As someone who was not a child prodigy, but still closer to one than to normies, I can say that achieving results easily in childhood leads to not developing good discipline and persistence that are crucial in the adult world.
There are more factors that are not easily accessible for both ends of the spectrum, like access to good, personalized education, amount of trauma, and proper psychological support. But the 'discipline' part is what affected me most.
On the other side, maybe those who are more disciplined become real prodigies, and burn brightly because of the lack of social knowledge on how to support them and help to become highly developed adults.
This observation about discipline is perceptive but I have also seen variations of it dozens and dozens of times on HN.
Tons of former gifted kids on here. The gap between assumed potential and actual reality apparently has to get blamed on someone, and that person is the kid themselves.
All parts seem true to me. Most kids think they were more gifted than they were. Learning to work hard and be persistent was actually more important. A lot of talk about being gifted was an obstacle to that.
That resonates with me. Both in the lack of discipline as the adults in my world basically defaulted to, "You're so smart, keep it up!" And -- very much related -- the fixed mindset I developed not knowing until later how to actually study, learn, and practice. It lasted quite long unfortunately as I was a functioning undisciplined, fixed mindset person who could still one-shot stuff reasonably well.
I recall being told by an English teacher in high school once that because it was so easy for me to write something passable, I wasn't trying hard enough to write something excellent. Wish he pushed me harder on that.
As someone like you, this isn't the case, because it _entirely_ depends on environment/culture. Not just for you and me, though it's more extreme for us.
Discipline is not the most correct word. Motivation is a better description for the behavior.
As the smartest child in the room you live in a world where the answers always came easy, at least the answers to questions and expectations on above average terms. This sets the elite children up to try less hard on everything because they know in advance they are always going to cross the finish line well before everyone else without effort or preparation.
I can remember being one of these kids myself. My motivation was just wanting to be productively employed and not bored in class, for example employed in a minimum wage high labor job instead of sleeping through honors advanced chemistry. At least then I was challenged.
I also remember leaving visible signs of accomplishment to the attention starved sociopaths. That attention seeking behavior always felt beneath me, infantile even.
I do remember occasionally, very rarely, encountering other elite children who were also not interested in attention seeking behavior. The greatest commonality was excessively low neuroticism. You had no fear, even in very physical terms, which resulted in thrill seeking activities. Many of these people would end up joining the military even after attaining access to elite universities.
These people were never without extended focus or discipline but about half the time were poor performing at academics, as is the case with certain learning disorders like dyslexia.
For me, this is the major selling point to own a car. I may drive a few times a week, and taxis might be much cheaper, but no way I'm going to deal with human taxi drivers if I have a choice.
This seems weird to me, maybe it's a generational thing. Is it really that bad to share a car with someone? You don't have to talk to them the whole time.
As a woman, while 95% of the ridesharing trips I take are perfectly pleasant and sometimes great with conversation the 5% of rides where you are trapped in a car with a creep asking you extremely off putting questions sours the entire concept of ride sharing for me.
Same. Ever been a vulnerable woman stuck in a car with a man who starts ranting that "nobody wants to date men who aren't rich anymore" and it turns out the driver is angry because the women that are trapped as riders won't go out with him?
Yea, I can't imagine being a woman and having to deal with some of these drivers.
This doesn't compare, but as a man I get really put off by the amount of invasive questions (where I work, where my family is from, etc) when I'm just trying to get from point A to point B.
I'm a mid-millenial FWIW, so I very much remember a world of only having old school taxis.
the situations you've described and the fact that our answer as a society is seemingly to throw up our hands at our inability to solve these situations other than by increasing the number of cars on the road in a way that funnels even more wealth to a tiny group of unfathomably wealthy sociopaths who also use ourour personal information to impact our spending habits... very depressing. i really hate it here.
I like humor, however, for the peanut gallery who might not get sarcasm:
Every credible scientific study of women and guns in the last two decades strongly indicates that a firearm in a woman’s home is far more likely to be used against her or her family than to defend against an outside attacker.
More women carrying guns makes them more likely to get shot, and, mostly, not by strangers.
> Is it really that bad to share a car with someone?
Sometimes it is, and you never really know when.
Some of my most unpleasant experiences involved a couple of reckless drivers, even more nutters who insisted on talking about their politics or pet peeves, I fear one of them may have gone beyond mere eccentricity and probably required some medical intervention, but couldn't figure out how to report that without possibly resulting in the driver being punished by the app.
Hah, I had a 2am conversation with a woman from Argentina about Javier Milei which is one of my Uber riding highlights.
But then another time a guy warned me not to open his glove box because his Glock was in there and he sounded deranged and it’s the one time I’ve literally gotten out of the car and cancelled my Uber.
One female Uber driver told me about how she had to go to court because a drunk man threatened to stab her with a knife (that he was brandishing), then he passed out and the police had to haul him out of her car. The .1% ruin it for everyone else.
Personally, I find it odd to have interactions with anyone just based of transactionality. I want to interact with people because I have relationships with them. I've always found it hard to figure out exactly how nice to be with someone you don't know. I don't think this is a maladjustment on my part, I think you probably shouldn't be overly nice to people before you establish trust with them... and that takes time.
The human driver could be nodding off because they didn’t bother sleeping last night, or maybe they just had some food with lots of garlic, or…ya, this has all happened to me before. I’ll take the Waymo over uber.
The Uber Driver who told me all about his Glock in the glove box was pretty off putting.
Also the Jeep that picked me up in August with broken air conditioning, although that was an annoyance vs “what is happening right now am I going to die”.
I’m fine to share a car. I’m less keen on dying in one.
Riding in a car is easily the most dangerous thing I do in my daily life and my subjective impression of how well uber/lyft/taxi drivers drive is not great.
I always (as soon as I could) owned a car, first on independence, but soon that became on price. A car costs between $350 and $500 per month, plus about 2 gas tanks, let's say $600. That's only 10-15 short taxi rides and two long taxi rides at best.
And now I have a family, there's 5 of us. A car is easily less than half the price of public transport for what I need to do (because you pay per person).
I hate traffic, and I don't really like driving, but since a car is easily 30 minutes faster than public transport to drive in to work, sadly 30 minutes of traffic in the morning is still faster than public transport, no matter how annoying it is. Oh and no waiting in the rain/cold is a nice bonus.
A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month. If it does, it’s a status symbol, not merely a tool to get from A to B, and therefore it is unfair to compare it against taxi rides.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a nicer more luxurious car for yourself. But it’s just ingenious to compare that against taxis with beaten-up and spartan but reliable cars.
A status symbol will easily run you $1000/mo. I currently pay $350/mo (including cost of capital), and I don't know how I would pay less for a car that's not actively falling apart. Chevy Spark, manual transmission, $7k KBB value, averaging 500 miles per month.
There's no shot that number isn't being driven up by people purchasing more car than they need. You can get a used car for $10,000 or less, there's no reason one needs to pay $500/mo.
You sure about that? A $7k car expensed over 18 months plus insurance and road tax is ballpark $450 /mo. That omits maintenance and fuel but conversely also underestimates how long the vehicle will be kept on average. Depending on where you live parking will range from free to potentially more than $100 /mo.
If you manage to stretch $10k cars out to 5 years on average with zero maintenance it's less than $200 /mo but ... no maintenance in 5 years?
I think $300 /mo plus fuel and parking is probably a reasonable estimate for frugal behavior.
6 years ago, I was driving a Subaru BRZ which averaged 32 mpg. My commute was ~30 miles each way, add in a couple miles for weekly errands, and let's just say I was using 10 gallons/week. If gas was $3, that's $30/week, $120/month. Plus $150/month for insurance, it's $270/month.
Still way under your 350-500/month figure, but that's also assuming the car is paid off.
> If it does, it’s a status symbol, not merely a tool to get from A to B, and therefore it is unfair to compare it against taxi rides.
$350-500/month is cheaper than taxi rides. Even with a more reasonable 5-10 mile commute, I'd be spending probably $50/DAY if I took taxis.
You're not including an amortized cost of maintenance, registration fees, etc. Adding in tires alone ($720 for a set, 50k/1200 ~=41 months, ~$17.50/mo) brings it to almost $290/mo. Oil change every 6 months or so, add another $10/mo or so. Now we're at $300/mo and hoping nothing in the car breaks and needs repairs on a car that's already paid off, and we still haven't paid our taxes and registration fees.
Now figure in the fact you've got several thousand dollars in a car instead of even something like a high-yield savings account. At even 4% APY, if you had just $8k tied up in that car that's another ~$27/mo of income you're missing out on.
I'm not making the argument riding a taxi for every trip is cheaper than this. Just pointing out there's a lot of things people don't think about when they think of the cost of car ownership.
Insurance alone can be 100€ a month (and more so for younger drivers). At a very modest 5 liters / 100km and a one way route of 20 km you're at 800km a month / 40 liters of gas => 1.80€ a liter => 72€ in fuel. Your average car then has 20 ct/km for maintenance costs (inspections, spare parts, oil changes, tires, workshop time), so another 160€ a month - and more if it is a run-down junker car.
That are just the fixed running costs you have with pretty much every car, around 330€ a month. We haven't talked about depreciation yet at all. Even if you say you buy a barely road worthy wreck for 3000 € and run it until it's only ripe for the junkyard to fetch maybe 500 € every two years, that's still about 100€ a month you're paying.
And what we also haven't had a single talk about is operating and purchase taxes, highway tolls, city-core tolls, rental spots for parking (including the price you have paid for the garage in your house, it's a lot of real estate), that also can easily add to many hundreds of euros each year.
Cars are expensive once you actually include replacement/depreciation and maintenance costs.
> Cars are expensive once you actually include replacement/depreciation and maintenance costs.
Yep, that describes cars. High up front cost that barely goes up when you need more done (meaning: family of 5? Car beats even the bus fare for a 3km ride to school). In trade for independence, cheap groceries, cheaper travel (at least in opportunity cost), cheap days out with the family, bigger house is realistic, ability to go work in not so well connected places (I'm a consultant), capacity to actually get heavy things, collect people, not waiting/dragging things around in cold/rain/...
Oh and these DON'T add up. Bring the kids to school AND drive to work AND get groceries by car? You don't pay 3 times like you do with any other means of transport, you pay 1.2 times what you pay when doing only one.
With 2 people in the car it easily matches public transport costs if you use it enough. Oh and even by yourself it's like half taxi/uber fares, a third or less of waymo fares (though at least those don't charge per person).
The standard tax deduction for car travel is $0.70 / mile in the US, which accounts for things like insurance, gas, maintenance, and depreciation. So $500 / month is around 700 miles, which probably around 90% of US drivers surpass.
Car insurance has essentially doubled in price over the past few years, from a combination of
- cars becoming more complicated to repair. Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything
- inflation in both goods and services means car repair costs are going up
- more reckless and uninsured drivers thanks to general post-covid norm breakdowns
Insurance alone can now be $150-200/month even if you don't have a particularly nice car. Combine that with gas, maintenance, and registration taxes, and I think most people in the US are paying at least $350/month for their car even if amortized costs mean they don't realize it.
Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything
Hyundai Ioniq 5, backing into the garage next to the RV, and at "backing into the garage" speed ran into the RV. The fiberglass body of the RV suffered a 3 inch diameter break in the fiberglass that I could have fixed myself. The Hyundai? 17,000 American dollars. The rear quarter panel took a dent, and (IIRC) the bumper might have had some damage. Part of the problem was that there really isn't a "rear quarter panel" anymore. No, as I looked at it, that piece of sheet metal goes all the way from the rear bumper to the front of the passenger compartment. The shop didn't replace that piece, but rather cut the dented piece out and welded in new sheet metal.
Between that, and all the sensors, etc., $17K for backing into a piece of fiberglass at not even a walking pace. Now that the car has some years on it, if I do that again they'll probably total it.
huh? i bought a used, very low-end/utilitarian 10 year old car and paid more than half upfront and my monthly payment was like $300. factor in insurance and gas and i was easily close to 400-450. the days of $1000 beaters that actually run well are gone :(
The cost is a factor -- and something that I think policy makers should very much push to change.
For our family of four, two of us pay for public transport as of now. That adds up to $12 round trip; which is often more expensive than parking in the even in a high density area. Once we have to start paying for the kids too, that would add up to $24 for a round trip, which ends up being more expensive than driving. I get that public transportation is expensive to operate; maybe that alone is the root of the problem here.
Yes, all those things. Except on cost, at least in SF, MUNI is free for children.
We mostly drive wherever we need to go, especially when it's all of us. But if we're going to a Warriors game, we always take Muni, at it's more convenient (and free for adults too if you show your ticket).
Also, it's generally faster and more convenient (and fun) to get to Chase Center via Muni than driving. Getting back is tough both because this is peak Lyft/Waymo demand as well as peak Muni demand.
In most of America there is abundant free parking on private property including homes, stores, and workplaces. That is hardly a subsidy. I understand the argument that dense cities shouldn't have so much free public street parking but there are only a handful of neighborhoods where that even matters.
The "free parking" isn't really free, you just have land that is really cheap devoted to it. And where it isn't...well, American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them. Street parking matters in almost every neighborhood in Seattle now...since parking on its own is expensive, and you will also have to pay for a few busted windows on your car for the pleasure of free street parking.
The highways are heavily subsidized by general funds these days since raising the gas tax outside of a few states isn't very popular.
I'm American but in the other countries I lived in (Switzerland and China) and the many countries I've visited, private car ownership is always a luxury, not a cheap necessety attainable by everyone.
If you have a driveway. I had to look around hard for a house with a car port that wasn't just a slot in a crowded alley, heck, I saw some beautiful houses that had no effective parking at all (maybe they had sunk garages built in 1920 that were not usable by modern cars).
> And where it isn't...well, American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them.
The driver of housing cost in US cities is lack of supply. Parking spaces are a drop in the bucket versus what is missing. The root cause is zoning laws; particularly the height restrictions as they currently stand.
That was 2022, $56k is probably about 10% of a one or two bedroom condo price.
> The root cause is zoning laws; particularly the height restrictions as they currently stand.
Tokyo is, as I understand it, the libertarian ideal for a city that doesn't let zoning get in the way of a good time, and parking space prices are still expensive there:
> Monthly rental rates for spots in the 23 Wards range from ¥30,000 to over ¥80,000, which reflects high underlying property value.
I think there's a misunderstanding. I'm not claiming that parking space if charged at the market rate for an unimproved cement room in a high rise is particularly cheap. You can only fit so many cars within the footprint of a typical condo after all.
I'm claiming that removing parking (ie converting the raw sq footage over to living space) would not meaningfully impact housing prices. The existence of parking, free or otherwise, is not a significant contributor to the housing shortage. The issue is one of scale. That's what my "drop in the bucket" comment is referring to.
You specifically said "American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them". That is technically correct but in context it is blatantly wrong. The price increase as it stands is approximately zero.
The error is failing to differentiate between cost due to construction and maintenance versus cost due to land value. The latter is linked to total supply and thus height restrictions. The former is not the primary component in HCoL cities. You can easily verify this by checking the cost to purchase an apartment building in say San Francisco versus a small town in the midwest. (I refer to the cost to purchase the entire building there, not the cost to rent a single unit.)
Parking garages in HCOLs are expensive, they definitely aren’t free. You can’t build a new multi family without planning for one or two levels of garage underneath. But you are correct that sub-basements, at least in the USA, wouldn’t have been used for living space anyways.
Right, I specifically called out that I agree with you on that. They aren't cheap. But then most places around here charge $50 or even $150 per month per parking space so it's not like the spots are being given away either.
> you are correct that sub-basements, at least in the USA, wouldn’t have been used for living space anyways.
That isn't what I said. I claimed that the amount of space dedicated to parking, if converted to housing, would not meaningfully reduce the housing shortage. It's a simple numbers game. The shortage is far larger than all of the current parking combined. We badly need to build much farther upwards but it is not permitted to anywhere near the extent necessary.
Another way of looking at it is to ask, if every unit of housing in a major city added additional square footage equal to a single car, would that make or break the market? Even at the scale of the entire market it would still be well under 10%, probably under 5%. The typical apartment in the US is definitely larger than a 5x2 grid of parking spaces. Meanwhile most HCoL cities could do with double the housing inventory at absolute minimum. Probably substantially more.
This is the same problem with reducing setbacks. Unscrupulous developers keep lobbying for that (and often getting it). We don't need to reduce buffer space. A few extra feet around the perimeter of a lot is nothing compared to doubling (or 3x, or 5x, or ...) the height.
We are suffocating under our own political dysfunction.
> That isn't what I said. I claimed that the amount of space dedicated to parking, if converted to housing, would not meaningfully reduce the housing shortage. It's a simple numbers game.
In HCOLs places, parking garages, usually basements, are the solution to this problem. If you want to argue that they wouldn't solve the housing problem in SFH neighborhoods...well, SFHs aren't going to solve the housing problem anyway that you look at it, so...
> We badly need to build much farther upwards but it is not permitted to anywhere near the extent necessary.
You are also right. You just need to add your budget of the garage into your housing projects costs, or not, since people of the option to buy condos in buildings that do not mandate you also buy a parking spot (which can pay for the underground garage construction).
> Another way of looking at it is to ask, if every unit of housing in a major city added additional square footage equal to a single car, would that make or break the market?
OMG, yes, if you mean major cities in China. How the heck would you even build enough underground garage space to even think about doing that? The US is nice because our cities are small and not very dense, so we aren't talking about adding parking for every unit in a 40 story...heck, the road infrastructure alone to get that many cars in and out of the garages would bankrupt Beijing or Shanghai.
> This is the same problem with reducing setbacks. Unscrupulous developers keep lobbying for that (and often getting it). We don't need to reduce buffer space. A few extra feet around the perimeter of a lot is nothing compared to doubling (or 3x, or 5x, or ...) the height.
More first world problems and American exceptionalism I guess. No, I disagree, but you should really visit Tokyo.
The best solution I've found a few years ago is one Venta LW 45 for every 30 m² of space. That's enough to run them on the lowest speed while maintaining acceptable humidity and CO₂ levels.
Higher speeds are too noisy. Smaller machines evaporate less.
For sub-zero outside temperatures, it's necessary to add at least 5 g of water to each cubic metre of air coming from outside.
The recommended ventilation rate of 30 m³/h per person requires to evaporate 4 liters of water per day.
That’s a lot of refilling. You might want to look into a whole house humidifier, I added an aprilaire 700 evaporative to my hvac ducts, it costs a few hundred $. Plumbed in, automatic. So much less screwing around
Chinese I’ve mentioned blew Ventra out of the water. I’ve been using humidifiers for the last 15 years and switched to smartme around 5 or something like that (liked the idea of auto speed and was tired of aged squickness after many years of its predecessor).
Haven’t used the first generation. Had a couple of the second (they notoriously had water level sensor issue that could be fixed just enabling “drying mode” that always ran for 8h after the sensor thought there were no water).
Third gen is the charm.
Cheap, effective (pump, double-bottom for rounded instead of flat tank — uses evry last drop), quiter, 5L tank, less creak after a few years.
tldr; I only wish it lasted whole 24 hours when it is -5C and lower outside, but I guess that requires 7-8L.
Also, having a few helps with the noise (I have total of three in my apartment).
I bought two Ventas well over a decade ago, and they still work as well as the day I bought them. They're an expensive initial investment, but IMO worth it over the long run.
They are also mechanically simple, so I trust that if they ever break, I will be able to repair them.
There are always too many painful and different things to do in any business, so a single person will certainly start aggressively delegating and outsourcing after a few millions of income.
But not willing to grow over a 10 person team may be a strong and feasible personal preference.
My bet is on $10 billion with a team of 10 people.
I think that's like, fractally wrong. We don't allow early-stage developers to bypass security policies so that they can learn, and AI workflow and tool development is itself a learning process.
> We don't allow early-stage developers to bypass security policies so that they can learn
Back when I worked at an F500 it was normal practice to give early-stage developers access to a "research" environment where our normal security policies were not applied. (Of course the flipside was that that "research" environment didn't have any access to confidential data etc., but it was a "prod" environment for most purposes)
I suspect that in the near future, Meta will deploy advertisements where AI-generated images of persons who resemble, but are not identical to, an individual's friends and acquaintances are shown enjoying sponsored products.
They sort of do that now, using pictures of a people in similar age/generation and interest groups (jocks, nerds, etc) as your friends in targeted ads.
The only thing stopping that right now is that that's pretty expensive at scale. The research about using AIs to "nudge" people, the research that AIs can far more accurately determine your tastes than currently-used profiling techniques, all that is already in place and it's obvious how to take the next steps.
Jury's still out on whether AI is actually going to be a net benefit to humanity, or if the AIs will be so firmly under the thumb of their owners that eventually the only rational thing to do will be to disregard everything that may have come from them because you can presumptively assume that everything coming from them is for the owner's benefit and not yours.
Considering the people in control of AI are effectively sociopaths with not much interest in anything other then self interest, chances that AI will be net gain for humanity in short term is super small. Its owners will use it the way they use their money and power in general.
We are?? Just they don't run LLMs, but they certainly use a lot of AI to target the right ads for us.
I don't think you need to run the LLM, or that you gain that much from doing it. AI is probably going to be on the ad side to support micro targeting, is my guess.
I know you're joking, but this doesn't feel too far off the mark in this world of late-stage capitalism run amok. Give it another 15 years and the bleeding edge[!] insurance companies are likely employing agents to go after clients who have become a net drain on their P&L.
The agents probably won't be doing that "themselves", but instead will be offering bounties (think: contracts) on suitably well hidden assassination markets. After all, as a machine AI cannot be held accountable for what is essentially a management decision.
I'm personally still waiting for the first country to go full Running Man to solve their prison overcrowding issues, and in addition to entertainment licensing deals also offer state-sanctioned gambling options to get a second bite.
United Healthcare already did this with their AI powered death panels that would bulk deny claims, even if they later allowed them, the delta-t causes bonus subscriber terminations.
I am personally looking into 'backing up' my individual personal model, but it is not as straight forward as just copy pasting context data ( not if you want sufficiently deterministic/convincing model ). It is a fair amount of things to consider ( and not directly available on mainstream APIs like chatgpt ). Yes, the bare minimum can be done easily, but easy stuff is not as reliable.
There are more factors that are not easily accessible for both ends of the spectrum, like access to good, personalized education, amount of trauma, and proper psychological support. But the 'discipline' part is what affected me most.
On the other side, maybe those who are more disciplined become real prodigies, and burn brightly because of the lack of social knowledge on how to support them and help to become highly developed adults.
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