I’ve just finished. 125454 letters in 2600 lines of code, now I just have to get this project off the ground.. yeah maybe later. It’s not exactly exciting telling people about your weekend programming, even if it was with awesome rainy weather and even if you did get.. like a third of the size of your last 4-month project done in 4 days. People like telling stories about sports and stuff because they think its exciting. It gets to a point where it’s actually more exciting telling the story than experiencing it. See, why is this? It’s because, one day, an idiot saw how much trouble people had coming up with interesting stories and decided to fix it. He wanted to make it convenient. Then there’s reality TV where you can watch other people having fun. Then, you can even tell your friends about those TV people having fun and it’s completely normal because convenience has become so integrated in society. It’s not even shameful anymore. People are rewarded for making things more convenient. Rewarded is an understatement. Convenience is the goal of science, engineering and just about everything, which is inherently contradictory because if all professions are geared to the ultimate goal of perfect convenience, what’s left after that? Maybe it’s unattainable and, as time goes on, technologies that make life more convenient are harder and harder to invent. What was super-genius-pro a thousand years ago is common knowledge now, but that argument goes nowhere. Perfect convenience probably isn’t attainable because it sounds unreasonable. Even so, our baseline for convenience from the standard-of-living POV has rapidly increased as things become more convenient. For example, even the homeless today don’t have to walk miles and hunt for food in the forest. If convenience is steadily increasing and science is steadily increasing, then it’s all fine right? Science fuels progress and society relates progress with increased convenience. But then, why are there books and organizations and cults and stuff that are completely against increased convenience? Like the whole Brave New World thing where physical effort and difficulty are great. Looking at the general trend, the average worked a hundred years from now wont be doing construction. He won’t even have an office job managing the corporate database. He’ll be well-educated (for our standards, he’s average for 100-years-in-the-future standards) and he’ll be doing jobs that, in our POV, require a high level of cognitive ability. He’ll be doing computer programming (very likely), product engineering, or some future form of non-BS government position. People are okay with doing jobs that are not below their ability threshold. This concept is especially hard to explain: So, I like programming because I believe it’s near the top of my ability threshold, meaning it is the most efficient/productive way for me to produce results (i.e. convenience). Someone in the future wouldn’t be satisfied with just simple programming; they’d want a job that stretches their mental limits for a couple of reasons: First, the general trend of jobs will involve scrawnier-looking guys, more white cubicles and bigger brains. Second, as convenience increases, every job becomes more and more menial as measured on an absolute scale of willingness to work it. These two combined force people to educate themselves better and challenge themselves with increasingly difficult problems in order to stay competitive in society. Human threshold of effort? Nonsense. You might think that people in the future would give up trying to stay on top of the increasingly large pile of intelligently designed technology just like people in the past wouldn’t even think about taking a job involving typing programs in a small room for hours on end. It sounds contradictory, but somehow, human capacity to persevere will increase over time. Now, if you apply this to present day, people are all different in their maximum thresholds for perseverance and work. But inevitably, this must increase. Wanna try harder now? Yeah heh...