m_fayer

There’s something phenomenally powerful, uncanny, and potentially deeply corrosive about current AI. Dismissing it as “evil” is pat, and prevents any full encounter with something that now irrevocably exists and deserves and demands the consideration of thinking people.

Hit the nail on the head. These bureaucratic obstacles are also a manifestation of a culture. A culture that will, in a subconscious and subtle manner, sneer bristle and balk at you, who dared to start a company. What’s wrong with you and who do you think you are, comes the message. Why isn’t what we all do good enough for you, comes the demand.

Fandom-as-identity was a niche thing even within nerddom until quite recently.

Also a lot of those properties had a lot of substance there decades ago and have since been watered down and turned into memeable cliches.

Not necessarily no - but sustainably doing good work while shoulder-to-shoulder with human frailty and confounding diversity does raise the chances.

Nerd-dom has also somehow merged with the world of fantasy and fandom. These are subcultures obsessed with hero journeys, morality tales, escapism, and cartoonish black-and-white ethical systems. I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.

We need a whole new generation of fertility medicine aimed not just at conception but the rest of it as well.

That or go "one and done" after having enough fun with:

- Stress on the relationship of trying and failing for a long time - Stress of fertility treatments, if needed - Likelihood of dealing with inevitable miscarriages on the way to a birth - Overall "medicalization" of pregnancy in middle age, and the stress of all that contact with the medical system

We've gotten smarter, to our detriment.

I have a different pet explanation from the other replies here, and I honestly don't get why it's not talked about more.

Basically, our economic reality and expectations have come into conflict with biology and human lifespan.

If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family, every year that takes a little longer. And these days, almost everyone wants that dignified middle class life before they start a family.

A degree, an advanced degree, a good enough job, sufficient housing, a little fun to boot. Not until 25, 28, 30, 33, 35.

But we're supposed to have children in our early 20s. That's when we're strong and energetic enough, with good backs, and grand parents fit and willing to pitch in.

When we finally feel ready in our mid 30s, we find that time has conspired against us. Our parents are far away and often ailing and demanding care and attention. We have less energy and more stress and dread the lost sleep. We have the wisdom and worldliness to know just how hard this is going to be. And once we've metabolised all those things, that's when we realize that conception is no longer a question of a great night out and a few drinks. How many kids will be born at the end of that gauntlet? We're finding out right now.

Might sound hyperbolic but this is clearly the softly smiling fascist menace of the corporate regime.

A gentle friendly assumption that we are all eager to partake in “euphemism for platform-serfdom”. Our desire to “connect/share/express/etc” is simply taken for granted.

And what if you just don’t want to? We’re sorry, but that’s simply not an option.

I strongly agree. I try to urge coders to document intent, that’s how I put it.

Sometimes the intent is obvious and doesn’t need explanation, you’re implementing the feature.

But if the intent is not obvious - like compensating for some out of band failure, or responding to some not obvious business need, or putting in something temporary that will be fixed later, then the reader needs to know.

It’s frustrating that so few think about the perspective and needs of the reader or reviewer, not just the machine.

I’m pretty sure Claude is German, which complicates things.

One of the reasons I love the Expanse so much is how deftly it wove subtle economic and resource dynamics into the plot, while also integrating so many other themes, genres, and styles.

I agree with your analysis of the cause of Earth's troubles, though I'm not sure that adds up to not much being wrong with it. The Earth in the Expanse never figured out how to deal with "excess humans" and the result was planet-Baltimore, that seems pretty wrong to me. And I don't think it's too soon for us to be taking a hard look at how this is likely to work out on the real Earth.

Agreed it’s a tolerable vision, it could be worse. But it’s also a vision of humanity mostly living in enormous disenfranchised structural underclasses - corporate-authoritarianism in the asteroids and subsistence-UBI for all those unnecessary humans on Earth.

It’s a vision of incredible technological progress without any growth in our ability to justly and humanely govern ourselves or move past violent conflict.

I agree with GP this is our current trajectory. I’d live in that world and hope I’d get lucky, but what a disappointment if that’s all we can manage.

I think an undersung and underquantified factor here is how much less time people have. For reasons psychological and socioeconomic, across class lines, it seems we all have a mental calendar and todo list in our heads now, a tyrant that will always point out that aimless chatter is not appropriate, lest we fall even further behind.

I’m not trying to minimize a tragedy, but maybe this is almost the perfect wake up call?

Not many fatalities but nevertheless a spectacular collision. At a major hub airport in a major city. It’s hard to look away from, the cause is obvious, and all that without hundreds of deaths.

My 5ish years in the mines of Android native back in the day are not years I recall fondly. Never change, Google.

I agree with you, but safeguarding the vulnerable while preserving access for the fit is something we as societies know how to do, if we try.

I think 4o was more than just unusually sycophantic. It “understood people” better and had a kind of writerly creativity.

I used it to help brainstorm and troubleshoot fiction: character motivations, arcs, personality, etc. And it was truly useful for that purpose. 4.5 was also good at this, but none of the other models I’ve tried.

Of course this particular strength is dangerous in the hands of lonely unstable people and I think it’s dangerous to just have something like that openly out there. This really shows that we need a safe way to deploy models with dangerous specializations.

What felt incredible was getting the setup and prompting right and then producing reasonable working code at 50x human speed. And you're right, that doesn't excite after a while.

But I've found my way to what, for me, is a more durable and substantial source of satisfaction, if not excitement, and that is value. Excuse the cliche, but its true.

My life has been filled with little utilities that I've been meaning to put together for years but never found the time. My homelab is full of various little applications that I use, that are backed up and managed properly. My home automation does more than it ever did, and my cabin in the countryside is monitored and adaptive to conditions to a whole new degree of sophistication. I have scripts and workflows to deal with a fairly significant administrative load - filing and accounting is largely automated, and I have a decent approximation of an always up-to-date accountant and lawyer on hand. Paper letters and PDFs are processed like its nothing.

Does all the code that was written at machine-speed to achieve these things thrill me? No, that's the new normal. Is the fact that I'm clawing back time, making my Earthly affairs orderly in a whole new way, and breathing software-life into my surroundings without any cloud or big-tech encroachment thrilling? Yes, sometimes - but more importantly it's satisfying and calming.

As far as using my brain - I devote as much of my cognitive energy to these things as I ever have, but now with far more to show for it. As the agents work for me, I try to learn and validate everything they do, and I'm the one stitching it all into a big cohesive picture. Like directing a film. And this is a new feeling.

(White) Americans of the center and left have long since lost the conviction that you may just need to bleed for your children’s freedom. It’ll come back, hopefully not too late.

This is awful in many ways. Among other things what really gets my goat is that Xbox something or other ads can have cartoony sexuality, violence, and so on. Those things don’t bother me, but there are plenty of elderly, conservative, religious, etc. people who would be taken aback by it.

There’s plenty of that content in our media, but those people don’t consume that media. A computer is a critical general purpose tool. Everyone needs it. This is like putting scantily clad elves on every refrigerator.

I live in Berlin but grew up in the US. Yep, Germany has much more train coverage than where I'm from originally. And that's great. But to understand the complaints you really have to spend some years living with the uncertainty created by the DB.

It depends which route you take, but for a wide swath of the German population, your chance of an absolutely wretched experience seems to be around 1 in 4. That means that people are constantly weighing the desire for affordable, sustainable, comfortable transport that may go horribly wrong, against the (similarly unpredictable) endemic traffic jams and exhaustion of driving, and often choosing wrong. If you have no car, you're weighing more reliable but slow and uncomfortable and traffic-jam-prone buses, or simply avoiding the travel. Constantly making decisions on penalty of deeply unpleasant consequences without any way to actually reasonably judge your decision is a special form of miserable.

At least in the US, most of the time, there is no decision to make: you drive.

Thanks for your open introspection and wisdom. I learned something from reading it, and wish you well.

Thanks for the thoughtful clarification. I agree that what you’re saying is wisdom many people could use.

I like reframing New Year’s resolutions in a more humane way.

It’s an arbitrary day on the calendar, yes.

I want to grow as a person, in terms of character and ability. My desire to evolve is a product of curiosity and vitality and ethics, not some capitalist mania for MORE.

Putting a random day on the calendar where I tell myself that I’m at an inflection point, that I’ve decided to bend my path, it’s useful. There are religious holidays where you atone, forgive, and so on. Those are also just days on a calendar. But they serve a purpose.

2025 version: write mapping functions by llm.

I use it to indicate my derision, and that I refuse to take this person seriously. That's the point. How the reader reacts is beside the point, to me.

Diminishing names used for delegitimization are not something reddit invented. Calling George W. Bush "dubya", Barack Obama "barry", or Richard Nixon "look it up" are all great examples of a time-honored tradition.

Hope I cleared that up for you.

Your description of Elmo applies to several other billionaires who have somehow avoided quixotic hyper-destructive rampages through American politics. I’m all for wired funny, but not when it comes with this much carnage.

Most people don’t even know what regulatory capture really means. There’s no “brand” to rally around and I don’t know how you’d go about building one.

And without the concept spread through the population, where would you find the grass roots support you’d need for resisting the avalanche of interest-group pushback?

“Draining the swamp” or “revolving door” were sorta in the neighborhood, but still ineffective and counterproductive.