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.
It's not minimizing, it's galvanizing. 100% A wake up call. I don't fly much but I was bothered by the earlier ATC stories and now I don't feel safe at all.
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.
> 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.
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.
I can only speak for myself of course, but injecting software into all those processes to me seems like a source of stress more than something calming.
The best technology is the one we don't even need to use.
(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.
The thing is, to most white Americans, their childrens' freedom isn't at stake. The majority of white voters have always supported Trump, and probably support ICE, whereas most of the rest simply don't don't consider it their problem.
And unfortunately that probably won't change until ICE kills more of them and makes it their problem.
You are right that America isn’t going to fix this problem until Trump supporters feel the pain. It is coming, but I’m afraid of what we will have to go through to get there.
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.
Probably a Samsung, the company that replaced door handles with a microphone for "open fridge" voice command, and advertises to you based on the contents of your fridge.
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.
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.
Which is all well and good, and if it works for you, I’m genuinely glad. But we know that’s not the case for most people. We know most set an unrealistic goal in the New Year which is never achieved (if it even lasts a month) then feel worse.
I’m suggesting that those who identify should cut themselves some slack and not feel pressured to have something planned to do in the New Year. Do it calmly. Don’t get hyper specific.
For example, instead of saying (in December) “I know nothing about plants, and in 2026 I’ll grow a giant sequoia”, one day during the year you may be walking around, see a book on home gardening with some seeds attached and decide to buy it to finally start to learn about plants.
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