alt Hacker NewsWhen I was 17, I wrote poetry and learned how to play guitar. I’m really happy that I did. That’s what I would do now, were I 17. I feel slightly bad for people who didn’t.
Replies
nphardon • today at 9:27 PM
Same. But if I could go back, I would add skating as well. I slept on that one and spent too much time trying to be a hacker.
Sure, but isn't this a bit of a sneer? “I feel slightly bad for people who didn’t” has an air of superiority about it, and seems like a veiled swipe at those who lacked whatever qualities your 17-year-old self had. The guidelines have several different ways of asking us to avoid commenting like this.
As to the substance of your comment, there's nothing stopping a 17-year-old from writing poetry, learning guitar, and also learning about how LLMs work, if they're so inspired. Indeed I'm sure pg would encourage it, and that he did the equivalent of all those things himself when he was young. There's plenty of evidence of that in his essays: he short stories, published a scandalous school newspaper, played soccer, and studied fine art and philosophy. See:
https://www.paulgraham.com/worked.html
https://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html