I guess in the end the journalist didn't feel necessary to impact his readers with punchy one line stats and bold infographic-ready layouts, considering he opted for the first draft.
> "The Internet’s next business model will be powered by pay-per-use, fractional payments, and microtransactions—tools that shift incentives toward original, creative content that actually adds value,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.
No. It isn't. Here's what happened to all the micropayments network platforms that competed with the internet:
The gatekeepers (telecoms) first decided they were going to publish things themselves too, which had zero success, then to pay themselves more than anyone on the platform, then when that still didn't work they kicked everyone else off the platform with various excuses (porn, crime, getting money from outside the platform, promoting non-sanctioned shows, ... the big thing that was successful were mail and chatrooms)
The problem is that these companies were always willing (after a short while) to damage the economics of the infrastructure as a whole, just to increase their own share (for example per-email charges). Eventually they had close to 100% ... of nothing.
And the irony is that because of these companies constantly trying to move into content and apps, destroying their own system more and more by crude attempts to force people into their content the only thing that remains of these systems ... is publishers. They couldn't really improve their apps, since that cost them money. They quickly discovered to use money as a way to avoid friction on their apps ... and then no business leader ever approved removing friction anywhere.
I built five different apps that pay-per-use with microtransactions and users were uninterested. The key reason I think is, and something one user stated to me explicitly, is that microtransactions change interactions from a social gratis model to a business transaction.
Grimmer than paying with your soul? With targeting kids with ads for gambling, ultra-rightwing podcssters, and fucked up sexual content? I find it hard to believe.
That's good for CS and CE related work. Too many people went there not because they liked programming or engineering but because they wanted to get rich fast.
Hopefully this means the clogged up job market will stop being the clown circus it is now.
Getting rich fast, and doing what you love in your spare time, rather than pretending you love your work, which no one does, sounds perfectly coherent to me.
Do people actually get rich fast without loving their work, at least to a reasonable degree? Motivation is the most important requirement for productivity, not smarts (unnecessary for engineering where the main job is to understand tools to the fullest) nor even experience (though the ones that stay in the industry for a while generally also have more motivation). I've seen plenty of folks get managed out that fall in the unmotivated, unproductive pattern as they probably should be.
Retiring early to pursue something different is a great goal, but I think that means liking your work enough to get there. And some luck maybe that someone shared the importance of investment which is often the missing piece.
No, because they are not the people who love to do it in their spare time. They never do it in their spare time, because they don't love the activity that much.
My parents pushed me hard to do piano when I was around 10-12. After a year that went pretty well I was starting to get lazy and put very little work and investment into preparing for the next lesson. They still had me play piano a full year until they eventually gave up and bitterly told me what a waste my resignation felt to them.
20 years later, I got back to playing piano, and I can't thank my parent enough for having me to continue playing in my teenage years. Because it only took me a few month to be able to play pretty advanced piano sheets compared to some of my relatives who are struggling with the basics starting it in their adulthood.
Same for maths. I feel that a lot of people like the author of this blog post are being extremely misdirected thinking math can and should be taught in a fun or amusing manner every time.
Sure, a lot of topics in Maths can be made more digestible by "gameification" to help younglings develop an intuition.
But a very big part of Maths actually requires you to sit down and painstakingly crunch down the numbers/equations, memorize and learn when to apply the correct methods to solve some problems. And even though this part can feel fun and engaging after a while, you can't expect children to exhibit such interest right of the bat without having them first struggle with the classics.
Kids don't know better. Your role as a parent is to navigate along the fine line of forcing your kid to get good exposure to the (boring) activities we adults value and letting him enjoy what he enjoys.
Only in doing that will your kid open up to the world and grow up into a functional human being.
"20 years later, I got back to playing piano, and I can't thank my parent enough for having me to continue playing in my teenage years."
One of the tragedies of being young is that few have the insight to realize that the 'boring' stuff parents and teachers are forcing us to learn will actually benefit us and that eventually we'll be very thankful that they did.
My parents nagged me all the time about studying and even though I did my fair share of it I never fully appreciated how important it was until much later.
It's a strange phenomenon, one cognitively understands the reasons but one is isolated from the reality so one is somewhat distant from it. For example, one can get upset watching war footage on TV but being there is on another level altogether (soldiers often do not talk of their experiences because they know those at home will never fully understand).
In the same way, wisdom gained through experience is almost impossible to impart to a younger generation who has no actual experience.
I upvoted all of the above posts because - all of them share some correct arguments.
* Training is hard.
* Using your training e.g. a bicycle race is fun.
* Training is easier, if you actually know why you’re doing it and recognize some progress.
> the 'boring' stuff parents and teachers are forcing us to learn will actually benefit us
My parents forced me to play the piano for more than 10 years because they were obsessed with the piano, and because they had a piano. I hated every second of doing that in order to please them, and I never got higher than beginner level because it was a torture for me. Being a beginner for 10 years should be considered as abuse and it messed me up big time, especially for my daily confidence.
30 years later, I still hate that fucking thing and I understand that they fucked up due to their delusion. They deny everything when we talk about it though.
Sometimes you have to listen to the kids and understand what they want do do, and accept it instead of feeding your Munchausen by proxy syndrome. All I wanted was a computer, even the cheapest computer ever would have been acceptable. Nowadays, I write C++ for a living and I still hate the piano. If only anyone listened to me back then... My hatred for that instrument is a mystery for some people, and some people think that "wisdom gained through experience is almost impossible."
Amen. And the surreal thing is to then hear the very same mentalities behind this uttered in this comment section.
It's like there's like a vehemence in people towards abuse. Reminds me of how Zweig said that people were in a state of jubilation in anticipation of WW1.
There's something dark in humans where they don't accept the absence of pain. They think to at least some extent, that hurting their kids is a good thing, perhaps under a twisted "toughen them up" mentality.
And the thing is, they get away with it. Maybe their kid gets a chip on their shoulder against them, or maybe even estranged from them. But they don't get hurt back.
"They think to at least some extent, that hurting their kids is a good thing, perhaps under a twisted "toughen them up" mentality."
Hurting a kid and proper discipline are two separate matters. Good discipline and training doesn't hurt kids (in fact many enjoy them). If you find that your actions are hurting a kid then you are doing things wrong.
"Sometimes you have to listen to the kids and understand what they want do do, and accept it instead of feeding your Munchausen by proxy syndrome."
I agree, and it's more than 'sometimes', kids have a right to be heard and that hearing should be fair and reasonable. Clearly, in your case it wasn't.
What you experienced was unacceptable by any measure, and in my opinion the fact that your parents were oblivious to your predicament is a damning indictment on their parenting skills.
Your extreme situation isn't what I was referring to, so let me explain by briefly describing what I experienced.
I learned the piano because I wanted to, not because my parents forced me. In fact, whilst my parents were both musical we didn't have a piano when I was young—so I started late and that's been to my disadvantage. I mention that to let you know I understand what you went through.
Whilst I like the piano learning it was no bed of roses and it's difficult for all but the most talented (anyone not wishing to learn it would be an unmitigated drag). For me, those fucking Czerny scales used to drive me to distraction, I'd goof off and play whatever took my fancy whenever I could. Also, my teacher used to reprimand me regularly for not reading score timings as written, I'd play the tempo as I felt felt like it and that always casued a ruckus.
At no time did my parents force me to take subjects that I did not like. That said, gentle persuasion was used. I was never much good at languages and despite my ambivalence for the subject I took French not so much at my mother's insistence but rather her desire that I do so (her sister married a Frenchman and was living in France and she thought it would be useful). Learning French used to drive me crazy, it's not that I detested it (I understood its value), rather the problem was that I wasn't much good at the subject. I'd sit on my bed at home doing my French homework and bash my textbook up and down on the bedclothes whilst tying to learn those fucking French nouns with their damn random genders—why the fuck can't they all be 'la' or 'le' and not random? Having a single 'the' in English is immanently sensible.
Well, despite being not much good at the subject in hindsight learning French turned out to be a blessing when I was living in Europe. I could never have foreseen that situation when I was at school.
Another example, my father used to nag me about not taking Latin, my usual retort being why the hell would I want to learn a dead language (although that was more in jest at his persistence). I sort of had a paltry excuse as my school didn't teach Latin but there were arrangements to do certain subjects by correspondence under teacher supervision in the library. So I never took the subject at school, so nowadays my Latin is at best a mess.
That was a fucking mistake of the first order on my part for reasons too long to describe here. It's only the wisdom of hindsight that I now know I should have taken my father's advice.
BTW, I understand your frustration over not having access to a computer, I'm an IT professional and I managed an IT department for years (I was one of those nerds university security would regularly chuck out of the computer room at 10pm at night). If I'd been in your position, I'd have been mightily pissed off at your parents' miserable attitude.
> One of the tragedies of being young is that few have the insight to realize that the 'boring' stuff parents and teachers are forcing us to learn will actually benefit us and that eventually we'll be very thankful that they did.
I'm 40. I don't know, perhaps I'm still young.
I did not appreciate having to learn the boring parts. Learning things for the next exam so as to forget them in two weeks... I didn't see the point then and still don't.
I managed to get by with the minimum possible, fluked my CS education, then had a career earning an order of magnitude more than the average salary. Shrug.
Maybe I'm missing something else because of my lack of education? I don't know...
We’re all going to have different paths but I’m certain that flunking CS education and then getting 10x the average salary is not going to be the common case and was probably only possible for a given point in time.
I’m in my late 40s. I left grad school to get a job in VLSI because it was possible to do so in the job market of the 90s. In today’s job market we wouldn’t even pickup the resume of a new college graduate that didn’t have at least a masters. I would’ve been totally passed by today.
Assuming the benefit we’re looking is getting a high paying job of course.
You (and I and many others on HN) were lucky enough to join the tech industry while it was still growing explosively and got outsized salaries because of it. If you were to do the same thing today, you'd be telling a very different and much grimmer tale.
I had way more than usual share of "life events". I threw my career out the window to care for my toddler and dying partner. Then my partner died and I'm left alone raising the kid. What else is going to happen to make me wiser?
My parents forced me to play piano, right up until I told them that I'll destroy our piano if they don't lay off, and any consequences they could think of would not stop me (I was normally an obedient child, but enough was enough).
That got their attention.
30 years later I picked up classical guitar and loved it! Do I thank my parents for forcing the piano on me? Hell no.
Like I commented in another post, piano gave you the foundation for learning classical guitar (and appreciating that genre of music). Very few guitar players can even recognize note names on a staff. You’re not going to get far with classical guitar without it.
That was ironic understatement. With classical guitar, you won’t really get anywhere without being able to read sheet music. It’s not like rock and pop guitar where you can just learn tabs and slightly develop your ear and that’s enough play along with all your favorite tunes.
If you’ve already picked up reading music for one instrument, it’s a ton easier for the next one.
You want to have fun playing along to your favourite song. Or impromptu jam with a friend. Or sing for yourself because a song reminds you of a memory.
They all have a minimum skill requirement, without which it isn't as enjoyable.
You need to know to play reasonably well by ear to have fun imo.
Sure, those are definitely fun things to be able to do, but it’s not some kind of essential life skill. If it’s not someone’s thing, why force it? There are plenty of other skills that are also fun to have.
I mean, fair enough. I had an aptitude for it.
If you're able to figure out what skills they might have fun with in the future, that's excellent.
If not - I'm not sure, you gotta shoot your shot I guess? Because the dislike might be for the process (practice) when they actually would like the end product (jamming)
I just had a kid so this is pretty real to me. How it will go is anybody's guess, but I hope it does go well :)
I guess I believe more in the Montessori idea that kids are intrinsically motivated to learn and excel, and they will tend to be naturally drawn to work hard at the skills that they are best suited for.
I understand the idea that some skills have a hump to get over and it’s good to encourage that determination, but I’d also guess that for every person like you who is glad they were pushed to learn some particular skill, there is another person who it affected very negatively. So I suppose it’s a bit of a gamble in that sense.
> Because eventually you plateau without proper foundations, and that's not fun.
This is a completely alien perspective to most people. Most people never even really try to be good at anything. That you think this quirk of your own psychology is the norm shows a deep disconnect with the mass of mediocre people who don’t care about being competitive because they’re not trying to get highs up on some leaderboard. https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
I get that. It’s satisfying to overcome those hurdles and frustrating to be blocked. Speaking for myself though, if I find I’m getting really frustrated by something that I’m supposedly doing for fun, it’s a sign that I might not be approaching it in the best way psychologically. I’m usually much happier when I try to have more of a zen ‘putting in the reps’ mindset. Then the periods of progress are like icing on the cake, not something I need to enjoy the thing.
Learning sight reading is the most natural on piano like instruments. The notes are literally arranged in the same order. Stringed instruments are much more difficult to learn sight reading from scratch on.
That's an odd take. Sight reading is about associating the mark on the paper with the actual note, duration, style etc. How that note gets played on a particular instrument is a different matter.
> piano gave you the foundation for learning classical guitar
Absolutely not. If you hate something and don't learn anything more that entry level, it won't give you any foundation, only hatred and bitterness. Also the piano and the guitar are very different beasts that you cannot compare at all.
The piano and the guitar are different in many ways, but they also have some similarities depending on how you play them.
Mechanically, sure, nothing transfers. Rhythm transfers pretty well. An ear for what sounds right would too.
If you're reading printed music, that transfers. A lot of guitar play comes from tabs though, which isn't really transferrable.
If you play chords on the piano and the guitar, and especially if you're thinking about chord progressions, that transfers. But you might play either instrument without a lot of chords.
Lead melody kinds of things can transfer a bit. Especially if you were thinking about how the notes in the melody fit with the chords, even if you didn't play the chords.
Even if you didn't think you were learning music fundamentals, you might have picked up something.
I’m happy that there was overlap between what your parents put in front of you and what you found passion in later in life.
I think that story happens to many but I cannot accept a premise that it is somehow universal.
The passions I found later in life were unrelated to what my parents put in front of me. I suspect that it’s because the activities I eventually found (distance running, volleyball, cooking) were not activities that my parents enjoyed or thought much about.
Moreover, I was unable to develop healthy models of internal motivation until mid life. I didn’t have to when the “why” was covered by my parents.
Childhood should be the lowest risk time in life for people to learn to fail and find the path back to success. This is what I worry about as a parent when I try to set my kids up for future success. I want them to fail now.
I see my role as a parent as coaching them to care about how they spend their time and how to recover from disappointment and failure. If they get that, then learning piano later in life is just work. They won’t be afraid of that.
> I can't thank my parent enough for having me to continue playing in my teenage years.
Counter-example to anyone reading this and thinking about imposing this misery on their child - I absolutely hated piano lessons, and nowadays I absolutely hate that my parents forced me to do it. Total waste of time, even spending more time on Civilization or whatever instead would've been more valuable to me.
> "Because it only took me a few month to be able to play pretty advanced piano sheets compared to some of my relatives who are struggling with the basics starting it in their adulthood."
I don't get it. you'll be a beginner in something that you weren't pushed to in your childhood. so what?
are you planning to only do things you were pushed to as a child? I learnt skiing in mid 30s , never even saw snow as a child. Its my fav thing to do all winter and spent like 40 days a season on snow. Not sure if i would've enjoyed it the same if i was "pushed" skiing as a child and hated it.
I noticed that all text looked garbled up when I had some lucid dreams. When diffusion models started to gain attention, I made the connection that text generated in generated images also looked garbled up.
Maybe all of those are clues that parts of the human subconscious mind operate pretty close to the principles behind diffusion models.
I also lucid dream occasionally. Very rarely things are very detailed, most often the colors and details are just as bleak and blurry and keep changing as these videos. I walk down a street, take a turn (or not), its almost guaranteed I can't go back to where I came from. I usually appreciate when I can track back the same path.
I don't think lucid dreaming is a requirement for this. Whenever I dream my environment morphs into another one, scene by scene, things I try to get details from, like the content of a text, refuse to show clearly enough to extract any meaningful information from it, no matter what I try.
"I try" sounds like lucid dreams though? In my dreams there is no try, things just happen (including my actions). I think I get meaningful information sometimes, but it's selective
Also the AI generated images that can't get the fingers right. Have you ever tried to look at your hands while lucid dreaming and try counting fingers? There are some really interesting parallels between the dreams and diffusion models.
On the other hand, psychedelics give you perceptions similar to even early deepdream genai images.
On LSD, I was swimming in my friend’s pool (for six hours…) amazed at all the patterns on his pool tiles underwater. I couldn’t get enough. Every tile had a different sophisticated pattern.
The next day I went back to his place (sober) and commented on how cool his pool tiles were. He had nfi what I was talking about.
I walk out to the pool and sure enough it’s just a grid of small featureless white tiles. Upon closer inspection they have a slight grain to them. I guess my brain was connecting the dots on the grain and creating patterns.
It was quite a trip to be so wrong about reality.
Not really related to your claim I guess but I haven’t thought of this story in 10 years and don’t want to delete it.
This may be a joke, but counting your fingers to lucid dream has been a thing for a lot longer than diffusion models.
That being said, your reality will influence your dreams if you're exposed to some things enough. I used to play minecraft on a really bad PC back in the day, and in my lucid dreams I used to encounter the same slow chunk loading as I saw in the game.
Playing Population One in VR did this to me. Whenever I hopped into a new game, I'd ask the other participants if they'd had particularly vivid dreams since getting VR, and more than half of folks said they had.
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