It's currently socially/politically unpalatable for authors to admit superintelligent AI is a possibility. I frequent some writer forums. As a group, they are 1) clearly feeling angry/threatened 2) in denial about LLM capabilities.
Folks working in software can more readily track progress of the frontier model performance.
I met some of my best friends in VR, and had life-changing social interactions in some VR games on the Oculus platform... Especially EchoVR. I'm still a true believer in VR as a medium. It'll go mainstream one day, and there will be a Meta-sized company built upon it.
They had lightning in a bottle and somehow lost it. Honestly it might have been hiring Carmack that sent them down this path. Moving away from PCVR expanded the market, but it also killed the magic. Now the quest store is a wasteland of what look like low budget mobile apps.
Yes, this is my intended meaning. I am a PhD student working on my thesis. After a certain number of hours of doing mathematics or algorithm design, I have to switch to easier tasks like reading papers in a domain I'm familiar with, or documenting code.
While I cannot speak for anyone but myself, my performance on highly challenging tasks is capped at 4-5 hours per day. At that point, it is better for me to switch to lower hanging fruit.
If I am feeling especially inspired, sometimes I'll put in a 12+ hour day of hard work. Rarely, even two or more in a row. But inevitably, I will feel extra burned out in the subsequent days.
The actionable advice in this post:
1) Track where you spend your time
2) Apply deliberate practice to improve where you are weak/slow
I am typically energy constrained rather than time constrained, as I imagine is the case for many working in engineering/science. Yet, the author's advice remains useful. Deliberate practice should provide gains to both time and energy costs of tasks.
For me most productivity advice, including this post, ultimately reduces to "try to get better at your trade, and track your progress".