Ehh, I grew up in the suburbs in the 90s. We were fine. I would hang out with the neighborhood kids unsupervised all day long even when I was single digits old. The issue is with American culture and how it shifted into a low trust society.
I think the parent is saying what you had is now not possible, because the neighbors don’t have kids. I’m in the burbs. Nearest kid is 4 door downs. Nearest kid the same age as my kid is two blocks over. Most people are 60+.
Anecdata but I think this is what the parent comment is asserting anyway.
Yeah, homeownership within young families is ridiculously out of reach, which makes “young suburbs” a difficult thing to maintain. Anecdotally, we are a young family and there’s very few other ones in the neighborhood that are in the similar boat as us.
As compared to what I heard from the older neighbors, when they had kids, all the others around also had kids. So many in fact that all the neighbors had doors in their backyards that opened into all the other neighbors yards, so the kids would just run around without having to go into the streets.
This is honestly great, I’m especially concerned about my parents as they get older. Though I am curious in the side effects. The flu shot now makes my arm ache. The Covid shot makes me extremely sick for a day though I am willing to pay the price compared to being really sick when I get Covid.
I rarely used Codex compared to Claude because it was extremely slow in GitHub copilot
. Like maybe 2-5X slower than Claude Sonnet. I really wish they just made their models faster than “better”
Very interesting to see the range of peoples' preferences. I would almost always prefer smart over fast; I have all my LLMs to be all-thinking-all-the-time.
GPT-5 was recently updated to make it more "thinking" and "warmer" or whatever and now a task (semantically compare these two short files) that used to take 5 seconds and reliably produce useful and consistent output now takes 90 seconds to "think" (while it's thinking output makes it pretty clear there is zero thinking happening) and produces a completely differently structured output every single time, making the tool not only slower and more expensive to use, but worse at a simple task that LLMs should be very good at.
There's an option to "get a quick answer" and I hoped clicking that would revert to previous performance and instead what it does is ignore that I uploaded two files and asks me to upload the files
Literally the only real good task I've found for these dumb things and they still found a way to fuck it up because they need to keep the weirdos and whales addicted. It's now almost easier to go back to comparing these files by eye, or just bite the bullet and finally write a few lines of python to actually do it right and reliably.
It’s a balance, I haven’t felt like codex provided anything that Sonnet 4.5 didn’t. Why wait longer for getting the same results.
Though that does bring up an interesting point. Anecdotally, Sonnet does a lot more grep-ing while Codex reads files straight up. Might be the difference in speed and maybe smarter models will do better. Once this model is on copilot, I can test it out.
That does not make business sense though. If people want to use Open AI models in Copilot and other tools and they dont perform they will just switch to another model and not come back they are not going to use Codex.
I wonder if there is a third option. Partner with someone like Pine64 and release your own watches. I find it hard to believe that the market is that big to begin with. If you have a small batch that can attract the tinkers and engineers like us, it’ll be a self fulfilling cycle. More users, more contributors, more income.
I understand what you’re saying but it’s a difficult balance. Not saying everything needs to be regulated and not saying we should be full blown neoliberalism. But think of some of “social” laws we have today (in the US). No child marriages, no child labor, no smoking before 19, and no drinking before 21. These laws are in place because we understand that those who can exploit will do the exploiting. Those who can be exploited will be exploited. That being said, I don’t agree with any of the age verification policies here with adult material. Honestly not sure what the happy medium is.
I already wrote “over 18”. AI is already regulated, you can’t use it if you’re under 14/18. But if you want to ask ChatGPT “what’s the meaning of everything” or “can we have digital children”, that’s a personal choice.
People are weird… for someone who is totally alone, having a virtual wife/child could be better than being completely alone.
They’re not using ChatGPT to do anything illegal, and already regulated, like planning to kill someone or commit theft.
I'm of the opinion that should be unregulated as well. Just like you say, what's important is people's awareness and understanding of the tool and how it works underneath.
I would argue the fragmentation is a feature, not a bug. Part of the “free” is to be able to do whatever you want. There’s a price to pay for it but unifying requires discipline and governance. And governance requires authority. And the whole point is we can write whatever the hell we want.
I'd argue that fragmentation is also a symptom of a lack of truly high-quality solutions, where people keep reinventing wheels because they think they'll solve problems in the existing solutions (and end up creating a different set of problems).
Having a group of people come together and agree on some structure (i.e. governance) doesn't take anybody's freedom away. But such a group could hopefully achieve more than all the "lone wolves" or small teams on their own.
I think the big difficulty is that every person has their own taste and preferences when it comes to the desktop UI/UX and doesn't want to contribute to something that is somewhat different from that. It's easier for a company / organization which can hire people. The payment makes up for any small misalignment of ideas.
But the article also talks about compatible interfaces, so all those fragmented projects could be used together in a meaningful way.
One of Henry Ford biggest push was for a 5 day work week when no one else did it. Why? Because it meant workers had two days of week to spend money which increased consumer spending and look at the US today. Our consumer spending is about 2/3 of our GDP spending. I'm not saying you're wrong. But there's more to "drive your workers to the bone means we get better productivity and economic conditions". The biggest mistake the US is making is not capitalizing harder on onshoring + robotics.
On the flip side I would argue that European countries have largely fell flat or negative because employment law is too generous and it forces companies to be too cautious in hiring. I don’t know what the right balance but I am not sure going for even fewer hours is the right move.
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