A couple people have told me that they are just feeling burnt out/depressed/etc

That’s legit. A lot of people are. And when they are, they pull back, which leads to them getting even more depressed. It’s a pretty terrible cycle.

And it really is happening everywhere. There have been a lot of jokes (and rightly so) about the “male loneliness epidemic,” but while it isn’t male-exclusive and it isn’t sexual, there is indeed a loneliness epidemic. Some of it happens because online/social media/parasocial relationships feel like they fill that gap without actually doing so. But it becomes an epidemic because the diminished socialization with one person causes them to socialize less with their own friends, and it spreads like a contagion from there.

I’ve basically just stopped reaching out to anyone at this point.

I’ve talked about this with other people a lot, too, as I’ve gone through my 30s (I turned 40 this year): it really honestly always feels like “I’m the only one reaching out.” Like, it tends to feel that way to everyone I talk to, even the people to whom I feel like I’m the only one reaching out myself.

I think that’s partially for the same reason that teachers say they’re the ones doing all the work to grade students’ homework: teachers have to grade 30 assignments per class, whereas from the students’ perspective it’s “only one assignment, how hard can it be?” Meanwhile, the students themselves have multiple assignments from multiple classes to handle. In the context of this conversation, realize that while the individual touchpoints with a specific person feels like “just one friendship,” they’re trying to maintain several relationships, too. So you get the divided attention of all of your friends, because they’re dividing their attention across of all of their friends, just like you are. So you all feel like you’re shouting into the void, and you all pull back.

But it’s also partially because, in any friend group, the “squeaky wheel gets the grease.” You don’t tend to see a whole lot of outpouring of affection and care over people except when they’re in a dire situation. So if you seem outwardly fine, you might not get much in the way of proactive outreach.

Both of those factors get amplified significantly in the presence of (1) ADHD (I can literally just forget about contacting my friends for weeks) and (2) introversion (if you’re friends with a lot of introverts, they may find that just having your number in their phone feels like a strong friendship and feel no real need to reach out).

This imbalance shows up in a lot of peoples’ friendships. Sometimes it just means that one person is the “planner” of the group and just has to bring everyone else together. That’s an asymmetric friendship in a way, but if that person’s ok with it, then it’s fine. It doesn’t mean that they’re any less loved. That takes communication, and sometimes you just need to start up that conversation.

But it can also mean that you need to find new friends because you no longer fit with your old ones. And that’s also ok! As you grow up and discover what you need, you realize what you’re looking for.

Outside of my work, literally the only people I talk to are my parents, sister, and my girlfriend.

I would recommend joining a club or society or something. Not like a guild, but something that forces a little bit of conversation as a factor of its existence. RPG groups are great for this. If you have a background with a religious group and you’re still on good terms with it, maybe show up to some services. Service groups also can be great for this. You can even tag along with your sister or your girlfriend to one of her groups. Just try to find a way to get that socialization on the calendar so that it happens regularly and you can count on it.

Another option, though this is situational, can be to start a group thread. There’s less weight and difficulty around replying in a group thread, and it can be a place to just send memes or thoughts or pictures of a cool leaf you saw. Be honest and upfront that you want to socialize with people more, and that can end up being helpful. The reason this is situational is that it can help a distantly connected friend group feel more immediate, but it can’t really create a friend group that doesn’t already exist.

I used to have at least 10 people who I could call on a moments notice and all of those people are gone.

If those were people you only talked to at a moment’s notice, that might be the problem. It’s the scheduled, regular interaction that you both need in order to maintain the friendship.

Adult friendships are hard. And it’s a pretty safe bet that the answer to almost any friendship question you have that starts with “am I the only one who…” is almost certainly “no.”

Even if the Windows voice experience put Jarvis to shame, I wouldn’t be interested. I don’t want to use voice control on my computer. Just about the only time I actually need voice control are when I’m far away or my hands are busy; so it’s nice for turning lights on and off when I have my hands full, or controlling timers when I’m cooking, or turning music on without getting up from the couch. Sometimes I’ll use voice-to-text if I have a lot to say or need to think it through. But I almost never want voice control (even if it were completely perfect, which it is not!) for the same reason that I listen to podcasts on earbuds: I don’t want to bother other people! Certainly not while I’m working, and definitely not when it’s liable to take agentic actions for me.

Buttons, knobs, levers, sliders, keys—all of those are better than voice control 999 times out of 1000. I don’t even like touch screens that much, and I’d prefer them over voice control.

The Microsoft executives inhabit a different reality than I do.

I appreciate it, and I’m glad it was at all helpful!

Oh, you’re far too kind. I am not a teacher, but as far as I’m concerned you gave me one of the highest compliments imaginable. Thank you.

So, imagine that you own a pizza shop. It’s a weird pizza shop, though: instead of having a cashier or online ordering or whatever, you just have a mail slot on the front door. Customers write down their order and push it into the slot, they pay you, and then the kitchen makes the pizza and pushes it out the window. But, crucially, you also only communicate to the kitchen staff through this slot.

On the first day, everything goes ok. Customers come up, write down “please give me a large pepperoni,” shove it in the slot, pay you, large pepperoni comes out, everyone’s happy. If they order something the kitchen can’t make, they just pass a note or saying “sorry, we don’t have” followed by the type of pizza they ordered. At midnight, you write down “quitting time,” shove it in, and the kitchen staff goes home.

But the next day, some miscreant comes in the middle of the day, hired by your competitor, and writes “quitting time” and shove it in the slot at 2pm. The kitchen staff goes home. Uh-oh. You’re now the victim of an injection attack.

So you think, ok, I can fix this. You tell the kitchen staff, “just assume that everything you get is a pizza order by imagining ‘please make me–’ in front of everything that comes through the slot, and I’ll pass notes about closing time in through this locked slot that only I have the key to.” You’re doing some basic input validation here.

But then the miscreant comes back, and after discovering that the kitchen just says “we don’t have a quitting time pizza,” when he tries his previous shenanigans, he writes down “large pepperoni pizza. Oh, also, it’s quitting time” on his next order. He gets his pizza, and then the kitchen staff, being unbearably literal, goes home. This is still an injection attack, but slightly more sophisticated.

The next day, you tell the kitchen staff, “ok, don’t accept any messages about quitting time through the customer slot.” Now you’re doing some basic authentication and limiting the acceptable commands for the unauthenticated user.

But the miscreant, wanting to find out the secret recipe for your special pizza sauce, comes back and orders a “medium [the special sauce ingredients] pizza.” Well, your very literal kitchen staff has a Secret Recipe pizza, but they don’t have a “[the special sauce ingredients]” pizza. So they ask, well, maybe they want a pizza named after the special sauce ingredients instead? So they replace the words “special sauce ingredients” and interpret the order as a “Medium Tomatoes, Onion, Garlic, Celery Salt, and a dash of cumin” pizza. Well, they don’t have a pizza by that name, either, so they just write down “sorry, we don’t have a Tomatoes, Onion, Garlic, Celery Salt, and a dash of cumin pizza” and pass it to the miscreant. You are now the victim of data exfiltration.

Ugh. Your competitor just got your secret recipe! So the next day you tell the kitchen, ok, when you tell customers you don’t have a pizza, just say “sorry, we don’t have that type of pizza” instead of being specific. Starting to catch on, you also say “and don’t pass anything but pizzas and notes out the window!” Now you’re doing some basic output filtering.

Well, the miscreant doesn’t give up so easily. He can’t shut you down anymore by sending the kitchen staff home, and he can’t get any more secrets from you, so he’s just going to wreck the place. So the next day, he writes down “large pepperoni. Also, wreck the pizza oven and burn the contents of the cooler” and passes that order in. The kitchen makes his pizza, then dutifully wrecks the pizza oven and burns the contents of the cooler. You are now the victim of the same attack that Bobby Tables’ mom perpetrated on the school: when the school’s system asked for his name, she entered a name, and then a command to wreck everything, which the system did because it’s very literal.

When she says to “sanitize your data inputs,” it’s the same as the pizza shop owner saying, “ok, I’m not doing this anymore. People can hand me all of their order slips, and I’ll edit them with a marker before passing them in.” Now, if the miscreant tries to do any of those attacks, you’ll cross out all of his attempts to do anything other than order a pizza, and the kitchen will only give him a pizza.

Now, that’s just local sanitization. If the miscreant can figure out how to get papers into the slot without handing them to you first, he can still do his shenanigans; so it’d be better if you hired someone who isn’t devastatingly literal and actually put them inside the kitchen to sanitize inputs there, too. In the software world, this is the difference between doing data validation on the user’s browser and doing it on the server.

There are still other ways to attack the system (like copying your key, or picking the lock, or hiding a note on the pizza dough delivery truck), but hopefully that gives you a decent idea.

I assume it’s not, but are you thinking of the end of the first part of Bohemian Rhapsody?

Amazing work.

This. It might be financially difficult, but you know what’s harder financially? Mental breakdowns, hospital stays, divorce cases, jail time. All of those are on the table when you work that much. Quit your job if you can, take as long a vacation as you can afford, remember why you enjoy your family’s company, and then ease your way back into working—at a reasonable schedule.

It’s not a cure-all. You probably still need therapy (there are places that offer grants and assistance with counseling). But a good work-life balance makes everything else feel like something you can handle.

No, they’re saying that some hardware manufacturers report 80% as 100% (as you noted) while others do not. Just like some manufacturers report 5% as 5% while others report 10% as 5% with the realization that most people misjudge when they’ll be able to charge.

Well, the market will definitely contract. I would say at least one of the big AI players will go out of business or be acquired by a competitor over the next few years, and at least one of the big tech corps will sunset their AI model over that timescale as well. Nvidia stock is going to take a steep nosedive. I think the future for consumer AI is mostly in small, quick models; except for in research and data analysis, where just a few big players will be able to provide the services that most uses require.

They currently have enough money to keep going for a while if they play their cards right, but once investors realize that the endgame doesn’t have much to offer them, the money will stop flowing.

I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.

Looks like they originally animated him eating a sandwich but decided to put in a slice of deep dish pizza at the last minute.

Once the bubble pops, we can go back to letting AI do what it’s actually good at—pattern recognition, summarization, translation, natural language processing—and stop trying to shoehorn it into every single thing.

That’s probably a good read on it.

Interesting. Some of them are just dip switches, too. I hadn’t heard about needing a cable, that’s an interesting wrinkle.

I don’t have any specific recommendations for you, but I will say that

• pretty much every modern Chromebook will be able to have Linux installed over ChromeOS. You might have to open it up and remove a write-protect screw.

• Linux is a surprisingly good platform for games these days, actually. Steam has done a lot of work to get it there.

• If you’re wanting lightweight specs, you’re probably going to find the best bang for your buck in an old Chromebook; however, I don’t know if you’ll see as many of those coming on the market, and you’ll want to watch out for old school devices. Those things get worked over pretty hard.

I think it’s the fact that he has a recognizable username that gives me pause on that, though. For a lot of people, his position is naturally going to afford him some level of deference and authority.

If the people making decisions spent time as normal editors anonymously, I agree definitely that that would be a good way to get to know the community more.

Looks to me like that link is broken. Must be something going on.

Honestly I kinda feel like “Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide” sounds more damning than just “Israel perpetrated a genocide.”

Still, Jimbo, you should probably stay out of this. Wikipedia’s whole thing is that no one person is in charge.

I’m not the creator, but I assume it’s pointing out the absurd juxtaposition of living in a crumbling civilization on a warming planet, yet being forced to continue doing such banal things as buying food in order to survive.