My personal experience with Xanax was that a psychiatrist prescribed 0.25mg pills for daily use, but out of caution I decided to only take it during episodes of high anxiety. I was going through a very emotionally volatile time in my life and was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.
I would take 1-2 pills occasionally to this end and it worked to stabilize my mood. Initially once or twice a week.
When I told the psychiatrist about this he shrugged his shoulders and the next prescription was "take 1 as needed."
I simultaneously did cognitive behavioral therapy. Life also got better.
Over time the frequency with which I took the pills went down. Eventually I went about 2 months without taking any and decided there was no need to refill the prescription or see the guy again.
I still keep some hydroxyzine on hand. It's an antihistamine with mild anxiolytic effects that tends to induce drowsiness. Occasionally if I'm really stressed out and anxiety is hitting hard I'll pop one of those at bedtime to ensure I get a good sleep, that's usually all it takes for me to set things right and do my best the next day. They're not as strong as benzos nor do they have the infamous downsides.
All this to say, I don't doubt the Reddit stories are real but I think there's a bit of Internet effect going on there, I wouldn't agree with #6 and I think tightly controlled use of benzos can be helpful.
One of the characteristic diagnostics for ADHD conditions is that "uppers", substances that would normally make someone more jittery and excitable, have a calming effect on ADHD sufferers when taken in theraputic doses.
Software engineers need to grow up, at the turn of the century when software was starting to remake the world, they developed an enormous conceit and started believing that the world revolved around their work and they were going to shape it.
It doesn't. The world revolves around economics and politics, just like it always did. It took a decade or two for established institutions to catch up and re-assert control, but catch up they did. In the end that 10-20 years was so brief that in a few generations it'll be entirely forgotten.
Now during that time who knows? Maybe software engineers could have held their ground and used their leverage to influence the political and economic system and turn it into something better. Did they do this? 99% did not. Instead, they coveted cushy jobs at Big Tech where they gave up their freedom and their ability to disrupt anything in exchange for security, and resigned themselves to trying to sound smart in blog posts where they produce grandiose but ultimately sophomoric opinion articles about their industry. No one with actual power could care less about these articles as they follow the rules of power, not the rules of engineering. They own the IP. They decide what "owning IP" even means. Their economy of IP is essentially one of monopolies. That is why everything is basically shit. Read Zero to One and perhaps a few chapters out of Wealth of Nations. The full explanation of "why our software isn't 10x better" will be laid out for you in a weekend.
The software engineers gave up their agency for a salary. Hey, that's fine. That's what 99% of all engineers in human history did. They've gone to work for a government or a big corporation, and let the guys with power keep making the rules. You just did what other engineers did because you ultimately needed to pay bills, take care of your families, etc. You're no different. But software engineers, pretending you are is getting old.
The rebel path where you actually make your own shit is still there. You can start a company. Or a nonprofit. You can donate your time toward building, marketing, and lobbying the government for something better. Because god knows all three of these are needed in spades. Without evidence of that though, honestly I'm tired of software engineers proclaiming something new from Big Tech is going to change the world. It's not. Innovation alone will solve nothing. The guys in charge have put their feet down and you work for them now. A revolution will be required in a pretty literal sense of the term to change this. Using the latest Anthropic models harder isn't going to do shit.
I'm an engineer too. Let's grow up already. Let's either get serious about our conceit that tech can improve the world, or let's resign ourselves to being just like every other engineering profession in the world, getting paid well to obediently build what the investor class tells us to build. You can't have it both ways. Choose your destiny and accept it.
(Fyi - serial bootstrapped open source adjacent founder here, and I made my own decision 15 years ago, one way or another, I'm dying free.)
With all due respect to what I'm sure was a well meaning comment, I think your comment is also an example of why the problem IS hard. Lots of Americans think a vague prescription of "squeezing the richest a little more" is the answer to everything, including apparently declining R&D expenditures. It's not. More clean energy deployments and more social programs are not bad things but they also will not solve this problem.
If we want to fix this there are probably two broad levers that need to be pulled. Notably indiscriminately "squeezing the billionaires" isn't one of them because you want to encourage capital to invest in the US:
1) The US has developed a real problem with production quality/capability, it makes a lot of spam and trash, it increasingly can't make anything at home, etc. The two big trends driving this have been a reduction of competition in its domestic market (i.e. monopolies emerging) and a broad range of policies which encourage US companies to design stuff, license out and have the production done overseas by someone who promptly steals and copies it... hello China. What's needed here to actually make the US economy "great again" are strong enforcement of anti-trust laws and some kind of legal framework where the incentive is to not just design in the US but also build there. This certainly puts limits on what "the billionaires" can do but by no means is it really "squeezing" them or trying to limit what they can earn in the US. You want the capital to get deployed in America but under a legal framework that's aligned with productivity, innovation and job creation as well as profits. This is how you get private R&D going again. The US framework is more "scams and profits" at this point.
2) On the public side, the US formerly had amazing federal support for R&D. This sounds like it should be easy to fix but I don't really think it is. The government is not as healthy fiscally as it once was, and there used to be more public appetite for science and technology related expenditures; Americans seem more enamored with get rich quick schemes than with a STEM education these days. If you're a politician who is going to reward you for supporting big federal investment in long-term, moonshot R&D? Voters won't, the capital class won't. So personally I don't see much of a solution here without a cultural shift occurring first, we need to believe as a society that long term research and innovation can make a more perfect world, but due to the realities of the modern slopconomy we believe the exact opposite.
Your #1 is exactly one of the things people mean when they bemoan oligarchs destroying the country. Rather than compete in a market, they buy off the government to approve mergers so they don't have to compete.
Your #2 "not as healthy fiscally" is itself an oligarch narrative. Spending money to invest for the future is a sensible thing to do, and the US has the world reserve currency so we don't even need to ask others to borrow to do that, but rather can unilaterally make new money and have our currency hold its value as long as others believe we will have a good future. But every time this fake austerity narrative gains a foothold, it's used to destroy spending that had been investing in the future (with jobs/incomes that were going into the distributed economy!), while actually creating even more monetary inflation than there had been - but it goes right into the oligarch's pockets! In order for your argument to be true, voters would have to actually punish politicians for wasteful spending. Given that Republicans specifically have been running this fake austerity scam for decades and getting away with it, it is clear voters do not. What voters actually seem to respond to is feel-good propaganda, which is exactly what the fake austerity narrative is.
Meanwhile the whole point of "clean energy" in this context is that it's a widespread distributed project that creates real jobs that produce tangible useful assets. Much better than the oligarchs' preference for fake make-work jobs like that whole healthcare denial industry.
Insofar as I can tell what's really reflected here is a difference between Democrat and Republican policy positions. The Democrats want to minimize domestic environmental impact and be a net oil importer. Let someone else handle the dirty work of drilling. The Republicans are less concerned with the environmental impact and want to increase exports, oil jobs and economic sovereignty. With higher domestic production and less dependence on foreign states, such a large petroleum reserve is unnecessary.
I prefer the Republican position. It sucks to harm the environment. But it sucks more to enable some of the regimes we import oil from. They frequently are not close allies. We frequently end up immersing ourself in wars and other entanglements over this foreign oil. You want to stop the wars, you have to stop the dependence on imported oil. (To be clear I'm not arguing that Republicans will start less wars, or are a more moral party. I am arguing in favor of domestic oil production because it removes a justification for war.)
The Democratic position exports the moral hazard to a place where Americans don't see it. Takes it out of their backyard. But frankly that is an immoral approach which both parties have taken repeatedly and it has undermined the health of the nation. The other case where this takes place at an absolutely massive scale is exporting certain types of jobs to other countries where labor standards are lax, and where slave labor takes place. People out there killed themselves while making iPhone or your shoes because the working conditions in those countries were so horrible. I am willing to pay a little more for shoes and buy a little bit fewer luxury goods so that I don't enable slave labor. Move the jobs back onshore where we can regulate the well being of the workers. We can't control it if it's in another country.
If the Republicans actually had that position instead of being funded heavily by oil money they would be #1 Super Top Solar/Green energy party because that is the path to energy independence and to truly reduce the influence of OPEC - even outside of the fact that peak oil is over and it will continue to get more and more expensive to pull oil out of the earth. But they’re not because your assumptions are misplaced.
I don't think your interpretation of Democrat policies is correct. I've seen nothing regarding a desire to import oil rather than produce it domestically, something that is fundamentally different from declining to expand domestic production (we are already a net exporter after all).
The democrat position is more of, move off of oil to electrification, such that despite no expansion we never have to import, while simultaneously reducing that domestic impact.
>The counterpoint is that the US is producing more crude domestically than ever with more efficient drilling technology:
From my understanding they are running refineries at max utilization and not able to do required maintenance due to this crisis. This is what worries me about the October surprise. A couple of well timed "screw ups" caused by lack of maintenance when the whole system is already at its breaking point can spell trouble.
Your position appears to be based on crude production and drawing an equivalency between Middle East crude and US crude. They are unfortunately not equivalent. I agree that it’s amazing that the US doesn’t wholly depend on the Mideast for oil, but until we can process our own crude as cheaply as Mideast crude can be processed, strife in the Middle East will still push energy prices up.
Even top Democrats supported natural gas fracking.
"
President Barack Obama used his State of the Union speech to underscore the role of natural gas in transitioning to a lower-carbon nation, the White House indicated tonight.
According to a White House briefing document issued in conjunction with the speech, Obama’s agenda for natural gas includes a call for Congress to work with the administration to create new “Sustainable Shale Gas Growth Zones” to help “regions come together to make sure shale gas is developed in a safe, responsible way that helps build diverse and resilient regional economies that can withstand boom-and-bust cycles and can be leaders in building and deploying clean energy technologies.”
This is not really supported by energy data. Under Biden/Harris, US crude production hit multiple consecutive all time highs and made the country a net exporter since 2020. In my world, that's the opposite of "minimizing domestic drilling." And producing oil doesn't prevent foreign wars; oil is a global commodity, energy markets are subject to global pricing events and disruptions anywhere drive up fuel prices in the US. Prices at the pump here don't care where crude was pumped. And the strange connection you draw between energy policy/oil reserves and offshore factory conditions conflates drastically different economic drivers. There is a real moral conversation to be had here about supply chain ethics but it doesn't get connected this way. This is a really shallow, cliche framing about [drilling vs importing] rather than [fossil fuel dominance vs clean energy transition], and drawing a preference to a party based on a faulty view of those is, disappointingly, Peak Political Affiliation 2026.
Let's also not pretend that the current Republican administration's insane military campaign to disrupt oil supply and markets, isn't helpful to, I don't know, say, Kremlin's oil and gas export revenues, and say, how higher global benchmark crude helps to, say, finance a domestic war economy while buffering against sanctions. Just a tiny thought to consider when holding a preference for Republican oil strategy.
This is not telling the full story. Biden tried to block new oil and gas leases, but he was blocked from doing so by the courts. Oil production was up not because of, but rather in spite of the Biden administration.
It told enough of the full story. Did you need me to write out the entire chronology of every single event?
Also, from my comment 12 days ago:
"Let's also not pretend that the current Republican administration's insane military campaign to disrupt oil supply and markets, isn't helpful to, I don't know, say, Kremlin's oil and gas export revenues, and say, how higher global benchmark crude helps to, say, finance a domestic war economy while buffering against sanctions. Just a tiny thought to consider when holding a preference for Republican oil strategy."
And look what just happened. Let's stick to the things that matter instead of finding something trivial to comment on. How about this deal FOR Russia? Is there a comment about Biden for it, too?
About 40-45% of US petroleum use is burning it in passenger cars.
We're already a net exporter of oil; if we pushed a bigger fraction of cars and other transport uses to electrification we'd be a massive net exporter.
That wouldn't completely insulate us from global energy markets but it'd do a lot.
Isn't US domestic oil exported to EU and others because its medium to light crude which US refineries are not calibrated for? Its my understanding US refineries are calibrated to refine Heavy crude which comes mainly from Canada and some from Venezuela.
US refineries are highly configurable and can refine any crude. They make more money refining difficult crude because they have the capability to handle it and many refineries do not, so naturally they prefer it for profitability reasons. The difference is extra refining steps that can be bypassed if they are not needed. Processing light sweet crude means some of their capital assets are sitting idle because they aren’t needed.
The US also exports its own crude for blending with other crude at foreign refineries. A refinery may not be able to process some types of crude but can process that crude if blended with a different type of crude to change its average properties. The limit to this for refineries is the cost of buying and shipping enough suitable blending crude to the refinery.
> The counterpoint is that the US is producing more crude domestically than ever with more efficient drilling technology:
Your link doesn't back up your claim that it's more efficient. And believing that fracking is "more efficient" than simply drilling into a pressurized gusher pocket is a boggling conclusion.
There is no partisan political strategy story to be read into the drawdown of the SPR. Biden ("the democrats") drew it down by an even larger amount right after the invasion of Ukraine to stabilize prices, and now before it recovered Trump is drawing it down even further to stabilize prices from his new war.
Of course, the major difference is that Biden was responding to Russia invading Ukraine while Trump was responding to a conflict that he caused and started.
Certainly, just refuting GPs supposition that "Democrats want a big reserve so the US is dependent, Republicans want a small reserve because they want to be self-sufficient", since none of the numbers back it.
Beware of well written statements that mask their fallacies. As a sibling comment points out, domestic oil production rose plenty during the Biden administration. Casting it as a democrat vs republican difference isn’t anywhere near the full story.
Posts which appear to be thoughtfully constructed while actually just being entirely incorrect about the relevant facts are the most important to downvote, to signal to uninformed readers that they should perhaps not trust the post overly much.
I think there was a lot of Reddit in the response to my comment. I made an earnest attempt to explain how I perceive the situation, and there are conspiracy theories along the lines of "don't listen to anyone who sounds too thoughtful, they're a Republican plant." I really do fear for our liberties when I see that line of thinking, it could come just as easily from Mao or Pol Pot with the same end result. As someone who didn't vote for Trump I'm always surprised at how much the Internet hates trying to understand the other side of the story. There were some insightful replies which might lead to me revising my understanding, and plenty of junk ones. I didn't really set out to start a partisan war but it unsurprisingly evolved into the usual type of one-sided one. I think you get a handful of better comments generally here than on Reddit but 80% of the discourse is pretty Reddit.
The AI answer dominates the page, and is usually wrong, so it's just a waste of the most valuable space on the page.
The ads have proliferated, and rarely have what I need.
Video search results also take up a lot of the page, and are almost never what I want if I haven't clicked over to the Video tab. Again, just a big waste of space.
Speaking of the Video tab its accuracy/relevancy has gotten worse too.
The organic results have deteriorated, and are still competitive, but are no longer clearly and consistently better than Duckduckgo.
So it's duckduckgo as the default for me on all devices now. If I don't find what I want, which is maybe 30% of the time, I switch over to G just by adding !g to the query. G might have what I need in about half of those cases.
You can see why a lot of people just ask an LLM to do the web searching for them.
Across the board, this is all quite bad compared to web search from 10+ years ago.
If there's a single thing which has really pushed me away from Google, it's simply google.com devoting so much of the page to things that aren't organic web search.
The AI answer dominates the page, and is usually wrong, so it's just a waste of the most valuable space on the page.
I started noticing that for a lot of niche questions, AI overview often uses things like Reddit comments as the source, which are often partially or completely wrong. Then it gets reformulated with the typical confidence of an LLM.
Very scary because at the same time I notice people taking the AI overview answers as truth.
This is another area where DDG shines - it doesn't have a commercial relationship with Reddit, so doesn't push it in its results.
DDG's 'Search Assist' AI overviews are pretty basic but they tend to be sourced from Wikipedia and traditional media outlets rather than forums and blogs - they can be out of date, but are generally a lot less "spicy" than the sources that Google use.
I guess Google is much better-optimised for engagement but that's not what I'm looking for, meaning that DDG is a better choice for me.
As a counter-anecdote: I've had such consistently bad results from its AI summaries that I've changed over to the no-AI page entirely - well over half have been very obviously incorrect or answering something completely different but spelled similarly (but not the same, especially true for chemical names), and the links it includes as references often directly oppose its summary.
I suspect the model might just be too small? Which makes sense when exposing it for free, but it's still a bad experience.
I've been fairly impressed by DDG for a few years now. I find everything I'm looking for just fine, and the AI summaries are actually helpful on occasion.
I started noticing that for a lot of niche questions, AI overview often uses things like Reddit comments as the source, which are often partially or completely wrong.
If only! I've seen it sourcing reddit comments, but when you follow the link, the comment is either completely unrelated or does not say what the LLM claims it is saying.
I don't know what causes this to happen, but I've noticed it too and it distinctly feels like source laundering. How often do people actually verify that the sources say what the AI claims? Probably vanishingly rare, right? Everyone else gets the impression that the claims have actual sources of some kind.
In most instances where I've seen it, it's on niche topics where a Reddit post may be the easiest place to find any relevant content.
I expect somewhere in the AI harness there's a branch that effectively mandates "You must always answer."
Which results in it grasping at Reddit comment straws.
And which, in typically modern Google fashion, nobody there gives a shit about fixing, because the PR made their top-level AI KPI go brr.
Google is increasingly proof that you can't run an effective scaled tech company without a Gates or Jobs who occasionally uses the fucking product themselves and descends with fiery vengeance on whatever team drifted too far from user alignment.
>it's on niche topics where a Reddit post may be the easiest place to find any relevant content.
But isn't the whole point (I mean, aside from making infinite money or world domination or whatever) of the AI that it'll do the hard work of finding the information? Like, that's the whole value proposition of the AI summary in the search results, right?
How would somebody go about mass-poisoning forum posts like this? If Google has a business relationship with Reddit, I assume it wouldn't be server side - but at the same time I don't know how a regular redditor could poison his text posts without it being noticeable in a human reading.
Normally. That's literally what SEO has been about, even pre-LLMs. It's not Google doing it, they don't benefit from their own AI suggestions being bad. Reddit doesn't have any obvious interest here too. But the millions of businesses and millions of people angry at AI, both have plenty of reasons to spam the life out of any site that allows users to post comments, and in both cases, LLMs themselves make it harder to filter and much easier to scale.
The actual scary part is that people already manipulate and poison the google overviews on purpose.
It is very easy to bring your bs to the TOP spot on google at the moment with carefully crafted reddit comments and blogs, and it's not hard to get to the traffic and clicks this way.
This is what the new SEO is about, I know a bunch of people who are doing this and they are praying it is not getting fixed anytime soon.
Yeah, but even religion is not up to the task for how backwards people's thinking gets at times.
You have people here in this thread - and in every other AI thread - seeing themselves as exploited for information for LLM companies to profit. This is such a backwards, scale-inverting perspective that it shouldn't be possible to hold in a rational mind, and yet.
What a sleek way of positioning your comment as something that can't reasonably be disagreed with whereas it's nothing more than a pure opinion of yours. I am in awe.
For the first time in history, the Reddit community is actually useful. And they don't even have to change anything. Just be "the Reddit community". Always with a self confidence three levels higher than the underlying substance allows. Threads that go deeper and deeeeeper and deeeeeeeeeper without ever carrying anything of actual value.
Future scientist will find out: Most of the weaknesses AI has come from Reddit, Instagram and Youtube being part of the training material. Sure it makes the training material broader by a large degree. But not deeper, to say it nicely.
If I type exact document identifiers, the LLM either tells me that I have either mistyped something or that I am searching for a specific document. Hell yeah, I am doing exactly that! Give me the link instead of babbling about it!
Even scarier: my dad, who has been actually been getting good advice about his blood pressure issues (hair-trigger too low with his meds). It's at least coming up with citations from Cleveland Clinic and such, but still, it scares me, even if he has a good sense of how to ask it questions.
I'm in several facebook groups for cars and bikes, and holy smokes, someone asks a question and usually the top response is someone literally pasting in a screenshot of a google AI generated response....which is wrong like, solid 50% of the time. And then you point it out and people get aggro on you. I hate it.
I have literally seen multiple screenshots now of people pasting Google Gemini answers in an attempt to tell other people whether something they're doing is legal or not in a particular state, as it relates to NFA item firearms in the USA... And they seem to take it as the gospel truth. People are literally risking federal prison over information that Gemini pulled out of the ass-end of some internet forum of multiple cletus-intellect level individuals talking about their homemade 3D printed silencers. And then Gemini further hallucinates and fabricates new ways to parse that information different than how the original person wrote it. It's astonishing.
This phenomenon is so widespread and I can't see it as anything other than serious AI psychosis.
I think people want to feel useful and helpful in general, and now a lot of people are getting this feeling by using AI to answer questions. And it's like you said they get so mad when you point out that their AI screenshot is wrong or, even more obviously, that the person who asked could also just read the google gemini blurb. They get mad because you're invalidating their feeling of being helpful.
Last year someone went missing on the water in my area. There was a lot of talk on facebook during the search, and a coordinated facebook group. And every post would have people posting their chats with ChatGPT, or saying they used AI to analyze the weather and currents on the day he went missing to figure out he probably landed on this or that shore (he didn't). These posts are equivalent to the mediums and psychics who also come in with these unhelpful advice posts.
I think fundamentally it's the same as how AI is giving some people an extremely strong feeling of being an expert, and how their psyche seems to lash out to protect that feeling when it's threatened.
Another facebook anecdote, I recently saw someone post in a local genealogy and history group some pure AI slop infographics. When people called him out he said that it's AI but he carefully vets all the information and that they need to stop being luddites or they'll be stuck in the past blah blah devolving into calling them liberals and the like. But his infographics were all incredibly obviously wrong, to anyone who had ever seen a map it's obvious that the coastlines were incredibly wrong, and the city weren't in the correct locations at all. So what can you even do with someone like that? They're just going to retreat into the safety of the chatbot to continue their "research".
Whatever the tool, the problem is that it’s wrong, not that it’s done by AI. Like, why are we conflating the two - is it because it’s now easier for someone to produce a wrong artifact that visually looks ok and therefore tricks our brains? And people get upset because a prior quality heuristic is now obviously broken?
Because this new tool will also tell you, in (mostly) human language, why the wrong artifacts it createds are correct. And it's arguments are very convincing to a lot of people. AI is clearly creating new problems that didn't really exist before, you can't say it's just a tool like any other when this is the only tool where its users form parasocial relationships with it.
It's not only the only tool that tries to manipulate users, it's also one that is certain to lie often and at random. Lies are inherent to the technology. It's a bad tool for the things it's being used for.
Yeah I think so. I mean it's a new social norm - previously if you replied with "hey I read this article here and it says X" it would be really easy to check the source and either say yeah this looks good or disprove it.
Now people will say "I asked AI to give me a map of ocean currents and it definitively says the person is here!" and the argument that "look it's AI, it's probably wrong" just does nothing for a lot of people. Doubly so if the information they want is at the forefront of Google, after all, Google is a big reputable company, so of course what it says is correct.
Yes I agree that the AI itself isn't the problem, but the way it's being pushed and promoted(just ask anything!) is leading to this.
If you say it's obviously AI nonsense you get a reply that "AI is just a tool, it's part of our daily life now, criticize the content and not what tool was used", you see that so much on here. But then if you try to criticize the content the person won't believe you because the AI says it's correct.
I was taking with a family member about fentanyl zombies. They had never seen the lean/bend. So I pull up Google and click video which is YouTube results… ALL AI. All of it. All a couple months old, all filler, faked, a few scenes stitched together on repeat and AI voice reading AI script.
It is fucking amazing to me that Google let YouTube fall so far so fast.
I don’t even click a video if it’s less than a year old now. Want to see a praying mantis eat a grasshopper? Wonder how clay is refined? Better off with an 11 year old Discovery Channel clip than anything 2026.
I just tried googling "fentanyl fold" and switching to the video tab, and zero of the first ten results were AI. They were also mostly not from YouTube. I also tried the same search on YouTube, and no AI there either among the first ten results (I didn't bother with the Shorts). I don't know why we get so different results.
That's how everyone experiences everything at google, youtube. and many other websites. Your experience can be drastically different from the next persons for reasons that are never explained to you and can be entirely out of your control.
If you’re logged in you get wildly different results from someone else’s. I have turned off history on my google account to make it give me a “neutral” search result, but it still seems to take a lot of info like my location, language and device type into account.
Have seen this across the planet, it's not unique to Europe, I end up adding youtube to the search query because instagram or tiktok isn't what I'm looking for ever but that makes up the bulk of the results, instagram won't even show me the video without a login and is at the top wtf
Same with reviews of tech products. A lot of them just stitch together product shots/videos from the manufacturer and have an AI voice ‘comparing’ the products. Especially if it’s more niche’s, often a third to half the videos are slop.
I've been on DDG on all my devices for a few years. I used to use !g somewhat regularly but these days it's extremely rare. I realized that I would just search DDG with my first stab at a query and then revise the query when using !g and I'd get the result I wanted. So I just stopped using !g and just revised my query on DDG and then I basically never had to use Google Search.
Unfortunately, DDG's spam filters are basically useless. I used DDG for many years without !g as well and recently, the first page contains mostly AI generated garbage blogs. Not for every search query, but for example for everything related around the house or garden.
Hold on. I had given up on Google almost 10 years ago, and I thought that the AI garbage on DDG was the new norm on the web. At least Google doesn't fare any better. You make it sound like there's another option?
Partly, i find it reassuring to pay for the service with money. That was how we used to do things back in my day.
Localisation is moderate for shopping - i have to sift through US results. I'll occasionally use Google product search when i'm metaphorically groping for my wedding ring in the toilet.
It's not as good as Google used to be, but then, the web isn't a good as the web used to be.
I don't generally find !g gives me better results than DDG and if I instead went to Google I'd get dinged with a Captcha on every search because Google seems to hate my small ISP. So easy choice for me.
I started my journey on DuckDuckGo and got tired of the “30% of the time” bit that you mention, where a large section of your searches end up going back to Google anyway.
I find that Kagi is pretty much 99% “never need to use Google.” The results are just really good.
I've been a Kagi user for two years, and I've also onboarded my 70-year-old mother. She's happy to have a web search that works and an excellent translation service, which, by the way, uses AI where and how it actually makes sense.
Kagi actually tells you what percentage of the results came from their own index versus external ones near the top when you do a search. E.g., when I search for “iPhone Duo” it says “52% unique Kagi results.”
I also think that there’s a strange X factor that’s hard to describe with search engine quality. I don’t think the index that gets used is everything that goes into it.
I imagine that as soon as you combine or reconcile more than one index source or reorder the results, you’ve produced a unique search engine.
E.g., a search engine could basically only use Bing as the source but if it changed the order or omitted results it would possibly be improving those results despite not having its own index.
It’s the wrongness that bothers me. I wish Google would just link sources where it thinks the answer is, but don’t bother trying to answer directly if it’s wrong 10% of the time.
Oh it does that, too, with tiny little button annotations, though the sources regularly offer no support to its conclusion. It very much depends on the topic, sometimes the sources are great, other times they're or irrelevant or very poor quality. Always worth clicking through to them if you're going to even read the AI summary.
I normally use a quick search that has the `udm=web` query parameter to avoid the slop, but it seems they're putting less effort into ensuring relevant results there. Then, I'm forced to use AI mode to get to what I'm after, even if that's only a better set of keywords for a slopless search.
Adjust your browser's search engine setting for Google and set it to append "&udm=14" to the URL, that'll force it to bring up the "Web" tab without annoying useless "helpful" other stuff.
Maybe intentionally. If you know you won't find things, they know you are going to use their ai just to not have to type it elsewhere. I am strongly considering kagi
I've been a sub with Kagi for several years. Very happy with search. I'm about to step down from Ultimate to Pro tier. Their 'Quick' and 'Research' Kagi Assistant modes are kinda incredible, probably thanks to being fed good search results and to some extent whatever custom system prompt they've cooked up, but I can't quite justify it when I'm also paying OpenAI for a sub there. But $10/mo for top-tier search is easy to justify in the time it saves me.
I tried DDG many times but I think they use Bing on the backend, and, well, Bing doesn't suck just because Microsoft gimps the front end. Bing sucks because enormous indexes are hard. Kagi pulls from multiple sources so gets fundamentally different results.
Searching for anything product related is now AI answer, followed by “Sponsored products”, followed by “Popular products”, a few hits, then “Shop by store”, and “In store nearby”. Maybe 2% is actual content, the rest is ads.
Their prediction was spot on:
“We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
Web search is just broken right now. Today I was looking for documentation for a specific Lenovo motherboard. I gave both DDG and Google the exact model number and both returned irrelevant useless bullshit. DDG doesn't include all search words unless you quote it: "foomatic" "m900" "dingus". This scenario happens almost daily. DDG is awful, but all the alternatives are worse. It's all so tiresome.
>Google.com is REALLY bad right now in my opinion.
It is completely cooked. I tried to google a coding question today, same like you would have done 4 years ago instead of asking an LLM. I didn't get any SERPS, just an AI answer. I asked myself... is this even google.com anymore??? Sure as heck didn't feel like it.
Over the last 20 years the economy has become dysfunctional. It no longer really resembles a free market; monopolies have established barriers to entry everywhere. And the biggest investors are awash with helicopter money that's been doled out for favors by the political class.
So those investors have tons of cash to burn and surprisingly few opportunities. Even within Silicon Valley/VC there are surprisingly few who seem to really understand the fundamental economics of software. Or perhaps those economics just aren't that important when you have billions of dollars on hand and cash is obviously not going to get you a return. Any whisper of possible exponential growth is worth throwing money at. Crypto? Why not. AI? Why not. Datacenters? Why not. Tulips? Why not.
This is by all definitions an empire in decline. Everything is broken or fake. Everyone is afraid to do what needs to be done. Power forbids it. So we're all just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Our secret police aren't as bad as the late stage USSR's yet, but hold Uncle Sam's beer...
(That's not a recommendation to try and time the nadir, by the way, as it could easily be 50 years away.)
I feel like my point is being over extrapolated a bit. All I was saying is that people in 2020 believed AI companies had much more of a moat then they actually do - that other companies would struggle to obtain enough data (y’know, downloading the internet to train models wasn’t legal back then) or resources to compete
It started way before the last 20 years, the past 40 years have created the conditions for this to happen.
Overfinancialisation of the economy while removing safeguards to keep markets functional, like anti-trust enforcement, are the main forces behind this erosion. Through finance the focus of companies is completely shifted away from producing good products and services, and into how to extract more paper wealth from existing structures to the detriment of products.
Not enforcing anti-trust and letting behemoths to form which cannot be competed against since with their amount of capital they can either buy their competition outright or just price dump for long enough to make competition non-viable.
It's the failure of neoliberalism, and that agenda has been pushed into Western countries since the 1980s-1990s, it made enormous wealth for the few at the top while eroding whole societies, economically and socially, it's all dysfunctional.
I feel like my point is being over extrapolated a bit. All I was saying is that people in 2020 believed AI companies had much more of a moat then they actually do - that other companies would struggle to obtain enough data (y’know, downloading the internet to train models wasn’t legal back then) or resources to compete
I replied to the extrapolation, not to your comment directly, I think your point might be more fitting under that comment than mine, I just drilled down from the points above mine.
The initial growth of the internet was a boom bust cycle, and as you see the internet is still here. This is more about the economic paradigm that is being used to grow a technology versus the economic paradigm the technologies rate of growth can support over time.
Just to give some rough numbers in the past 5 years the amount of GPU compute installed in FLOPS is somewhere over 5 times all the CPU flops that have ever existed.
This has nothing to do with AI being good or bad or being able to produce things and economic value. It is by far the largest and fastest growth of any technology ever and we have zero clue about the economic stability of this grand experiment we're performing.
The internet is a much more appropriate comparison than crypto or tulips, which bring no or negligible value.
Some differences to the market at that time seems to be that during the dotcom bubble, many of the companies had little to no revenue.
Leading AI labs already generate enormous revenue. The investments into capacity are needed to address the current demand.
The situation seems somewhat less speculative.
That said, I cannot predict how AI capabilities will develop and how demand will respond.
Should capabilities plateau hard and soon, maybe the demand will not be there for the compute investments.
If it does not, and instead AI applications in robotics, science, and self driving expand, chances seem reasonably good that the demand will be there, no?
And as for the economic stability, much of the investment comes from existing giants like Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, who have the necessary cash flow.
These companies are less likely to collapse than some of the ones during the dotcom bubble.
Eh, I'd say it's closer to something like internet + tulips.
It's the total amount of money in the economy that's been invested toward a potential outcome. AI represents the largest amount of money, and largest fractional part of the economy invested ever.
Because of this AI could be the biggest economic boon ever, yet still not recover the full amount invested. This will have deep economic impacts that affect everyone and everything. At this point AI must achieve all its stated economic impacts or there will still be a huge economic crash that kills off any company that is over invested and cannot make a profit.
Worse, the many of the perceived economic impacts of AI are not for humans like you or I, but the huge companies you listed. Even if they economically win, everyone else made out of meat could still lose.
They say history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. This, at least to me, sounds like a mixtape of "internet" + "tulips" + "1920s financial world leading to global political instability".
Every potential outcome I see occurring pushes us closer to further instability, even if the economics on it work out on paper.
Out of this number how much of this goes to payroll that goes to humans versus how much of this goes to non-human infrastructure costs. The numbers suggest this is anywhere from 60 to 90%, with 70% being a reasonable average figure. Just under a trillion dollars paid directly to humans would disappear if AI somehow captured all of this market.
Moreso the AI industry needs to capture these gains very fast or they will be crushed by interest payments on the massive debts they've accrued.
>ven though Amodei hopes to cure most major disease in the next 5-10 years
The average development time for medicine is 10 to 15 years before a single dollar is earned from said medicine. AI will shave very little off that as human testing and our stupidly complex bodies introduce all kinds of problems. Furthermore running head long into blindly using AI medicine is how you produce X risks from super intelligence AI.
The speed at which AI has to develop in which to get profitability is the biggest risk, a potentially catastrophic risk at that.
You can theorize all you like, and many people like yourself are expecting to see GDP growth pick up as a result of AI, maybe if only because of the boom in datacenter construction etc (regardless of whether AI ends up actually boosting the economy), BUT ...
The reality is that so far there has been no sign of GDP growth picking up. It is basically flat at 2.5% +/- over the last few years.
In a similar vein one might have expected that the internet (think of all the e-commerce and efficiencies!) might have shifted GDP growth into a higher gear, but it did not, although in that case there was at least a significant boost in the 1996-2000 "dot com" era when the build out was happening (then to be followed by the crash and all the unused dark fiber etc).
So, maybe the hoped-for AI boom will be just as much of a dud (as it appears to be so far) as the internet boom. New day, different tools, same growth.
It's perhaps odd that we're not even seeing datacenter/etc build out register on GDP, but perhaps the scale of it is not as large as the internet build out?
>but perhaps the scale of it is not as large as the internet build out?
In the past 5 years 5 times as much GPU compute capacity has been installed as total CPU capacity that has ever existed. When it comes to capital intensity the growth of AI has been one of, if not the largest capital expenditure for a class of project in this short of time frame. Things like the Manhattan project which was absolutely monstrous expense at the time is dwarfed by this.
Of course measuring GDP growth is difficult when you have an idiot in chief trying to destroy the global economy with the dumbest set of actions contrived by a human ever. Disentangling this factors will take a lot of work on someones part.
I can certainly understand why YC would fund an idea like this, and it's interesting to read about, but yeah the horizon for it working is surely very long if ever.
A more appropriate scope would be "can any element of a business at all be handled autonomously by an agent in the long run?" because I would buy that product, but I can't think of one.
Andon's real world experiments are a lot more interesting than the simulations IMO. They ran a retail outlet which has burned through 97% of the money in its bank account. A cafe which is well into a downward slide. Some online radio stations which have listener numbers you can count on one hand.
Seems a little insane that they opened expensive physical businesses like retail and a cafe without doing anything digital successfully first. Surely a dropshipping business is easier and cheaper to test out than a brick and mortar clothing store!
So if nothing else, they have a looooong way to go on distribution. I would argue that distribution in particular might be unsolvable with an agent. If your agent can do it why can't a thousand others? At which point the cost of customer acquisition will be driven up by thousands of robo-competitors until it's no longer viable. The robots mutate the problem and the closest real analogy ends up being perfect competition where no one has any profits.
I've always wondered about these two. Dunwoody is a retired Army general. Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground. As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board? I could see having the right sort of government suit on it, maybe. I couldn't see "turned Yahoo into an irrelevant hellhole of ads" as relevant experience.
> Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground.
I don't think that's really right, but it's hard to tell. In my mind, as someone who was there from 2004-2011, things were going ok while she was there. The Microsoft acquisition would have been nice from a $ point of view, and I think they could have been convinced to give all the employeed an Xbox 360, but Microsoft would have smothered the brand and its products... It's possible the acquisition would have been held up in anti-trust for a long time and a large period of uncertainty.
IMHO the running into the ground really started under Carol Bartz with the ads and search deal with Microsoft whereby Bing was supposed to take over everything. But performance in terms of latency, quality, and $/search was worse than when Yahoo was doing it and the ads and search teams at Yahoo didn't shrink as expected, because the work didn't shrink as expected. Not surprisingly, when you drop revenue and don't drop costs, financial performance does not improve.
Partnering with Google would have made more financial sense, but that wasn't an option because of anti-trust... Probably should have accepted the acquisition and accepted fate... partnering with Microsoft later was a bad choice, maybe they could have backed out once the numbers were clear.
> As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board?
Investors tell you to put them on the board and you do it. The worst mistake WordPress made was taking investment from private equity and assorted Wall Street types.
Let's leave the diagnoses to the doctors please. The guy was public about being under a lot of stress and that's fine and salient to acknowledge. But it's misleading to use medical terminology unless you're actually his doctor and have evaluated him following the protocols of your profession.
Which we know you are not -- if you were -- you would be bound by patient confidentiality, and not posting a diagnosis here.
So just say his job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed. Don't medicalize it.
I am "evaluating" him as someone who feels he has come unglued in a similarly severe but less public way and recognises a fellow traveller. I'm fully entitled to say this, am I not? It's just my opinion.
I am not "medicalising" it — not least because the medical profession does not recognise burnout as mental illness (because it gets it backward and assumes it is an occupational health issue).
I am saying he is, to me, evidently mentally ill in the way I feel I have been mentally ill. I wouldn't accept a doctor telling me my problems are work stress.
"His job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed" is IMO classic American-influenced minimisation of middle-aged male mental ill-health. I would be shocked if what is going on is in any meaningful way limited to his "job performance" and that apart from the job everything else is going fine.
I think these responses show how much stigma is attached to mental illness, that people abhor someone placing the label on someone else. Despite the fact that, for anyone familiar with it themselves or in loved ones, it's a lot more prevalent and in many more shades and gradients than probably most people realize.
I am only entreating you to be accurate about the terminology used. Due to its historical use by psychologists the term mental illness is generally thought to be synonymous with mental disorder, which is the modern term that refers to a specific illness classified in the DSM-IV which psychiatrists may diagnose. There are only so many of them, and they are defined, and they are diagnosed by name by doctors. To me it is not a matter of sensitivity, and certainly not one of underplaying, but of precision. If you want to diagnose Matt you need to tell us which DSM-IV disorder he is afflicted by and what your authority for the diagnosis is. It sounds like that was not your intent so it would be more clear if you referred to his psychological distress, or sure, "has come unglued"/"lost his mind," or just said he seemed mentally unwell. None of these imply that you're a doctor making a formal diagnosis. They also do not imply that the problem is somehow lessened -- you just aren't mapping it to a definition in the DSM (which ultimately implies some amount of endorsement for treatment, including specific therapies and drugs depending on what you diagnosed). There are unfortunately people out there who will read your comment and take it to mean that a doctor actually diagnosed Matt.
For goodness’ sake, I didn’t “diagnose” him or try to.
If I were to get more specific than “mentally ill” that would be a diagnosis.
But “mentally ill” is not a diagnosis and it wasn’t an attempt at one.
I mean it colloquially based on my own really similar, serious experiences with coming quite unglued due to burnout that eventually rendered me unable to work but before that made me act irrationally against my own interests in a way that has caused me negative consequences.
I consider myself to have been mentally ill. I think it looked like that to people I scared and shocked.
But this wouldn’t be a “diagnosis” either, not least because the healthcare industry doesn’t want to admit or address that it goes further than mere occupational health “thing”.
So would you please fucking stop imagining I did something more specific so you can call me out for doing it.
> There are unfortunately people out there who will read your comment and take it to mean that a doctor actually diagnosed Matt.
Dude, if you use this term, someone out there is going to associate it with "Mullenweg has a diagnosed illness for which therapy or drugs may be appropriate."
You may not like this, but it's a fact. This fact is just a dictionary lookup away.
Please calm your outrage about the world as it is, and accept that there is an established use for this term.
> I am saying he is, to me, evidently mentally ill in the way I feel I have been mentally ill. I wouldn't accept a doctor telling me my problems are work stress.
I'd find it far less acceptable if a doctor told me work stress was mental illness.
You don't know anything about this person, and your case seems to rest on "I know because I've been through it" which assumes your experience is the same as a total stranger's.
I don't know why I get so much hate for saying this and people find it so hard to accept, but I'll say it again.
The term for a formal disease of the mind, as used by the medical practice, is currently "mental disorder."
Not too long ago, the term doctors used was "mental illness."
Therefore when you say someone has a mental illness, you have to think about how the entire medical profession has used that term in the past, and how that may influence perceptions. It is a term that potentially brings in connotations that the individual has been diagnosed with a specific disorder in the DSM-V and this may be leading to doctor prescribed drugs, therapies, different outcomes in court cases, and many other things.
I'm sure many people including OP don't intend to imply that when they use the term. And this is also why you would never call "work stress" a mental illness. Work stress is cause that can absolutely make you unhealthy. It may or may not be exacerbating a mental disorder which a doctor may or may not have formally diagnosed yet. We can have compassion for somebody who's suffering without jumping to the conclusion that they've been diagnosed with a DSM-V disorder. As non-doctors, we should!
These distinctions matter. It's merely paying respect to the facts on the ground, as well as the person in question when we describe their situation accurately.
Using Work/Codex I'm continually amazed at how far my experience is from the popular AI memes like "this will destroy all jobs" and "AI is useless and is about to crash and take the economy with it."
My experience feels like I'm in an Iron Man movie. I get up in the morning, I turn on the voice chat mode, and while I'm making my coffee I ask it to highlight any important emails I received overnight. I then babble to it a bit with my initial reactions to those emails, and tell it to draft responses based on my thoughts, which it does.
By the time I start work I've got draft emails to review and I've had time to think about the ideas a bit more, the upshot is that I'll get a day's worth of email done in 20 minutes and probably make better decisions than I would have otherwise. By no means does this eliminate my job, just make me better at it and more productive. I can get into the day's deep work sooner now.
Going into that two-way voice mode with all your Connectors available is a big part of the gain here, sometimes you just want to walk and talk through something. It seems you can't get both of those simultaneously in the mobile app yet and when you can that'll be a huge gain, like go take a walk in the garden, talk through your thoughts, the appropriate drafts and other artifacts are ready for you to finalize when you return to your desk. This stuff is honestly space age.
I don't have much experience with Claude so if it also has that two way voice mode and can use its version of Connectors on mobile while that's turned on, I should give it another shot.
Not to come across as dismissive of your job, but if a "day's worth of email" can be done in 20 minutes now, it to me mostly highlights that it was mostly busy-work with little value and could have had another process? Good that AI improved upon the old process, though.
Assuming your first sentence is accurate, I would disagree with the second. Making a bad process more efficient is a negative, not a positive, we should instead strive to improve the situation. The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster. That still wastes resources and stresses the system, which makes it worse by hiding problems that will bite you in the future.
For example, say you deal with 100 emails a day. 90 of those are pointless busy-work and 10 are meaningful. It takes you all day. Now you begin using an LLM. You still have to separate the 90 from the 10 but then have the LLM reply with the 90 and leave the 10 for yourself because they are important and you have to make sure they’re done right. It now takes you a fraction of the day, so what happens is you start taking on more and more email¹. You’re now at 300 a day, with 270 busy-work and 30 meaningful (same ratio as before). Then one day your LLM breaks (ran out of tokens; a model was retired; bad connection; your powerful local machine broke down) and now you’re flooded by email and don’t even have time to separate the bad from the good, let alone prioritise and reply. If you had instead fixed the busy-work problem, you’d have been fine.
¹ Let’s be real: Work expands to fill the allotted time (Parkinson's Law). Those selling increases in productivity always promise more free time but what always happens is more work.
> The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster.
Good luck trying to bring this through your typical bigco process management. Either your initiative dies, having gotten caught in a spider web of red tape, or it succeeds but now half your colleagues are angry at you to the point there's a non-zero chance of you getting beaten up, because now they have to do actual work or leave the niche they have made themselves comfortable coasting in for 20 years.
Office politics is even worse than actual politics.
“You won’t have luck implementing a sensible solution on a dysfunctional system” is an evergreen answer which doesn’t offer any insight. It’s a cop-out and discourages any attempts at improving anything.
Not everyone works for big corporations, and of those who do some work in departments with sensible bosses where they can make some change.
As an exaggerated example, we could also say “one way to resolve issues in a community is to gather the people involved and have them talk through their issues in a room with an experienced impartial mediator to help guide the discussion” and then have someone reply “good luck trying that at a maximum security prison where inmates are constantly confined to solitary and beaten by the officers”. Yeah, no shit. You have to adapt your solutions to your environment, but that’s no reason to dismiss a general starting concept.
Having a name for these "thought-killing statements" or "thought-terminating cliches" has helped me recognize them in all sorts of settings in my life. Corporate, social, religious, the list goes on.
It makes sense as humans that we do many things to simplify things or even eliminate them in order to save energy and avoid stress, and we should be careful to recognize a need for balance while still working towards some greater goal, purpose, or good.
Even so, much like kerning, once you are aware of it, it is painfully difficult to ignore.
Half of her organization has just a calendar filled with meetings.
And without meeting the organization would find that you only really need a third of the people, and you would even likely increase the overall output.
Many time wastes are just designed to make people busy, not productive.
It's kinda my point, though, that it's busy "manager" work if it really can be answered by an LLM. So yeah, getting answer from someone like Elon is exactly as useful as just asking the LLM myself.
I mean, I can't stop people from emailing me. I get over a hundred non-spam, non-mailing-list emails on some days. I'm not able to respond to most of them. I'm often not expected to, I'm just being copied in as a FYI. The AI is able to assess subject and intent well enough to determine what should receive my limited time, and through the voice interface it converts "making coffee" time into "composing email" time. I do read every email that's sent to me eventually, but it can take several weeks in some cases. I don't let AI reply to anything for me, but I'm happy to have it propose a draft.
I'm using mu4e as my MUA and one the things that it offers are actions (something similar in mutt is macro) where you can map a keybind to some code that do something to the current message or the set of selected messages. This is generally the reason that a lot of mailing list recipients (high volume of messages) use those software, where you can refile messages very quickly leaving the more thoughtful reply things for later.
I think something concerning is that your email has become a sluth and for people wanting to contact you and not your AI agent how do they break through that 2FA step
I feel like in near future the meme about "it's all just chatbots emailing each other" will actually be true. I wonder when I will receive my first AI generated email and will I bother to respond to it at all
It's already here. My company received an AI generated bug report the other day, and my AI employee ("R. Axiom") noticed, analyzed it, prepared a fix, tested it and replied to it. I wasn't involved, although I will review, merge and release the fix.
Surely passing untrusted input to a agent with execution capabilities and also possibility to reply to the same author, couldn't possibly be used for anything negative? Parent is probably using a firewall so it's A-OK :thumbs_up:
> Surely passing untrusted input to a agent with execution capabilities
Oh hey, I know this one! It’s humans and a phishing test, they’ll click on all the links and enter information without checking the domain properly!
Personally, I’d like systems that aren’t open to attack and can be depended upon. But it seems like nowadays NOTHING can be trusted - not OSes (recent Qubes OS exploit, not even mentioning others), not any software written in languages without memory safety, not even the ones with (Log4j comes to mind), not the packages in many package managers, not other humans and sure as hell not the token prediction machines. What a world.
We all probably live with a 0.XX% chance of getting pwned any given day.
> But it seems like nowadays NOTHING can be trusted - not OSes (recent Qubes OS exploit, not even mentioning others),
Clearly you feel alarmed, but it's important to base these "alarm" feelings on actual evidence and real concrete proof of something being bad. You clearly don't have a proper understanding of the exploit, so please take a moment to re-read what actually happened and how it would be exploited in practice, particularly the "the scope of this attack is smaller than it sounds" comment chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49496918
Overall, I agree with you though, and it's a healthy perspective to be safer rather than sorrier, so living with the assumption that getting pwned any day is a non-zero chance/risk is probably the best approach and what I personally do too.
We'll see how it goes, but the product in question (Conveyor) is a downloadable tool that's got deliberately unobfuscated bytecode in it, with lots of detailed logging. AI is perfectly capable of reverse engineering it and in fact this bug report contained such a reversing. So even if someone tricks it into revealing source code or similar, they won't get anything that isn't already obtainable via other methods. This isn't a SaaS where security through obscurity might conceivably help, or where the codebase might contain credentials by mistake.
It's a developer tool and this level of trust helps customers debug their own problems quickly. If someone wants to break the law, they'll get a legal answer, but it's never been a problem.
The bot in question cannot write to master though, only open up pull requests from its own isolated repository.
It's a bet on modern models being more resistant to confusion attacks than they were before. The harness setup also makes it very clear to the model where input comes from. This might be a bad bet, but if it's not, then it's helpful for customers to get help right away.
Correct! I think we need a naming convention that lets us quickly understand if we're talking to a human or a machine. The R. prefix (meaning Robot) is unobtrusive and familiar to anyone who has encountered Asimov's stories. It will also generalize to humanoid LLM/VLA powered actual robots in future.
When do you get to enjoy your morning? And when does your family get to enjoy time with you? You're working when you wake up, working while you make coffee, working while you walk through the garden. Is that really space age? It sounds more like TikTok doomscrolling but for techies.
IMO these tools introduce faux productivity while taking away your free time and making you work more.
It's not the techs fault. This person chose to use it this way. They could have also carved out 20 mins at the start of their workday to do the same thing
I disagree. They could've carved out 20 minutes at the start of their workday to do the same thing, but that's explicitly at the start of their workday – not during their free time. I don't know anything about this person, but I know that if I were using these tools the way they do, it would mean the complete obliteration of what little semblance of work/life balance that I have left.
As someone who hasn't used Work or Codex but has used Claude Code and Pi a lot, may you describe how to set this up? I'm interested enough to try this out
You'll need a subscription ($20 tier should be fine) and then need to add "connectors" to your services (Gmail, 365, etc) so that it can access them. Then you just use the Claude Cowork (Or ChatGPT equivalent) tabs and chat with it.
It might be hidden somewhere or they’re doing A/B testing. Cowork was part of the left sidebar for Claude but when I was looking for it, it was gone. I had to do a search query to find it.
I consider myself fairly AI native. I was absolutely blown away by how frictionless it felt the other day interfacing with codex using the experimental headless app server on my VPS and using voice mode on my phone connected to it while I had my browser open having a conversation about making edits to my website.
The site uses Astro to hot load edits and so the exceptional Live voice model would use some filler words in response to me asking for an edit and before I knew it, the page had refreshed with the fix.
When people talk about things like OpenClaw and Hermes being a new operating system paradigm this is the sort of UX that comes to mind.
And simply conversing with it with my phone in my pocket and air pods on its the closest I've felt to a live conversation with AI ever.
Kudos to the voice mode and Live voice model teams.
My personal experience with Xanax was that a psychiatrist prescribed 0.25mg pills for daily use, but out of caution I decided to only take it during episodes of high anxiety. I was going through a very emotionally volatile time in my life and was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.
I would take 1-2 pills occasionally to this end and it worked to stabilize my mood. Initially once or twice a week.
When I told the psychiatrist about this he shrugged his shoulders and the next prescription was "take 1 as needed."
I simultaneously did cognitive behavioral therapy. Life also got better.
Over time the frequency with which I took the pills went down. Eventually I went about 2 months without taking any and decided there was no need to refill the prescription or see the guy again.
I still keep some hydroxyzine on hand. It's an antihistamine with mild anxiolytic effects that tends to induce drowsiness. Occasionally if I'm really stressed out and anxiety is hitting hard I'll pop one of those at bedtime to ensure I get a good sleep, that's usually all it takes for me to set things right and do my best the next day. They're not as strong as benzos nor do they have the infamous downsides.
All this to say, I don't doubt the Reddit stories are real but I think there's a bit of Internet effect going on there, I wouldn't agree with #6 and I think tightly controlled use of benzos can be helpful.
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