smugglerFlynn

The study cited in the article was about people watching birds through a window

This "passive consumption" needs disambiguation, though.

What separates "I see colorful moving things" [watching birds] from "I see colorful moving things" [social media reels] is not the perceived passiveness but passiveness in the psychological sense.

Watching birds is active attention: you scan, predict, analyze. You get random, sparse rewards for it. Importantly, birdwatching is mostly nothing happening, which leaves room for your mind to wander - and wandering is the thing that's apparently really good for the brain.[1]

[1] - Moshe Bar, Mindwandering (2022), Michael Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking (2015) and different related research papers

I believe our current work environments will be romanticized one day, in a similar way - we just don’t recognize the fun parts of the mundane.

Saying this because looking back at my own office spaces through photos and nostalgia feels very different from how it felt and was perceived back then. Connecting in person is much harder nowadays, true, but back then people were not really valuing this ease of connection - it was just an obvious and often obligatory part of your work life.

Brains are weird.

Interestingly, these kinds of insights into how light around us really works are still flying under the radar of modern digital photography.

In Fujifilm online communities ‘film simulation’ is peaking at this moment. Thing with Fuji cameras is, you can tweak many settings in-camera, including built-in simulations for the film look, white balance color shifts, and more. When you take a photo, camera applies these tweaks on the fly, resulting in a photo that does not need much extra post-processing.

For the past 2-3 years this got viral on socials, with the influx of new Fuji owners, and the exponential rise of "film recipes" - set of settings that lead to a specific photo look. The interesting part is, in most cases people share example photos that are taken in vastly different geographies.

What gets lost is that a recipe is mostly just a fixed color shift: more blue or yellow, more red or cyan, plus a tone curve on top of a film sim. That’s it. Many popular recipes are one or two notches apart from each other. The dramatic differences people see in the example photos come from the light where those photos were taken, not from the settings.

And light is far more complex than most of us think we understand. As the post shows, direct sun gets yellower the more atmosphere it passes through, so it changes with latitude, season and time of day. Shadows, meanwhile, are lit by blue skylight. So one photo already contains light of different colors, and a single fixed shift can’t correct all of them the same way. The "Wes Anderson" recipe that looks great in California turns yellow and muted in Finland.

People blame the settings, or even buy another recipe, when the thing they’re actually trying to copy is the sun and atmospheric scatter.

They don't "want" anything. They preach to enterprises and intentionally create a fear of missing out to get more paying business customers on board of this hype train. This is what is happening.

This is also the reason absolutely no attention is spent on evolving B2C products.

What is being exploited is the overt attention businesses pay to their own cost metrics, to the point where broader strategy is getting thrown under the bus in favor of efficiency. I believe this is an illusion, and for many companies that jump on board, sober learnings are right around the corner.

It is jobs to be done theory on steroids. If someone wants a drill, give them a hole, this kind of logic. Let users literally click “make a hole” button that would instantly make a hole in the wall, and you’ve just disrupted the whole drills market.

Or like in Harry Porter, where you don’t need cooks - food just appears from thin air and floats straight to the tables.

The problem is, jobs to be done theory is not new, and product teams that build Excel and SAP know this stuff. The reason why nobody has yet made an accounting software that is just one magic button is in the amount of user decisions that are necessary to make a “proper hole”.

This is where analogy breaks, because you are not helping to drill a hole anymore, you are helping to design a hole. And to design something you need visibility into what parameters you control, what has just changed with the latest tweak, where rough patches are that require cleanup and design rework.

In programming it just so happened that your code structure and your IDE were also your design UIs. In other areas, like Accounting, your design UI today is Excel and SAP.

Arguably a chat interface can also be a standalone design tool, just not a very user friendly one, like trying to pilot a plane through popup notifications. It works for areas where we fully give control over design to LLMs themselves, but step up into higher level designer shoes and you need proper UI/UX again, chat becomes suffocating.

Current reality and current numbers are totally irrelevant. This whole business model bets on people believing that TAM at the scale of whole human population is right behind the corner, just one more SOTA model, just let us get to AGI and you will see.

Guys are milking investors and try to manipulate gen pop and governance systems to ride this illusion for as long as possible, with fear mongering and weird “we see miracles in the lab” posts like the OP, which you read on a regular basis over the past N years.

Saying this as a paying customer from that 20m segment.

> Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all.

“Cy Draven: I tried everything. Believe me, I hammered the race thing, I hammered the gender thing, the trans thing, the border thing, the homeless thing, the war thing, the election thing, the abortion thing, the climate thing, the thing about induction stoves, Israel, library books, vaccines, pronouns, AK-47s, socialism, BLM, CRT, the CDC, DEI, 5G, everything. All that I did, nobody, just nothing.

People are just numb these days, I don't know why.”

— Knives Out movie

Don't tell me you are reading readmes with your eyes in 2026. Blasphemy!

Exactly. Imagine alternative time line where tech is the same but each creative provides their own trained model that scales their own creative vision and skills, and keeps them in control of their own work.

Imagine OpenAI, Anthropic &co having to compete by hiring [thousands] of their own talent to help training their commercial models.

Another thing is attribution. Even a book that was re-published illegally can be easily attributed to its author. What happened is the exact opposite: no attribution, not even a notice, just obfuscation that strips away any traces of the original ideas and original work. Imagine piracy websites and trackers just dropping first few pages that name their authors, and publishing "the book you are looking for". This is exactly what happened.

This reminds me the car industry touchscreen craze: if you can paint anything and control anything via the touchscreen, then the only thing you need is the touchscreen, right?

I cannot shake the feeling that we are chasing the wrong goose.

The end goal of education is to help you understand how things work, with problem-solving being a means of developing and applying that understanding. LLMs shortcut the former and turn the latter into a pointless arms race that we cannot win.

I loved the example of increasing the complexity of learning projects, but I still feel like one question is missing: are people really trying to learn the same thing we were trying to teach them in the first place?

This is seriously cool, Mitya

Thanks for sharing this.

I actually work in education and can share the following first-hand: the things we now build, the ways we now educate, and all the opportunities for reaching out to students are beautiful. I foresee that _many_ people will cut corners now, but I believe that, in the end, we will get a new generation of education that is personal and humane.

I don't mean this as preaching some shiny future that I hope will magically arrive. I already see these things happening. And I also see all the ways people misuse the tools or take shortcuts.

Educators with good intentions, skills, and powerful tools will always beat ignorance and laziness relying on those same tools.