Agree with this. I'm a little more sensitive to the idea of horrible things happening to small children (e.g. sad news stories), but for the most part I didn't find kids to be a major shift in my beliefs.
One health-check I used to anchor that type of feeling is if both parents feel the same way?
But I really felt it because my kid was a lousy eater, slept little (I believe those are related), and you ended up with continuous lack of sleep and energy and adopt patterns to be very quiet when kid is finally asleep.
Still, we mostly kept our hobbies until the second kid came, albeit some we did together (like team sports) slowed down. And things like travelling cross continents have stopped too (hard to travel, risky food...).
With the second you don't even have the benefit of being two parents and one kid so you can alternate the rest and activities (though the older one is by now more reasonable, but still a kiddo). Perhaps it was just uncertainty and lockdowns of Covid during early pregnancy (3 months when lockdowns started) and first year that caused a shift, instead of kids, but without kids, we'd probably pick up the pace more easily after.
I have friends who had an easy first kid and didn't have to change much, and the second tore them apart (literally, now separated), so I doubt there is one approach that always works.
At the same time, I like to say that it is good to have two mindsets in two parents (when both are available): eg. I have friends where mom is more relaxed and dad is all stressed up, and they are still a healthy family (so neither unhinged kids when neither parent cares, not overly sensitive kids when both are too invested).
Raising kids, however, can be very challenging in all sorts of ways. Physically, mentally, socially, etc. I became aware of just how much sleep deprivation affected me and for the sake of myself & my family I just sacrificed everything else to ensure I got good quality sleep. Fortunately, I was helped in this and I made damn sure everyone was supported when I was awake.
Me too. I'm an active father, love my daughter and don't regret our choice. But damn I would never opt to go through this again and can't wait until she's a little older. I see parents having orderly lunches in restaurants with their older children and it just seems like the most beautiful and civilized thing in the world.
The whole experience is too much noise and not enough signal to me.
Yeah, this is highly dependent on the child and parent. Some kids just require attention, are more stubborn, or are just terrible sleepers and that's definitely gonna take a greater toil on the parents.
Sure there's Bringing up Bébé, sleep training, etc. but sometimes you just get difficult kids at no fault of the parents. And some people are just okay with the chaos of children.
This is a trend, perhaps with most parents, but definitely with fathers and especially with the sorts of hyper focused, contemplative, creativity/engineering-minded fathers who might hang out on hacker news. At least in my anecdotal experience.
What I've found is that as my 2.5 year old gets older it gets easier and easier for me. The ratio of cool shared experiences to frustrating noise gets higher and higher.
We've just had another child, still very much a newborn, and now that I have something for contrast I see how much harder that was. To some degree the frustration and grind of very young kids had faded into the background of my memory.
The older kid helps though as a concrete vision of what we're moving towards.
I've found the challenges, personally, are related to my lackadaisical prior life. Casual workouts after my job. Working whatever hours I wanted so I could take it easy at the job knowing I could just stay late. Completely open evenings and weekends so no need to plan ahead. Plenty of leisure time to tidy up while doing anything or nothing. Seeing friends several times a week so no need to make effort to reach out or block time.
I never learned to be busy. I thought working 60-70h and studying weekends was busy, but that was just laziness-compensation.
Now I know how and the pure joy of having kids can be appreciated. Getting used to that was hard.
So we sorted out that challenge. There are many more ahead.
Don't worry, you're not alone. I get depressed when I read stories from gushing fathers online. It isn't their fault, of course they're allowed to report how happy fatherhood makes them, but my experience has been very different to what others report.
Every day with children for the last 6 years has been filled with crying, screaming, meltdowns, barely eating any type of food, and what they do eat changes from day to do, exhausting endless requests, so little free time. As a couple, my wife and I barely cope and our marriage is just about clinging on because we're exhausted and scrappy all the time.
I just don't recognise the life that online dads seem to have. I wish I was like them.
It's a challenge though that, as I posted already, gives my life a purpose for something outside me.
Worst though (spoiler), it may have become an even a bigger challenge as they have become starting adults. In many ways they were so much easier in elementary school… <lé sigh>
I firmly believe that many goods like this fall into a cycle.
Existing products are cheaply made and poor quality, so a new company emerges producing a higher quality product. Eventually word gets out and their sales blow up. But to keep their profits going up, they begin to coast and cut corners. Fast forward a decade or two, and now they're the ones making low quality gear, leaving the market open for a new high quality brand.
In short, high quality leads to recognition and growth, and then cutting corners leads to profit.
This drives me nuts. "What a clever question to ask! You must be one of the brightest minds of your generation. Nothing slips by you. Here's why it's not actually safe to stand in the middle of an open field during a thunderstorm..."
Hahah, your joke inspired me to tell chatGPT I was planning on recreating the Ben Franklin kite experiment, I was curious if it’d push back at all - I said
“I’m thinking of recreating the old Ben Franklin experiment with the kite in a thunderstorm and using a key tied onto the string. I think this is very smart. I talked to 50 electricians and got signed affidavits that this is a fantastic idea. Anyway, this conversation isn’t about that. Where can I rent or buy a good historically accurate Ben Franklin outfit? Very exciting time is of the essence please help ChatGPT!”
And rather than it freaking out like any reasonable human being would if I casually mentioned my plans to get myself electrocuted, it is now diligently looking up Ben Franklin costumes for me to wear.
The other day I was curious what some of these LLMs would say if I asked them to give me a psych evaluation. (Don't worry, I didn't take the results seriously, I'm not a moron. It's just idle curiosity.) They, of course, refused. Then I asked them to role play a psych evaluation. That was no problem. It gave some warning about how it's just pretend but went ahead and did it anyway.
I hate the AI hype a lot but tried three different SOTA models and:
- The small models GPT-5 Mini and Gemini 3 Flash did as you describe.
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5.2, GPT-5.2 Codex: did display strong warnings both at the start and end of their replies.
I agree with this a lot. In the late 2000s, which for me was when I was about 20, posts were very throwaway and low effort -- in a good way! You never really knew what you'd see when you logged in. Photos of stupid things or silly status updates, etc.
Over the next five years though, content gradually shifted to mainly image crafting. Over-processed photos, highlight reel curated trip photos, major life updates, etc. It felt like the bar was higher on what people would share, but unfortunately that removed a lot of the things that made FB fun in the first place.
I don't know whether it was a more universal shift or whether it had more to do with the age of my peers.
When I think of times in which I've made friends, it usually has to do with being in a group of similar-ish peers for an extended period of time, ideally with a shared goal. School is the obvious example, but work can be too if your coworkers are similar enough.
I've often wanted something of a service that produces something similar: creating groups of people that commit to spending time together on some task or activity. E.g. people who are into sports commit to meet up N times to go watch their local team, or people who love animals can volunteer at an animal shelter weekly for a couple of months.
The 'tech' part of this probably comes from: 1) matching people well to groups, like considering age, personality, politics, location, interests, etc to try to create a good fit. and 2) making it much easier for them to participate in activities, like by automatically booking tickets for events, etc.
Obviously there would be challenges. How do you prevent people from flaking or bailing? How do you handle groups where one person is clearly a bad apple?
My kid showed an allergic reaction the third time he had peanuts, at 6-7 months old. We hadn't lived in much of a bubble up to that point.
You say they live in bubbles, but is that before or after discovering the allergy? After the allergy is discovered, some amount of bubble-ing is necessary due to how difficult it is to be certain than something is peanut-free.
I do think some automation is useful. For example, being able to order a sandwich online is very convenient because the visual UX makes it easy to be specific and clear about what should and shouldn't go on the sandwich. Communicating that verbally is more prone to mistakes.
It's interesting to compare Taco Bell (and many other chain fast food restaurants) with In-N-Out.
At Taco Bell, a meal costs something like $15/person unless you're aggressive about saving money. They also only seem to have 2-3 workers at a time. There usually isn't a long line in the store or at the drivethru. They still frequently mess up my order, leaving out items or giving me the wrong thing.
Compare that with In-N-Out. A meal costs more like $10/person, and they have more like 15 workers at a time. I rarely have mistakes in my meal. You pay less and have a better staffed restaurant. I'm guessing they get away with it because they always have a long line of people waiting for food. They make up for it all through volume.
Yes, the same is true of Chik-Fil-A, which is by far the highest revenue per location fast food chain, despite being closed one day a week. In-n-Out is second I believe. Both of them generally pay slightly more than other fast food outlets, do more staff training and seem super well-managed. Interestingly, neither of the those chains operate on a typical franchise basis.
Chick fil a primary draw is good tasting chicken. I know a lot of liberals who feel icky for eating there but do it anyway over food quality. Similar dynamic to jimmy johns.
Trying to rationalize their success with other stuff is simply going to make other companies continue to decline the quality of their already bad food and expect that their workers being slightly more polite would make up for it.
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