Wow, this article is a tour de force in menu and icon design, I learned a lot. For anyone who wants to understand the design world better, or wants a glimpse into the brain of a design-minded person, this is a great article. Incredibly accessible, incredibly insightful, and just overall a gem.
Childhood is only half of subjective life if you stagnate as an adult. If you keep changing your routine, you'll find each year has just as much subjective experience as the previous.
Start a company in an industry where you have no experience. Move to a country where nobody speaks a language you understand. Find a new sport and commit to being a top 0.1% participant (for most sports that don't air regularly on national television, this can be done in a year).
If subjective life is speeding up, throw yourself some curve balls.
If life is moving too fast, then make specific choices to slow down. Take up hiking or camping. Do things with your family if that's a valid option for you. Turn your phone off. Be mindful of your body and emotions.
Lots of small things that can help you slow down a little.
My life has had a 5 year event horizon since I left my family home. I.e. every 5 years has seen major changes I could not have predicted.
For much of that there have been critical pressures making most days important. Which makes them memorable.
Subjectively and objectively, things have changed so much, and so many times, I feel like I have had several lives, so far.
Right now I am in a “make” or “break” situation going three productive years. I solved some very difficult problems that I put myself in a “must solve” position. Each problem solved had significant life impact.
The indicators for “make” are going up month-to-month now, making it a tough but intense and wonderful time. Feels a lot like my early 20’s when I started a dream business (for me) while in school.
Definitely don’t experience time as indicated by those graphs.
my best friend had kids before me and told me something before I had kids that changed my life forever - “I was here first and I have my life, the kids need to adapt to my life just as much as I have to adapt to theirs.” I have followed this mantra for the past 12 years and I think both my life and my kids life is much better for it. I see too many parents turning their lives upside down after they became parents, I have not much at all. I am definitely more risk averse which is probably the biggest personal change I made but otherwise I do everything I’ve done before I became a parent and my kid has experienced extreme levels of boredom while waiting for me to finish what I am doing
In the US, unless you have a few million saved up, children will probably make most people more conservative.
Wake up, drop kid off at school, go to job allowing one to afford health insurance for kids, come home, take kids to after school activity, eat, sleep, repeat.
A child is from the parents perspective a lot of repetitive motion over a very long time, and, I think, a main contributor to speeding up your relative passage of time.
Which you might find super rewarding! But I am fairly confused by the claim that children are interesting and wonder how people spent their pre-children time to arrive at that conclusion – or how much they actually are involved in all the parts of taking care of their kid.
Right its a weird take for me too. Childhood was fun sure, but you were stuck in a time/place not of your choosing, with others making many/most decisions for you.
As an adult, especially a well paid SWE like many on HN.. you can create the life, make the decisions and have the experiences that you want. Your life is as vibrant as you choose it to be.
Much of the stuff I used to read about or watch on TV as a precocious child.. I can just go buy/see/do with the agency & money I have as an adult.
Sure you have a 9-5 (or 8-6, or 7-7) job but you used to go to school and after school activities all day as a kid probably too. It’s your choice to do something or nothing with your hours of free time after work and weekends.
Small children in the picture adds additional time constraints, but should also bring additional vividness/subjective time experience to your life.
Oh man, DB has one of the worst experiences in my well traveled history.
If you don't buy a seat, you don't get a seat. I was taking the 4am train 8 hours from Brussels to Berlin, and I bought seats for both legs of the trip. To sleep, of course.
The first leg of the trip was delayed, so they gave me a free ticket on the next train, 40 minutes later, but with no seat.
So, exhausted as all hell and wanting nothing more than a little nap, I was forced to stand in one of the hallways between the carriages, unable to rest much even vertically because people had to push past me to get to the bathroom.
I have close acquaintances who will take that $50, spend it on drugs, and then starve to death. If you want them to stay alive, you have to give them non-money.
If everyone spent money like a rational, 100 IQ individual with a moderate amount of schooling on basic financial strategies, it'd be a lot easier to manage a population. Unfortunately, less than half of the population is 100 IQ, and in some areas less than 5% of the population understands a single high school course worth of financial management.
And then of course you have fundamentally irrational actors as well, like drug addicts. IQ and education don't help there, addictions are monsters that swallow people of all socio-economic varieties.
So you have to either let those people squalor, or find another solution.
> If you want them to stay alive, you have to give them non-money.
Which can be traded for money.
Believe me, I understand first hand how difficult a heavily addicted person can be. Recovery is a huge process that takes more than just giving someone a safe place to live and food.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. It doesn't need to be 100% effective, just need to be effective enough that it reduces the size of the problem to a manageable size.
Then you can manage the special cases with specialists.
> I have close acquaintances who will take that $50, spend it on drugs, and then starve to death.
I'm sure we can all think of edge cases. I'm sure there are people who will trade the food for drugs some how. They probably need addiction and mental health help, rather than someone who 'knows what is good for them'
We seem to be moving the goalposts on AGI, are we not? 5 years ago, the argument that AGI wasn't here yet was that you couldn't take something like AlphaGo and use it to play chess. If you wanted that, you had to do a new training run with new training data.
But now, we have LLMs that can reliably beat video games like Pokemon, without any specialized training for playing video games. And those same LLMs can write code, do math, write poetry, be language tutors, find optimal flight routes from one city to another during the busy Christmas season, etc.
How does that not fit the definition of "General Intelligence"? It's literally as capable as a high school student for almost any general task you throw it at.
I think the games tasks are worth exploring more. If you look at that recent Pokemon post - it's not as capable as a high school student - it took a long, long time. I have a private set of tests, that any 8 year old could easily solve that any LLM just absolutely fails on. I suspect that plenty of the people claiming AGI isn't here yet have similar personal tests.
Arc-Agi 3 is coming soon, I'm very excited for that because it's a true test of multimodality, spatial reasoning, and goal planning. I think there was some preliminary post somewhere that did show that current models basically try to brute-force their way through and don't actually "learn the rules of the game" as efficiently as humans do.
How do you think they are training for the spatial part of the tests? It doesn’t seem to lend itself well to token based “reasoning”. I wonder if they are just synthetically creating training data and hope a new emergent spatial reason ability appears.
>think they are training for the spatial part of the tests
I'm not sure the party that "they" is referring to here, since arc-agi-3 dataset isn't released yet and labs probably have not begun targeting it. For arc-agi-2, possibly just synthetic data might have been enough to saturate the benchmark, since most frontier models do well on it yet we haven't seen any corresponding jump in multimodal skill use, with maybe the exception of "nano banana".
>lend itself well to token based “reasoning”
One could perhaps do reasoning/COT with vision tokens instead of just text tokens. Or reasoning in latent space which I guess might be even better. There have been papers on both, but I don't know if it's an approach that scales. Regardless gemini 3 / nano banana have had big gains on visual and spatial reasoning, so they must have done something to get multimodality with cross-domain transfer in a way that 4o/gpt-image wasn't able to.
For arc-agi-3, the missing pieces seem to be both "temporal reasoning" and efficient in-context learning. If they can train for this, it'd have benefits for things like tool-calling as well, which is why it's an exciting benchmark.
I think we're noticing that our goalposts for AGI were largely "we'll recognize it when we see it", and now as we are getting to some interesting places, it turns out that different people actually understood very different things by that.
> 5 years ago, the argument that AGI wasn't here yet was that you couldn't take something like AlphaGo and use it to play chess.
No; that was one, extremely limited example of a broader idea. If I point out that your machine is not a general calculator because it gives the wrong answer for six times nine, and then you fix the result it gives in that case, you have not refuted me. If I now find that the answer is incorrect in some other case, I am not "moving goalposts" by pointing it out.
(But also, what lxgr said.)
> But now, we have LLMs that can reliably beat video games like Pokemon, without any specialized training for playing video games. And those same LLMs can write code, do math, write poetry, be language tutors, find optimal flight routes from one city to another during the busy Christmas season, etc.
The AI systems that do most of these things are not "LLMs".
> It's literally as capable as a high school student for almost any general task you throw it at.
And yet embarrassing deficiencies are found all the time ("how many r's in strawberry", getting duped by straightforward problems dressed up to resemble classic riddles but without the actual gotcha, etc.).
> The AI systems that do most of these things are not "LLMs".
Uh, every single example that I listed except for the 'playing video games' example is something that I regularly use frontier models to do for myself. I have ChatGPT and Gemini help me find flight routes, tutor me in Spanish (Gemini 3 is really good at this), write poetry and code, solve professional math problems (usually related to finance and trading), help me fix technical issues with my phone and laptop, etc etc.
If you say to yourself, "hey this thing is a general intelligence, I should try to throw it at problems I have generally", you'll find yourself astonished at the range of tasks with which it can outperform you.
> Uh, every single example that I listed except for the 'playing video games' example is something that I regularly use frontier models to do for myself.
LLMs are at most one component of the systems you refer to. Reasoning models and agents are something larger.
> If you say to yourself, "hey this thing is a general intelligence, I should try to throw it at problems I have generally", you'll find yourself astonished at the range of tasks with which it can outperform you.
Where AI has been thrust at me (search engines and YouTube video and chat summaries) it has been for the sort of thing where I'd expect it to excel, yet I've been underwhelmed. The one time I consciously invoked the "AI assist" on a search query (to do the sort of thing I might otherwise try on Wolfram Alpha) it committed a basic logical error. The project READMEs that Show HN has exposed me to this year have been almost unfailingly abominable. (Curiously, I'm actually okay with AI art a significant amount of the time.)
But none of that experience is even a hundredth as annoying as the constant insinuation from AI proponents that any and all opposition is in some way motivated by ego protection.
I used the $200/mo OpenAI subscription for a while, but cancelled when Gemini 3 came out. It was useful for the deep research credits until the Web search gpt got sufficiently good on it's own
Oh for sure. Why are movies scattered all over oblivion? Because there's no simple marketplace for licensing movies, it's a closed market that requires doing lots of behind-the-scenes deals. Healthcare? Only specific providers can make medical equipment, tons of red tape, opaque billing structures, insurance locked out in weird ways, etc.
To understand how healthy a market is, ask 'how easily could a brand new startup innovate in this area'. If the answer is 'not easy at all' - then that thing is going to be expensive, rent seeking, and actively distorting incentives to make itself more money.
No, ads are not the same thing as free speech at all. "Free speech" is the right to say anything to anyone *who is willing to listen*. You don't have a right to come into my home and tell me your ideas about immigration policy - though you do have a right to talk about immigration policy in other places!
The government has to guarantee that there are places for people to say things. But the government does not have to guarantee that there are places for people to say things *in my own home*. And similarly, I think most public spaces should be free from ads and other 'attention pollution'. If a company wants to write about their own product, that's fine, but they must do so in a place where other people are free to seek them out, as opposed to doing so in a way that forces the writing upon others without consent.
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