safety1st

I unfortunately predict doom for this group. Statecraft is largely about coalition building and who is doing favors for whom. Without this the wheels simply stop turning, public bureaucracies stop cooperating, private funding dedicates itself to destroying you instead of supporting you. This is never going to change, this is how politics is, it's why parties always form even when we try to prevent them.

The essential factor in whether a state is good or bad for the people at large is arguably whether you can draw a clear line around which sorts of favoritism are permitted and which are outlawed as corrupt, and actually achieve enforcement when people in power inevitably break these rules. A cardiologist, bioarchaeologist and a physicist are going to know nothing about all of this. Their job is to work with the incumbent bureaucrats and elites who hold the real power in that society and those people will almost certainly run circles around them. Fantasyland Reddit politics consists of making aggressive, principled statements. Real world politics is about recognizing you have to deal with a ton of people who are quite frequently awful but because they've managed to cling to one lever of influence or another you can't ignore them. They are moving things in a the direction you don't want them to go every day so what do you do about them? Jail them? Kill them? Buy them off? Cut a deal with them? Make them see reason even though it's against their personal interest because you're just that smart? (lol!) You can't ignore them. It's nothing like the deterministic systems all these people have studied. I wish them luck but I think I know how this is gonna end.

I'm kind of pro AI while also being pro LESS AI.

These are ultimately all software systems where updates can be pushed out with the press of a button. We just found an amazing new tool in the LLM and people are trying out all kinds of ways of using it, many of them dumb or stupid, this is discovery that has to be done, we'll keep doing it and pushing updates.

It doesn't take rose colored glasses really to infer that over time we'll cull the dumbest uses and extrapolate on the best ones. There's a huge difference between using a generic chatbot, even one driven by a SOTA model, vs targeting a specific business task with good guardrails, skills, and tool interfaces that call out to real business logic when the model isn't the right thing. The latter will emerge more and more over time.

We need that too, but the ability to git diff changes to the law is a great win for democracy and transparency in 2026 because git is an interface that agents are experts at using. If you're a journalist, activist or anybody else doing the type of research you just described this makes it faster and easier.

In the present day, mainstream journalists won't be meaningful advocates for democracy and the public interest any time soon. It's time to acknowledge that this idea is wishful thinking. The root cause is changes to the law like the Telecom Act of 1996 which allowed for the consolidation of old media under a few corporations.

For many years these mainstream journalists have been required to support corruption, cronyism, the centralization of power, and the increase of corporate power in order to retain their jobs. The law needs to be changed before they can become a net benefit to society again.

Is this some kind of AI generated karma farm? I didn't mention uppers and have never been diagnosed with ADHD.

Hunh.

My personal experience with Xanax was that a psychiatrist prescribed 0.25mg pills for daily use, but out of caution I decided to only take it during episodes of high anxiety. I was going through a very emotionally volatile time in my life and was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

I would take 1-2 pills occasionally to this end and it worked to stabilize my mood. Initially once or twice a week.

When I told the psychiatrist about this he shrugged his shoulders and the next prescription was "take 1 as needed."

I simultaneously did cognitive behavioral therapy. Life also got better.

Over time the frequency with which I took the pills went down. Eventually I went about 2 months without taking any and decided there was no need to refill the prescription or see the guy again.

I still keep some hydroxyzine on hand. It's an antihistamine with mild anxiolytic effects that tends to induce drowsiness. Occasionally if I'm really stressed out and anxiety is hitting hard I'll pop one of those at bedtime to ensure I get a good sleep, that's usually all it takes for me to set things right and do my best the next day. They're not as strong as benzos nor do they have the infamous downsides.

All this to say, I don't doubt the Reddit stories are real but I think there's a bit of Internet effect going on there, I wouldn't agree with #6 and I think tightly controlled use of benzos can be helpful.

Software engineers need to grow up, at the turn of the century when software was starting to remake the world, they developed an enormous conceit and started believing that the world revolved around their work and they were going to shape it.

It doesn't. The world revolves around economics and politics, just like it always did. It took a decade or two for established institutions to catch up and re-assert control, but catch up they did. In the end that 10-20 years was so brief that in a few generations it'll be entirely forgotten.

Now during that time who knows? Maybe software engineers could have held their ground and used their leverage to influence the political and economic system and turn it into something better. Did they do this? 99% did not. Instead, they coveted cushy jobs at Big Tech where they gave up their freedom and their ability to disrupt anything in exchange for security, and resigned themselves to trying to sound smart in blog posts where they produce grandiose but ultimately sophomoric opinion articles about their industry. No one with actual power could care less about these articles as they follow the rules of power, not the rules of engineering. They own the IP. They decide what "owning IP" even means. Their economy of IP is essentially one of monopolies. That is why everything is basically shit. Read Zero to One and perhaps a few chapters out of Wealth of Nations. The full explanation of "why our software isn't 10x better" will be laid out for you in a weekend.

The software engineers gave up their agency for a salary. Hey, that's fine. That's what 99% of all engineers in human history did. They've gone to work for a government or a big corporation, and let the guys with power keep making the rules. You just did what other engineers did because you ultimately needed to pay bills, take care of your families, etc. You're no different. But software engineers, pretending you are is getting old.

The rebel path where you actually make your own shit is still there. You can start a company. Or a nonprofit. You can donate your time toward building, marketing, and lobbying the government for something better. Because god knows all three of these are needed in spades. Without evidence of that though, honestly I'm tired of software engineers proclaiming something new from Big Tech is going to change the world. It's not. Innovation alone will solve nothing. The guys in charge have put their feet down and you work for them now. A revolution will be required in a pretty literal sense of the term to change this. Using the latest Anthropic models harder isn't going to do shit.

I'm an engineer too. Let's grow up already. Let's either get serious about our conceit that tech can improve the world, or let's resign ourselves to being just like every other engineering profession in the world, getting paid well to obediently build what the investor class tells us to build. You can't have it both ways. Choose your destiny and accept it.

(Fyi - serial bootstrapped open source adjacent founder here, and I made my own decision 15 years ago, one way or another, I'm dying free.)

With all due respect to what I'm sure was a well meaning comment, I think your comment is also an example of why the problem IS hard. Lots of Americans think a vague prescription of "squeezing the richest a little more" is the answer to everything, including apparently declining R&D expenditures. It's not. More clean energy deployments and more social programs are not bad things but they also will not solve this problem.

If we want to fix this there are probably two broad levers that need to be pulled. Notably indiscriminately "squeezing the billionaires" isn't one of them because you want to encourage capital to invest in the US:

1) The US has developed a real problem with production quality/capability, it makes a lot of spam and trash, it increasingly can't make anything at home, etc. The two big trends driving this have been a reduction of competition in its domestic market (i.e. monopolies emerging) and a broad range of policies which encourage US companies to design stuff, license out and have the production done overseas by someone who promptly steals and copies it... hello China. What's needed here to actually make the US economy "great again" are strong enforcement of anti-trust laws and some kind of legal framework where the incentive is to not just design in the US but also build there. This certainly puts limits on what "the billionaires" can do but by no means is it really "squeezing" them or trying to limit what they can earn in the US. You want the capital to get deployed in America but under a legal framework that's aligned with productivity, innovation and job creation as well as profits. This is how you get private R&D going again. The US framework is more "scams and profits" at this point.

2) On the public side, the US formerly had amazing federal support for R&D. This sounds like it should be easy to fix but I don't really think it is. The government is not as healthy fiscally as it once was, and there used to be more public appetite for science and technology related expenditures; Americans seem more enamored with get rich quick schemes than with a STEM education these days. If you're a politician who is going to reward you for supporting big federal investment in long-term, moonshot R&D? Voters won't, the capital class won't. So personally I don't see much of a solution here without a cultural shift occurring first, we need to believe as a society that long term research and innovation can make a more perfect world, but due to the realities of the modern slopconomy we believe the exact opposite.

I think there was a lot of Reddit in the response to my comment. I made an earnest attempt to explain how I perceive the situation, and there are conspiracy theories along the lines of "don't listen to anyone who sounds too thoughtful, they're a Republican plant." I really do fear for our liberties when I see that line of thinking, it could come just as easily from Mao or Pol Pot with the same end result. As someone who didn't vote for Trump I'm always surprised at how much the Internet hates trying to understand the other side of the story. There were some insightful replies which might lead to me revising my understanding, and plenty of junk ones. I didn't really set out to start a partisan war but it unsurprisingly evolved into the usual type of one-sided one. I think you get a handful of better comments generally here than on Reddit but 80% of the discourse is pretty Reddit.

The counterpoint is that the US is producing more crude domestically than ever with more efficient drilling technology:

https://www.oilmonster.com/article/more-productive-wells-spu...

Insofar as I can tell what's really reflected here is a difference between Democrat and Republican policy positions. The Democrats want to minimize domestic environmental impact and be a net oil importer. Let someone else handle the dirty work of drilling. The Republicans are less concerned with the environmental impact and want to increase exports, oil jobs and economic sovereignty. With higher domestic production and less dependence on foreign states, such a large petroleum reserve is unnecessary.

I prefer the Republican position. It sucks to harm the environment. But it sucks more to enable some of the regimes we import oil from. They frequently are not close allies. We frequently end up immersing ourself in wars and other entanglements over this foreign oil. You want to stop the wars, you have to stop the dependence on imported oil. (To be clear I'm not arguing that Republicans will start less wars, or are a more moral party. I am arguing in favor of domestic oil production because it removes a justification for war.)

The Democratic position exports the moral hazard to a place where Americans don't see it. Takes it out of their backyard. But frankly that is an immoral approach which both parties have taken repeatedly and it has undermined the health of the nation. The other case where this takes place at an absolutely massive scale is exporting certain types of jobs to other countries where labor standards are lax, and where slave labor takes place. People out there killed themselves while making iPhone or your shoes because the working conditions in those countries were so horrible. I am willing to pay a little more for shoes and buy a little bit fewer luxury goods so that I don't enable slave labor. Move the jobs back onshore where we can regulate the well being of the workers. We can't control it if it's in another country.

Google.com is REALLY bad right now in my opinion.

The AI answer dominates the page, and is usually wrong, so it's just a waste of the most valuable space on the page.

The ads have proliferated, and rarely have what I need.

Video search results also take up a lot of the page, and are almost never what I want if I haven't clicked over to the Video tab. Again, just a big waste of space.

Speaking of the Video tab its accuracy/relevancy has gotten worse too.

The organic results have deteriorated, and are still competitive, but are no longer clearly and consistently better than Duckduckgo.

So it's duckduckgo as the default for me on all devices now. If I don't find what I want, which is maybe 30% of the time, I switch over to G just by adding !g to the query. G might have what I need in about half of those cases.

You can see why a lot of people just ask an LLM to do the web searching for them.

Across the board, this is all quite bad compared to web search from 10+ years ago.

If there's a single thing which has really pushed me away from Google, it's simply google.com devoting so much of the page to things that aren't organic web search.

Yes.

Over the last 20 years the economy has become dysfunctional. It no longer really resembles a free market; monopolies have established barriers to entry everywhere. And the biggest investors are awash with helicopter money that's been doled out for favors by the political class.

So those investors have tons of cash to burn and surprisingly few opportunities. Even within Silicon Valley/VC there are surprisingly few who seem to really understand the fundamental economics of software. Or perhaps those economics just aren't that important when you have billions of dollars on hand and cash is obviously not going to get you a return. Any whisper of possible exponential growth is worth throwing money at. Crypto? Why not. AI? Why not. Datacenters? Why not. Tulips? Why not.

This is by all definitions an empire in decline. Everything is broken or fake. Everyone is afraid to do what needs to be done. Power forbids it. So we're all just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Our secret police aren't as bad as the late stage USSR's yet, but hold Uncle Sam's beer...

(That's not a recommendation to try and time the nadir, by the way, as it could easily be 50 years away.)

I can certainly understand why YC would fund an idea like this, and it's interesting to read about, but yeah the horizon for it working is surely very long if ever.

A more appropriate scope would be "can any element of a business at all be handled autonomously by an agent in the long run?" because I would buy that product, but I can't think of one.

Andon's real world experiments are a lot more interesting than the simulations IMO. They ran a retail outlet which has burned through 97% of the money in its bank account. A cafe which is well into a downward slide. Some online radio stations which have listener numbers you can count on one hand.

Seems a little insane that they opened expensive physical businesses like retail and a cafe without doing anything digital successfully first. Surely a dropshipping business is easier and cheaper to test out than a brick and mortar clothing store!

So if nothing else, they have a looooong way to go on distribution. I would argue that distribution in particular might be unsolvable with an agent. If your agent can do it why can't a thousand others? At which point the cost of customer acquisition will be driven up by thousands of robo-competitors until it's no longer viable. The robots mutate the problem and the closest real analogy ends up being perfect competition where no one has any profits.

I don't know why I get so much hate for saying this and people find it so hard to accept, but I'll say it again.

The term for a formal disease of the mind, as used by the medical practice, is currently "mental disorder."

Not too long ago, the term doctors used was "mental illness."

Therefore when you say someone has a mental illness, you have to think about how the entire medical profession has used that term in the past, and how that may influence perceptions. It is a term that potentially brings in connotations that the individual has been diagnosed with a specific disorder in the DSM-V and this may be leading to doctor prescribed drugs, therapies, different outcomes in court cases, and many other things.

I'm sure many people including OP don't intend to imply that when they use the term. And this is also why you would never call "work stress" a mental illness. Work stress is cause that can absolutely make you unhealthy. It may or may not be exacerbating a mental disorder which a doctor may or may not have formally diagnosed yet. We can have compassion for somebody who's suffering without jumping to the conclusion that they've been diagnosed with a DSM-V disorder. As non-doctors, we should!

These distinctions matter. It's merely paying respect to the facts on the ground, as well as the person in question when we describe their situation accurately.

Yes, there are.

Dude, if you use this term, someone out there is going to associate it with "Mullenweg has a diagnosed illness for which therapy or drugs may be appropriate."

You may not like this, but it's a fact. This fact is just a dictionary lookup away.

Please calm your outrage about the world as it is, and accept that there is an established use for this term.

Good information, thank you!

I am only entreating you to be accurate about the terminology used. Due to its historical use by psychologists the term mental illness is generally thought to be synonymous with mental disorder, which is the modern term that refers to a specific illness classified in the DSM-IV which psychiatrists may diagnose. There are only so many of them, and they are defined, and they are diagnosed by name by doctors. To me it is not a matter of sensitivity, and certainly not one of underplaying, but of precision. If you want to diagnose Matt you need to tell us which DSM-IV disorder he is afflicted by and what your authority for the diagnosis is. It sounds like that was not your intent so it would be more clear if you referred to his psychological distress, or sure, "has come unglued"/"lost his mind," or just said he seemed mentally unwell. None of these imply that you're a doctor making a formal diagnosis. They also do not imply that the problem is somehow lessened -- you just aren't mapping it to a definition in the DSM (which ultimately implies some amount of endorsement for treatment, including specific therapies and drugs depending on what you diagnosed). There are unfortunately people out there who will read your comment and take it to mean that a doctor actually diagnosed Matt.

I've always wondered about these two. Dunwoody is a retired Army general. Decker insofar as I can tell is one of the suits who ran Yahoo into the ground. As a platform technology company why would you want these people on your board? I could see having the right sort of government suit on it, maybe. I couldn't see "turned Yahoo into an irrelevant hellhole of ads" as relevant experience.

Let's leave the diagnoses to the doctors please. The guy was public about being under a lot of stress and that's fine and salient to acknowledge. But it's misleading to use medical terminology unless you're actually his doctor and have evaluated him following the protocols of your profession.

Which we know you are not -- if you were -- you would be bound by patient confidentiality, and not posting a diagnosis here.

So just say his job performance was suffering and he appeared to be stressed. Don't medicalize it.

I mean, I can't stop people from emailing me. I get over a hundred non-spam, non-mailing-list emails on some days. I'm not able to respond to most of them. I'm often not expected to, I'm just being copied in as a FYI. The AI is able to assess subject and intent well enough to determine what should receive my limited time, and through the voice interface it converts "making coffee" time into "composing email" time. I do read every email that's sent to me eventually, but it can take several weeks in some cases. I don't let AI reply to anything for me, but I'm happy to have it propose a draft.

Using Work/Codex I'm continually amazed at how far my experience is from the popular AI memes like "this will destroy all jobs" and "AI is useless and is about to crash and take the economy with it."

My experience feels like I'm in an Iron Man movie. I get up in the morning, I turn on the voice chat mode, and while I'm making my coffee I ask it to highlight any important emails I received overnight. I then babble to it a bit with my initial reactions to those emails, and tell it to draft responses based on my thoughts, which it does.

By the time I start work I've got draft emails to review and I've had time to think about the ideas a bit more, the upshot is that I'll get a day's worth of email done in 20 minutes and probably make better decisions than I would have otherwise. By no means does this eliminate my job, just make me better at it and more productive. I can get into the day's deep work sooner now.

Going into that two-way voice mode with all your Connectors available is a big part of the gain here, sometimes you just want to walk and talk through something. It seems you can't get both of those simultaneously in the mobile app yet and when you can that'll be a huge gain, like go take a walk in the garden, talk through your thoughts, the appropriate drafts and other artifacts are ready for you to finalize when you return to your desk. This stuff is honestly space age.

I don't have much experience with Claude so if it also has that two way voice mode and can use its version of Connectors on mobile while that's turned on, I should give it another shot.

If you use Android, honestly try Fdroid. It's great. I mean there are obviously huge gaps, you're not going to find banking apps, and there's going to be less polish in a lot of cases. BUT NONE OF THE APPS ARE EVIL.

Fdroid harbors the paradise we imagined in the early days where we just had these little computers in our pockets and didn't have to worry that everything on them was drowning in ads, scams and surveillance.

So if I do think I might want or need an app I immediately go and check on Fdroid. I can install apps from there without fear. If Fdroid doesn't have what I need, most likely I'm just tapping out. I won't use my phone. I barely use it these days when I'm not on the go anyway.

Yes it is wild. Within minutes, what I posted has attracted about 8 different "anti-fascist political extremist" comments all agreeing with each other and attacking me. Once again, Omarchy itself is not political, and the vast majority of coverage isn't either, but there is this... circle? Or minority group that will self-generate a furor whenever it comes up. Through posting volume this small minority can drown all other topics out.

It's important for us to start recognizing and dialing down this extremist political rage from a minority of people that dominates and ruins so many corners of the Internet. Like if you don't like whatever the guy who started the Omarchy project believes in, go donate to the opposite side or whatever, but leave the people who just want to make their PCs cooler alone.

Just to provide some balance here to readers who have never heard of Omarchy before... this comment is totally cracked.

Yes, DHH has conservative political leanings, but the vast majority of people who have tried out Omarchy either don't know or don't care. The project is in no way consumed by politics. The commenter's brain obviously is, and they are seeing everything through that lens.

HN is better when the discourse doesn't revolve around reactionary political extremism. 99% of the energy going into the distro has always been people who liked to "rice" their Linux (make it look cool). If the project has a "soul" it's that. It's also a classic "hacker" thing to rice out your desktop. It's like the modern version of the demoscene. It's fine. It's cool. Sorry if someone hurt you. Now let's move past the political histrionics.

This sounds like another one in those class of arguments that are essentially "We can't let users accidentally harm themselves on the devices they own." While I appreciate ergonomics and sensible defaults, ultimately I don't need you, Google or anyone else telling me I can't do something with my device because it's too dangerous to me. I mean I have a huge F U for anyone who tells me that quite frankly, just as I would if they said it about my car or my kitchen knife. I cleared the age of consent decades ago, I will use what I bought and I will accept responsibility for all of the outcomes. These little poindexter dictator nerds of IT who think they get to control everything about what I own can F right off. I applaud and will participate in any class action lawsuit against them and hope for the maximum penalties to be inflicted upon them.

> If my choices are to look at ads or leave Facebook, I'll leave

I'm reminded of a simple observation about negotiations: the one who's willing to walk away is usually the one with the upper hand in the negotiation.

I think this is a choice we need to be considering on every level right now. What technology are you willing to walk away from? Fundamentally from my perspective the operating system and browser are *user agents,* they are pieces of software I permit to exist on the device I own because they do my bidding. The major manufacturers have perverted these user agents to a previously unfathomable degree under the presumption that you won't walk away and they can just keep on boiling the frog.

I'll walk away, in fact I feel like the more I walk away the better my life becomes. Switching to Linux a decade ago was more than worth the headaches considering what colleagues using Windows now have to put up with. Staying on Firefox + uBlock has been worth the headache vs. what people without a reliable ad blocker have had to put up with. Turning off my phone completely for a growing portion of the day has totally been worth it for peace of mind and freedom of distraction.

At this stage my relationship with technology seems to revolve heavily around the principle "how do I minimize exposure to technology produced by the largest American crime syndicates (Google, Microsoft, Meta etc)." This may be a radical or absolutist view but frankly my life is way better for it

If the agent's changes are terrible, the first thing I would look at is not the agent itself, but the context: spec, scope and prompting.

We generate an AI branch immediately every time a spec is completed. It then gets a brief review in our team meetings when the spec is introduced. We just take a few minutes to walk through what the AI did and take notes on what was insane and what was a good approach.

#1, this informs us about the actual quality of the spec, if the model did something wrong it will often become evident that the reason was an omission, ambiguity or contradiction in the spec.

#2, it saves the developer a lot of time, because in ~3 minutes we've usually established that at least half the code the model wrote was acceptable for use. Dev tasks look more like "Here's the implementation in concept, but pieces X, Y and Z will require your expertise to formulate a cleaner approach." And since AI tends to do a cleaner job at smaller scoped problems, it tends to be a great help to the dev at this stage too.

If anything I feel this process increases quality, not reduces it. It certainly speeds things up. Most major challenges and problems are immediately exposed by the model's proposed implementation. We don't have to wait for the developer's first cut to discover them. They go into the task knowing exactly what to focus on, and having the uncontroversial parts of their eventual PR essentially "pre-approved." The result is where we would have had to do multiple iterations of a feature, they often come back at the very next meeting having totally nailed it.

Right. I actually do the inverse of the OP's advice. As much as possible, pooping is the ONLY time I use the phone.

If the only time you budget for mindfulness is a couple minutes on the toilet, you're doing it wrong.

One third of porn consumers are women. They are hardly immune.

Everyone's tolerance and ideal routine is different.

For me, it's:

- One cup of coffee in the morning, optional tea while it's still light out

- Sunlight exposure within a half hour of waking

- 10-15 minutes reading some fiction

- 10 minutes of meditation

Virtually guaranteed to yield a productive day with a good sleep at the end.

In the evening, both phone and overhead lights get turned off as much as two hours before bed. Reading lamps/spot lighting only. Any screens are dimmed.

Well, let's give the author the benefit of the doubt and try not to regard his article or its ideas in a subtractive fashion either; there's more here than the headline.

There's a lot of woo around meditation and mindfulness, but I genuinely believe that one of the most valuable habits I've acquired is just sitting still for a few minutes in the morning with zero distractions and observing where my mind goes.

9 times out of 10 it tells me exactly what it wants/needs to deal with that day, and if I want to stay emotionally balanced and pursue my deepest callings, I need to follow its suggestion.

If I don't do this I become out of touch with my inner state, less focused, less intentional, and over time, emotionally erratic.

The article's caution about doing this exercise if you have a condition like PTSD is very good advice, because eventually, the real shit you need to deal with will rear its head.

Everything you need for self-understanding and balance is there in your mind, speaking to you, all the time. Most of the time instead of listening we pull out our phones and distract ourselves. Or maybe we do what other people have told us to or follow some other drive.

But if you can and do set all that aside and just listen to the mind from time to time, it's almost a superpower. I suspect that many of humanity's greatest works have come about this way. Someone listening to what their mind just wouldn't shut up about, creating the conditions for hundreds or thousands of hours of flow state, and then just following its lead.