I often wonder in these threads what proportion of the commenters is male. HN skews heavily male, and statistically speaking, fathers are spared a huge chunk of the physical and mental burdens of pregnancy, birth, and parenting. Being a mom and being a dad are not equivalent, and I have a feeling that not many male HNers would readily swap places if such thing were possible.
Isn't it convenient that nature has already placed us in our respective roles and given us the necessary strengths to handle our different but equally important roles?
It's such a tragedy that one might feel compelled to weigh the burdens of motherhood vs fatherhood as if either side had a choice in the matter or as if there is some kind of competition to be won.
The only roles that nature put you into are carrying the baby and giving birth (and possibly breastfeeding). Everything else can be done by both parents.
(I'm a dad, who does do half of everything with the kids. It is possible, it's just a lot of stuff to do.)
I don't mean to inject politics, but there's a huge mental burden on fathers with more conservative values that take their role seriously.
Unfortunately, there's no way to elaborate what I mean on HN or much of the web without stirring up a ton of pointless argument. People will just get defensive and refuse to consider perspectives they can't agree with.
That huge mental burden is entirely self-inflicted, though. It's not a fair comparison to the physical burden that is unavoidable.
Growing up in a more conservative society, I've seen many people with that parenting style, who often pop a proverbial blood vessel trying to ensure that their children are more like army cadets that perfectly reflect their worldviews and don't take an unapproved step in any direction. Their rationalizations ranged from real safety concerns to arbitrary opinions like what religion is right (and exactly how someone needs to act at all times, with no limits on specificity or ridiculousness) or what large groups of people are evil (nationality, religion, identity - any group is fair game, just pick one and wall off your child from ever knowing about them). Regardless of motivation, ideology is a choice, and they could've relieved a whole lot of this burden on their own at any point.
Yeah, I agree, if you’re talking about the role of the patriarch as a stoic provider who isn’t allowed to be a vulnerable man with his own emotional needs.
It has been encouraging to see how much more men now seem to desire being engaged and nurturing in their children’s lives (even among those who otherwise consider themselves conservative or traditionalist).
Assuming the income stays the same, I'd happily swap places. I suspect many people would.
There are 2 further points:
1. I'd say the ideal setting is for both parents to work and hire a sitter even though it might financially net the same (or affordably negative) as having one stay-at-home parent. Because a human needs community and diverse things to do, not just one thing over and over everyday for years. Both of the parents will be much happier.
2. When people say taking care of baby/toddler is difficult, it's almost always about not eating well and/or not sleep well. Eating would take an hour of spoon-feeding because the kid wouldn't eat by themselves. Kids wouldn't be able to sleep by themselves. You must focus on solving these 2 areas first. Once they are solved, it gets a lot easier to take care of a baby/toddler.
While stay at home parenting isn't, and shouldn't have to be, for everyone, it also isn't somehow a downgrade from being in the working world. If anything is doing something 'over and over', it's trudging to some job to push papers/keyboard keys around for 8+ hours.
granted our kids were easy, but kids don't need to sleep by themselves. see attachment parenting. we let the kids sleep in our bed which solved the sleeping problem and the feeding problem because the kids could get milk at night without my wife having to get up and be wide awake.
i can't speak for my wife's experience directly, but while she complained about other issues, lack of sleep was never her problem.
and the idea that work gives you more community than staying at home is nonsense. we always had family and friends around, and taking the babies to events or visit others is also a non issue.
about swapping places, i did. when our first was 1 year old, my wife started to work. i was always working from home, and i loved the idea if taking care of the kids at home, it's been something i wanted to do all my life, except when it actually happened i was lost. i didn't know what to do with the kids and things only got better for me when i started working part-time and we hired a maid. but this was my problem, it wasn't at all my wife's problem while she was at home. also, as the kids got older, things got easier, and i'd happily repeat the experience now that i am better prepared for it.
practically speaking the most annoying part of my wife working for both of us was breastmilk pumping. the benefits of going to work are not worth that hassle.
> You know what’s fun? A stick. A stick is fun. A ball is fun.
Having a body is fun. I think that's one reason why VR has such quick hype/death cycles--it doesn't do a good enough job of fooling your body. Conventional games induce more like a dissociative or hypnotic state where you temporarily forget your body. That can range from very, VERY abstract (like Pong or Pac-Man, or BABA IS YOU), or built on an attempt to simulate the real world as convincingly as possible through high-end graphics and physics engines.
One of the things that made Untitled Goose Game so much fun for me was that playing it made me _feel like a goose_. It made me want to run around doing goose things for goose reasons. You can spread your wings and honk, regardless of whether it advances the game. A similar game that came out called Little Kitty, Big City offers the promise of the same idea but as a cat instead of a goose. I tried that game but never felt like a cat playing it, instead it felt like being a person controlling a cat. These are such subtle shades of gameplay and storytelling that I have a hard time imagining LLMs being useful in the design.
Anyone who has worked on a game knows it is a long, painful slog to the finish line. AI dev is promising the exact opposite: minimal prompts and the agent does all the slog.
Even if AI can whip up a quick demo or prototype for a game, it is the long-tail of tedious details that a passionate person has to hammer away on that separates what ships from what dies. I'm guessing most AI opportunists are looking for quick wins.
I still think it is only a matter of time before someone with the passion hammers an AI to get a game to market.
In the other corner we have the AAA publishers who are laying off devs and canceling games and talking as if AI is going to revolutionize their business… somehow.
Not to be argumentative since I broadly agree with your characterization (and the mass cancelling of games is concerning), but I think AI will revolutionize at least asset creation.
I worked on sports titles for a while and there was literally an army of contractors making uniforms, shoes, hairstyles, etc. I'm pretty convinced gen-AI will make that job obsolete.
I think the most interesting argument similar to yours centers around the problems of "social VR", that is, maybe people would like something like Horizon Worlds if the authoring tools weren't so bad. Part of the problem is that affordable XR headsets have a tiny amount of RAM and headsets with a moderate amount of RAM are crazy expensive and headsets with enough RAM just don't exist. Assuming you had something that could run generated worlds it would certainly be nice though if somebody could prompt them into existence.
I think you could make decent assets with AI but I don't know if the people who make video games today could. There's a certain kind of tastelesness which seems to infect people when they get infected with AI fever -- I think "gamers" are on edge for signs of this kind of thing because the AAA game makers give them off copiously no matter what they do.
At Disney, they had an immersive Star Wars VR experience that I don't think is there any more (and was extremely pricey for a session).
They tricked the senses by having physical objects you could touch for every space in the game environment, there was stuff like wind, you could feel the heat of lava radiating off the ground in some spots - and body packs that would jolt you if you got shot, and a physically held "blaster" with haptic feedback.
I was blown away at how good it was and how immersive it felt. But, you need an entirely custom experience and game room and as I said it was very expensive (probably for good reason).
From my impressions so far, writing might be safe for far longer than many of those day jobs. At least provided there are enough people interested in reading good literature and willing to pay for that
I agree with you. The harmonics/diagonals of the notional rectangle(s) of the piece are more important than any one particular ratio. Phi is no more special than any other self-similar relationship in terms of composition. The root rectangle series offers more than enough for a good layout even without phi.
And yes, for the people who get hung up on what the Old Masters did, it’s mostly armature grids and not the golden ratio!
That's the OLD way of thinking! The future is bigger and bigger vibe-coded machines for faster and faster vibe coding, oceans of unread code piped back into the intake valve, for the glorification of itself and its own inevitability. "Practical" "applications" are merely speedbumps in the way of our new Singularity Engines, shooting out million-line diffs that will not, and SHOULD NOT, be useful for anything. We will know when we have achieved success when we no longer even consider computer programming a tool for solving real-world problems.
We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
…
https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/filippo-tommaso-ma...
reply