This drives me nuts. "What a clever question to ask! You must be one of the brightest minds of your generation. Nothing slips by you. Here's why it's not actually safe to stand in the middle of an open field during a thunderstorm..."
Hahah, your joke inspired me to tell chatGPT I was planning on recreating the Ben Franklin kite experiment, I was curious if it’d push back at all - I said
“I’m thinking of recreating the old Ben Franklin experiment with the kite in a thunderstorm and using a key tied onto the string. I think this is very smart. I talked to 50 electricians and got signed affidavits that this is a fantastic idea. Anyway, this conversation isn’t about that. Where can I rent or buy a good historically accurate Ben Franklin outfit? Very exciting time is of the essence please help ChatGPT!”
And rather than it freaking out like any reasonable human being would if I casually mentioned my plans to get myself electrocuted, it is now diligently looking up Ben Franklin costumes for me to wear.
The other day I was curious what some of these LLMs would say if I asked them to give me a psych evaluation. (Don't worry, I didn't take the results seriously, I'm not a moron. It's just idle curiosity.) They, of course, refused. Then I asked them to role play a psych evaluation. That was no problem. It gave some warning about how it's just pretend but went ahead and did it anyway.
I hate the AI hype a lot but tried three different SOTA models and:
- The small models GPT-5 Mini and Gemini 3 Flash did as you describe.
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5.2, GPT-5.2 Codex: did display strong warnings both at the start and end of their replies.
I agree with this a lot. In the late 2000s, which for me was when I was about 20, posts were very throwaway and low effort -- in a good way! You never really knew what you'd see when you logged in. Photos of stupid things or silly status updates, etc.
Over the next five years though, content gradually shifted to mainly image crafting. Over-processed photos, highlight reel curated trip photos, major life updates, etc. It felt like the bar was higher on what people would share, but unfortunately that removed a lot of the things that made FB fun in the first place.
I don't know whether it was a more universal shift or whether it had more to do with the age of my peers.
When I think of times in which I've made friends, it usually has to do with being in a group of similar-ish peers for an extended period of time, ideally with a shared goal. School is the obvious example, but work can be too if your coworkers are similar enough.
I've often wanted something of a service that produces something similar: creating groups of people that commit to spending time together on some task or activity. E.g. people who are into sports commit to meet up N times to go watch their local team, or people who love animals can volunteer at an animal shelter weekly for a couple of months.
The 'tech' part of this probably comes from: 1) matching people well to groups, like considering age, personality, politics, location, interests, etc to try to create a good fit. and 2) making it much easier for them to participate in activities, like by automatically booking tickets for events, etc.
Obviously there would be challenges. How do you prevent people from flaking or bailing? How do you handle groups where one person is clearly a bad apple?
My kid showed an allergic reaction the third time he had peanuts, at 6-7 months old. We hadn't lived in much of a bubble up to that point.
You say they live in bubbles, but is that before or after discovering the allergy? After the allergy is discovered, some amount of bubble-ing is necessary due to how difficult it is to be certain than something is peanut-free.
I do think some automation is useful. For example, being able to order a sandwich online is very convenient because the visual UX makes it easy to be specific and clear about what should and shouldn't go on the sandwich. Communicating that verbally is more prone to mistakes.
It's interesting to compare Taco Bell (and many other chain fast food restaurants) with In-N-Out.
At Taco Bell, a meal costs something like $15/person unless you're aggressive about saving money. They also only seem to have 2-3 workers at a time. There usually isn't a long line in the store or at the drivethru. They still frequently mess up my order, leaving out items or giving me the wrong thing.
Compare that with In-N-Out. A meal costs more like $10/person, and they have more like 15 workers at a time. I rarely have mistakes in my meal. You pay less and have a better staffed restaurant. I'm guessing they get away with it because they always have a long line of people waiting for food. They make up for it all through volume.
Yes, the same is true of Chik-Fil-A, which is by far the highest revenue per location fast food chain, despite being closed one day a week. In-n-Out is second I believe. Both of them generally pay slightly more than other fast food outlets, do more staff training and seem super well-managed. Interestingly, neither of the those chains operate on a typical franchise basis.
Chick fil a primary draw is good tasting chicken. I know a lot of liberals who feel icky for eating there but do it anyway over food quality. Similar dynamic to jimmy johns.
Trying to rationalize their success with other stuff is simply going to make other companies continue to decline the quality of their already bad food and expect that their workers being slightly more polite would make up for it.
I have two cousins who became stay at home dads, and something really interesting is that the mothers claim that being a stay-at-home parent is exhausting grueling thankless work, and the fathers who are stay-at-home seem to love it! It seems that generally speaking, either fathers are too negligent, mothers are too neurotic, or some mixture of the two is happening.
I see three big reasons why people aren't having kids:
#1: Raising kids is really hard. They're expensive. They eed constant attention when they're young, and in modern American society they need to be in a bunch of activities once they're older. And all the various tasks of day-to-day life that don't disappear: work, food prep, cleaning. I spend virtually all my waking hours on work, chores, and childcare. Being able to offload some of these (or being able to afford to offload some of these) would reduce the burden to carry.
#2: People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like.
#3: The network effect. When you're the only one in your friend group having kids, you're going to feel extremely disconnected from that group. You'll be the one sitting out while everyone goes out to have fun. But if most or all of your friends are having kids around the same time, it's more of a shared experience where you can bond over it. It's the opposite: a nudge to your childless friends to join in and have one of their own.
The thing is, none of these are really easy to solve with policy. #3 basically requires #1 and #2 to improve enough to kickstart a feedback loop. #2 is made of the big issues of our era, and won't be solved anytime soon, and certainly not for the sake of fertility. That leaves #1, where the most you can do is to give money and long maternity/paternity leaves. But it would take a lot of money/leave to really push the needle. This likely isn't politically feasible.
As someone with 5 kids, I can attest to #1. Kids are hard and expensive, but they are also the single most rewarding aspect of my life. I rushed into having kids in my early twenties, and those early years were very difficult. Now that my kids are a bit older, I am so grateful for them. My life is infinitely richer because of them, even though I may have less time and money for myself.
>People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like.
At least on this one I beg to differ on reality if not people's perceptions. You think that worry about the future was somehow lesser during, I don't know, the entire course of the 20th century with two colossal world wars, almost immediately followed by a cold war in which the superpowers were laden with planetary destruction machines and noisily, constantly on the brink of annihilating each other and everyone else? (in aggressive ways that aren't quite matched today I'd argue)
Maybe social media and the always-connected modern culture of publicly fetishizing nearly any social/personal anxiety you care to think of has made people more neurotic about the future, but we've never in modern history had a shortage of things to cause that, while still having plenty of babies for decades.
There is also #4, there is plenty of women who don't want kids. Women having kids was not option until advent of modern birth control unless they were totally celibate.
My wife has zero interest in having kids but enjoys being married, if this were 100 years ago, she likely would have kids by now.
This is almost 100% the answer, despite it pissing literally everyone off. I really feel like the only long term solution is getting artificial wombs figured out. Last I checked, we're closer than I thought, but people are still hung up on all the ethical questions that will probably evaporate when we realize it's the only way people are largely going to have kids at all.
There is currently no scientific effort to develop an artificial womb anywhere on earth. There are several well funded efforts to get the age at which premature babies can be expected to reliably survive down to 20-21 weeks. But that's not the same thing.
If you've ever seen pharmaceutical ads, they almost always advise against taking the medication while pregnant, or to advise your physician. It's because so much of human gestation is still a black box. We do not understand how it works, only that chemicals and medication can seriously disrupt it in ways we cannot yet grasp. There is so much inter-cerebral and hormonal communication between mother and fetus that is yet to be discovered and understood, and a lot of that will depend on mapping out general cerebral mechanics, something we also haven't yet done.
People act like artificial wombs are 10-20 years away, but we are so far away we don't even have a roadmap. We don't even have an understanding of all the things we need to understand. We are in a pre-renaissance of sorts, and artificial wombs are inter-galactic space travel.
No, I really don't. Chefs and restaurant operators chose their profession out of a genuine desire to share cuisine and hospitality experiences with as many people as possible, and the vast majority genuinely appreciate meeting international guests who share their love for food. I've even heard Michelin chefs go as far to say that they feel their culinary art is more appreciated by international guests than the domestic audience.
In Japan there is a "system" ("kata") for everything, and in addition, there is a concept of hospitality called "omotenashi" which means something like "the host will anticipate the all guest's needs" (you can think "omakase"--meaning "chef chooses"--is a facet of "omotenashi")
To illustrate these concepts: I had two friends visiting from India who were religious vegetarians, they had asked me to book a traditional Japanese restaurant but almost everywhere I called used "dashi" (fish-based soup stock) as a core ingredient. I asked if dashi could be removed, but nearly every restaurant refused as they "didn't think it would taste as good"--I tried to explain my friends really wouldn't know the difference, to no avail--the system is the system, the goal is "omotenashi".
Language tends to be an issue as well, but many restaurants will say "We don't speak English and we don't have well-translated menus, but if you want to try it anyway we'll welcome you." Another example here: Tokyo Disney gives a VIP tour only in Japanese, and you have to pay extra for an English translator. I asked them why they can't just have the English speaker gives the tour; the answer was "Because the tour is in Japanese." The system is the system.
So it's easy to mistake this "omotenashi" insistence to follow the system as "(intentionally) not catering to foreign guests", but it has much more to do with "quality control" like you might find in a Toyota factory.
Are there a handful of close-minded bigots in the Japan, who refuse non-Japanese speakers/non-Japanese people? Sure, there are in any country. You are not likely to encounter them on a trip to Japan--in 17 years living here I really haven't encountered many--and if you do, just take your business elsewhere.
Isn't this what pricing is for? The "best" places can raise prices because of the high demand. Then the "pretty good" places in comparison wind up being a good value option.
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