His idea seems to be to detect the approximate timing of a flip or roll with sensors and then strap in and wait for it to happen. I have some serious concerns though lol. I mean if the ball rolled off a cliff on the iceberg and fell into the water I’m pretty sure it would be like trying to survive a crash at terminal velocity, and I doubt the racing chair would handle it.
It's really funny how much better the AI is at writing python and javascript than it is C/C++. For one thing it proves the point that those languages really are just way harder to write. And another thing, it's funny that the AI makes the exact same mistakes a human would in C++. I don't know if it's that the AI was trained on human mistakes, or just that these languages have such strong wells of footguns that even an alien intelligence gets trapped in them.
So in essense I have to disagree with the author's suggestion to vibe code in C instead of Python. I think the python usability features that were made for humans actually help the AI the exact same ways.
There are all kinds of other ways that vibe coding should change one's design though. It's way easier now to roll your own version of some UI or utility library instead of importing one to save time. It's way easier now to drop down into C++ for a critical section and have the AI handle the annoying data marshalling. Things like that are the real unlock in my opinion.
More examples/better models and less footguns. In programming, the fewer (assumed correct) abstractions, the more room for error. Humans learned this awhile ago, which is why your average programmer doesn't remember a lick of ASM, or have to. One of the reasons I don't trust vibe coding lower level languages is that I don't have multiple tools with which to cross check the AI output. Even the best AI models routinely produce code that does not compile, much less account for all side effects. Often, the output outright curtails functionality. It casually makes tradeoffs that a human would not make (usually). In C, AI use is a dangerous proposition.
> I don't know if it's that the AI was trained on human mistakes, or just that these languages have such strong wells of footguns that even an alien intelligence gets trapped in them.
First one. Most of C code you can find out there is either oneliners or shit, there are fewer bigger projects for the LLMs to train on, compared to python and typescript
And once we go to the embedded space, the LLMs are trained on manufacturer written/autogenerated code, which is usually full of inaccuracies (mismatched comments) bugs and bat practices
> It's really funny how much better the AI is at writing python and javascript than it is C/C++. For one thing it proves the point that those languages really are just way harder to write.
I have not found this to be the case. I mean, yeah, they're really good with Python and yeah that's a lot easier, but I had one recently (IIRC it was the pre-release GPT5.1) code me up a simulator for a kind of a microcoded state machine in C++ and it did amazingly well - almost in one-shot. It can single-step through the microcode, examine IOs, allows you to set input values, etc. I was quite impressed. (I had asked it to look at the C code for a compiler that targets this microcoded state machine in addition to some Verilog that implements the machine in order for it to figure out what the simulator should be doing). I didn't have high expectations going in, but was very pleasantly surprised to have a working simulator with single-stepping capabilities within an afternoon all in what seems to be pretty-well written C++.
There are a lot of strong claims that the paper could, but does not make. It never says that Congressional leaders outperform index funds. It just says very specifically that leaders outperform other members of congress. The paper also does not include any clear charts on the actual returns the congressional leaders were getting.
Having done some reading on this myself I don't think it's the case that Congress as a whole outperforms SPY [1]
There are a lot of strong claims that the paper does not make. It never says that leaders outperform index funds. It just says very specifically that leaders outperform other members of congress. The paper also does not include any clear charts on the actual returns the congressional leaders were getting.
Maybe I'm simply too dumb to interpret this paper, but overall I find it unconvincing of anything notable or scandalous.
I'm interested in the specific claim that Congresspeople are trading in ways that beats SPY, and I think it's just not true.
The Unusual Whales piece says that in 2023, Democrats had 31% returns, Republicans 18%, and SPY was 25%. Doing a weighted calculation, I get (31212+18222)/(212+222) = 25% exactly. So that piece provides some strong evidence that in that year, Congress did not outperform the market, despite attempting to imply the opposite.
Your other links are just general speculation on the subject, and in fact link 4 even says "House and Senator stock returns are consistent with random stock picking."
I do think Congress should probably be restricted from options and maybe short-term trading in general. But I get frustrated by all these doomers who think Congress is corrupt and doing insider trading all the time when there's just not any generalized evidence for it.
Has anyone switched to Gemini CLI? It's so important but also exhausting keeping up with which model is the leading edge. Especially since every model has different idiosyncrasies you have to learn to work with it effectively.
Currently my ranking is
* Cursor composer: impressively fast and able but not tuned to be that agentic, so it's better for one-shot code changes than long-running tasks. Fantastic UI.
* Claude Code: Works great if you can set up a verifiable environment, a clear plan and set it loose to build something for an hour
* Grok: Similar to cursor composer but slower and more agentic. Not currently using.
I haven't tried Gemini CLI with Gemini 3 Pro, but pretty much all the others. I usually run four agents at the same time, for each task, giving them the same prompt and then comparing their responses.
Gemini CLI has the lowest rate limits, lowest inability to steer the models (not sure that's a model or tooling thing, but I cannot get any of the Google models to stop outputting code comments constantly and everywhere) and seemingly the API frequently becomes unavailable for some reason.
Claude Code is fast, easy to steer, but the quality really degrades really quickly and randomly, seemingly by time of day. I'm not sure if they're running differently quanitized models during different times, but there is a clear quality difference depending on when in the day I use it, strangely. Haven't found a way of verifying this though, ideas welcome.
Codex CLI is probably what I use the most, with "gpt-5+high", which is kind of slow, a lot slower than Claude Code, but it almost always gets it right on the first try, and seemingly no other model+tool does instruction following as good, even if your AGENTS.md is almost overflowing with rules and requirements, it seems to nail things anyways.
Codex has gotten kind of nerfed with their weird choice to limit loc read to 250 and dropping middle of context a lot. None of the CLIs are performing well for me right now. I'm codex and claude max btw. Disappointing.
For Gemini 3.0, the rate limits are very very generous. Google says rate limits refresh every five hours, and that only “a very small fraction of power users” will ever hit the limits.
Maybe these new releases bring some serious enhancements, but my experience with the Gemini cli has been dreadful. It craps out at least half of the time. When it works it is ridiculously fast so I keep trying it. But it has proven very inferior to the Claude code experience in my usage
Codex with gpt-5-high I trust to get things right without much effort. Claude is the best tool using agent out there. Very good at using the tools to ground whether changes are producing outcomes.
Incredible wisdom here. I can only speculate that the author is right about the later stages since I'm nowhere close to that sort of thing.
Overall this piece reminds me of reading writeups from pickup artists who sort of ascended beyond the game, like they practiced so many social skills that they can see through every situation and lose interest in it all.
I can't really agree. I mean you scroll 1 paragraph down and it says he worked a Google Deepmind, that's really all I'd need to see. I think the market is just super hard for new grads. I've heard from people that had to apply to hundreds of companies and do 20+ interviews to get something.
Totally agree that this guy could write books though.
On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.
It's frustrating for the participants, but typically for these "internship programs for disadvantaged students", future employers will not treat it as equivalent to a regular internship.
That includes the company that runs the internship. In my large tech company experience, usually the entire "internship for disadvantaged students" program led to zero job offers.
Honestly, it might be a good idea to avoid those programs entirely. You often don't get to work on "real problems" while you're there. The program exists for PR much more than to give you useful experience.
That said, I don't have experience with this specific program, so this might not fit the archetype.
That's what it says on paper but that's not reality. If you are asian you are suddenly not disadvantaged even if you are an immigrant. It is just legal racism.
The fact that employers even get to play games like this tells you a lot about our current situation ironically.
"Disadvantaged" is not something that is defined purely by race (atleast in the UK) The key factors that are considered in your university application are all pretty much pure contextual factors IE; income, poor academic performance family history of higher education etc..
If you are of Asian descent in the UK the biggest factors to determine if your going to get into a program like this is not your skin color. Its an evaluation of you and your family's history and providing ascent to people less fortunate.
You say that you can't really agree [about the resume being poorly formatted from having too much text?], but then you agree that there's too much text (if all you need to see is the 1 item of "Google", then you're saying there's firmly too much text, like 95% of the resume is useless).
Also consider that the resume has too much text in a pre-LLM world (e.g. this submitter doesn't structure documents for consumption very well, but I'll still read it). Post-LLMs, using an essay-format would make me suspect that the submitter didn't even write it (taking the time to read it is a big gamble).
Not to detract from the article's palpable despair. I genuinely can't say for certain that "well if they made their resume less verbose they'd definitely get hired", because I suspect there's a good chance they still might not. But it probably wouldn't hurt.
I'm not sure if this is a good approach or not.. but I've started just exploding my resume out, then feeding it to an LLM to create a job-specific version a few times... I'll edit the job-specific version a bit, which does cut things down.
I don't know it's helped or hurt, as I've only gotten a response from about 1:50 that I sent out before or since I made the shift and I know the job market sucks.
I still need to flush out some of the prior jobs in terms of older history, projects and accomplishments. I've done a lot of contract work in 6-12 month segments in the past three decades... It's kind of wild to look back on the shear variety, scale, scope and size of some of the things I've done and worked on.
At this point, I'm not sure if it's luck, ageism or just the number of short stints in my past... but It's a weird feeling in recent job market that I haven't felt in decades. 5 years ago, it felt like I was being overwhelmed when I wasn't even looking... today it's a mess.
Last time I was job hunting I did something similar: Write out everything I've done, even "silly" things like Haskell knowledge from uni, then comment out everything not relevant to a job until my resume fits on 2 pages. My Latex Template made this much quicker than it sounds, maybe ~10 minutes per application (and 10+ hours to create the CV itself...).
Two issues I see that haven't been mentioned yet:
1. A lot of companies, especially startups, are fake job advertising. They want to look like they are growing, and they might hire a golden goose, but many job ads I saw just stay up for months or even years.
2. A lot of companies, especially large ones, are using AI to pre-screen CVs. So you now have to get through AI, then HR, then a technical manager, each with their own sets of requirements. I've played around with some of the HR AIs, they tend to be quite... superficial. To give one example from the CV above:
> Ran small A/B tests and collected human-in-the-loop safety ratings to calibrate thresholds and escalation rules.
Is a perfectly good sentence, but according to AI should be:
> Optimized escalation rules and safety thresholds by conducting A/B test collecting human-in-the-loop safety ratings, reducing false-positive escalations by 15%.
Put your achievement first? Good. Strike out verbs like 'small'? Fair, it is a sales situation. Make up numbers entirely to provide a 'quantifiable result'? Complete crap. But it seems to be what every HR bot really wants to see, so now you have to sprinkle it in and hope it gets you past the bot, and doesn't make the technical manager think you're a complete charlatan.
It's that second one that I'm trying to actually work around by using AI to generate the trimmed down version. I just haven't taken the time to pull open some of the really old versions of my resume to flush out the history and to expand on older projects yet.
The whole process just seems to suck all around. As much as I never liked filtering through a stack of hundreds of resumes as a senior member in a time hiring, being on this side of the wall is even less fun.
I don't see the point of applying for "hundreds of jobs." I think use the time to network with real people and forget about Indeed or whatever because those jobs are mostly fake anyways.
> I think use the time to network with real people
It kinda doesn't work these days. One of the points of DEI was to eliminate the nepotism hiring (and it's kinda good if the hiring wasn't so broken), so these days referrals don't mean shit unless you're referred by someone high-ranked enough.
I've literally seen people being autorejected after being referred by team-leads these days.
I was auto rejected from a publicly traded company through internal referral because I applied to a remote position. My friend told me the recruiter told her that position wasn’t available to SF residents, only engineers in LCOL areas.
My experience is completely the opposite, every quick hire is a referral, jobs constantly ask for and bonus for referrals. The higher up the position the more it matters that you have a warm introduction.
Agree. The big public traded companies might be different but if a business owner thinks you can solve their problem and that will gain them more money than you ask for it is very easy to get hired
Just saying "referrals are worthless" or "referrals are useful" doesn't mean much without specifying the type of referral. Obviously if you're talking directly to a hiring manager who's willing to bypass HR, it's much likelier you'll end up with a job than if you're talking to someone who sees an open position on another team and says he'll flag your resume on their ATS if you apply.
> I've literally seen people being autorejected after being referred by team-leads these days.
Yes. But not always. Getting an internal referral helps somewhere between not at all and a lot. And it is pretty random, nothing to do with you. Just a matter of timing and attention span and where other candidates are in the queue.
However, it never hurts. So overall, don't expect networking and referrals will get you the job, but do expect it to help every now and then. So it is worth spending some time on that.
I haven't found this to be the case as much. Posted a job, got 100 applications, at least 10 had referrals. 10 is manageable for me to sift through but not the win the applicant thought. More than that, I found a colleague had a whole google form process to farm out referrals.
Bonuses. Usually there is no penalty for failed referrals, so the more people they refer, the more likely someone gets hired and sticks around long enough for the bonus.
That's not a scope expansion, a first-order relationship within your family is barely even networking at all. Giving preferential treatment to friends and relatives is an entirely different world from what's being suggested above.
As one of those new grads, I'm frankly not seeing where I could expand my scope to. Most random tech workers, outside the people I know through a past job, wouldn't want to know me, a random person. Everyone always suggests networking and going to events in the vaguest possible ways, but I'm not seeing any results in terms of establishing actual, real, interesting connections through the watered-down LinkedIn version of interaction. I would have to either build something so profoundly interesting that they would come to me first, or get to know someone in the field via some different means (like an unrelated hobby). It feels like there's very little that can actually be done productively. If you already happened to know someone somehow, you have a shot at the golden ticket, otherwise it's pretty bleak.
I think you need to find one of those people collectors. I know one of them, and I could ask him to introduce me to somebody with <insert skill/interest> and he'll know somebody within a hundred miles.
I've made six figure revenue over the course of the past 5 years from introductions to new clients through a "people collector". Definitely a great person to have in your network!
I wonder how hard it is to become such a person. Just start telling people you're looking to be one, and I imagine they'll give you their business card in case you manage to become one and they need you in the future.
I think it's a personality trait. He actually enjoys talking to dozens of people every day. He's friends with pretty much all the professors at the local uni because he turned up to random events as a student, and somehow he met a director level person at my company at the dry cleaners and they have regular catch-ups. he keeps a notebook of small facts about everybody in his network. COVID lockdowns were devastating for him.
In contrast, my Dunbar number is about 5. I need a few days to calm down from meeting new people. I can't imagine putting in the effort that he does in collecting people. COVID lockdown was a welcome break for me.
I hope I eventually manage to stumble into one of these. I honestly didn't know they had matchmakers for the corporate world. Since most of my connections are within my age group, most people I know are in a similar situation to me and also have most of their network feed back inward to other similar people. Finding someone like this seems pretty unlikely.
he's a lot younger than me, and he was doing it as soon as he started uni. I think it's a personality trait, although of course he spent time on improving the skill.
That's an interesting data point. I think covid did a lot of damage too. Kids spending formative years stuck in their room texting just didn't get the chance to build basic social skills and habits.
But it's hard to separate out that effect from just earlier and earlier exposure to modern phones. The class of 2018 was ~10 when the iphone 4 came out. And even that wasn't nearly as addicting as modern phones - it was tiny, and didn't have vertical scrolling video (except for Vine, briefly).
It's so insane that they let things go this far. It could have been immediately obvious to those involved that cell phones in class would have immensely negative effects. I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"??
I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.
I feel like we have had a long history of overreacting to new things. "D&D is the devil", "Rock music is evil", etc. But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back.
I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
> But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back.
This can't be it. I was in high school when smartphones were coming out and there was zero tolerance for them or any other electronic devices (dumbphones, ipods, palm pilots, etc) in the classroom.
I don't know when or why it happened but allowing smartphones in school was a conscious choice and a policy change.
Upper-middle class parents addicted to constant communication with their children started complaining about their kid's not being allowed to carry their phones, nearly at the level of implying it was a human rights violation. They combined this with worries about school shootings (that cellphones haven't ever helped with to my knowledge, unless having live recordings of children being murdered is help.)
After they got it, it was instantly allowed everywhere. It was another result of the "activism" of the same suburban let me speak to your manager class that has been ruining everything for the past 20 years.
edit: A lot of parents are constantly texting back and forth with their kids all day. It's basically their social media, especially if they don't have any friends, and I bet in plenty of cases a huge burden to the children.
Schools are not employers that can implement take it or leave it policies. You need coordination and agreement between school leadership, district leadership, staff, and most critically parents to put your foot down on anything while also working to ensure basic safety and decent academic outcomes.
Now that the ills of social media and screen time are mainstream knowledge, it’s easier to make a common sense argument without much pushback.
I started teaching in the 90s, and left classroom teaching in 2019. This is how I saw it play out in every school I was aware of.
People think "just ban phones". But there are so many factors at play, it has to be a coordinated effort across an entire school. And everyone has to play along. Any policy is only as good as its enforcement, and enforcement is hard.
Pretty simple really, we're basically all [1] addicted to smartphones, so we basically all [1] advocated for this. After all, to admit it was a problem for our kids, we'd have to also admit it could be a problem for ourselves.
Even I find myself holding onto my phone during most of the day when not on my computer, I don't even know why. It's an incredibly addictive piece of technology.
[1] - to a first order of approximation, yes I know you're the exception
What's missing from the initial comparison is the fact that smartphones opened up all sorts of conveniences, which is partly what makes them so addictive. Rock music, D&D, etc, these other things that were crusaded against offered no convenience for all, so a conservative mind saw no value in it and attacked it as something that warps or rots young brains. Smartphones obviously do that and worse, but because they offer all sorts of helpful tools in our daily lives, we let it slide.
When I was in high school in the 90's, the famed Texas Instruments calculators were often banned in some maths classes because, as was said at the time, we were "not going to be walking around with a computer in our pockets all the time," so we needed to learn to do the work. By the time my younger brother passed through the same classes, they were required to have a graphing calculator because it actually helped kids complete the work. And play Dope Wars.
While we do tend to overreact to new tech, ways of thinking, games, music, etc, there's something inherently oily and snakelike about a thing that brings convenience to our lives the way smartphones or cell phones did. They slip in, comfortably at times, settling into our habits and routines while simultaneously altering them. We end up manipulated by it and before we know it, we can't set it down. In the case of smartphones, our data became the commodity, a mere decade or two after we were worried about tracking devices in cars or phone lines being tapped. But the smartphones kept delivering on their promises, which kept us hooked.
As someone who recovering from alcoholism, I struggle to call our love of smartphones an addiction, but if it helps people be aware of the dangers, by all means, use the term. To me, the problem of smartphones is manipulation at the deepest cognitive levels. We started offloading some thinking to them and who could blame us? We had the store of human knowledge in our pockets! We could play a game instead of sitting idle on the train, gamble with online casinos to try and win some extra cash that week, keep up with the Joneses on Facebook or get into a heated debate on Twitter during our lunch break, check banking, stocks and eBay sales, etc. We no longer had to carry a separate device to photograph or record the moment. The list goes on and on. But in the end, it altered our behavior just enough that we allow ourselves to be controlled by it, monitored by it, and bought and sold by it.
My school even had a gazebo on the school yard so smokers didn't have to stand in the rain. They literally spent money to accommodate smokers.
Of course by the time I was there smoking on school grounds was prohibited, so smokers had to go just beyond the gate. Which students were not allowed to, but few teachers were willing to enforce that
In the classroom not, but during my youth in Germany, the smokers had their own smoker's corner with an ashtray until smoking age was raised from 16 to 18 and the smokers had to go out of the schoolyard (i.e. they had to walk 5 meters more, lol).
Parents are insane and demand access to their kids at all times.
My son goes to a private school, and I was on the board of trustees when we basically did the same thing the NYS requires three years ago. The drama and insanity was beyond anything I expected. One parent left me a three minute voicemail excoriating me as being no better than a school shooter - in the event of an emergency her son would die alone, because of me. (I introduced the motion and was called out in the minutes)
It’s great that the state passed a pretty sane law on the matter. Crazy people already think the governor is <insert terrible thing>, and the school boards can just nod, point to Albany and get on with their business.
There is leeway as well, our school (and some others that I know of), allow 7th graders and up to email parents via GMail. So little Tommy can keep folks in the loop about scheduling changes or whatever.
Hey, we must have been in high school at the same time. I saw the same thing going through my final years. But when I went back to visit the school a few years after I left... Things were very different.
I'd say there was definitely a grace period (roughly iPhone -> iPhone 4 maybe?) where device addiction wasn't yet normalised, and the real world hadn't ceded control yet. Not sure what happened at the school level after that, but somewhere along the way phones (devices as they were called then) everywhere all the time became very normal.
They were. I was there in edu conferences, training sessions and other events years ago and could observe all this massive FUD which appeared – "smartphones are the future", "all communication will be in social media in the future", "books will not matter", "privacy will not matter", "if we ban smartphones, we will handicap our children" etc. People didn't know better and there was genuine fear in education. Or actually, it's still very much there.
This is a huge factor, and heavily influenced by the purveyors of the technologies involved. A factor I hadn't realized that is implicated in this transition is the shift from the Teacher-led classroom to the device-led classroom. The teacher is no longer seen as the expert, the interpreter, the model figure of the subject when the laptop or tablet is the delivery tool. Students learn that the teacher is a facilitator, likely not up to date on the latest changes to the app interface, and not an authority on the subject.
Device-delivery instead of teacher-delivery puts the student first, even when the student knows nothing, and has zero impulse control.
So instead of modelling a productive and enriching data accessing environment, we're actually just tearing down the walls of the school and asking teachers to babysit the mayhem.
Well, in the era of school shootings, some parents argued that a phone could be a literal lifeline to their kids and a way to say their last goodbyes if the worst happened. It doesn’t really stand up when you compare the likelihoods of a school shooting (rare) to phone-induced educational and social regressions (almost certain). But it was an evocative argument and it worked to a large degree.
The pandemic induced the major change. Schools were forced to put everything online, and so screens became the default learning environment. What's the difference between them being on a laptop/chromebook/tablet and a phone? Not really that much. Plus parents allowed their kids get phones at a younger age to keep track of them. Now we are trying to claw it back, but the big problem is that the parents are the ones preventing it. They need to be constantly attached to their kids. Our son is 16 and while he loves screens, he also is enjoying kids spending less time on them at school so he can chat with people more.
If you haven't been to a school recently where >99% of kids all direct >99% percent of their attention during breaks I can see where you are coming from. But I was at a highschool with a lax phone policy (allowed in breaks etc), and I was amazed and appalled. A no-phones policy is really important to me, because there seems to be no middle ground possible.
> But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful.
Next let's ban kids from social media.
Or better yet, let's tax social media as a negative externality. Anything with an algorithmic feed, engagement algorithm, commenting/voting/banning, all hooked up to advertising needs to pay to fix the harm it's causing.
They're about as bad as nicotine and lung cancer. They've taken people hostage and turned society against itself.
> I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
Chatbots aren't smart and AR glasses are dorky. They're going to remain niche for quite some time.
iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. You can tell those other two don't have the same spark. I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.
> It’s telling that none of the tech CEOs allow their children to use their wares.
This is way too general a claim to be plausibly true, or verifiable even if somehow it was true. There's a lot of tech CEOs, running companies doing lots of different things in the world of computer technology, with lots of different family situations. They do not all have the same philosophy of how to raise their children, that they have publicly and truthfully talked about. Even if you're just talking about, say, Mark Zuckerberg specifically, who I know has mentioned some things publicly about his approach to raising his relatively-young kids, I don't think he claims that he blanket-disallows his kids from using every Meta product. And if he did, why would he say that publicly? Or maybe he did do that at one point when his kids were younger but then they complained a lot about this parental restriction and eventually he relented without happening to inform the world on a podcast that he's now making a slightly different decision in his private life.
I also don't think that any parent's decision about what kinds of computer technology use to allow or forbid for their children should be primarily based on what tech CEOs do with their own kids (and of course, really, what they heard tech CEOs somewhere without actually being able to verify this unless they happen to be close personal friends of a tech CEO).
> Chatbots [are] going to remain niche for quite some time.
> iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire.
> I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.
The facts say you're wrong about this.
The adoption rate for the iPhone was slow. There were only 1.4 million iPhones sold in its first year,[1] whereas there were 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in its first year.[2]
ChatGPT is not niche, and is not a 'much smaller population'. Right now it has 800 million weekly active users. That's how many iPhones were active in 2017. Are we to say that iPhones were a niche in 2017? It's how many smartphones in general were active at the start of 2012. Are we to say that smartphones were a niche in 2012?
> The adoption rate for the iPhone was slow. There were only 1.4 million iPhones sold in its first year,[1] whereas there were 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in its first year.[2]
The ChatGPT number includes people who paid no money. iPhone adoption was incredibly fast for a paid product
It's my fault for lumping tools like ChatGPT into the bin of "chatbots" that people - mostly kids - are sexting and forming intimate relationships with. In my mind, the latter are "chat" apps.
ChatGPT and Claude have incredible utility, whereas Character.ai-type chatbots are much less certain. I can't fathom trying to spend more than a few minutes talking to them since they have so many shortcomings.
I don't consider ChatGPT a chatbot because my inquiries tend to match my usage of Google Search. It's a search tool.
I'm interested to see where this goes. I don't like how it's likely reducing privacy the internet. But social media is obviously a threat so serious that it might be worth the costs.
I've also been thinking that perhaps social media platforms should start displaying some kind of indicator when a poster is from out of your country. So when foreign troll farms start political posting you can see more clearly they aren't legitimate. I suspect that social media is largely to blame for the insane politics of the world right now.
They didn't have to implement it in a way where everyone has to upload their ID - there are other ways they could have done it. But Australia seems to love being a total surveillance state.
"and most people I know have barely engaged with it beyond a few queries once or twice to try it."
Have you recently spoken with the younger generation still in school?
I doubt you find many there who just "have barely engaged with it". It is just too useful for all the generic school stuff, homework, assignments, etc.
Agree. The conversation behind "adoption" was totally different as well. I was a young Army private when the first iPhone was announced. Before that I remember the iPod touch and other MP3 players beingthe rage in the gym and what not. I distinctly remember in the gym we were talking about the iPhone, my friend had an iPod touch and we took turns holding it up to our faces like a phone, and sort of saying "weird, but yeah, this would work".
Point being, when smart phones came out it there was anticipation of what it might be, sort of like a game console. ChatGPT et al was sort of sudden, and the use case is pretty one dimensional, and for average people, less exciting. It is basically a work-slop emitter, and _most people I know_ seem to agree with that.
Why do we say it was rapid? When I grew up, cellphones (then mostly Nokia-shaped and the cool ones were flip phones) were always banned in school. If they weren't banned recently, then that was a reversal of a previously existing norm.
A big difference with your examples is that basically every adult was already using a smartphone. So adults don't just jump to conclusions that it's evil. It's more like... "Smartphones are useful"
I think it won't automatically settle in a good state. We need to actively work towards it. Phones obviously have many useful and beneficial functions, photography, phone calls, etc. It's the engagement hacking from social media primarily which has broken society.
Sports gambling is astoundingly popular for teen boys. Already the prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading was getting to be too trendy for teenagers, and this shit just supercharges it.
> prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading
Calling day trading “zero sum” seems like a huge stretch. To get the sum to be zero you need to include everyone involved in the market: institutional investors, hedge funds, etc. Somewhere between 87 and 95 percent of day traders lose money.
There's so many of these absurd "investing" trends where financially illiterate people are getting tricked in to buying in to schemes where the only way to win is to be one of the insiders. Or more recently, the Counter Strike skin "investing" where a single change from a company can wipe out all of your investment.
Had you bought actual regulated shares you could sue the company for deliberately crashing the value. But since video game skins are not a real investment. You have no protections at all.
Isn't that actually illegal in most jurisdictions? But the betting companies seem to have effectively bribed legislatures in the past couple of decades.
I think both yours and the GP's points can be simply explained as: it's obvious in hindsight, but not in foresight.
Quite frankly, we (in a collective, general sense) suck at predicting the future. Half will think A, half will think B, and the half that ends up being correct by chance will think they are actually smart rather than lucky.
give me a break. you don't need data to know that a child lacks the self control to not look at their phone when they need to be doing anything else. smartphones are almost 20 years old. There are adults going to university and into the workforce that grew up without knowing a world without smartphones.
Here's a couple of arguments I had to deal with whilst expressing my support for electronics ban at schools including a blanket social media ban:
1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.
> I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought?
Indeed you don't; let me help you out then:
Arguments must be made in good faith; and when you hear anyone saying anything I mentioned above it is immediately obvious that they are not arguing in good faith.
If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed.
If anyone considers the above arguments valid and worthy of discussion, they need to exempt themselves from this discourse.
Those statements as described earlier were made in bad faith:
> 1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
A public school intervenes between the parent and their children to tell the student what is good work and what is not. Parents do not always know best. (Yes, there are policies which let the parent appeal, but the parent does not have final authority.)
Child protective services can take children away from parents who are egregiously poor parents.
I don't see this as a good faith argument.
> 2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
If we believe in educating citizens then we set rules to help educate citizens. There is a long history of prohibiting certain electronics at school. At https://archive.org/details/makingvaluejudgm0000elde/page/38... we can read that over 50 years ago some schools prohibited transistor radios.
If the claim is in good faith then it's also saying that laws and rules forbidding smoking in school must be repealed. I certainly want to keep them in place, so I don't see this as a good faith argument.
> 3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
Which is an argument that if the child wants to play video games all day and is getting Ds or worse in every class, than teachers should like the child continue to make that mistakes. I don't see this as a good faith argument.
Do you really think that people can't come up with such arguments on their own? People aren't very unique, lots of people independently come up with very similar stupid arguments.
You should have to deal with these arguments, as should anyone else who is in a similar position to you advocating for an institution to ban something for other people.
I will not say that some kind of electronic use ban at schools is necessarily bad, but someone proposing such a ban should absolutely have answers at hand to these reasonable counter-arguments.
Forbidding things doesn't work. Not for kids and not for adults. Hence speakeasys and the end of prohibition, or the war on drugs (which was won by drugs).
In pretty much all countries that instituted heavy restrictions on smoking, e.g. banning smoking from restaurants, you can see an accelerated drop in number of smokers the years after that ban regardless of changes in education. This is particularly easy to verify because it has been done in many countries but all at fairly different points in time. Some did it decades ago, some have done it recently, there are still countries where it's allowed.
Forbidding things works very well most of the time. There are exceptions, but as a rule, it works.
Would a parent be allowed to send their kid in with a pack of smokes, and expect their kid can smoke them inside the school?
No?
Because it effects others and brings down the overall ability for the learning environment to succeed. Same deal with phones. If it makes the environment toxic to success, there should probably be some prohibition within those grounds. This isn't banning phones across the board, or banning them for kids. It's banning them within a location, like how firearms are banned inside courthouses.
Forbidding things works. People drank less during prohibition, and they do less drugs than they would were they legalized. Hence there is no serious proposal to legalize most hard drugs
Eh, nuance: forbidding things entirely, which people want to do, and don't really harm others, doesn't work.
Having separate spaces works a lot better. Which is why we have alcohol venue licensing. Forbidding kids from phones entirely, at the same time as adults are on them constantly, isn't going to work. But having a phone-free space like a smoke-free space is more viable.
> I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.
I was trying to relate, and thinking until around 7th grade school lunch was a pretty awful lonely experience. But then remembered 2nd/3rd year of middle school finding the other outcast that somehow came together as our own little group of enterprising odd-balls.
We would buy large packs of gum (we sold for $.10-$.25 a piece), champion-caliber pencils (we tested a bunch playing a lot of pencil-break[0], sold for $.50-$1+), ping-pong balls/paddles (we had raggedy ping-pong tables near the food-court for before/after school and lunch that the cool kids didn't use so eventually other kids would rent/trade-for balls/paddles from us once we started playing) etc.
I think the biggest thing we did was start and run table/paper-football[1] games/tournaments; sometimes offering our perfectly-folded-winning paper-footballs or champion-level pencils or packs of gum, to make it exciting.
First we used the table we sat at for lunch, then noticing how shunned the un-cool ping-pong tables were, we turned them into paper-football fields (the green colour and white border lines made it that much more awesome as a paper-football field). We started playing before/after school and during lunch. We started doing ping-pong games too in one of the 3 time slots -- I think before school but maybe lunch I forget. But, I mean, this was Texas -- football is football -- we started drawing crowds and people were mixing outside their cliques wanting to get in on playing games (note: these were latchkey kid days in the south, the main groups looked like something out of prison movies; but we were a mixed sort of popular-group rejects, male & female)
Anyway, I would have to agree it was an important time for the foundation of my basic social skill set (never thought of it that way before). As much as I value that time and experience -- to be fair -- these kids are figuring it out in a different way for the world they live in. I've chalked up my dislike of watching my siblings kids being perfectly content to not get up from the couch/phone for hours at a time, as me being old.
This looks a lot like my childhood. I would guess most of us were popular-group rejects, latch key kids. Pencil fighting, paper football, exploring nearby creeks, (poorly) playing guitar for one another, gossiping in each other's basements, etc. Great times!
> I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"??
Look, I think that phones and computers don't belong in classrooms, but instead of assuming that the world has gone that mad, you should probably assume that whomever wrote those words has a tenuous relationship with honesty.
A lot of teachers (particularly, but not exclusively, younger teachers) are uncomfortable being strict with students, and especially teenagers. The local High Schools recently banned having phones during class (each room had a pigeon-hole style place for each student to put their phone), but enforcement is poor.
At least some of this is poor support for teacher's enforcement by the administration (I have been told that teachers are not allowed to kick students out of class for having their phones).
How in the world would you keep AI out of schools?
Ok, turn off the internet. And ban the cell phones.
I suppose a district could block the known AI providers, so kids could only use AI at home. I’m very skeptical this would eliminate the negatives.
On the contrary, every administrator I know of is gung-ho about the coming improvements in education driven by AI. (There certainly are SOME, but it comes with minuses.)
This 1000%. When my wife was a teacher she would often comment on what a huge distraction chromebooks and tablets were. Most of the things being learned through high school do not require a computer and do not benefit from them. Added to that, having kids spend 40 hours a week away from screens is a huge bonus.
The actual levers of control available to those in charge in schools are limited, in the end.
The rules that exist are routinely broken and can only be enforced selectively. Many of the rules are unpolicable frankly and are only kept to or only marginally broken as a matter of social norms, and understanding so there is not total choas. An equilbrium is found.
With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned.
It was always going to creep to the current status quo. Again this would have been true even if a rule were ostensibly set.
Society is learning, slowly, that this isn't ideal, and the pendulum seems to be swinging back. It may settle at phones being completely banned in schools, but in practice this will also obviously be moderately chipped away at all the time in various surprising and unsurprising ways. Especially as the hardware itself evolves.
> With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned.
Phones, and electronic devices in general, were always banned. What changed was schools started allowing them.
I was in high school right when some kids first started getting (dumb) cell phones. MP3 players were still new, CD players were not uncommon, and ALL of them were banned from being outside of your locker or backpack. If a teacher saw one, it was gone until the end of the day. Period.
Teachers didn't need to bear the brunt of angry parents, it wasn't their call to make. That belonged to the school administrator, who merely needed to say "tough shit". Somehow, the adult children still won anyway.
They had to know. My middle schooling coincided during wave of beepers (early 90s) and then high school was mobile phones (late 90s) then college in early 2000s (iPods but not iPhones). During all that time, devices were practically unacceptable at school. It was a zero tolerance, teacher would confiscate your device, your parent would have to come to school to get it back. It likely was accompanied by some detention or more punitive measure. College was a more adult approach to same, professor would yell or just tell you to leave the class if your device came out and you appeared distracted at all. If it rang, and everyone was distracted, they’d often be livid.
Then, it seems only a couple years after my schooling was complete, smart phones came out and they just let them exist, everywhere. It has never made sense to me how that shift happened so suddenly but best theories I’ve heard are 1) parents insisting kids be reachable and 2) educators just gave up the fight against it.
But yeah, it’s sad to me to think a whole generation had lost core social experience and socialization of such a pivotal age in life. When I hear stats about how kids/teens don’t; drive, party, date, sex, etc yet are lonely, anxious, depressed, etc I’m always like “no shit”
> I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school
What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson. It’s who is allowed to sit where, and who is outcast from a table. It’s the shit teenagers lower on the social hierarchy have to take daily from teenagers who are higher, even if they are allowed to sit at the same table. High school is widely remembered as a brutal rite of passage, and lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and shaming.
The bullying is still there, it's just moved online. If anything it's easier for the perpetrators, because they can hide behind anonymity, or create humiliating deepfakes - and so on.
The problem isn't phones, it's the addictivisation of social media and gaming. Being able to stay in touch with friends and family is potentially a good thing.
But it's currently implemented as a hook for psychological and chemical addiction, so that user attention can be sold to advertisers.
That is a problem, and I think we're starting to see a movement which will eventually end with these platforms being banned, or strictly regulated at the very least.
It's basically casino psychology applied to all social interactions. That is clearly not a good or healthy thing.
What seems likely is addiction mechanisms and social media will end up banned for kids. Loot boxes and daily login rewards banned from games, etc. Proof of age will be required for social media.
Learning where you fit in the social hierarchy and attempting to navigate that hierarchy is more important than anything you’ll learn in math class. Even if it is embarrassing. It’s not like you graduate high school and then the bullies go away.
That's quite a claim. I'm not sure I buy it. We never had all this lunchroom social drama growing up, and my old mates and I seem to be doing just fine.
Maybe you feel that navigating social hierarchy is more important than anything in math is because that's the kind of culture you happened to grow up in, not because it's truly more important?
The exception being work, where a lot of people seem like they never left high school. Everywhere I've worked had the social totem pole, the cliques, the politics, the in-crowd and out-crowds. One place I worked was almost exactly like the movie Mean Girls. Lots of people just don't grow out of it.
Bullying in school absolutely has consequences, and they're mostly going to be much farther-reaching than those suffered as an adult - getting messed up psychologically is more impactful as a kid, not to mention any physical toll it takes, or the impact of it on one's education.
Oh fair enough. My apologies Mr Worf. I don't fully agree - plenty of shitty behavior gets ignored (or even encouraged) even in a workplace - but there's definitely some truth here.
I always hear this from Americans. My experience in Canada is that the bullying and shaming was limited to junior high (grade 7-9 in my province). Maybe my high school was just too large for any of that nonsense? Or maybe the culture is different - I couldn't have told you who was on the football team, and there was no prom.
All my friends were nerds, but at the same time I didn't feel like there was some brutal social order hanging over me like I did in jr high.
I think age cohortand school makes a difference. Personally I had a perfectly fine time in highschool, most people just got along. Same problems as other posters though, it's just anecdote, and a heavily biased sampling (pretty decent chunk of CS people with poor social skills)
PE class being the other one where bullies thrive, and prey on the sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful kids. The coaches look the other way because they want the "win".
Both of these are different failure modes of adults to parent and/or mentor children. Just because A and B are both bad does not mean C is not a potentially better place to be. Just because lazy teachers and staffers tell kids "you have to learn to fight your own battles" does not make social media A-OK.
The social lessons people learn from their high school experience vary wildly. I have read many accounts of people who had bad experiences like this when they were in high school, and also many accounts of people who didn't have experiences like this. When I think about how the people I know have described their high school experiences, I can also think of a wide range of things. It's certainly not what my high school social experience was like - there were things I disliked about it, but mostly related to highly-idiosyncratic details of my personality. Describing it as a brutal rite of passage with some kind of global social hierarchy involving who got to sit at which lunch table rings very false to me.
Heh, we were at a family reunion with my grandparents in-laws talking about school. The topic of bullies was brought up and grandma said "Oh there were no problems with bullies" and I replied "thats because you were the bully.
Grandpa laughed heartily, as I may have hit a bullseye
Asociality is not the same thing as social harmony. It's not better for children if their shithead peers are replaced with smartphones.
The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a ton of different adult emotions.
That high school is necessarily a place of cliquey behavior and bullying, and that kids may even benefit from it, is not a universal thing. In some countries, viewers of imported American TV shows are baffled by that depiction of high school, because in their high schools there aren’t such hard knocks.
I agree with you, American schools seem particularly bad at breeding these sorts of unhealthy dynamics, and we shouldn't accept it as normal. But even in a better environment, unstructured social interaction with peers still seems like a useful part of growing up/socialization and shouldn't be replaced with kids sucked into their phones.
I've had plenty of friends I've only known through the internet and a chat room. It's not the same as being in-person - I don't see a way to reliably turn out healthy adults unless kids talk to each other.
The point you're making is important and I can already see how many, once years out of school, are able to re-frame their memories into something that bullying wasn't so bad and it's actually a social good, etc. It's as if the return-to-office-policies bringing back bullying/sexual harrassement to one's work environment would be hailed as a chance to improve one's social skills. Ridiculous.
I do think though that it's worth discerning here: We don't need to accept a world in which we have to decide between apathetic children stuck to tiny screens and daily traumas. Both things are evil, and in both cases it's a testament to lack of care our education systems have for us/children.
It's fear mongering bullshit. "WHAT UF THERE EMERGENCY". Every room has a phone and a teacher with a phone. Absolute bullshit post Columbine 9/11 fear based nonsense.
90's high schooler here. Oh yeah, those basic social skills at lunchrooms at school.
Sitting in noisy lunchroom isn't fun if you have autism. Walkman/disc man was my fav (you know, that thing I used while on the bus, so no I didn't talk much there to others either). Too bad we didn't have noise-cancelling headset back then. Back to lunchroom. Went for a drink while leaving your school bag? Your scientific calculator got reset by one of the bullies. Good luck getting it ready again for math/physics/chemistry/biology class test. But I usually just lunched elsewhere anyway, since I wasn't allowed in the cool kids group, and I ended up finding solace in that. So where did I end up? In the multimedia library! 20 or so PCs which you could use for, eh... 'homework.' At one point I found out you could just edit your student number in HTML, so once I figured the student number of a bully I signed him up to study in one the silence rooms for a week. When he found out I did that, he did the same to me, but -unlike him- I was cool with that. As for that library: other, more smarter kids than me, went to sit separate to study during break. And during lunch break there were people bored, shooting with elastics, yelling, running, bullying. Book reading at school? Didn't happen much during lunch breaks. Some studying, sure. That it was so awesome before the smartphone time, is a nostalgia myth.
FTA:
> The faculty donated board games to help ease kids into the phone-free era. Student volunteers oversaw a table stacked with games: checkers, chess, Yahtzee, Scrabble, Clue, Life and Trivial Pursuit. For many of the kids, it was their first time playing the games, and they said they were enjoying it.
Oh, yeah. I played MtG back in those days but was called a 'nerd' for that, and surprisingly nobody in my class (gymnasium; highest education level on high school) would also play it. At times, I kind of enjoyed something like Black Lady and Rikken, but Poker just bored me, and I didn't like the play for money (it was officially forbidden, but you know how that goes).
> Ko said other analog activities have also made a comeback, including cards, hangman, tic-tac-toe and Polaroid cameras. “There are just a lot of memories that we make throughout high school that we want to capture,” she said. “I actually have a lot of Polaroids on my wall.”
Funny how there's still a need to make photo's. That is one thing I hate about smartphones. That excessive need to photograph everything these days.
Now, about the subject. I don't think it has to be 'all' or 'nothing'. It wasn't 'nothing' back in the days (as I already wrote above, we just consolidated a lot of devices), it wasn't perfect back in the days either.
not a Cursor employee but still a researcher, it’s Zhipu/Z.ai GLM-4.6/4.5. there’s traces of Chinese in the reasoning output + its the only model that would make sense to do this with RL, and is a model that already delivers near SOTA performance + is open-source/open-weight.
Cursor Composer and Windsurf SWE 1.5 are both finetuned versions of GLM.
reply