I struggle so much with what the allure is for using a chatbot for companionship and I've dealt with loneliness before. Then again I struggle to understand how people become fixated on celebrities or adult actors.
Either one seems so glaringly artificial and transactional it'd be more depressing than loneliness.
People 50 years ago would laugh at the irony of that statement, being made here on what we call the internet. Real life will never be digital, and yet here we are, talking to anonymous strangers many of whom are not actual people.
I considered this too but I didn't think it too ironic considering anonymous pen pals have been a thing since the 20th century at least. Obviously the technology would amaze, but the concept would be understandable and appreciated.
Yeah it's awful and the lack of any sympathy from people further along in their career with kids made it even worse. Everyone thinks it's great but I literally developed depression and anxiety from isolation.
Isn't that kind of how society works? i.e. If a senior employee benefitted from having close mentorship and a strong social network when they were a junior, then they may wish to pay it forward by being present and mentoring juniors now that they're a senior.
Wishing to go to office and make friends is very different from forcing everyone to do so. Many of us remote senior workers have rich social lives and were able to upskill ourselves, without needing coworkers to substitute for a failing social experience.
Begrudging more senior employees for lacking sympathy for younger employees who feel left out by remote work is not the same as begrudging them for working remote. Regardless, I would say it's a fair hypothesis that the vast majority of senior employees now would have reacted negatively to working remotely out of college. My experience and my peers has been that it's a significant negative to working relationships or gaining a mentor which is crucial for younger people. I see no reason why this would not be a universal experience. Studies back this up even before remote work was a thing. One I recall of the top of the dome was that it was actually cheaper over a lifetime in many occupations to go out to eat for lunch with coworkers than packing a lunch because just going out to eat with work peers had an immensely positive impact on promotions and networking. If just going out to lunch does that you can easily extrapolate to what effect not even working in the same place physically has.
I cannot find the exact study that concluded this but here's a recent one making a similar case. I know this isn't the one I've recalled since I read it back in high school. This one speaks to the benefits to the employee and employer.
Your hypothesis that the vast majority of senior employees would have reacted negatively is a projection of your own isolated lifestyle. You yourself noted “I literally developed depression and anxiety from isolation” which is more reflective of your own social issues than it is a representative experience of a healthy lifestyle.
Relatedly the most successful engineers in my social network are those who have worked remote most or all of their careers. It’s not a coincidence that they have more fulfilling social lives and earn more money, when they are able to spend more time with their spouse/kids, learn skills on their own, and switch to higher paying jobs that are not location-bound.
Yes, eating together is great for forming social bonds. A great many of us senior engineers (in my opinion the actual vast silent majority) are able to form social bonds that improve productivity, without needing to go to an office daycare to make fake forced friends.
I feel for your experience. To note, as a field we've long been one of the worst when it comes to depression and mental health (from the top of my head, we're par with teachers ?)
It was brutal before any glimpse of remote work, open offices didn't help in any way.
Some saw remote work as a way out of the quagmire, others like you had it worse.
PS: participation in local communities would benefit both the lonely people and the community.
Yes it seems that this discussion that has sparked such controversy involves an already well defined concept in business.
Net margin versus gross margin.
Net shows profitability after extracting all expenses while gross only extracts the cost of the goods sold. Putting the model training costs into a one time fixed expense provides a much better gross margin.
This is known as COGS reclassification or classification shifting and is a common tactic to mislead investors.
This is why analysts look at Free Cash Flow Margin.
WorldCom and MicroStrategy did this before the Dotcom Bubble imploded.
Why would it not make sense to change your opinion on something based on its origin? Supporting local artists and small businesses is commonplace. How is this not just another extension of that?
How can someone be born in a state that does not yet exist? The statement has the year in it clearly demonstrating the contradiction. One can't be born in the Soviet Union in 1995 or in Tsarist Russia in 1950.
Newtonian physics doesn't just work well enough for education. It provides an incredibly accurate and precise model of the world except at extremes. The majority of engineering does not necessitate using theories of relativity. Both theories are incomplete models approximating reality and are very far from being false.
Why would that matter? You still have to read, understand, and respond. If something is important and specific it takes longer to prompt iterations to generate my response. It's nice for spelling and grammar correction.
Then why are birth rates falling across all income levels in all countries? Please take the time to research your position.
"This perception, however, is false. In most human societies, poverty does not predict higher fertility, and well-to-do families often have the highest fertility. When families in America have more money, they tend to have more children. The stereotype of fertility being skewed towards low-income women is a product of basically two data analysis errors: 1) failure to control for important underlying cultural stratification, and 2) failure to adequately deal with the relationship between age, income, and fertility."
Birth rates are falling all around because access (including knowledge about) to contraceptives has increased over the years. Here in Jamaica just a few decades ago it was a regular thing to see women in poverty with a bunch of kids, and we had a decent birth rate. Today our birth rate is way lower, but I'm pretty sure there's still a lot of sex happening among especially those considered poor. It seems contradictory, but while they don't mind having kids, they'd rather not.
I've started looking at profiles of the non-technical "AI at any cost" people on Reddit and noticed a trend towards AI generated NSFW posts and anime. Unsurprisingly they tend to have zero tolerance towards accepting legitimate criticisms or concerns.
After reading about the blackmail a school system in the UK faced because criminals took a public post of 10 year old soccer players and generated sexual child abuse materials with the real girls faces it's in everyones best interests to not post their children's images until or unless we can regulate this behavior.
"By November 2025, IWF reports of AI-generated CSAM had more than doubled year over year, rising from 199 to 426. Girls accounted for 94% of the victims. Reported cases included children ranging from newborns to two-year-olds, according to the organization.
The ecosystem around these tools is industrial. In April 2025, a researcher found an exposed AWS S3 bucket belonging to South Korean “nudify” app GenNomis containing 93,485 AI-generated images alongside the prompts that produced them."
What more regulation needs to happen? Real or synthetic CSAM is already illegal. Adding another law that is effectively, “Same thing as the previous ones, but this time the generator is a LLM, not Photoshop”.
You'd have to have a model that has never seen children, which is perfectly fine, but I can't see any of those with the resources to train such a model form scratch actually doing so.
Guys, it's always the victims fault. Grift Economy 101. No way to prevent this says Grift Economists for the 928401st time. Better write another check to big business.
Either one seems so glaringly artificial and transactional it'd be more depressing than loneliness.
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