It is primarily driven by the expansion of the diagnosis itself. DSM-3 Autism (1980) is quite different from DSM-5 Autism (today). We use the same word to describe two different things. Today's autism includes things that used to have totally different names. It also "allows" for a diagnosis much later in life. Autism used to be something very specific and discreet. From another perspective, the rate may not be soaring. That is, many more people in the 1980s and 1990s would be autistic by today's new standard.
Our economy is being propped up by this. From manufacturing to software engineering, this is how the US economy is continuing to "flourish" from a macroeconomic perspective. Margin is being preserved by reducing liabilities and relying on a combination of increased workload and automation that is "good enough" to get to the next step—but assumes there is a next step and we can get there. Sustainable over the short term. Winning strategy if AGI can be achieved. Catastrophic failure if it turns out the technology has plateaued.
Maximum leverage. This is the American way, honestly. We are all kind of screwed if AI doesn't pan out.
The pairing has become almost flawless as well. Years ago, it was slow and inconsistent, but now the hotspot feature is almost perfect and automatic. Honestly, I don’t really think about it anymore.
Monopoly in charge of the world's video content shows users what is most profitable instead of what they want to see. "Content creators" suffer as a result. Brain rot content is real, it's profitable, and it's only going to get "worse".
Does anyone remember the internet before pop-up blockers? Like, right before. It felt like the same thing to me. The internet was infested with pop-ups and becoming borderline unusable, and then comes along the pop-up blocker (and other things, but I'm simplifying here) and there was a "golden age" which is now giving way to a new wave of advertising-based atrophy. Not sure what happens next.
Yeah, I didn't even account for that. Drive enough and you get into an accident. Add all the hours and cost to dealing with that. You'll probably get somewhat injured, even if minor. Physical therapy and healing time. Lifelong back pain. Now you DO need to drive to a gym for physical therapy. More car time.
I also think about how my nutrition has declined DRAMATICALLY with a car. Gone are the days of fresh lettuce and berries unless you drive to the grocery store every day. Gas stations should sell ozempic at the pump.
Issue for me with cars isn't space vs no space, it's the amount of stress, time and money that is wasted in car-centered societies. 20 minutes to work. 20 minutes home. Add another 20 minutes if you do anything else but home to work. That's an hour a day. You've also wasted an hour doing nothing that might have otherwise been spent walking. Now you need to borrow another hour for the gym or some kind of physical activity… and that assumes you don't drive to a gym (one of the the most bizarre things people do). But that's two hours a day that just feels "wasted," and that's a best case scenario. Then there is the cost of the car, insurance, gas, maintenance. The hours that all translates into. Add it all up over the year and you spend like 15-20% of your waking hours dealing with the reality of the car. For some, it's more.
I also feel like a peculiar externality of car-centric society is anger. I get why. You are wasting all your time in the car. You aren't walking. No exercise. Fast food. Parking. I can see why people who are pro-car want space—they are angry all the time. They need space to cool off. There is even a face that I call "car face" which is that kinda pissed off for no reason always in a rush face. People who "love cars" and don't find it "stressful at all" seem to have this face to the max.
> BTW can your neighbor, who keeps saying that he's going to kill you, or maybe your friend, obtain a machine gun?
Definitely. This is America. There is nothing I can do to stop them.
> Would you approve of that?
No, but I don’t really have much of a say in the matter, and that’s kind of the point. I just have to accept it and try to make peace with my neighbor.
Are you suggesting that if your neighbor threatens you that you should just go over and murder them first?
USA says Iran can't have nuclear weapons. Says China can't have modern silicon.
USA only has a limited amount of time left to dictate these things. We are playing with fire before the world order shifts. It is inevitable, and we would all be better off recognizing this and working towards a better future for all of humanity than trying to pretend like the USA is always going to be able to dictate who gets to do what.
> Am I seeing something different than anybody else?
Maybe. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow.
As others have mentioned, the core problem with Meta today is the dark patterns. They move, edit, and remove UI elements specifically to optimize against whatever behavior they want the user to take. I'm always amazed when things end up posted, shared, or alterated in a way I did not intened or can't even remember having taken an action against. Things just seem to happen with Meta products… even for accounts that are idle.
And if you spend enough time with Meta products, you'll start to realize that no two users are guaranteed to have the same experience. There is no standard experience. The experience changes based on region and langauge and honestly who knows what else. They are constantly testing and optimizing for dark patterns in production. Spend an hour with the Meta Business Suite. The entire platform is essentially a dark pattern labyrinth of broken links, broken features, and UI elements that go nowhere or to deprecated functions. One team is trying to get you do X and use feature Y, and another team is trying to get you to do Z and use feature W. Business Suite just mashes it all together. You could freeze the codebase today and study Business Suite for months and you'd find that it's dark patterns all the way down.
No people, no supply chain, and no total lack of environmental regulations mean most manufacturing jobs are not coming back no matter what the tariffs are. It's not just one reason that the manufacturing jobs have left, but a conflation of reasons.
Unless… well, unless you eliminate the EPA, invade Canada and Greenland and take their raw materials, and make people so poor that they take up factory jobs again.
Courier will only pay the tax if it's a DDP solution, and then bill it back to the actual merchant. FedEx, DHL, and UPS provide this as an option. If it goes USPS, or no DDP solution is in place, it's going DDU and it will simply be stuck in a sufferance warehouse or at the local post office until the recipient comes in and pays the bill.
This is an interesting idea, and I am actually curious what Apple is going to do going forward. A "Snow Leopard"-esque release would be nice, but I think what would be better is an LTS release. Historically, you get a new Mac and you usually only get 5-6 years before they drop your model from the latest release. This has always made some sense to me, as after 4-6 years, you do start to feel it.
I bought an M1 Max that is now almost 4 years old and it still feels new to me. I can't really imagine a change that would happen in the next 2 years that would make this thing feel slow where an M3 would feel sufficient, so I'm curious to see if Apple really does just go hardcore on forced obsolescence going forward. I have a few M series devies now, from M1 to M3, and I honestly cannot tell the difference other than export times for video.
I can imagine some kind of architecture change that might come with an M6 or something that would force an upgrade path, but I can't see any reason other than just forcing upgrades to drop support between M1-M5. Maybe if there is a really hard push next year into 8K video? Never even tried to edit 8K, so I don't know. I'm guessing an M1 might feel sluggish?
Gmail search doesn’t work well either. It simply doesn’t find things. Almost as if they have stopped indexing and repurposed resources towards LLMs.
And whatever there is left to index and search has been completely overrun with slop.
Search is over. Internet as we knew it is over. Something new has emerged in its place, and we are still calling the new thing the old thing.