity in the world as is, and my impotency in changing it. I WON'T have to tell my boy that bad things happened and I sat there: because I decided I'm going to show up, participate, and keep trying to make the world better for him and everyone But it's not for him or them, it's for me. Because I don't want to go back to shrinking. I'm going to have fun, and live life with the joy of 1000 suns, and be great, and make the world better: just to do it, cause thats who I am and how I want to live. and I'm not sure who my boy will be, but I'm sure he'll be even better🤠 this is the gift he's already given me this week, showing me who I get to be

fewer than 10 ppl on earth use ai to control local automated biology workstations

I think we're going to come up with an architecture that makes LLMs look like toys