Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
How does one find purpose/meaning? That is, what gives you a "reason to get out of the bed in the morning"? Particularly when "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" seem particularly aimed your way.
(More specifically, with neither the usual standbys of "faith and family," and while being too anhedonic for hedonism?)
Edit: to put it more simply, how do I find a reason to keep struggling through another 30+ years of miserable, pointless, futile existence, rather than just skipping to the end?
In my case, I think the near future is probably going to be really fucking sick. AGI. Full immersion VR. Colonizing the solar system and then the galaxy. Immortality in one form or another. The best fucking movies, video games, books and music you can imagine, delivered custom made and nigh instantly on demand
As far as I'm concerned, there's no other period in time I'd rather have been born, and even as someone who is rather depressed and gritting his teeth to pull through more days a year than he'd like, especially when so much of my hopes and dreams have been sabotaged by circumstances outside my control, I still have so much to look forward to that even at my lowest I have no real desire to "skip forward to the end". They'll cure my depression and ADHD sooner rather than later. And even if I get paperclipped, we're far too close to the end of an era for me to bear missing out on that closure.
At any rate, the human body and mind was designed to keep trucking through far worse. Most depressed and unhappy people don't kill themselves. Even if you don't have a "reason to live" (and I cherish life for its own sake), you'll find that you keep on rolling, if only slightly downhill. It is what it is, but will probably get better.
This is nothing exciting for someone who consumes no media. I've stopped watching TV, playing games and reading books (going out with friends, running, cycling, lifting and working on programming projects is better).
I'm a programmer so there is a lot of exiciting projects that can be done though. The new embedding models made text classification a solved problem.
Given how much programmers like to complain about programming, rejoice! You won't have to much longer 🙏😩
On the other hand, I am perennially plagued by niche tastes and an acute absence of good media of the genre I like to read, so I will gladly take my obsolescence as a writer if it means I can read more quality stuff. I wrote a novel precisely because it was the kind of thing I wanted to read, and I'd rather not have to, it's a lot of work you see.
(One minor annoyance I have is that SOTA models often have knowledge cutoffs that are just before recent library releases, especially knowledge of the latest updates. Less of an issue when you can throw the entire documentation into the 1 million tokens, but still annoying all the same. Can't wait till we have online learning.)
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