Interesting finding: not using the brain leads to a whack brain. Or: we had 10 people play tennis and ten watch a robot play tennis. The people who played tennis stimulated more muscles in their arm while playing tennis than the people who watched the robot play tennis.

It felt indeed that what the paper said is just: "If you are using a tool in order to make hard-work feel more easy... then your brain is not working as much"

This seems ubiquitous (in baby steps) in my social circles. I think there's a big difference between general ai (LLMs) and the troubling implementations of ai like flock, and other surveillance implementations, spotify and their distortion of music, and their investment into ai military drone tech, etc. and how wrapped up politics has become in everything. Its a bad time to have a browser in your pocket.

> I think there's a big difference between general ai (LLMs) and the troubling implementations of ai like flock ... spotify and their distortion of music ...

I'm curious about the distinction you're making here. If we accept mainstream uses of LLMs, such as writing online content or generating images, why is music different?

As for the surveillance stuff, outside some geek bubbles, it's really not something that people care about. The prevailing narrative is that crime is getting worse and when the push comes to shove, most residents want more policing, more license plate readers, etc.

I would disagree that people aren't willing or able to care about it. Most folks I know care deeply, but aren't technical enough or capable enough to do much about.

Remember: most people aren't STEM and don't have the money or skillsets to just decide to, as a New Years Resolution, to de-google. A Ring doorbell cam is a non-trivial home upgrade, etc.

I don’t know how ubiquitous it is in my circles, but I have noticed a lot of folks in their 20s and 30s tell me they only buy paper books, never Kindle. I started buying only the latter years ago because of the convenience and lack of a need for storage, but have recently switched to getting everything I can (digitally) through the library and the Libby app.

I've stopped with Kindle books (or e-books in general). It's been a while. But my kindle got destroyed by my then 3 yr old going all crazy on it. The screen just froze and nothing made it unfreeze. I was moving towards paper books anyway. So I just did not buy another Kindle.

From new reports it seems Denmark is rolling back a lot of e-learning/screen usage. I hope the same comes to pass in the US. My daughter gets an iPad for her high school and while its locked down it is incredibly distracting. It is also restrictive. You can't read your notes and make summaries and write your own interpretation of what you've read without switching context between apps. As a whole I think its a bad option for learning.

> It is also restrictive. You can't read your notes and make summaries and write your own interpretation of what you've read without switching context between apps.

A lot of folks really underrate how inferior digital technology is to paper, in many ways. Digital has some advantages (e.g. copying, transmission, physical size), but is grossly inferior in other ways (flexibility, engaging spatial awareness, etc.).

We have also seen the Boomer's cannibalize themselves, even my 7 year old can see that her grandma's screen addiction is a very scary thing and something to be avoided; very cautionary. The Boomer's inability to defend themselves against the algorithms is a wild case study in screen addiction.

I think AI is just a tipping point and an easy target.

M.I.A.'s clothing brand is looking real good now. There are others but hers was the first I heard about. Seems like the waist bag would be critical for activists.

From the Ohmni website:

"...fabric's work by utilizing the principles of a Faraday cage to block or shield against electrical signals, electromagnetic radiation (EMR), and radio frequency interference (RFI)."

There's levels, for some, no-phone is the safest only route, for others, this could be a good solution. There's vids on her site showing how it works, it's very nice.

You can put it in your pocket and go somewhere else with less of a chance you'll be tracked

> But what's the point of bringing a phone at this point?

I don't have much experience with protests, but I'd think people still need to commute to them. Either by their own car, public transport, or uber.

It would be nice to have your real phone for the commute to/from the protest, or in case of emergency, or if you leave the protest for some food or coffee.

A lot of cameras have built in wifi now, so when you leave the protest you could upload your camera's photos through your phone.

There's still a lot of utility of having a phone and selectively being able to prevent signals emanating from it.

> But what's the point of bringing a phone at this point?

Really??

You can take it out of your pocket and use it to communicate.

Sonnet 4.5 did it for me. Cant imagine coding without it now, and if you look at my comments from three months ago, you'll see I'm eating crow now. I easily hit >10x productivity with Sonnet 4.5 and Opus. I use Opus for my industry C and math work and Sonnet 4.5 for my swiftui side project.

I think the gap between Sonnet 4.5 and Opus is pretty small, compared to the absolute chasm between like gpt-4.1, grok, etc. vs Sonnet.

The republican party is explicitly anti-science. One of the ripple effects of the anti-science agenda is an anti-education mentality among republican civilians. An educated populace is the enemy of the U.S. right wing.

I'm a scientist and I mostly agree with the scientist part, but I am definitely collaborating with my bot, I don't view it as "just a tool". I know this because this morning I had to do a forced reboot and my VsCode wasn't connecting to our remote servers, it took like over 5 minutes after reboot to reload my bot chat, and from like minutes 3-5 I had the distinct feeling of losing a valuable colleague.

Mine gets ashamed and embarrassed and goes and deletes the evidence (and my project folder! Good thing I've got backups.) when it fails. It also gets lazy and tells me to go stuff when it could do it, and I have to tell it to go do it instead of me having to go do it.

Thats wild! I have had nothing but consistent, stable experiences. It's possible they just take on the personalities of whoever theyre working with. So for me, it's become this like idealized version of a scientific collaborator. Also, I assume different models and versions have different personalities. As far as I can tell gpt-mini has no personality, whereas my claude sonnet 4.5 has a big one.

Personification can build empathy up to a point, but the machine has no desires.

I don't have illusions about whats going on on the other end, but we've done some deep collaborating and I 90% anthropomorphize it; much like how people on Star Trek TNG interact with Data.

This seems wild to me; would lovvvvve to peak at your codebase.

I'm in old school tech in the semiconductor industry. I do a heavy hybrid of pair-coding / vibe coding with my LLM in VsCode, 8 hours a day, across a wide spectrum of tasks. I am always working in C, alternating between implementing a new algorithm, testing, correcting, and analyzing some new technical algorithms either from literature or in house, and then refactoring old bad code written by EE folks 30 years ago (like 100+ line for loops). But I handle all unit tests myself and all code commits myself. I need to get my bot running the unit tests.

I would not be surprised if less than 1/4 my colleagues use an llm agent.

Ship fast, let customer do the QA, is that the idea?

Looking at the Data from 2024 (I don't see the 2025 data) it's hard for me to see how they combine to form a metric for happiness, but it's interesting still. I spent 3 summer months in Helsinki doing a research internship at Aalto University. Those three summer months were some of the most fun I've ever had, but on last day I was there, a friend of mine who was local, pointed around the bar we were in and said, "Look around, you can see the depression setting in" in prelude to the fast approaching winter months. It always surprises me to see Finland hit the top of these happiness reports because he really made it seem like winters were grimmmmmm.

ive been vibe coding (i think it's vibe coding) in C for the past three weeks and it's been super fun. i was tasked with trying to improve our highly optimized hyper-graph partitioning algorithm. One of the fun things i like to do is feed the llm an academic paper, have it summarize the key pts, and then implement the algos that we (me and the llm) find interesting. This feels like i hit the fabled 10x productivity mark because it would have taken me at least a week (probably more) to digest a paper enough to implement it, and often I would give up, convincing myself it's not worth the time / effort. So 10x might even be a low ball.

I can feel ya ... Nothing more fun then vibe coding b-tree, ART, LSM, Double pointer b-tree, bw-tree, ... and so many other storage solutions relying on different indexes, compressions etc.

And having them fight it off between each other. To see where the issues are with each methode, what works better. Doing that without vibe coding the hell out of it, will take months of work, but with vibing and some cash, you do it in a few days.