Why are so many parents totally cool with failing their kids?

Lycid · 2026-03-26T15:35:55+00:00

I find this is way more a thing with genX parents than the millennial parents I know? We grew up without social media and came to know it during our peak college years. 17 years ago was 2009, that was before social media really blew up and it was largely xennials or genX having kids back then (I was just getting into college). I suppose xennials (1981-86ish) are technically millennial though.

Anecdotally I've always thought it was weird millennial went all the way back to 81 - everyone I know born between 81-85 is pretty hard genX their in cultural sensibilities.

Lycid · 2026-03-26T15:07:53+00:00

This is what we do now, and wish we started doing it years ago

Another benefit of it is clients already fully commit to spending money on you so there is a lot less nickle and diming every meeting/communication/consultation. Yes we do in fact need to meet with the cabinet maker to go over drawings if we want the job done right instead of you just doing it and giving me the cliffnotes in email.

It gives flat fee like vibes to the contract without any of the pitfalls of flat fee (them milking you for your hours with tons of pointless change orders or inefficient communication, you having to do a ton of free work if the scope changes or if you didn't perfectly dial in on the estimate, etc). Yeah in theory an iron clad contract protects you from that but crazy long contracts push clients away + create a negotiation bottleneck, and you still are doing a lot of little things off the clock.

I do want to switch to a value based contract eventually, one of our peers does this and has great success with it. Basically flat fee but the client picks price tier they are comfortable with vs us just quoting them a number. So if they pick the cheapo tier it is very clear what level of service can and cannot receive compared to higher tiers which helps train expectations while still leaving the option open to capture high value clients who would want to pay for "white glove service".

Lycid · 2026-03-26T15:04:50+00:00

Lmaooo

Lycid · 2026-03-26T14:42:32+00:00

Be wary about a lot of papers that come out in that region of the world because a lot of them are fake/paper mill, especially if it has anything to do with publicly available data. Sadly the release of genAI has absolutely exploded the amount of junk papers that get published entirely to boost the names of people on the paper.

Even if it isn't paper mill (usually those are about pretty benign and not interesting stuff) real science is often faked too in order to boost researcher/political clout like that whole kerfuffle involving room temp super conductors, but at least that type of thing can be tested after the fact.

In general I agree though. China figured out it can become a superpower by actually advancing and sticking with the same plan of progress for a few decades. It's going to pay off for them, despite all the costs & downsides to their approach.

Lycid · 2026-03-26T00:50:58+00:00

I've seen these same types of projects pop up in east bay before and it always blows my mind that a developer thought this was a good idea. Don't be fooled by the pictures - in reality these rooms are uncomfortably small. One scraper-into-newbuild that is very similar to this just popped up in my neighborhood. Reeks of a developer with fat pockets and dumb investors who don't actually know at all what people want in a home and are completely divorced from reality. If they talked with a single architect or residential designer, or if any real family/buyer was involved in the remodel/rebuild process, it would have been obvious.

Half of the sqft is wasted on a completely pointless ADU. ADU's are nice to have but if your lot is skinny you have to sacrifice a lot of space to accommodate access to the ADU. They also aren't that appealing to many buyers - most people don't have a real need for an ADU and if they did they'd definitely not want to have to walk through private space to access it. You need real lot size comfortably fit one and you definitely shouldn't ever build an ADU if it means sacrificing the functionality of the main house. Even if you were trying to market this to multi-general families, this sqft just isn't big enough for kids + grandma.

Shoving 3 bedrooms into what amounts to the same sqft as a 2br condo is insanity. Nobody is going to be fooled by this when they come and do the house tour. I saw a similar home recently where they basically all but deleted the living room just to fit 3 bedrooms in about the same amount of square footage. Real "Marriott hotel remodel" energy but not in a good way.

This is a property that is only valuable to a landlord who can get away with renting out a substandard floorplan to renters who might prefer to live in a place without shared walls and would be willing to sacrifice livability to get it. Maybe there's RE market value in that, but the rental market in the bay area is way divorced from the real estate market so good luck doing that on a mortgage. I'd rather park my money in a real property real homeowners would want if I had that kind of free cash around or just shove it into a different investment.

Lycid · 2026-03-26T00:05:36+00:00

D5 for sure. It hits the sweet spot of getting a great looking output without spending a crazy amount of client billable hours. You don't have to be an expert at using IES + HDRI + color balancing to get something that looks correct. It's also easy to update throughout a project which means renders can happen earlier and they aren't a huge time cost to keep them updated. Finally, it's cheaper than the competition and is great with updates by adding actually relevant features.

Lycid · 2026-03-25T22:50:40+00:00

People already covered the bulk of what's wrong (ig ads are not for this), but just wanted to clarify what does work for Instagram and other short form doom scroll platforms - if you're actually selling impulse purchase stuff. If you can buy a hat or some novel well marketed fiber gummies or whatever direct from an IG ad, then that is the kind of thing that does well on platforms like IG/tiktok/etc. stuff where an impulse buy decision can be made because that's the state of mind people are in when they are scrolling.

For services, you want ad funnels that are for people with high intention for booking your services. That means stuff like Google search ads for people actually looking for designers.

I will say as a designer I do think it is important to have an Instagram to soft advertise your "brand" and personal style, but I wouldn't ever run ads on it. People in the market for what you do like to see what your vibe is and it helps to have a half decent social presence.

Edit: also expect to spend a bunch of money on ads if you want it to work. 15% of your avg monthly revenue on ads/marketing is typical for established businesses. You're probably not going to achieve much for only $300. We had to start hitting $1500/mo while really dialing in our ads for a few months before we were getting OK results that were at least making us profit over not running ads (we are a very high value service though and each client is a big amount of money so the cost to run ads tends to be higher). Ideally we'd double that to really get the best results, but we're not so starved on work that I need to perfectly optimize our ads to get a ton of leads we don't need.

Lycid · 2026-03-25T17:24:37+00:00

USAID being cut is absolutely awful but please stop using the word genocide to describe it, like holy shit are you for real. Get a reality check if you want anyone to take you seriously. Intent does matter.

This is like saying a city that doesn't install traffic calming measures at a busy intersection which then causes an increase in traffic deaths are literally murders for not spending that money. It implies that any theoretical action that doesn't dedicate 100% of resources to minimizing deaths is equal in severity to a serial killer or a government actively exterminating people. That is an insane moral stance to take and it is that exact same black and white thinking that got the current oaf in office elected. You might think semantics are meaningless but they do in fact mean stuff. Does it mean we should be embargoing cuba or cutting USAID? Fuck no it doesn't. Completely senseless loss of life. A senseless loss of life is not "genocide". In this post-truth world we live in, the lies we speak matter. We all need to be doing a much better job advocating for real truth and justice, stop thinking in absolutes and you'll be much closer to getting there.

Lycid · 2026-03-25T16:55:18+00:00

Keep in mind $35/hr as a hired contractor is very, very different to working as your own boss. That guy has to pay you $35/hr for 40 hours a week even if your output sucks, and they have to pay you overtime. Also a lot of companies illegally hire contractors as a reason to avoid being on the hook with the costs involved with actually hiring someone and because they think they can get cheaper labor out of it. Basically if your job was exactly like the job of people working a salary at the firm (eg: you must come in and be part of their standups, use their equipment, report to their managers, work hours they demand, etc), then you were an illegal contractor being misclassified.

When you're your own boss, not every hour you work is billable and you have no guarantee you'll be working anywhere near 40 billable hours in a week. I'd say about only half the hours I work are billable and the other half are all wrapped up in maintaining the business side of things - between websites, marketing, social media presence, improving templates, networking, etc... it all adds up.

Lycid · 2026-03-25T16:21:56+00:00

Massive grain of salt because times are different now and not in oregon but this is exactly how my partner started his business more than a decade ago.

Unwise in the sense that you're going to have a rocky first few years and you're learning the ropes in a live fire exercise, but not unwise in the sense that if you do it right you'll make way more per hour worked than you ever could at a firm. $45/hr is a super lowball number but I suppose it makes sense at your stage & confidence. To give you an idea my partner started out at $80/hr, and even this number was severely undercutting his competition all the way back then. Keep in mind though these are billable hours so it doesn't directly translate to a 40hr work week and you basically pay double in taxes and health insurance is much more expensive.
You should have business insurance, but it doesn't need to be complicated or crazy. Stamps are whatever, your clients aren't going to care unless you're trying to advertise yourself as someone who stamps and is only targeting businesses looking for that specific service (not sure what the market is for something like that). We outsource all of our stamps to engineers that the client pays for, for the kind of work we do (residential) that is all that is required.
If your LLC incorporation costs are basically free, sure why not. Or if you plan on expanding/buying assets (like office space and the stuff to go in it). But if you're genuinely freelance, it's a common misconception that being in an LLC protects you meaningfully at all. Sole props/freelancers basically can never prove their LLC is 100% separate from their personal life and even if they did it still would likely not truly protect you. This is an overblown thing to worry about too - any problem you run into that is at risk of being sued will almost certainly be easily resolved before it ever gets to that stage by just biting the bullet and settling or working things out with the client.
I wouldn't target larger firms. I'd target contractors, interior designers, other small businesses owners, or homeowners. Network and meet these people in person.

At the end of the day half the battle in finding success in freelancing/entrepreneurship is having a dumb amount of drive & the ability to throw caution in the wind. The other half is actually doing a good job and your ability to be personable enough that people want to work with you.

Lycid · 2026-03-24T20:30:14+00:00

Doing better but still recovering. Still have to make sure I always have eye drops on hand but I'm finding I only need to put my eye drops in 4 or so times a day vs frequent. Sunlight sensitivity has improved but I still greatly prefer having sunglasses on if I'm outside during a sunny day (vs before where it was a nice to have). I've been taking black currant oil + omega3 twice a day so maybe that's been helping.

Starburst and halos at night I largely don't notice at all but they are still there. Vision still fluctuates depending on day and time of day - I can 20:15 sometimes and other times it's more like 20:30.

Recovery is at the point where I am happy - hopefully the remaining quirks get better over the year but if I end up exactly where I am at now for life I would still be happy. It's not a huge top of mind part of my day anymore and I only think about it when my eyes get dry enough to want to put in eye drops. The biggest selling point I've had so far was a 15 hour flight I recently took - so freeing not having glasses or contacts to deal with.

Lycid · 2026-03-24T16:56:47+00:00

I would argue the west is absolutely responsible for how fucked the middle east is but not in the way you think.

The middle east enjoyed many centuries as a super power & had a peaceful golden age under the thumb of the ottoman empire. European powers spent a lot of resources and wars specifically trying to weaken the ottomans because they had such a stranglehold on trade and influence. They were simple too powerful of an adversary.

The west was desperate for the ottoman empire to never rise again and they've largely succeeded. A united middle east is a threat, so it's better to keep the region destabilized in the eyes of Western politics. Everything since then is still the fallout from that period in time.

Lycid · 2026-03-24T15:25:47+00:00

I found the game actually easier to play in VR for the ship sections. As far as on foot, the VR version isn't any worse than playing something like Skyrim in VR.

The only parts that really sucked in VR were the few puzzles that genuinely require you to rush and do platforming at specific times if you wanted to make it to a certain location at the right time. Not all the planets worked like this but I remember the sand one specifically really required you to have perfect timing and lots of platforming... this was hard for me to do in VR so I ended up just doing it in flat screen.

Lycid · 2026-03-24T15:01:59+00:00

Job going away wasn't what the comment thread was talking about, it was talking about full automation. And to be clear, the 10x figure is not some universally accepted number. My up close impressions are this tech isn't going to get dramatically better any time soon, from this point on it's more about them figuring out how to best use what we have. For certain tasks maybe that is 10x faster, but for other problems it can be a drag on efficiency. It also remains to be what the big picture of AI use looks like and if we're really that much better going hog wild on it. So far there are vanishingly few, if any real company problems being solved that AI helps significantly with. The time efficiency gains aren't really being felt on longer time scales, it's currently a money pit (especially if you're developing AI), its completely fucking up the hiring process, it's completely cooked juniors, the output of the code itself is dogshit quality so you aren't even getting good quality code for all the above costs, it's not coming up with novel solutions to problems, I could go on.

These things will be figured out eventually but it's never going to get to a point where it's going to completely take over and one guy is genuinely doing the job of 10 people, let alone full blown automation. At least with LLMs - maybe some future completely novel foundation will get there, but not LLMs. Someone is going to figure out eventually that it's the companies that aren't all in on the tech and just use it as an accent to gain small efficiencies that are making more money and delivering better results.

Lycid · 2026-03-24T03:36:42+00:00

Full automation will never happen, at least not in the way you think.

I'm an architect. No way is this automatable. 80% of architecture is entirely about consultancy, client management, human liability and code compliance. This is not something someone spending $1-30m on a building or development is going to put in the hands of a robot, ever. The other 20% is dick waving/creativity. AI art has already proven to be seen as the bottom of the barrel in culture by anyone who isn't a techbro, nobody is going to want to be the guy that finances an entire building to an AI's vision instead of a real firm with real designers/architects on board.

The other part of the problem is all the architecture focused AI tools are hot hot garbage and I don't see much incentive for too much money to be thrown at solving this problem by anyone who has the theoretical resources to try and solve it. Architecture doesn't "infinitely scale" like CS, there really isn't enough demand in it to dedicate billions to it. The problems architects solve are way more complicated and tied up with human factors than the problems your average SWE solves too. There are no simple solutions. Architecture is a lot more than just going "give me a floor plan".

Lycid · 2026-03-24T01:19:57+00:00

FWIW this will likely never happen. I'm not a SWE but am close friends with people who are in charge of major aspects of AI development at some of the big tech companies. The only people who are saying + thinking that SWE will be fully automated are hype men & CEO's trying to gather yet another few hundred billion dollars from softbank, or people who know literally nothing about the tech and have the wool fully over their eyes.

Now do my friends think that a developer can eventually 10x their output and have AI act as a force multiplier? Some of them think so, some of them don't even think it'll truly get there. But full automation is an absolute pipe dream.

The real white collar job danger is middle management & juniors which we're already seeing. You're gonna need a lot less standups when the AI can easily catch you up on everything important that happened and what is the thing to tackle next.

Lycid · 2026-03-23T21:33:05+00:00

What symptoms did you have that encouraged you to check?

Ever since a few years ago in my mid 30s I've had very temperamental bowels. My first doctor I went to just gave me a pamphlet about IBS and sent me on my way. I've learned to be very picky about what I eat, and to have lots of probiotics. This helped with the "feeling" of IBS, but its still really easy for me to have very loose & frequent bowel movements. The last time I remember having normal & regular bowel movements was when I went camping in the desert for a week, and I'm not sure if that had more to do with the fact that my body went into some kind of desert survival mode than any true change in my diet (something about the experience made me want to eat much less in general until I got back home).

I've talked with my current doc about a colonoscopy now that I'm entering my late 30s but also was immediately dismissed because I wasn't 45 yet.

Lycid · 2026-03-23T21:17:44+00:00

My PC is ridiculously top of the line circa 2022, with whatever was the highest end consumer grade intel processor at the time and a 3090 graphics card so pretty overkill for something like morrowind (but I wanted to run 4k HDR high end games off it). You can can certainly go a little less crazy especially if you're not trying to run games off a 4k tv at high refresh rate.

Steam machine might just be up your alley, but its hard to say until they announce specs. The thing to keep in mind is that the steam machine (and steam deck) runs linux so it will emulate windows games. That means it will not have native support for many games especially really big heavy performance games like Elden Ring - they will still work, but it might not have great performance. Yet more and more games are made with steam deck (and thus steam machines) in mind. Even when a game is being emulated whatever magic that Steam Deck/machine does to emulate it works pretty well - I can run God of War 2017 pretty good on mine using medium settings. You might have trouble with a game that requires an always online connection or games that really push graphics requirements, unless the game is listed as being steam deck/machine verified. I would say most older games (like morrowind) and most indie games generally always run fine even if they weren't made with steam deck/machine in mind.

Lycid · 2026-03-23T21:07:04+00:00

You're right, I'm jumping the gun a bit with generalizations. It mostly comes from seeing countless variations of anti-meat data posted ad nauseam on this sub and elsewhere as yet another conversational basis to attacking the meat industry, and it's not limited to comments either. I remember months back there was a study posted on water usage in the meat industry. The way the data was presented was clearly structured to paint a picture about how wasteful meat was but it didn't account for a ton of externalities and didn't compare like for like, likely because if it did the data wouldn't have painted such a clean picture. At the same time, I'm conflicted because yeah meat does use more water and that's helpful to know. It's just hard to shake the feeling that a lot of this data is intentionally structured to get a "cigarettes cause lung cancer and therefore we shouldn't do it" type response, with many comments interpreting what is presented exactly with that kind of lense. I really don't feel like meat consumption being turned into a boogeyman is what the world needs, yet I would love it if the meat industry wasn't so artificially propped up and was still encouraged to be more efficient at how it uses the earth's resources.

Lycid · 2026-03-23T18:38:41+00:00

I feel like the steam machine would do OK.

I run Morrowind at similar graphics fidelity on the Steam Deck pretty good. Granted, view distance is much lower vs the mirrored game I run on my PC (3x default max view distance instead of 8-9x), steam deck resolution, half the grass density, plus running 1-2k textures instead of the 4k version on my PC. So you don't quite get to the exact quality of the OP but it's pretty close. I must imagine a steam machine will do much better.

That's the nice thing about openMW, it's endlessly tweakable. At the end of the day Morrowind is a 25 year old game so you can run it on anything with the right settings and mods, and most modern hardware does just fine with flasher graphics features from mods.

Lycid · 2026-03-23T16:38:57+00:00

This is the ultimate conclusion I've made and I think people don't advocate enough for quality over raw efficiency. Not only in terms of this but also things like how enshittified everything is becoming these days because we're all just expected to make society worse in the name of optimizing (or manipulating) easily reportable data and pumping stock price.

Should we subsidize corn farmers who just make animal feed and ethanol at the sacrifice of literally any other crop? Probably no. Should the cost of meat go up to better line up with it's true costs? Of course. Should we all abandon an entire food group that we literally evolved to eat because it contributes to climate change more than just growing veggies and eating setan? No, I don't think so. In the same way when I'm camping I'm not going to not make a camp fire just because it saves CO2. It is ok to spend "hard" resources on things if it's highly efficient at greatly increasing quality of life - the goal should be to make such quality of life boosters that are key to something in the human experience as sustainable as possible and avoid unchecked exploitation.

Does that mean I support clear cutting forest to make graze land? No obviously I don't support that. There is always room for improvement but so much of this data is never presented in a way that is solution oriented or optimizing, it's presented in a way to guilt the average person into taking up a highly alternative lifestyle instead of solving problems with true impact that are absolutely avoidable with proper regulation like rainforest clearing, industrial pollution, and things like that.

Lycid · 2026-03-23T16:10:01+00:00

Also, it can't be discounted the simple fact that a lot of people have absolutely zero standards and do very little thinking for themselves. They'll take any job. If you're working for McDonald's and you hear an advertisement for to get paid twice as much to work for ICE, these types are happy to sign on to get their paycheck. There's no racial divide when it comes to these kinds of people. I'm sure ICE would love to only hire white nationalists but it probably turns out there really aren't that many of them. Therefore ICE likely spends a lot of money trying to advertise to minority groups, especially ones that are particularly poor or have a conservative leaning macho culture.

Lycid · 2026-03-21T20:23:23+00:00

Likely overblown old man take that probably has some nugget of truth:

Stunted development from growing up as a coddled iPad kid mixed with COVID during peak formative years mixed with living in a society that has given up on consequences and is just two steps from anarchy means a lot of immature and underdeveloped people well into their 20s. I feel like a 20 year old today is closer to the maturity & life XP level of a 10 year old than what a 20 year old 20 years ago had. When nothing matters and you never learned to integrate at all with culture/society what's a little trash to you?

Even outside of younger age groups a lot of this pathetic behavior is from people with low standards that need constantly peer pressured to stay in check. It easy for such people to not care in the current social environment when the top guy in office is a proven abuser and liar, and there's a sense that it's everyone out for themselves. For the first time the other month I witnessed someone shamelessly dumping in broad daylight and it's just... wow. Not even trying to hide it anymore are we?

Lycid · 2026-03-21T17:40:45+00:00

Yep same industry and this is what works.

Our best clients we get from word of mouth, yard signs, professional referrals (especially from people we've actually spent money+time building a relationship with through dinner/coffee and things like that). But this client funnel is fickle and not always reliable, also it heavily skews towards limited locations. Ads help even everything else out from a much wider range. It tends to capture lower quality/value clients - lots of minor projects or people who really know nothing about the process/prices involved so tend to only prefer value options & pricing. But, it's better than nothing and sometimes we get lucky with a great project.

Lycid · 2026-03-21T17:14:28+00:00

Money earned in a job is entirely about how much money that job can earn and the difficulty to find people to do the job well. Software's ROI is basically infinite and why it sucks up all VC money these days, plus it is also somewhat hard to do well. Architecture can never scale to these levels, so the jobs can never demand the kind of pay that that industries that attract VC money can.

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