Time with my young adult children. They are all out of the house, recently, and there is nothing, and I mean NOTHING more valuable/meaningful to us than when they come home for a visit or we spend time out in the world.

It's incredible.

I lived a short time in my 20s with friends a few blocks from my parents. When I returned to live with my parents for a short period the entire dynamic changed. You leave the house so you don't go to your room, you visit. I started talking more and listening to music with them. I really appreciated my parents more. I hope my relationship with my children will be the same.

What do you mean by listening to music with them? Like, sitting around in the living room playing each other's favorite songs? I don't think I've ever done that with my parents, my kids, or anyone really.

Many such mutual activities are being lost. But I can't believe permanently.

Listening to music with my young kids is a favorite. My wife and I also frequently invite other couples over to listen to vinyl and enjoy a cocktail or two.

We like vinyl just because it has the physicality to it but I think anything here is fine. It's the music and the shared experience.

Sitting and listening to an album with someone is a very nice experience.

You learn from each other in unexpected ways.

I guess most people don't sit and listen to something nowadays. I rarely do it.

But to just play your favorite songs to your family? You surely have woken up to a song you remembered or have been listening and played it out loud?

If you haven't, do it! Your family will love to see you sing, dance, react to it!

I currently do that with my kids (Older teens almost to college) pretty regularly

this is nice to know as someone who is the adult child.

i used to argue a lot with my parents when i was still living with them, but ever since i moved out and we only see each other once every few months, our relationship has improved so much, and we're always happy to see each other in smaller doses

It's because we're no longer a burden.

Many parents would gasp at this sentence, but the same parents would likely complain to anyone who'd listen about how negatively their children are affecting their lives.

It's also the other way around - when the parent is no longer in charge of you, you can coexist as peers more easily.

So true..had my parents over for Christmas one year and they stayed for 4 days. 3 would have been perfect.

its a saying in Lithuanian: "Guests are like fish - starts rotting after 3 days". It might be a bit dark to some readers :)

I never enjoyed spending time with my late parents. I only did so out of a sense of obligation. I have no children and have never really given that choice a second thought.

Its interesting that people value their relationship with their children so much and I assume its due to a deep sense of connection with them, they being "flesh and blood" but I've never given that any weight. I feel much more connected to people who have had similar life experiences and ideas to myself, and that could be anyone. I have quite a few relatives who I've never met or met once and do not see because they are nothing like me.

I suspect this is mostly due to being pretty far out on the pointy bits of various bell curves.

It’s actually incomprehensible as a non parent. Your entire psychology re-orients after kids.

I actually have long disagreed with this sentiment -- I know people who don't want and never want kids, and they seem to totally comprehend the kind of love I have for my children. I also remember being a teenager and always kind of understanding the depth of the love my parents had for me (as in knowing "they love me implicitly, and they'd die for me, and they wish me so much happiness", and all the other trappings that I'd use to describe it with my own kids).

Being able to feel that love directly is, of course, a different story that's probably indeed pretty unique.

I think it is more than that though. Parenthood is a long, multi-year process full of hormones, self-reflection, and fundamental changes to your psyche. A non-parent can intellectually understand what happens and why, can emotionally understand or feel that love by swapping out kids with partners, pets, etc. But I believe there is a level of understanding that is just not possible unless you also go through that process. Hard to describe. Closest analog I can think of right now is my perspective on pregnancy vs my wife's.

I don’t think we disagree at all. The feeling is very different from the intellectual understanding of it.

You have to do the journey as a parent. It's long. It's beyond intense. It's a million small victories. A thousand small tragedies. If you come out the other end with mutual admiration and love, the depth is beyond explanation.

One thing that surprised me as a parent is that watching kids grow up provides significant introspective reflection which is nourishing in a different kind of way.

Do you want people here to try to convince you to have kids?

It also depends on the parents and how they nurtured the relationship with the child as they grew up.

I had a a good relationship with mine growing up, and enjoyed visiting, talking and so on as I was an adult.

A good friend had it different. They were not good parents. He, much like you, visit out of obligation and not to get written out of the will quite frankly. If it was up to him he'd never see them again.

Thank you for this reminder. This is probably only a short few years away for me.

This means a great de-risking is happening for the costs of deploying somewhat autonomous agents. This has profound implications on the timeline of deployable personal agents. Cost was a significant factor for many people during the OpenClaw frenzy, specifically when they let their agents run somewhat wild. It will become much more palatable, or already has, to install whatever the next generation of token consuming autonomous systems will be.

Ahhhhh memories. As far as I remember this didn't really spread beyond the PC game developer world. Back in the day we built an automated finger puller (poller) to grab all the game developers .plans and post them on PlanetQuake, etc (depending on which game they were working on). At the time it was considered a core feature for hot game news! Certainly the twitter of its' time for direct from the horse's mouth news.

I was very into PC gaming during this era, and ran a decently sized gaming news website, and Carmacks use of .plan as a one-to-many microblog was really a decade or two ahead of what became mainstream twitter’s primary use case. None of the games I ‘covered’ had enough .plan activity by the developers to warrant an automated script, but I remember being really impressed by the sites that did it (usually id-centric ones like blues news or stomped I think?)

Such good memories. I think my whole career has been built around chasing the feeling I had when making that gaming site.

icculus [1] (who ported a bunch of games to linux), still uses finger [2]

  [1] https://icculus.org/~icculus/
  [2] https://icculus.org/finger/icculus

Fantastic! How lovely to read these stories. And what influences Id has had on Finger.

Did not get bought by OpenAI. Creator was hired by OpenAI and they sponsor the project with tokens. OpenClaw is a non-profit now.

The problem is really that the promise was so big but the management and implementation was so painful, coupled with non-stop updates, coupled with far too big of an implementation surface.

A classic "lets solve 15 problems at once" situation, but none of them really well.

YMMV but I think with the SOTA models building a token efficient engineering loop is absolutely doable with (imho) solid development and testing practices. I see no reason to buy a 3rd party system for this either. I'm not in enterprise so don't come at me here - I'm a small shop and I'm not trying to corral 100 devs or whatever. We've got linear boards getting cards pushed and pulled, debated over by multiple models, coded, debated, tested, accepted, etc etc. True software factories now exist and they don't screw up the login.

> True software factories now exist

That statement somehow amazes me. Obviously, LLMs need plenty of steering, but I don't get how a company can be built on that.

Small companies doing consulting certainly could. My use of the term "software factory" really implies a lot of automation in turning out useful tools for internal and external customers.

One area that I find really compelling and useful now is controlling hardware that I've struggled to use in the past, like the BlackMagic ATEM video switcher/controller. They are very powerful and can turn your space into an incredible video studio. The software that ships with them is probably appropriate for experienced video techs. The last time I setup a studio to run a webinar with one it took me a couple of days to get it working how I needed. Yes, I love tinkering with hardware so there is that and I did enjoy figuring it out. Today I had a webinar that needed to be setup quickly and thought it would just be a raw Zoom feed. Instead, within an hour, I had a full video switching system with embedded graphics, feeds from a laptop configured with live content, multiple cameras, etc and a custom html page specific just to todays webinar to drive it all. I've used a number of 3rd party apps for the ATEM series. They all have to boil the ocean. This kind of personalized project tech is the perfect software hole for llm's to fill.