You are right and all these people replying to you are living in some kind of fantasy world.
I forget what it's called, but there's this fallacy of ordinary people, that states that we attribute superhuman abilities to people far enough from us on the social scale. In reality, rich people are far from movie villains, life is much more mundane.
It is scary for me to see how many well-educated people here on HN are so conspiracy-theory minded. In a quest to avoid these fantasized dictators, it is very well likely that we will vote for the one who promises to give us what we want, if only we give them enough power. In the end, the world's worst political systems were also the ones promising of liberating the poor and equalizing everyone.
> It is scary for me to see how many well-educated people here on HN are so conspiracy-theory minded.
The basis of so much of the era of computing I come from was basically based on a 70s Berkeley hacker mindset, which had a strong hippie crossover of that era that largely later became the basis for the Open Source movement.
I don't know how you mentally separate or understand the modern computing era without that era.
I'm sorry, not only is this far from definitive, it's not even a sign of an 'early' exodus.
There is not really any exodus, sadly. The US still is significantly more competitive and offers much higher upsides to talented people willing to take risks. I live in the EU and want us to succeed, but I'm skeptical about our ability to compete with America economically and technologically, because we foster a different type of spirit.
Lately I've been playing a lot of cooperative games with a lot of clever card play, often against some sort of boss or some other win/loss condition, and usually it needs a lot of expansions so I can keep trying new combinations of heros/villains/scenarios. I can set them up and play a game or two solo most evenings.
So the ones I keep coming back to are Lord of the Rings - The Card Game, Legendary (mostly Marvel since it has so many expansions you can mix and match, but I also have and like DC, James Bond, and Alien), Ashes Ascendancy (also Ashes Reborn), Marvel Champions, Aeon's End, Arkham Horror - The Card Game.
Memoir '44 would be in that list too if you could play that solo. I love that game, but I haven't had a buddy to play it with in a long time. BoardGameArena has a great implementation but I don't like playing against random people on there as much. Supposedly there's a new app coming that will let you play solo, so I'm looking forward to that.
I've also tried the following recently and they're pretty high up too, they might eventually join the games above: Primal: The Awakening, Star Trek Captain's Chair, Marvel United, Boss Fighters QR, and Bullet.
Smaller, shorter games I enjoy include Cursed!?, Rove, Hoki, Fliptoons, D-Day Pocket, All is Bomb, Palm Island, and Harmonies
The replies in this thread are already very good. I'm a dad of two, but I won't add anything more than that you will be hard pressed to find a parent who will regret having children. I understand the bias in it, but people can be persuaded into honesty and, under anonymity on this website, are more likely to be honest about such things.
Agreed, though I know some people who evidently regretted having children, or never bonded with their own but developed "quasi-parental" relationships with children who weren't their own. More than one case, actually!
But I think most parents, in reasonable socioeconomic conditions, don't regret having children.
Partner and I are childfree but in talking with other parents about it, I've had 3 admit, if they knew now, they wouldn't have had kids or had less. My father was one of them.
As is the case with so many things, the person you're replying to will reply with what they can quantify about the experience, but there is much much more to it that is unquantifiable and hard to convey. It is the difference between "using" someone's child for the satisfaction of these experiences, versus raising a child for their own sake, that you are wholly responsible for, especially in the early years.
Care to share more about your pi setup? I've recently started using it (after long-time Claude Code work) and was wondering how you'd achieve these long-running tasks. Do you allow it to spawn sub-agents? Thank you!
My pi usage over the past ~5 months went roughly like this:
* Install pi and a bunch of extensions from their package repo
* Realize that all the packages (with a few exceptions) are massively overcomplicated and vibe coded
* Ask pi to rebuild a very simple version of the packages I used. So e.g. subagents - all the default subagent extensions are massively complicated with named agents, recursion, communication. I made one that stripped all that out.
* Then whenever I hit an annoyance, spin up a parallel session and fix it.
It's less work than it appears because I have ~5 extensions: hooks, subagents, background processes, a custom footer, a loop command... Maybe that's it. Within a couple of days you can have a setup pretty close to Claude Code but with a fraction of the base context use. After gradual improvements over a few weeks/months you'll have a system far better, tuned to your exact preference.
Of course, just like Linux or any other highly tunable system equally important is having the restraint to not spend all your time tuning it. I've definitely had a couple of days where I was bored with my real work and did that, but whatever, it beats browsing reddit.
As for getting long running tasks, I set a looping message every ~20m and tell the agent to strictly track progress in a session doc, then reread and continue after each compaction.
There's quite a few tasks I've found that work like this, although if course most tasks don't and require a much higher degree of interaction. The prime examples are read only audits of very large codebases, and that's what I was was running overnight. One file per subagent, each subagent writes a report with recommendations. Since it's pi and the subagents have very now scope, looking at them they ranged between 7-40k context use per subagent. I've found codex maxes out at about 50 concurrent subagents before I start getting rate limited, so the coordinating session is instructed to run them in batches of 50. My subagent extension is set up to make this as efficient as possible, the subagents can share a prefix and suffix prompt then a list of name + specific prompt in json format.
Overnight it ran ~800 tiny auditors. I then run synthesis on the written audit files, extract bugs, then another round to find which ones have a common source, group them by priority etc.
I've cautiously started doing larger tasks that are not just read only, for example I was dealing with a large codebase full of lint and type errors, so I sent out waves of workers with clear instructions to only fix obvious/trivial issues to and otherwise to append to a todo file for my review. That worked well and cleared a few thousand issues over several hours.
I don't really want to share any other tasks I've worked on this way because it'll draw out the agentic coding sceptics and I'm not interested in defending my workflow.
I'm not the person you asked, but if they're running in their own local hardware, then it might just be a lot slower than what the big providers run their models on. System RAM is a lot cheaper than VRAM, especially if you bought it last year.
I'd like to study your setup. Would you be willing to share?
Perhaps a github repo of your 5 extensions or even a pastebin if you would be so inclined. I would be grateful to learn more about this by studying from your success...
I might share it at some point but I think it's quite similar to a lot of others out there, except that it's very specific to my personal projects and goals. If I shared it I'd need to spend at least a while cleaning up and improving docs.
It's one of the reasons I suggest you study the famous setups (oh my pi, or superhuman skills etc.) and convert them to your personal needs.
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