You'd get rapidly diminishing to zero returns after the cost of university a few times over. Every dollar past that would produce no performance gain beyond that.
Focus on your kids, your health, and your work? It seems like a very tall order.
You've studied many notable builders, but have you studied the great dads? How much time does one have to spend to be a great dad? Do they get to pick the times when they can spend their focus on being dad, or do they have to be present at times they'd rather be doing other things? I think being a great dad might involve a lot of taking your children to sports practice, music lessons, play dates, libraries, and tons of other activities until you discover what clicks with them, and then there's many years of supporting those interests. I don't think you can just put it on pause during the week. To be a great and present dad, I think you can only count on being able to spend maybe 55 to 60 hours a week on work (with a lot of that being after bedtime and/or starting very early).
Looking at the great builders, I think the common element is that they picked the right thing to work on at the right time, in the right place, executed better than their peers, and also had a ton of luck.
* Zuckerberg was in the right place at the right time with ample luck and he chose to drop out of Harvard to spend a few years doing the hardcore startup house thing working exclusively on building Facebook, and nine years later he had his first kid. Right place, right time, strong execution, and much luck.
* Bill Gates was in the right place (a high school where he got extensive access to a mainframe computer, then in a local company that gave him and his friends unlimited computing time in exchange for them finding and fixing bugs) at the right time (when mainframe computers were an extremely rare and expensive thing and before operating systems existed) and he dropped out of Harvard to go all in on building Microsoft, then 21 years later he had his first kid. Right place, right time, right skills, great execution, and much luck.
* Paul Graham was in the right place (a Harvard CS Ph.D. who studied design at RISD living in NYC) at the right time (during the Internet 1.0 boom and before both the bust and before anyone else had brought a site building cloud application SAAS offering to the market), and he brought a great idea to market in time to sell it to Yahoo in 1998 for $49M of stock and he correctly elected to cash out his stock before the bubble burst in March 2000. And then he leveraged his great technical and business faculties to identify and develop great business ideas via YCombinator (2005-present). Then he had his first kid in 2009). Right place, right time, right skills, great execution of a novel great idea, and much luck.
* John Carmack is probably the platonic ideal of focusing and getting things done. His work ethic and habits are legendary (8 hours of sleep a night, 10 hours of focused work a day, and 60 hours of work a week) as is his output (Doom, Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake). In 1978 he discovered video games and in 1982 (at age 12), his family bought an Apple II computer and he quickly learned BASIC to start making games before digging deeper to learn assembly code. He gained deep and extensive knowledge of how computers work, motivated by his drive to make games, and this enabled him to make the limited PC hardware of the time do things comparable to purpose-built arcade machines. He came up at the right time, had sufficient interest, drive, and vision that motivated him to deeply explore and master computing as well as design and develop many iconic games of the 1990s. Then in 2004 he had his first kid, at which point he started working less, although still a 50+ hour per week workload. Luckily his children are interested in programming, which makes it easier for him to get quality time in. Still, right time, great skills, great ideas, much luck.
* etc.
Having a child already, you might be a bit constrained. But if you can manage getting into the right place to seize upon a great and novel idea that you are uniquely positioned to execute on, you might be able to build the idea out while the market and need is unserved.
Another potential strategy is to work on an established business model that someone else came up with, and spend your evenings and weekends with your children. The best dad I knew growing up did this (he was/is a database administrator and was the dad of three of my friends I knew through my boy scout troop who have all grown up to do incredible things and also be deeply happy people) and is still one of the coolest, most interesting and well-rounded people I've ever met.
As I've aged and grown as a data engineer/scientist, unsurprisingly, it has become much rarer that I encounter something new that seems like magic (ie is something with functionality that expands my understanding of what is possible), but through new hobbies or explorations into new fields, I continually discover new and exciting uses of technology that adds neat functionality to my life.
For example, maybe a year or two ago, my wife started getting into bird watching, which introduced me to the Merlin Bird Id app [0], which (using my location, the date, and audio from my phone's mic) identifies the birds around me on walks. I can walk around and get mostly accurate identifications that help me better understand a complex and rich facet of the world that I had mostly ignored before! Super cool!
Another tech thing I recently learned a lot about that got me excited: I was playing around with a personal project to produce safer bike routes and I finally dug into OpenStreetMap [1, 2]. I had been aware of OSM for a long while, but taking this project on led me to look for a source for freely available route segment data that I could collect and use to build upon, and I found OSM was perfect for this. Digging into the source, I discovered it's essentially a Wikipedia-esque project (a triumph of the human species) where anyone can contribute edits to maps and they're immediately published worldwide! I was and remain very excited about this project.
When I just stay in my technical lane, I get desensitized to the cool stuff people are doing (which becomes hard to find in our ecosystems that have sold our attention to the highest bidders), but when I go out looking, people are still doing exciting stuff.
If they were only copying, for example, New York Times articles and many publishers to a disk, I don't think NYT and the publishers would have sued OpenAI. But OpenAI isn't just copying things to disk. NYT reported ChatGPT (before Dec 2023, [0]) was returning near verbatim sections of NYT articles.
Is this stealing? Is it depriving NYT or publishers/writers from money via lost sales/subs? I don't know, but it certainly could be.
Have you ever wanted to try flying a plane or running a city or being a tycoon of roller coasters without having to invest much time, money, and energy to take flight lessons, run for political office, or work your way up through an amusement park company? Sim games let you play with these complex systems easily and walk away when you get bored.
I get the impression he's not saying all sim games, but "drive the vehicle" sims in general. I have to agree. There's just nothing engaging about it imo.
I have often said that for many people that want to change the world (for the greater negative), they need to get addicted to Sim games. They will end up doing a lot less harm in that situation.
The real question is, how do you determine who is going to do negative or positive gains. A debate that is millennia old.
I don't know. If they were training on this, I feel like they would be able to get the shape of a bike frame right; it's a pretty simple polygon, and a lot of the bike frames that are getting generated would be impossible to steer.
Looking at the FAQ for the data source [0], specifically this part
> What methodology is used to calculate Statcounter Global Stats?
> Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1 million sites globally. These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device.
I assume they infer the OS and stuff from the User Agent and other stuff in the headers of requests. And I assume scrapers collecting data for AI systems don't include the standard User Agent stuff Statcounter classified when they made their data collection tooling. So my guess would be non-browser-automation style scrapers that are getting around defenses and have header data Statcounter doesn't know how to classify to an OS.
Being bombed to hell and then split in half and starved of resources until 1989 really hindered Berlin's economic development. It's not the powerhouse one might expect given its cultural output and being a nation's Capitol.
You can edit OSM from its main site [0], although there's a much steeper learning curve when using the site (as you have far more freedom and it's not super easy to figure out the standard way to tag some situations).
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