I've just read that section of War and Peace and was blown away by the descriptions of guerrilla tactics as well as Tolstoy's way of capturing the state of mind of the Russian POWs and their ever-shifting relationships with their captors.
As an aside, the word Guerrilla (little war) was coined during Napoleon's occupation of Spain to describe the resistance effort by locals and peasants against the French army.
This comment actually triggered something in me and I wanted to write a dismissive and condescending response but in the spirit of HN I’d like to try a different approach.
I’ve honestly never been able to understand this kind of thinking (uniformly ruling children as a negative because of the downsides), but I’d be curious to understand more about your perspective.
How do you weigh the joy and meaning many people find in having a family against the economic and time freedom costs?
Or the fact that societies do need to continue having children in order to: sustain economic growth, service their elderly population (that will be us in a few years to decades), maintain their armed forces, perpetuate their culture and values into the future, invest in scientific research, etc.
Are these not things you value? Or do you just see the tradeoff as not worth it?
> How do you weigh the joy and meaning many people find in having a family against the economic and time freedom costs?
That's a very presumptuous question.
I don't know if the original commenter has kids or a family, but I can assure you that not everyone finds as much joy in it as you may. You can easily end up with a kid that just hates your guts, and is problematic in many other ways to boot.
It’s not that these aren’t valuable. It’s that you can also see the enormous damage done to children and the suffering that you put them through as parents. Life is a grueling, often thankless and cruel situation. It has no real explanation and we toss more and more people into the meat grinder every year.
I see very little love from parents, but I generally see an enormous amount of selfishness. True betrayal, overt and subtle abuse, and kids seem more to push through that to really thrive… occasionally.
This idea that someone has never felt to love this powerful before? Incredibly selfish. It feels almost disgusting to write about let alone really think about. Who the hell are these people saying these things? Do they even hear themselves?
Every metric and every explanation I ever hear or read about when it comes to kids seems… ultimately selfish. The future for civilization looks awfully bleak, and bringing children to this world? Now?! Their future is a dodgy proposition at best.
Having children consistently seems to be for people with little creativity, little prospect in their lives, and very little thought or consideration for a wide and colorful world which could actually use some help instead of holding up in a house for 20 years.
Society uses our biology against us. It uses it to create enormous anxiety, depression, and poverty through having children. I wish to live the second half of my life in a meaningful way rather than shackling some unsuspecting little-me to the insane whims of hyper consumerist and capitalist culture designed only to extract everything from them and create as much anxiety and hurt as possible, that it might produce as much from them as possible.
For someone to not see that this is what most societies have become? The height of blindness; i’m not sure I’ve ever seen a parent in America who didn’t have their kids as part of this culture of spectacle , of blindly shambling without critical thinking. It’s as if most people want to collect all the check boxes in life, like little Pokémon, little experiences that they simply must have and show off to people to fluff their ego.
Sure, the process produces all kinds of crazy chemicals but so do hallucinogenic drugs. They’re basically both the same thing, but one of them really makes people unhealthy, intense, and emotionally unbalanced while the other just makes them see weird stuff that isn’t there.
The more you look at it, just the less it makes sense. All the uncritical, thoughtless people that I’ve ever met in my life are the ones having kids, while all the people I’ve respected, who are generally considerate, intelligent, kind, intentional, mindful, and honestly quite accomplished and as helpful as possible toward their fellow people? None of them have kids. Not a single one. Not my entire life. Well one. One, and it’s such a bad experience, and is so painful and difficult for he, his wife, and the child that he says he would never wish it on his worst enemy, despite absolutely loving his child and doing his best to demonstrate that every day.
Wise words. But you must remember that society is a self-perpetuating system, that grows to consume all, like cancer, and for "it" (society) to exist, children must be produced to fuel its growth. Politicians, the sole benefactors of the modern society, therefore scream about children to fuel the machine.
Of course there are kind and loving parents, but you are right in that many (most?) just follow their biological program on autopilot, never thinking about the consequences.
But I do think, at some level, the species is starting to realize how unsustainable this is, and we see this in dropping fertility and child birth levels.
These levels I think, will only start to increase again, once society has adapted to man, instead of like today, when authoritarian politicians try to adapt man, pushing him like a cog wheel into the machinery of the state. Man is now tired, and refuses, and as a result, more and more people just stop procreating, which I see as a sign of health.
I believe this applies to a large segment of the population. Diction, tonality, and "vibe" have a big effect on how open recipients are to cold calls, at least according to my SDR friends.
OP likely just has more self-awareness than most in being able to be honest about it.
Personally I'm just not open to cold calls, period, ever. Not ever
I don't actually understand why anyone would be. Please don't waste my time trying to sell to me. If I'm in the market for your service, I'll let you know
The problem with cold calls is that you expect random people to stop what they are doing and listen to an advertisement; often for something they don't want or need.
Whatever you interrupted is far more important to them than whatever you're selling; especially if you haven't introduced enough filters in your process to ensure you're calling the right people.
We should either ban cold calling completely or introduce enough friction to the process that cold callers are incentivized to more closely filter who they call. (IE, I get cold calls trying to sell solar panels. The caller knows my address, and can see the solar panels on my roof on satellite photos. They just shouldn't bother calling me.)
It's because there's an imbalance of cost: It's cheaper to just nag me than to actually research if I've already bought the product or are interested in the product.
https://mit6875.github.io/ - MIT's Foundations of Cryptography is publicly available with full lectures, lecture note pdfs, and 5 problem sets. It's very rigorous and proof-driven which can be hard at times, but the professor's enthusiasm for the subject is infectious and makes the lectures a pleasure to watch.
"Hey sorry, I've got some things on my mind right now and can't really talk. Have a nice day though".
That takes less than 10 seconds to say, let's you protect your time and peace of mind, and as a bonus there's no need for fuming, blaming, and judging that the other person won't ever even know about.
The people likely to talk to strangers unprompted are also likely to ignore those kind of messages. Anything that can lead to further conversation can be used (like "oh, what's worrying you?") so actually politely nodding and smiling without giving any footing to further conversation works better than being assertive.
I don’t think it’s false, much less obviously false. On one hand I have my personal experience about it, on the other you can see there’s only a small range in the “I want a conversation” scale where they want it enough to ignore the nonverbal signs that the person doesn’t want to talk but not enough to ignore the verbal ones.
This is 100% completely on you, then. If you don't inform people you're being interrupted or that what they are doing is bothering you, they have no data to telling them to stop, and any energy you spend on silently judging them or being frustrated is only harming yourself.
No, it's on you. You can stop before you even begin by simply not interrupt and bother people for no reason. You're creating a problem and then blame me for not stopping it.
You realize _anytime_ someone needs to talk to you would qualify as interrupting and bothering someone else? Your expectation is unreasonable. Good luck with that.
I'd highly suggest joining a Brazilian jiu jitsu gym. They tend to be filled with other computer nerds (although not only) and people are very friendly in a genuine way.
BJJ is very social because you can't train alone. It also mostly weeds out assholes because no one wants to train with jerks (usually there's a single gym in an area that ends up with all the jerks lol). The other thing that quickly forms relationships is that you're trusting other people not to hurt you and vice versa. Giving and receiving this trust tends to cause relationships to build quickly.
And yes, many gyms are filled with nerds. Once you get past the basics, it's very much a thinking sport.
One of my major goals for 2026 was zero LLM use for writing, however I've found it a bit hard at times because LLMs are exceptional for research. Oftentimes I find that in reading an explanation or report that ChatGPT gives me about a topic there will be small turns of phrase or even whole sentences that capture a concept way better than I can. I then feel obstinate not using a clearly superior option, so I'm curious if you've run into that tension and if so how you navigate it.
Honestly I don't have an idea. I guess the stuff I write about I know enough to get a good first draft out, preserving my voice. But if I read a first draft by an AI I think I would be influenced.
If its in a playbook, its already ineffective. Use your own creativity to do something that isnt scalable or in any best how-to guides or books is a good start
This nitwit brought EVs to the mass market! And build a re-usable spaceflight platform that even the most powerful nation states can't rival! And helped found the world's leading AI lab!
As an aside, the word Guerrilla (little war) was coined during Napoleon's occupation of Spain to describe the resistance effort by locals and peasants against the French army.