setsewerd

Throughout school my reading comprehension surpassed most of my peers. For most of my early career I was a writer. Yet I also have ADHD, and one of the ways that manifests is that I really struggle with the dense, bureaucratic language on so many government websites (same with insurance sites). I have to actively force my brain to refocus on the text multiple times per paragraph. I often just find myself skimming and then simply proceeding through a process of trial and error, fixing issues if I missed a caveat somewhere, and otherwise just crossing my fingers on form submission and hoping I did it right.

On the other hand, there's research suggesting that the most optimal behavior for the best outcomes (based on the famously dependable economist style of analysis in a vacuum) is to practice the moral/ethical framework but to also engage in tit for tat - ie, assume everyone means well but respond proportionally when they don't.

They're slowing down token usage, not the path to regulatory capture.

Unless you were in Europe and didn't run a small business

As others commenters said, it's amusing. But also the person you're replying to is the guy who created the pelican test in the first place and I appreciate the whimsy he brings to the discussion.

I was using it on Cowork yesterday, so I would imagine so. It arrived before I updated but the message says it will work better after updating the app.

You see this type of thing daily in Brooklyn NY still, but instead of techno it's any genre, primarily hip hop, reggaeton, or afrobeats.

I was on Pixels since the first generation, and only I recently switched from the Pixel 8 Pro to the OnePlus 15, so I was very late to the game here and missed the peak OnePlus days.

But even so, I've been way happier with the OnePlus than the Pixel. Only thing I miss is the camera quality of the Pixel.

Bummed that I won't have the option next time.

I was already annoyed at the amount of headlines shoehorning the word "quietly" into a story to imply some kind of malicious secrecy (and therefore drive clicks), but it seems to have gotten way more common when people use AI to write titles.

> I wouldn't call Krugman nasty names

> If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.

It may not have been a nasty name but damn that was brutal.

When I lived in India everyone would always tell me how everyone drives so much safer there because they're more aware etc (similar reasoning as we're seeing in this thread), but man, the national crash statistics say otherwise.

Not to mention I lost count of how many dozens of accidents I witnessed in my year there. I've personally been in 3 rickshaw crashes.

I haven't formed an opinion yet, but tangentially, since you hope for the collapse of these orgs, what do you propose we do to incentivize higher quality information sources online?

Wikipedia isn't perfect by any means and I don't read it as often as I used to, but it's still a wealth of information for a huge depth of knowledge, and gets updated regularly by people invested in the topic. So if all these info sources start collapsing when people turn to AI, at a certain point our data sources get stale. And as of right now I don't see what system is replacing that.

Relevant Kendall Roy quote: "Words are just uh, what? Nothing. Complicated airflow."

Yeah, the more data that comes out on the "AI employment disruption" the more it becomes apparent that AI is just an investor-friendly excuse to do the layoffs they were going to do anyway.

I'm not sure if it's more frustrating or just laughably absurd how often I have experiences like this. Like where an LLM chatbot (mostly Gemini) or other AI tool gives me sample prompts to click and test (so they can show their capabilities, give inspiration etc) and it fails right off the bat.

Out of all things you'd think they'd at least invest some time to run some quality control on the demo options lol.

I might be an outlier here in caring about this product but I really want Proton Docs to get optimized better, it takes way too long to load.

Google docs may not be private but it takes <1 second to load when I click the browser bookmark, vs 11 seconds to load a Proton document.

11-second load time for a page is a lot of friction in 2026, no matter how secure your product is.

To your point about automation, I'm increasingly wondering whether the "post-labor economy" would be anywhere near as idealistic as it's typically presented. If people aren't working, they're presumably not paying taxes, and without taxes, there's much less incentive for a government to make choices in the people's best interest.

Or put another way, perhaps there's no representation without taxation.

> "influence is a euphemism for manipulate"

Strongly disagree with this sentiment. Influence can have a lot of sources, from institutional authority to simply being persuasive, which is distinct from manipulation.

In this context influence and persuasion are being used interchangeably, but persuasion is the act of winning someone over to your point of view, so they understand the topic as you do. It respects their autonomy and acknowledges that people can change their mind when presented with different perspectives. Oftentimes, being likeable (or at least respectable) is a prerequisite for getting someone to listen to you in the first place, so it's a central pillar to being influential.

Manipulation on the other hand, doesn't respect someone's autonomy. It might involve deception, threats, coercion, etc, but it ultimately aims to make someone do something that they don't want to do.

If you're getting a little kid to eat his dinner for instance, persuasion might appeal to his motivations (e.g. having more energy to run faster), while manipulation might look like saying not eating would make his mom sad (guilt tripping), or that he wouldn't get to play with his favorite toy (threat).

Reminds me of when Bjork was protesting the construction of a new hydropower plant in Iceland, when the Director of Iceland's National power company (behind the project) was actually her uncle. I used to be romantically involved with someone in his side of the family and noticed Bjork was conspicuously absent from any family gatherings he hosted, of which there were many.

Is this before or after you account for the initial training impact? Because that would need to be factored in for a good faith calculation here, much as the companies would rather we didn't.

That was my initial opinion, but more recently it's been established that there's quite a bit of a cat and mouse game here – people have come up with elaborate workarounds to avoid getting booted or limited by the platform, while the platforms come up with increasingly sophisticated monitoring to catch them before they win too much.

Though to your point I think these big winners are not representative of most users, who in my experience often think they're beating the system but in reality just don't log their losses very well. The house always wins etc etc.

Given the iran situation I think china will be fine.

(I'll show myself out)

It's always fascinating to see how fundamental concepts of Buddhist teachings appear in different names, forms, and metaphors across cultures.

Dependent origination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da?wp...

While some ideas are more obvious than others I always wonder whether the same insights occurred independently (of each other -- excuse the poor choice of words), or if the ideas can all trace their roots back to the same teachings.

Some might say you're a purist in that regard

Side note, would positing an argument online without doing an AI fact check first be considered rawdogging your answer?

It seems fitting.

Fascinating how much this varies by culture too. People generally have attitudes similar to you in Nordic countries, or even Seattle, but then you go to South American countries, or India, and it feels like everyone talks to everyone all the time.

No, no, if it's malware and you ask, it has to tell you. Otherwise that's entrapment.

I've noticed every airport is different, and major airports are usually more likely to have the big fancy looking scanners that help keep the crowd moving along, without taking everything out. Smaller airports seem to have less of that tech and are thus often more of a hassle.

And yet somehow, airport security staff frequently get impatient when people in line ask whether to remove their shoes, laptop, etc. As if the travelers are stupid for asking.

Yeah, I've trekked the Annapurna circuit as well as EBC and was struck by just how much better Annapurna was. And Annapurna isn't exactly unpopular, just way less overrun than EBC and way more scenic

"I'm a regular boss, I'm a cool boss. You can just call me Stan"

Probably not how you meant it but I chuckled.

It already bugs me when ChatGPT describes how it is going to answer before answering, but it's 10x more annoying when I'm asking for a concise response without filler etc.

As an aside, I've noticed the self-description happens even more often when extended thinking mode is being used. My unverified intuition is that it references my custom instructions and memory more than once during the thinking process, as it then seems more primed than usual to mimic vocabulary from any saved text like that.