[steamrolled]

More generally, prior to LLMs, you were competing with 8 billion people alive (plus all of our notable dead). Any novel you could write probably had some precedent. Any personal story you could tell probably happened to someone else too. Any skill you wanted to develop, there probably was another person more capable of doing the same.

It was never a useful metric to begin with. If your life goal is to be #1 on the planet, the odds are not in your favor. And if you get there, it's almost certainly going to be unfulfilling. Who is the #1 Java programmer in the world? The #1 topologist? Do they get a lot of recognition and love?

[harrison_clarke]

a fun thing about having a high-dimensional fitness function is that it's pretty easy to not be strictly worse than anyone

[bconsta]

pareto adequate

[musicale]

> Who is the #1 Java programmer in the world?

James Gosling, of course[1]. Next question...

> The #1 topologist?

I'm not a mathematician, but... maybe Akshay Venkatesh, who won the Fields Medal in 2018?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44005008