It's happening! We can see it! The future is somewhat legible and in it we don't all die! (Well we do, but mostly for the usual reasons)

We just gotta keep getting out of bed and making a smart choice or two between now and then!

In that sense Altman and Dario et. al. were extremely successful in their cringeworthy campaign to establish themselves as priests of a new machine god religion. Even the people who don't want it believed them.

The good news is at least this year companies are starting to get a little more thoughtful about why they're paying for AI and what specific business function it serves.

Realities:

1. AI is a tool. You don't replace a job with a tool, just like you don't replace an apple with a sock. It was always an error of classification to think this way.

2. AI is a useful tool. For every CEO who thinks it justifies mass layoffs, there are dozens of people who don't want to admit that it does have a lot of utility. Anyone who isn't figuring out where this tool can make them more productive will have a hard time down the line imho.

3. We can infer from the priors that jobs will continue to be a thing, just like they still were after the inventions of printing presses, cars, power looms, etc. but there will be some pretty massive churn, some roles maybe disappearing entirely, new ones getting created, same goes for skill sets.

4. Businesses will use this churn to the best of their ability to either reduce costs or increase output. That second part is the key the AI haters don't seem to recognize. Thanks to competition, not every business wants to just fire everyone. Yeah, America's financialized and monopolized and less competitive than it used to be, but still, plenty of businesses will repurpose their budgets to produce more and expand.

So in terms of real specific and concrete things I've seen so far.

If you're in customer support that's a pretty rough spot, a well designed RAG system can turn 20 minutes of research into 20 seconds. Customer support budgets flow downstream from actual usage/customer base so if they can do more with less people will get laid off, they don't expand scope, they automate and cut the budget.

If you're a developer, your position's a lot more secure than that, coding agents are pretty incredible but they are simply not at a point where they can think through architectural decisions, and they occasionally go off the rails and trash everything. These things need to be operated and steered. Yes that's 100% the future of the profession and I'm sorry if someone doesn't like that, being a blacksmith who forges metal things by hand is also very niche these days, kind of sad if you loved blacksmithing but it happens. Devs also have to be aware that a PM/product owner can likely do some of their job now and I think any dev whose preference was to avoid thinking about customer or business requirements is going to find his utility is shrinking. A mass shrinking of the profession is unlikely but things will change and the only rational paths forward honestly are to retire or to figure out now how you fit in, it's a career opportunity if you get ahead of the curve even.

Lastly there is a whole other domain now which for lack of a good term I'll refer to as "prompt engineering," it requires some level of systems design thinking, but basically no programming expertise. The best candidate for this work is a person who possesses business process knowledge as well as systems oriented thinking. Maybe these jobs will end up finding a home in the IT department or something. As an economy we're barely recognizing them yet but I see that in engineering we can increasingly implement places for a prompt input, and then hand some workflow/business domain decisions off to someone who understands them better and they just tweak their prompts over time to get a great system. Pretty sure new jobs will be created and formalized around this over time.

So this is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, and the conflict of interest is obvious; Google paid for this article because they want to preserve their own anti-competitive monopoly position.

It's unfortunate that this is where we are with American business in 2026, basically one mafia taking shots at another, but that's what you get when the government gives up on enforcing the law.

It's a given that the SOTA models need to raise their prices. It's also a given that they can't. The more they raise the more customers will move to their competition.

So what happens next? Well I think it will suck horribly if you can't move off of SOTA sooner or later, because the Big Two are going to lose customers, and therefore have to raise prices on the locked in customers even more than these projections suggest.

Beyond that if you're looking to start a business, figure out how to use cheap models in new scenarios. Build software which does that and license it. This is kind of contrary to the idea that you shouldn't over optimize for deficiencies in the models that will likely go away in the next generation - for instance a lot of problems were solved when context windows got way bigger. So it's a thin line to walk but I think it's there because a lot of orgs are using Claude today for pretty basic tasks.

The dev who's addicted to SOTA models honestly is going to have to settle for less or get totally screwed. Most applications within business from what I see aside from complex research do not require SOTA. They summarize, they classify, they transform, and doing that accurately has been cheap for a while.

It was a public high school in the USA. It was in a rich neighborhood on the other side of town; our neighborhood was below median income and had one of the worst high schools in the state. My parents encouraged me to apply for attendance at the school across town via a magnet program. I got in and took a public bus 80 minutes each way for 4 years.

I'm not relating this in order to validate precisely what my Privilege Index was. Rather to relate how public investment in resources which were available to anyone who was willing to make a bit of extra effort transformed at least one kid's life. It seems these days that public resources go mostly to those with the most money, or maybe those who were born into the politically correct group du jour, but almost never to the random kid who just wants to take a shot at doing something bigger.

I'm glad I was born when I was. Public policy has changed, that magnet program is now gone, that rich kid school is now for the rich kids only, and it has gone to the dogs in terms of academic performance.

The first was that my father purchased a PC in the early 1990s to help out with his self-employed publishing business, and like most PCs of the time, it came preloaded with QBasic and the source code for a couple of games like GORILLA.BAS that an introverted kid with a lot of free time could mess around with.

The second was attending a high school with a reasonably well funded computer lab and an unusually open minded computer teacher. If you demonstrated that you were dependable, he'd basically let you do whatever you want. While my school was mostly a Mac shop, I was a bit of a Microsoft shill in high school so by graduation I'd figured out how to stand up and run a Windows NT file & web server for our school newspaper. Another guy was a Linux nut and had been allowed to do something similar with RedHat for the school's drafting lab.

Inclination met opportunity, one thing led to another, and I went on to work with technology for the next 25 years of my life.

What worries me now is that so much technology is so locked down. It must be a very rare school today that allows the kind of freedom we had. There is no IDE preinstalled on a phone, and even merely installing an "unapproved" app is under fire.

If for no other reason, for the sake of the kids the industry, the tools, the operating systems need to be more open. They need to be tinkerable. That's how the most motivated kids tend to learn. Our best and brightest are not being made because we've closed things down to maximize some hedge fund's ROI somewhere. The financialization of America was a grave error.

If I had a larger home, a dedicated den or study room would be a pretty high priority for me. I want my office to be a minimalist, businesslike space with no distractions that focuses me on the screen where my work happens. But the study is a place for clearing my head, thinking and reading, more about comfort, dimmer lighting, familiar objects, and no screens unless I bring in a small e-reader.

There's already a lot of support out there, in both public opinion and the law, for the idea that if I pay for something physical like a device, I own it. Any substantial alteration in its functionality, especially a reduction in what it can do, requires my consent. Reduction in what it can do should require my consent. Just because tech made it possible for the manufacturer to brick my phone or my car, start charging me extra for certain features I already paid for, or block the apps the OS vendor doesn't approve of doesn't mean they should or that it's even legal to do so. Additionally once I buy the device the vendor has zero business telling me how I can modify it, or whether I can repair it.

I own the thing I bought, fucker. It's my property and I have property rights. The corp has no right to steal away part of the thing I bought or change the terms after the fact. It's potentially criminal if they try.

This framing resonates with a lot of people.

The guy who really exemplifies this positioning at the moment is Louis Rossman and by focusing on these widely understood and popular concepts, he's gained the ability to direct an enormous amount of attention to an issue. He can absolutely swamp a legislature with letters from angry constituents for example when he gives an issue visibility.

Frame it as theft because it is. If they push an update without my consent that removes functionality or sabotages my ownership of the device, it's theft. At the very least product liability laws should apply. Some part of what I bought stops working, that goes to product liability. But I'd take it a step farther and say we're dealing with straight up theft.

Really? I'm a total amateur when it comes to doing anything with local models but I tried a few in this range using ollama at this point, and they didn't seem to know much about anything, and I couldn't figure out how to get them to search the web or run other tools, so that was where the experiment ended.

A small local model that can use bash would be a bit of a game-changer for me.

There is a relevant concept in psychology called activation energy, James Clear provides a good introduction to it. Certainly in recent years screens seem to be incentivizing more stay at home behavior. People used to not own a TV, many quite intentionally, before our other screens were invented. But it is a very complicated topic.

Needless to say everyone starts talking to each other after a drink or two. This bar is enormously popular. I've never seen it not be packed. It's an incredibly successful strategy for them. With all the complaints about the death of third spaces, I'm baffled that more places don't do this. I see no reason a cafe couldn't do it as well.

All this to say I think it's a great loss that younger people aren't going to bars as much. I wouldn't say they're the best way to form deep connections, but I have zero fear of ever lacking random social interactions, because I know I can just go to a reasonably busy pub in the evening, sit at the bar, and sooner or later either I'll start a conversation or someone else will. It's also a great way to get good at handling opinions that are different from yours - if you have a thin skin or live in a bubble, being subjected to drunk people from every walk of life will rectify those issues quickly lol.

I haven't looked into voice/dictation yet. I'm dumber when I talk and smarter when I type so while it's super cool I imagine the net productivity gain may be a little overstated. Probably pretty straightforward with OAI's API.

I would dispute this. They just use tools that most Westerners are not familiar with. Take a look at how most of Southeast Asia's economies are organized, and at the top, you'll find a whole lot of Han Chinese families. In many cases these families emigrated generations ago, put a fair degree of effort into keeping their bloodline Chinese, still build shrines to their ancestors, and still maintain deep ties to the mainland. Dhanin Chearavanont, who runs the largest monopoly in Thailand, is Chinese-Thai and holds Shenzhen's Foreign Investor license #001. Probably half of the Cambodian economy is Chinese-owned at this point. The list goes on.

The Chinese do it through family and blood and assert a lot more control than most Western onlookers realize (but Southeast Asians are well aware). Outside of an invasion every few decades, the US exerts a weaker level of control on a greater number of countries. US military influence crumbles once they leave, whereas Chinese family influence endures for centuries.

The model will get full access to your data, but in the name of security, you will only be permitted to have data that is cloud-hosted; local storage will effectively just be cache.

The era of the general computer will end, and the products you purchased from these companies will be nonconsensually altered and limited.

I'm so glad I switched to Linux more than a decade ago. At least on the PC there will still be an open source ecosystem for a long time to come, it may have less features but I'm willing to accept that.

Knowing that they can change what you bought overnight with a single nonconsensual update, think very, very carefully about who you purchase all of your future technology from. Google's upcoming nonconsensual degradation of Android should be a lesson for everybody.

    Enable Developer Mode ↗ by tapping the software build number in About Phone seven times

    In Settings > System, open Developer Options and scroll down to “Allow Unverified Packages.”

    Flip the toggle and answer a scare screen confirming that you are not being coerced

    Enter your device unlock pin/password

    Restart your device

    Wait 24 hours

    Return to the unverified packages menu at the end of the security delay

    Scroll past additional scare screen warnings and select either “Allow temporarily” (seven days) or “Allow indefinitely.”

    On the next scare screen, confirm that you understand the risks.

    You can now install unverified packages on the device by tapping the “Install anyway” option in the package manager.

We can and do have public nuisance laws which kick in when an individual is impinging upon the health, safety, comfort etc. of other people. This exists in jurisdictions all over the world for all kinds of things, the penalties are usually minor and applied only to repeat offenders. It is completely reasonable for someone to support the idea of these applying to marijuana use, in fact, in most jurisdictions where marijuana is legal, they probably already do. Yes, repeatedly stink up your neighbor's apartment and you may get a warning followed by a fine, deal with it. Your parent is not a Nazi and is not throwing stoners in prison. Perhaps go touch grass instead of smoking it now and then.