I think this one might be super interesting for its entertainment value, but there has been some strong criticism as to its credibility. For example, here's a pretty comprehensive debunking from The Skeptical Inquirer: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-telepathy-tapes-...
Do you think if you're in that kind of situation, where you are dying on a beautiful mountain, you would have it in you to appreciate the beauty around you? I was imagining it to be more like a cold, painful death rather than a nice end where you appreciate the mountain air.
Of course the distinction itself is important in its own way, but I think/hope everyone here fully realizes and accepts that he technically donated as a private individual. You can clearly see it from the headline - it does not say "Mullvad VPN AB is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party", after all. For those who have an issue supporting Mullvad after this, that is unlikely to be the point of contention. The issue seems to be simply in this case, some people clearly find the private individual's actions objectionable enough to not want to support a product that individual is deeply associated with, profits from (and then funnels those profits into said actions), etc. Fixating on this being done as a private individual just comes off like a bit of a deflection attempt from a pretty straightforward case of individual actions having consequences.
I started doing this after moving to a university town at the end of 2024. Just taking random evening courses that sounded interesting. Having never studied past high school, it's been excellent! My first ever course was on nuclear weapons and disarmament and it was fascinating - we had professors with such a huge amount of experience researching and working directly with disarmament negotiations, policies, inspection missions, etc. Then it was a biology course with the most passionate teacher I've ever met. Last term I took a cosmology course and learned a ton about cosmology from different perspectives. My professors have all been great in the few courses I've done so far, and I don't pay attention to other students so much aside from when necessary for group work.
Mm if I had to actually see myself dying, probably not. If I could just get a letter with the information, as with a short story I read once, probably yes. Assuming the expiration can't actually be changed. If it's not set in stone, that would probably be too stressful to live with.
I sometimes get emails and blog comments like this and always love them. One of my favorites was a comment last year, left on a 15 year old post about building my first gaming PC. I love how the comment said it was a "really fantastic build for the time". Something about "for the time" made me feel so retro :D
> What are your philosophical thoughts on paying a subscription to get your work done?
I've paid for subscriptions to get work done for years. Educational materials, IDEs, source control tools, debugging tools, etc. I don't think the fact that you're paying for a subscription is the real potential worry here, right? It's more about the effects of using this particular tool.
I have observed this in myself when I began to over-leverage AI in my workflows. I've since become more deliberate with what kinds of tasks I will use it for, although I still slip up.
With writing:
Things like brainstorming a plot line for a book with a custom GPT or Claude project that has all of my prior books in its knowledge? Works great.
Things like asking it to write a paragraph or chapter for me - I can rapidly feel my own writing skill, motivation, vocabulary, and ability to grasp/remember the resulting plotlines deteriorating. I don't use it for that anymore.
With studying:
I've been taking a couple of evening uni courses and the thing I found so great is that I've been forcing myself to think through the problems, and take my own notes in every lecture. I may then still get ChatGPT to help explain and reason through some of the concepts with me. And I have it review and 'grade' my assignments. But I refuse to ask it to start drafting answers.
With programming:
This one is tougher. When I am not very personally invested in a problem or codebase it becomes too easy to offload more parts to Claude, and when the company encourages 'vibing' to speed up velocity and you're reviewing and writing a higher influx of lower quality PRs, investment goes down. I still sometimes catch myself committing solutions I only _mostly_ grasp and the rest is hand-waving. A big part of it is a work culture thing.
For my own projects I make sure to understand and have a back-and-forth with the planning agent for each task, or write the first plan myself to go off of. When it comes to producing the code, I have to admit it is much easier to properly review parts of the codebase I am extra interested and knowledgeable in (backend in my case). The frontend I'm less well versed in and also admittedly less interested in, so I do sometimes fall into the trap of "Ehh it works, just commit it" with the goal of doing a thorough quality pass before actual release.
With all of the above, I can feel my ability to think, plan, reason, focus (and my vocabulary) suffer if I go over the line too much into agent offloading. For me keeping that balance is as much about maintaining my own long-term brain health as it is about producing good output. I imagine younger people growing up with AI today won't even know what that more capable (in my opinion) brain state feels like - to them, the AI-using brain will be the norm.
I'm not sure what the take-home of this message is since you can replace "AI" with just about anything... "If you use a keyboard to do your work, you can be replaced by someone else using a keyboard to do your work." Sure? You can always be replaced by someone/something that can do your job better.
For me the small screen is fine as long as I can maintain the mindset of this being a _drafting_ tool, not an editing or structuring tool. I generally don't need to see more than a couple of sentences at a time, and my drafting process is almost stream-of-consciousness as I just focus on getting the words out. If I needed to navigate more to edit or regularly reference prior sections, the small screen would be a hindrance.
I post a lot of notes on my personal blog. From lectures and such. I use AI to proofread the notes I took during the lecture. Other than that it outputs them in exactly the same lecture-dump format that I take them in, and then I edit them into a structure that makes more sense and add further reflections etc myself by hand.
For me, the point of taking and posting the notes is to solidify the lecture in my mind, think about it, etc. Using AI for too much of this process would defeat the purpose.
My team was recently laid off, myself included. Before formal termination my employer had to negotiate with my union and run everything past them - from a potential exit deal (which I opted not to take) to the whole layoff procedure and new organizational structure. This is to make sure it was all by the books and I was getting everything I was entitled to. We have no collective agreement, but any employee who is individually part of a union has this right.
Some employers (completely non-maliciously, I should add!) simply don't know all the relevant labor law either, like summertime vacation entitlements, how the employee is allowed to search for other work during the notice period, unemployment insurance stuff, etc. It made a stressful situation much better for me knowing I have someone who knows this checking everything and advocating for me.
I keep seeing people say "unions won't work" in other countries. Who knows, maybe they're right. I'm just glad I don't live in one of those, I guess.
That seems like a really tenuous connection for him to make if that's what he's doing. I find it difficult to believe that ambitious people outside of a certain niche would refuse to come to the US because of perceived lack of AI progress. They'd refuse/are refusing to come because of the US's increasing hostility to outsiders, cutting of research funding, and subpar living conditions.
Not about sleep learning but lucid dreaming in general: I have long been puzzled and disappointed that we are not pouring more research, interest, and funding into controlling the induction of lucid dreams. There are ways to learn to do it now, but they are slow and unreliable. Gadgets exist but they're fringe - there is no great lucid dreaming movement like there is with longevity, for example.
I would have thought in a society where we want a gadget or magic pill for anything and everything, our interest in this would be through the roof. You can live a whole other lifetime in a dream, either your own or of some other character or world you step into. You can replay the past see the future, countless times. Controlled lucid dreaming seems like the closest we will likely ever get to immortality. Why aren't we more bullish about facilitating it?