My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh with no electricity, no telephones, little modern medicine. He remembers his childhood as a happy one, even though one in every four kids died before age 5. He’s materially better off in every way here in the U.S. But as to the specific point being discussed here, he had a richer social life with more and more frequent contact with friends and family than most americans I know.
You also can't separate the social media part of this. An expensive cocktail is a cool social media post, Natty light is not.
It is just a much more postmodern world than when I was young. There is a whole level of digital simulation on top of the activity that I never had to think about. The post about the expensive cocktail is the real social activity now.
We may as well be comparing dating on tinder to a rural barn dance in the 1950s. Technology has moved faster than our language as these aren't even the same activities but the words are the same. "Dating", "socializing".
I think you are right but the expectations of young people are up much more.
These are all relative valuations with your pears and expectations. No one cares we are all vastly more wealthy than people living a 100 years ago.
People know how much Jamie Dimon is worth. No one cares they basically have more abundance today than JP Morgan himself.
It is also the difference that when I was in my 20s I had no illusions that I was going to become Michael Jackson or a popular TV sitcom actor since I never danced, sang or acted. Now though you do have that anxiety since people your own age are famous and wealthy from nothing more than network effects.
When I was in my 20s the only people that seemed to have disposable income were drug dealers lol. It was easy to not feel anxiety that I wasn't as well off as a drug dealer.
That is because there has been tremendous stagnation in wages outside of software in the middle. Huge compression between the middle and min wage.
My first job as a cook pays basically the same as what my first processional job pays now. It was a huge win for me at the time and now would have been no raise at all.
I think this is expressed in the jump in housing prices since covid too. So young people have better purchasing power besides for the one thing everyone wants.
As an IT professional I don't have to put up with grave injustices like less than optimal rent seeking for myself and friends.
Whatever decision I come to is basically the results of a science experiment. Of course, the results of the experiment just prove I am always right. If the results proved otherwise then obviously there was something flawed in the method and design of the experiment.
Science is the method that proves what my friends and I thought all along was not just true but to think otherwise proves you are an immoral person. Unlike my friends and I that the experiments prove we are the good guys.
If this wasn't true, my salary would be much less. "the market is always right"
Anyone who thinks cycling of all sports is clean is a total fool.
It is a sport literally built around doping. You can't take things to the Tour De France level and recover from those workouts without drugs. Beating the test is part of the sport.
In the NFL/NBA, drug testing is just a theatrical performance. I know in the NFL because careers are so short, the players basically have a gentleman's agreement that whatever you have to do to stay on the field is fair game.
Cycling though is just such a sport of watts per kilo there is no way around doping being a huge variable.
The stupidest thing to me is every player basically says they will do everything they can to win , no matter what the sport. Everything but the thing that will help them the most in PEDs. For some reason the public just wants to believe this bullshit.
> You can't take things to the Tour De France level and recover from those workouts without drugs.
You absolutely can. However, you will almost certainly be impacted as the days progress, and this doesn't work well for the largest spectator single sport event in the world.
Also, watts per kilo is irrelevant in pack cycling and flat time trials. It only matters on when climbing.
It is especially stupid because there is nothing analogous to Tiananmen Square in the west.
On the other hand, have it write a dirty joke. It just wrote me a few jokes that silicon value wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole.
Not sure about the utility overall though. The chain of thought seems incredibly slow on things that Sonnet would have done in a few seconds from my limited testing.
Actually there is, fire up OpenAI or Claude and ask it for crime statistics.
I did and it lectured me on why it was inappropriate to ask such a wrongthink question. At least the Chinese models will politely refuse instead of gaslighting the user.
I don't know or really care what other people are doing with LLMs.
I have learned so much the past 2.5 years it is almost hard to believe.
To say I am getting dumber is just completely preposterous.
Maybe this would be leading me astray if I had the intelligence of Paul Dirac and I wasn't fully applying my intelligence. The problem is I don't have anything like the intelligence of Paul Dirac.
The wonderful life of a coal miner in 1890 lol. It is just a completely insane idea.