Anyway, it's not even that. The article focuses on global metrics -- which basically means poverty reduction in China, India, Africa, etc. I don't doubt that life in those places is better than ever, and in fact, having travelled quite a lot over the past twenty years, I can personally vouch for it.
What definitely hasn't gotten any better is life in the US and Western Europe over the past twenty years. 2015-2025 was a very bad period for the US in particular.
The generous interpretation is that was a jolly quip about those that confuse global averages with immediate specific locations.
For example, some might forget about hemispheres and assume January was globally meaningful when some of us are going through a tarmac melting heatwave.
Life under a rock is generally stabilised - warm during the night, cooler than direct sunlight during the day .. that's why goannas and perenties live in tunnels under rocks.
At this point they should really do away with the peace prize, or dramatically change how it's granted.
As things stand, it's frequently a complete debacle. (Of course in 2025, but see also, e.g., Abiy Ahmed.) Or an embarrassment. (Too many examples to list.)
They ought to either cancel the thing outright, or invert the usual Nobel Prize rule and only award the peace prize posthumously. That would solve every problem.
One month, a vain, vindictive, mentally unstable, and heavily armed parent who tirelessly lobbied for the award and lost begins physically threatening and menacing their neighbors, declaring that if they won't be recognized as the best parent, then by god they'll just take what they're owed until they feel they've gotten what is "psychologically needed for success."
In that scenario, I don't think focusing on reform of the office politics and favoritism of the PTA award is the most productive use of time.
This analogy would work if 2025 were an isolated incident. But the award has been a joke for a very long time, if not actively harmful, and recent events make such a mockery of its founding premises that it's simply too much to bear. What if the "parent of the month" award were perpetually mired in controversy? I think it would be fair to reconsider the thing.
The Obama prize was a problem that haunts the committee. I agree
But you are simplifying greatly. He got it because he reached out to Arabic leader to lower the tone set by George "crusader" Bush.
"The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the award on October 9, 2009, citing Obama's promotion of nuclear nonproliferation[2] and a "new climate" in international relations fostered by Obama, especially in reaching out to the Muslim world."
Either way. Stating that you don't care about world peace because you didn't receive a prize. It is a bit childish. I would not let guy near something that requires responsibility. You win some you lose some. Get on with life.
The problem here is that Trump believes that the Norwegian government has any say in what a private organisation is doing, and - to be frank - just shows that Trump is a tyrant who wants everyone to use illegal force to please him.
They would be The Norwegian Nobel Committee, who at this point should realize what a disaster their prize has been, and not only last year. It was inherently poorly conceived, and shouldn't be awarded to the living, who can and do go on to wage war, agitate social instability, and act against the interests of peace.
Having a situation where a president demands the peace prize otherwise he causes a war isn’t a good look for Nobel, and shows that we’ve now moved so far from the original intention of the prize that the peace component really should be scrapped.
> isn’t a good look for Nobel, and shows that we’ve now moved so far from the original intention of the prize that the peace component really should be scrapped.
I don't follow. Are you saying the committee should have known that Trump would literally wage a military war if he isn't awarded the peace prize? Are you saying if they changed their mind now and allowed Venezuelan politician Machado to gift her prize to Trump, that Trump would no longer have a desire to own Greenland? I'm honestly trying to understand but maybe I missed an important story.
Well it should be apparent that Greenland is the sovereign territory of another NATO member, Denmark. Coming along like a transactional narcissist and claiming you “need it or else” and breaking nato over it OR you get the Nobel peace prize for not capturing it.
Right! Either scrap it, or award it only to (A) those recently deceased who have devoted their lives to making peace, or (B) defunct organizations who have completed their mission and had operated in the interests of peace.
Giving a "peace" award to living people/organizations -- who can and do go on to sully the award with most unpeaceful deeds -- is a proven failure.
> Right! Either scrap it, or award it only to (A) those recently deceased who have devoted their lives to making peace, or (B) defunct organizations who have completed their mission and had operated in the interests of peace.
The legal trust for all the Nobel Prizes state (AIUI) that they can only be awarded to living persons.
The only option would be to not award it (like happened in 1948).
I just canceled my $200/month GPT-Pro subscription. 5.2-Pro is in decline -- it has been getting noticeably worse at a steady rate since introduction. At this point, it's not appreciably better for most queries than Claude 4.5 Opus, and Opus is roughly 10x faster.
Noticed the same. Also, I noticed the same with the prev version, immediately improved when switching to the new 5.2.
The smoking gun is the time. If I ask it a question that's subtle in "thinking" mode and it starts replying in a few seconds, the answer will probably be trash. I'm almost sure they degrade the models over time.
An interesting approach - start strong when everyone is running benchmarks, taper off through the life of the release, introduce new version that is no better than the last version but it magically seems much better by comparison to the degraded previous version. Rinse, repeat, grift.
My impression is that recently ChatGPT tries to avoid
going out to research on the Internet as long as it can. I have to tell it to pull info from the web or verify its answers on the web explicitly.
My non-existent marketing instinct would tell me that they are trying to keep you inside the app to convince you that ChatGPT is the internet, the same way some people wouldn't know there's life outside Facebook.
My grumpy instinct tells me they know that they're poisoning the internet and they have given out on trying to weed out the fake websites from the real ones.
I downgraded to the $20 tier. I also have a $20/month subscription with Anthropic and another $20/month with Kimi. There was a time when $200/month for Pro made sense, but I don't think it's a good value right now.
They were incompetent at declaring their own incompetence.
See, what the hell does it have to do with "moral authority"? I think that the authors don't know what the words mean. Morality has absolutely nothing to do with it.
It would be more precise if they had written "it's worth acknowledging that there is no consensus as to what constitutes AGI."
This article could have been written at any point since 1980. If anything, the past decade has seen an actual decline in gymbro culture and in the sport (yeah, yeah) of bodybuilding specifically. Also, steroids are a lot harder to get than they used to be.
It's interesting to note that the heyday of the once-huge bodybuilding.com forum was about fifteen or twenty years ago.
Yeah, I think this could be taken to a billion-dollar idea within a couple of months, if the implementation is decent.
Full-stack would probably mean, in context, something from Palantir-style data-mining and aggregation, through logistics/legal/command/etc., all the way to autonomous systems operating on the front lines.
I don't think that anything of this sort actually exists yet? I imagine it could exist, though, especially in smaller countries that feel threatened, and which have fewer layers of bureaucracy, e.g. Estonia.
Hasn't stopped Weinstein from publishing. That nobody takes him seriously isn't Witten's fault. At least... not directly. Witten just happens to be very rigorous and a very gifted mathematician, so he sets a high bar for the rest of the field.
If you're really hard up and have zero ideas, you can freelance as a software developer on Fiverr or something. (Lots of web app & SAAS work there.) You'd need to undercut the Indians and Pakistanis who are all over the platform, but at least it's honest work in the field of your choice.
In the meantime, and as your main gig, found a startup. There's so much going on right now, so many opportunities just waiting for somebody to grab them, that with some initiative and resolve you really can't go wrong. I'd be happy to help, if you're interested.
Aroxybutynin is (R)-Oxybutynin. Oxybutynin is an ancient (>50 year old) generic. Wikipedia notes that "the (R)-enantiomer is a more potent anticholinergic than either the racemate or the (S)-enantiomer, which is essentially without anticholinergic activity at doses used in clinical practice. However, (R)-oxybutynin administered alone offers little or no clinical benefit above and beyond the racemic mixture."
If you have sleep apnea and live in a country where you can buy most drugs OTC, this "Holy Grail" is something you can put together for yourself by tomorrow! Simply combine oxybutynin 5mg with atomoxetine 75mg, and done.
This is a huge value add to the above article, thanks for the breakdown. I'm gonna ask my doc to review this literature and evaluate whether it's worth being prescribed ahead of time for a off label trial of my own.
Anyway, it's not even that. The article focuses on global metrics -- which basically means poverty reduction in China, India, Africa, etc. I don't doubt that life in those places is better than ever, and in fact, having travelled quite a lot over the past twenty years, I can personally vouch for it.
What definitely hasn't gotten any better is life in the US and Western Europe over the past twenty years. 2015-2025 was a very bad period for the US in particular.
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