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Tacking onto this I think the more important variable for ease of conversation is the extent to which someone's sense of identity is tied to their political beliefs.

E.g. I'm moderately left but I'll still engage in healthy conversation with right-leaning friends and acquaintances because I like to understand where they're coming from. However I have some friends who I love dearly but know that despite their intelligence and how much I enjoy their company, they've become very tribal in their politics, so I don't bother engaging in political discussions with them beyond basic diplomatic contributions. Or posing questions that offer new perspectives. I still trust them and value their friendship though.

If that's true then why include it at all? From a UX perspective you don't want to throw a bunch of configuration options at the user before they even know what the options mean.

Slightly tangential but The Economist put out a really cool interactive article a year or so back — it explores the relationships between factors like economic development, secularism, social trust, and in essence, levels of tribalism. The findings are a bit more complex than people might expect.

Excerpt: "On the face of it, this shift suggests that people do think differently as they escape from poverty and insecurity... Perhaps. But at the moment, the WVS findings suggest this is not happening without obstacles and detours. If poorer countries were indeed converging with rich ones in terms of values, you would expect that they would be the ones where values are changing fastest, whereas the countries they are catching up with would be more stable. In fact the survey finds the opposite. Countries that are already the most secular and individualistic are changing fastest and becoming even more secular; those that are most traditional and clannish are changing less and sometimes becoming more traditional, not less."

Here it is: https://www.economist.com/interactive/international/2023/08/...

Archived page is less visually engaging without the interactive graphs but the analysis is still worth reading: https://archive.ph/rRx7s

> You're not accurately describing the argument the linked article is making

Page quote: "Benatar's antinatalist philosophy: sentient beings are harmed when they are brought into existence, and it is therefore wrong to procreate."

The absolutism and anthropocentrism inherent in that statement renders his whole argument kind of silly. The existence of life itself is inevitably going to cause harm, regardless of how self-aware that particular life form is. It might be smaller degrees of harm, or more indirect, but harm nonetheless.

Sure we should try to minimize the harm we cause others, within reason, on a case-by-case basis, but if your best solution to that is self-imposed specicide, what is the point of ethics?

(Also the comment about natural selection was a half-joke, not a stance on the argument, but your final sentence seems to agree with me anyway.)

We reason these things not simply to contradict our feelings (though that is often a side effect), but to draw conclusions of how best to improve society and our species as a whole.

If human procreation is immoral simply because it creates suffering for "sentient" beings, then it's this particular line of ethics that needs to go extinct, rather than humanity itself.

"The rules we invented for ourselves say that we shouldn't continue existing" seems like a mindset that natural selection will handle by itself though.

Primarily for reading articles aloud online. I've been trying the latest Siri TTS which is a big improvement (and free), but it's still nowhere near accurate enough for proper nouns or newer terms, which ElevenLabs handles much better.

Any plans to make a Chrome extension variant? Been looking for a high quality and cheap TTS extension for ages (like ElevenLabs Human Reader, except with less absurd pricing)

Yeah, my setup the last couple years has been a 4k projector + blackout curtains + casting movies via Airplay from my laptop. The screen ends up being over 90" horizontally (haven't measured diagonally). Zero ads, and the curtains make it usable even with sun hitting the window.

Late response here that might not be useful to you, but I mostly use Google docs for lyrics (on both my phone and laptop) and tend to rely on bullets for alternative lines.

This is fine for 1-2 alternate versions of a given line, but would get clunky beyond that. I imagine if I wanted to fork a song further than just a few alternate lines, I could insert a 2-column table and continue the song in each column.

It's rudimentary, but if you're worried that making your own software for it is just a form of advanced procrastination, something like Docs might be more manageable than Keep.

I use ChatGPT a lot each day for writing and organizing tasks, and summaries/explanations of articles etc.

When dealing with topics I'm familiar with, I've found the hallucinations have dropped substantially in the last few years from GPT2 to GPT3 to GPT4 to 4o, especially when web search is incorporated.

LLMs perform best in this regard when working with existing text that you've fed them (whether via web search or uploaded text/documents). So if you paste the text of a study to start the conversation, it's a pretty safe bet you'll be fine.

If you don't have web search turned on, I'd still avoid treating the chat as a search engine though, because 4o will still get little details wrong here and there, especially for newer or more niche topics that wouldn't be as well-represented in the training data.

Napping is also associated with dementia, I wonder if that's explained by sleep deprivation? Could be that you don't get as much (if any) deep sleep during shorter naps, compared to a full night's sleep.

Seconding this. My team meets annually for several days, at a conference that gives us plenty of social time together in the evenings.

As you said it's hard to quantify the value, but anecdotally I notice it most in 3 (distinct but somewhat overlapping) areas:

(1) Overall morale - everyone enjoys work more when you have a good relationship with your coworkers, so people are willing to do more than the bare minimum. People approaching burnout feel more enthusiastic about work afterwards. (2) Everyone is more inclined to help each other out with tasks outside of their routine but within their skillset, reducing bottlenecks. (3) Similarly, you develop a better sense of each other's personalities and skillsets in a way that's much more difficult when remote, so communication is more efficient, and collaboration more effective due to that increase in understanding and empathy.

This brings up the broader question: why are AI companies so bad at naming their products?

All the OpenAI model names look like garbled nonsense to the layperson, while Anthropic is a bit of a mixed bag too. I'm not sure what image Claude is supposed to conjure, Sonnet is a nice name if it's packaged as a creative writing tool but less so for developers. Meta AI is at least to the point, though not particularly interesting as far as names go.

Gemini is kind of cool sounding, aiming for the associations of playful/curious of that zodiac sign. And the Gemini models are about as unreliable as astrology is for practical use, so I guess that name makes the most sense.

I agree, I just don't understand this newfound hatred of AI-generated stock photos, when stock photos have always been bland and almost never a value-add for content.

I'm especially confused about this for feature images, because I would expect in most cases any helpful image (like a graph or diagram) would make for a really unattractive or incomprehensible thumbnail, and thumbnails are where featured images get the most exposure (social media previews etc).

Irrelevant images definitely cheapen the perceived quality of an article, but let's not conflate "AI image" with "irrelevant image."

AI images are often at least as relevant as a stock photo, if not more so (assuming the creator spent the extra 30 seconds to make a prompt that's more tailored to the content)