HACKER Q&A
📣 bix6

What do you care about? What is your joy and purpose?


What do you care about these days? The world feels so misaligned directionally and work is all in service of some esoteric AI that just strips the beauty from various crafts. What are you finding joy and purpose in for your own life and wellbeing?


  👤 chistev Accepted Answer ✓
I don't know how to answer this question.

I derive joy from writing about things I care about. I derive joy from learning to code. I derive joy from working out and seeing myself getting stronger. I derive joy from knowing I'm becoming a better person.

My purpose? I don't know. I just want to be financially successful and help people who have known me when I was a nobody, and also people who need assistance.

I don't really know how to answer this.


👤 tinktank
I care about being at peace; my entire life has been "the next thing". Started in my childhood and continues into my mid 40-s. Nothing is sweet, nothing is savoured. It's always "what's next?"

My joy and my purpose is to help those around me and to get the feedback that they appreciate it. My purpose is to earn money so my wife can do the things she loves and not have to worry about working, so my mom's health is looked after and so, at some point, I can go do something that brings me peace.


👤 keiferski
I think it's important to focus on self-development / mastery of skills, even if they are theoretically replaceable by an AI or technology more generally.

For example – maybe AI will make 90% of video editing work unnecessary. But knowing how to edit video properly, when to cut, how to tell stories, etc. is an invaluable skill that is worth learning.

I think this applies to pretty much any skill. Just because a computer can do it doesn't mean it's not worth mastering on an individual level.


👤 PJHkorea
AI is like a mirror reflecting the user. As I continuously improve my own capabilities, I am interested in checking how far the AI reflecting me develops.

👤 Imustaskforhelp
I wrote this in my personal diary just today before going to eat for some french fries and coding some questions on codeforces: "I wish to code for myself, nothing else"

I do think that I have the privilege for doing exactly that as I am going to college and many people within the workforce don't exactly have that choice but I believe that long term, the consequences of completely using AI for anything and everything is going to bite, so I am comfortable for the next 4 years to come.

It's not that I dislike AI the tech, but I hate AI, everything surrounding it. We have the abilities to ask it customized questions to learn so much which we previously couldn't have, (Yes AI is still sycophantic and one can say that its a better search engine) but instead, we are using it to completely automate ourselves or creating a set of expectations and ineffectiveness around the competent management around it.

My purpose: I don't think that there's one. We all just exist and I don't wish to die. So I have constructed my purpose around staying alive as an absolute baseline. Everything is built on top of it.

I think that my purpose is to feel alive probably which requires passion,dedication,failure/struggle, acceptance and perhaps friendship and love. I recently heard a line which struck with me is that: "Life has so much to offer, why are we stuck at only one emotion of happiness, why not just be alive"

I want to do better and be more competitive for the sake of it because I like doing the thing and improving at it.

Thus, I wish to code for myself, nothing else, except eating french fries of course :)


👤 mirmor23
I care about arch, design more than ever before as it is a lot easier now.

During the dark days of human slop, the progress was hindered by so many factors -- layers of abstractions, answers hidden behind thin documentation, self-important experts gatekeeping the knowledge, forums doling out rtfm attitude.

Now, it's just a matter of pointing a pack of llm in that direction, and with inquiry based learning, suddenly you are back in control. Heck, to get setup with eval boards and toolchain, it would've cost thousands of dollars 20 years ago.

LLM has allowed me to spend more time on hobbies, at the same time make new tech domain lot more approachable.

Being frugal really helps too - my job might disappear any time.


👤 malaiqa
i used to and still care about science and tech, im not much of an arts person but have a very strong opinion that narrow AI cant ever replace human creativity

it can be an enhancer/augmenter though, so almost all the work that used to be meaningful should still be the same

about the world, i mean all the hype is powered by giants and they are the ones who feed on it so public narrative is polluted for their personal gains apart from a niche group of people.