Why do they call it 'stream entry'? Also, what is stream entry?

If I'm understanding, you're saying that being well-received by an online audience when sharing hidden things has less to do with the unacceptability of the thing itself, and more to do with the talent of the writer. Talent in selecting the right people to present to, framing the subject to pique their interest, and just in being plain good with words.

This seems probably true to me, but you might underestimate how big a caveat "having the skills to provide value to an audience" is. An established platform, with writerly experience and long-term feedback on what people respond well to and what they don't -- if you have all these things already, it seems to me you're already most of the way out of the thicket of feeling not-seen, not-validated, unsafe, etc. Without the grounding of confidence that you can provide value to an audience, revealing hidden things still seems pretty risky.

Plus, if one doesn't have writing talent, generalized-coming-out-of-the-closet seems like a bad way to try and build it. Then you're risking the bad feelings of having something shameful exposed publicly, in addition to the general badness of not being received well.

I think the skill of baring your soul to the world (successfully) is really admirable, so I hope I'm wrong and it's not as risky as it seems.

Oh no, I use so many parens when writing. Am I going to be accused of having ChatGPT generate the things I say soon?? What did people who love em-dashes do when their favorite punctuation mark suddenly became cringeworthy?

This is really cool. It's interesting that many of them seem to be able to render New Zealand clearly as a separate landmass, but struggle to separate Madagascar from Africa. Actually, looking at it some more, the whole Indian Ocean seems like a serious weak spot for all but Grok.

It sounds like you're rendering each pixel in a separate context, right? So in addition to not being able to see Earth directly, the model can't "see" its own map. If so, I wonder how different answers would be if you were to try and ask it to render the whole thing in one chat, starting from the top-left and having it guess one at a time. (I'm sure this would be much more expensive to test.)

If the moral lesson here is not to render counterfactuals, because it's too painful to do so, then I sympathize. But if the moral lesson is not to do this because it is a dangerous new emotional exploit spawned by a cursed technology that mankind was not meant to know, then I wonder if you might be overstating the novelty some.

People have been rendering their counterfactuals for thousands of years. Before we had ChatGPT to draw the pictures for us, we would just draw the pictures ourselves, or ask another human to draw them for us. Or we would render them in words and let our imaginations draw the pictures. The fidelity is lower, but the feeling is the same. Even cartoon stick figures can make people weep.

I think interacting with the cutting edge of a new technology sometimes makes things seem newer than they are. And LLMs do add an element of creepy, uncanny computer noise to the dream. But ruminating on what-could-have-been has always been a painful, self-flagellating thing to do.

I hope you find peace.

What's the correlation between task horizon and useless sycophancy?

Would you still feel this way if you were, instead, a programmer in the mid 2020s? Or do you think the job market's changed enough that said fears are now more reasonable?

Asking for... a friend... who is thinking of quitting a miserable software job, but is afraid of job hunting.

I’m not sure if there are any languages that consistently order additive numerals from smallest to largest - “two and fifty and three hundred” instead of “three hundred and fifty two”.

I was curious about this, but the only mention I could see was classical Arabic, which is already mentioned in OP. The other flips brought up on the StackExchange question are all local ordering, where the overall structure of long numbers is still largest-to-smallest. Claude suggests Malagasy orders them backwards based on this source, but Wikipedia disagrees (see the numeral table under Vocabulary; "roapolo sy telo" = "twenty and three"), and the original source for the Malagasy claim is in French.

It's surprising to me that the smallest->largest order would be so rare. Even if it's less aesthetically pleasing, you'd think people'd be using it somewhere.

I'm skeptical that much of the suffering and meaninglessness you described is inherent to abundance, and especially that economic labor is a necessary structure for human desire to organize itself around. You might be interested in thecatamites' short post on consequences, which I like a lot:

i always end up talking to people at work who'll insist that without a job, without the consequences of NOT having a job and the way those consequences frame and direct our behaviors, that we simply wouldn't know what to do with ourselves. to which i always think, well, maybe YOU wouldn't, man... 

[...] 

to want something, to lack shelter or respite from the blunt animal miseries of exploitation, scarcity and torture - surely part of the cruelty of these is how they overshadow all the other ways that we might be unhappy. and how meagre their countervailing images of happiness turn out to be, money, food, ammo or red potion. compare to the strange and elaborate unhappinesses involved in simply being alive, in the directionless abundance of perception itself, that stuck tap endlessly pouring out into a drain. isn't that something worth fighting for, something everyone deserves?

He is writing in the context of video games, where all scarcity is artificial, and in which infinite abundance is only a matter of downloading a cheat engine. Somehow, though, the existence of cheat engines (or walkthroughs, etc) mostly doesn't prevent people from seeking out meaningful challenges and struggles in games anyway. And there are games without friction, walking sims or narrative-focused adventure games, and lots of people like them, too.

I also think it's surprising that you would see "loss of structure" as a characteristic flaw of utopias, when your example utopia - the boarding school - sounds like a very structured, maybe even over-structured environment. Classes go HERE, study hall from this time to that time. I can't speak for Aria, but the people I knew in school who did lots of drugs and pushed boundaries weren't crying out for lack of structure; they were sick of structures, of being told what to do all day, feeling trapped and powerless. Is it possible that what she was feeling had less to do with the weightlessness of endless abundance, and more to do with the awful constriction Scott Alexander describes here? (Scroll down to section III or Ctrl-F "child prison" for the relevant bit).

(My high school also had therapists and meditation programs, and occasionally emotional support animals, and nobody really tried to stop students from getting stoned all day, but it still wouldn't have passed the 'burrito test'. Would yours?)

Ultimately I would prefer human adults have the freedom to decide what they want to do in a state of abundance, even if some of them then decide to live in frictionless comfort. And then, if they decide that frictionless comfort is unsatisfying, to be able to change their mind, attempt something more difficult instead, and have the resources to pursue that too. Even if one chooses scarcity and labor in the end, I'd rather that be chosen internally, not inflicted externally. Schools don't offer that freedom; the students have their goals and purpose decided by an outside authority, and if they don't like them, tough shit. We think it's alright (sometimes), because the students are children and so aren't grown enough to figure things out for themselves. But any future where that becomes universal is nothing like what I'd call utopia.

I think this dynamic more-or-less existed before ChatGPT, as well, with just plain Googling something. Especially with simpler things where the answer could be quickly found without much skill.

Even if Adam knows how to get the answer out of GPT/Google/tea leaves/etc, though, Bella is still doing something of value (it seems to me) by going through the trouble of digging around and trying to distill an answer out of the murk of digital information. Even if it only takes a couple minutes! Generally a friendly human is better at presenting the given answer, and it's a way of signaling (at least a minimum level of) investment in helping Adam with the question. Which might even, hopefully, extend beyond a single ChatGPT query, if he'd already tried that and found its answer lacking.

So, I agree that Adam is making a mistake.