Nursie

These are somewhat orthoganal - young people are lonelier != everyone else has a fixed supply of friends and can never make more.

Nor does it change the fact that the author, who clearly does want to socialise, would benefit from doing something outside of their tech bubble and widening their horizons beyond "things that could conceivably further my career".

I think there are some valid points to be made about how people's socialising patterns are changing in the light of modern interactions with tech, but also about using US social habits as a proxy for everyone else's. I've rarely entertained people in my home even during my most sociable times, pubs, clubs and restaurants much more frequently figure in my calendar.

All that and the author of this article still needs to get out and touch grass.

It's true, but it's far from the only way to break the ice.

Really on top of the particularly narrow viewpoint the OP has on life and human relations, I find the core notion itself absurd - "In the future because of X, Y and Z, why will people bother to socialise?"

Because ... people like socialising.

Sorry, but I very much disagree.

Firstly, it made no mention of showing off to potential mates, to my reading. But have no fear, regardless of scarcity people will have ways to signal fitness to find mates and build hierarchies out of it, we're very good at that. It might come down to fashion choices, leisure activity choices, really anything.

Secondly, every example of how this person connects with others is to do with technology and career advancement. He wasn't asking knowledgable friends for advice, he was asking questions to strangers about linux on IRC. He doesn't talk about social groups or sports clubs, he was talking about communities of practice and his professional work. He values learning only for career advancement.

Those ways of building relationships might disappear, but old ladies will still get together to crochet and natter. Middle aged men will still make and drink beer together, or practice woodworking skills. Younger guys and gals will still form sports teams. And people will still learn for the love of learning.

You know, things which already happen away from the screen. Ordinary, everyday human stuff.

tl;dr - touch grass, the article says a lot more about the author's life than our future prospects as humans.

That whole "I made my friends on IRC asking about linux, if AI renders this obsolete how am I going to meet anyone?" screams (to use a fairly dismissive neologism) "touch grass".

> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless

Errr, not so sure that holds up to scrutiny really. Lots of folks enjoy learning in various forms for its own sake, rather than purely to increase their income level.

> As a teenager I ... went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. ... AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need each other. I still have friends, but I’m running off this pre-AI supply of friends I met through communities of practice.

Maybe learn to connect to other humans in circumstances outside of the professional/technological?

I think this is a very bleak take by someone whose experiences aren't really that in tune with how other humans exist. I can get better beer at the bottle shop, I can get cheaper beer at the bottle shop compared to the cost of all the equipment I need. Why then do I persist in home-brewing?

It's because I find it fulfilling, and I find the understanding and practice of the art satisfying.

The last chance to stop that particular albatross was lost under Theresa May, who was advised that it was already over-budget and wouldn't deliver value for money, and had to guarantee a pretty eye-watering price per kWh at the taxpayer's expense.

I can only think that the UK must need the reactor products for something defence related, because little else makes sense.

It’s also about energy security - why expose your energy markets to insane fluctuations in international fossil-fuel markets if you don’t have to? Surely the last few years have shown that energy independence is a critical social and defence policy now?

For many/most countries, investing in renewables is the best, cheapest and fastest way to move in that direction.

Which benzos was he peddling? I don’t recall that.

I remember him touting a substance he called “chaperon”, about ten years back, as an alcohol alternative. But it wasn’t a benzo, it was somewhere in the phenethlyamine superfamily IIRC (the internet tells me it was MEAI, a substituted, cyclized PEA).

He now has a company selling non-alcoholic spirit substitutes based on herbal ingredients, called Sentia, and is trying to get approval for something called “alcarelle” but I have no idea what class of substance that is and it hasn’t yet made it to market so saying it didn’t catch on seems a touch premature.

I don’t agree with the characterisation of him as naive, in fact I think his book delves into the societal and social effects of drugs quite well. The only way he could be considered naive IMHO is that he seems to have expected politicians to listen to reason.

I don't believe this was the case, at least not openly, until Trump made it part of his platform. His personal ego injury has accelerated this massively, and fed into the right-wing cookersphere all over the place.

America has recently done a huge amount to undermine faith in its own democracy, and that has been gleefully spread around the world. Absent any evidence. It's gross.

> Google TV, the default interface on most Android TV devices, puts a large banner at the top of the home screen promoting whatever Google wants you to watch next.

You know, I don't give a shit about that, that's fine. Recommend me some stuff to watch, I'm here to watch stuff, I might even like what you're punting and give it a go. I might have forgotten there's a new season of whatever it is. I even quite like some of the inline recommendation stuff.

What made me switch to App-only mode was that ads started appearing for general consumer products. So this writeup is interesting, if/when they make app-only mode advertise shampoo at me I'll probably have a go with that launcher.

My opinion is that it’s a lot like the brief trend for describing yourself as a prompt engineer when getting images out of models like DALL-E 2.

Yeah, for five minutes you needed to use a specific style, very specific language patterns and what have you, in order to get results that were a cut above. But then the models and the harnesses got better and that moment passed.

So the real story here is that seed oils are a proxy, you haven’t necessarily seen any effect from removing them from your diet (consistent with the actual evidence here) but by cutting out processed junk you’ve lost a load of weight.

Congrats on the weight loss (genuinely), but it’s very unlikely seed oils are any sort of factor in themselves.

> seed oils

Oh dear, someone gets their health advice from streamers and podcasters rather than actual health professionals.

The seed oil thing is nonsense.

> Eating clean proper ruminant meat will not be bad for you

Eating too much beef is bad for you in a variety of ways, it's associated with high blood pressure and high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

It's frickin' delicious, but it's not some panacea superfood, quite the opposite.

Yeah I've been thinking about that story more and more lately.

I first read it a long time ago, and it's looking more and more prescient. Not the specific tech, in fact it probably feels prescient because it doesn't talk about any particular tech, but the direction of travel feels very familiar.

Incidentally I now live in Australia...