>your fancy upper east side building doesn't count and neither does the Regency or the Hilton
I don't see why it doesn't count. It shows we still value the service but it is out of reach for anyone who can't afford it. It lost in the same way much better food outings went out if business while McDonald's thrives. By making society arguably worse and punishing quality.
I don't need people to tell me. My rent and paycheck are a very convincing argument in and of themselves.
>I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
There's a lot I can do by myself. But at the end of the day, someone choosing not to ghost me for a hangout or take the time to get together regularly is a 2-way street. Even pre-pandemic, it's been said people are flakier than ever.
There are systematic reasons to explain this, but on a micro level: "just work harder" is not a solution to friendship.
People are cynical about your idea, but it's not like it has never been done in society. There are in fact apartment complexes that focus on elderly demographics. Retirement homes are just that. What's a school but a bastion for a bunch of kids of similar age to socialize together (and should a random adult wander onto it, there'd be a lockdown).
Urban planning around these situations would be nice. But the very least we could do is build more third places that tries to attract that last middle demographic to come together; that mid 20's to 40's adults too old for college campuses but too young (and not on social security funds) for older gatherings. That's sort of what some bars can be, but a wide open space with less pressure to spend $15 on a "cheap" beer would be nice.
Yeah, I don't think the age disparity is talked about enough. Admitedly I'm in this weird "youngest millenial" bracket where, growing up, I was always much older than my parent's friend's kids. But even in general with young adult life: once you leave college, everyone around you feels "older".
There's maybe 1-2 other people around your age at work, unless you actively chose the massive internship to employment pipeline of MAANG, Big 4, or your industry equivalent that was still actively training employees. Not really for me; my first gig was pretty young, but going to a large corporation for much higher pay: it was a satellite office with 2-3 other people my age than a bunch of seasoned veterans.
Neighborhoods are the same way too. Even today, I can make small talk with my neighbors. But they are some 15+ years ahead of life with two young kids. Different vibe from a single dude in his 30's.
On top of meetups evaporating, the big issue is post-COVID meetups meeting 3 nights/week nearly impossible. I have 3 or 4 meetups I try to regularly go to and I'm lucky if they are run monthly.
I was recently watching a video mentioning a study that it takes ~200 hours of constant contact on average to make a "close friend" and some 40-60 hours to get go from acquaintance to "casual friend", then 80-100 to be a what you'd simply call "friend".
Meeting up for 2-4 hours a month would take years upon years to make anything out if you don't supplement it yourself.
The likely study in question, for those interested.
Hall, J. A. (2019). How many hours does it take to make a friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(4), 1278-1296.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407518761225
>I do not expect it will ever be difficult to access an LLM in the forseeable future
If you scope LLM's to "frontier models", I do expect it to be an ever-growing moat. Maybe not if you work at BigCo who will pump out $X0 million/yr to gain access to it, but definitely for the singular use cases of people navigating to Claude.ai and asking a quick question. That's assuming the companies stay afloat long term to begin with.
If you open it up to open-weight models, then I question how many this will filter out. Will it be a tool valuable enough for people to overcome the large starting hump like Photoshop? Or will some future company come in and streamline the UI/UX to make them as intuitive as possible? Those are the truly interesting questions in my mind.
Based on my experiences seeing what people actually do with AI tools: very. If this was a situation where I was seeing higher quality apps, PR's, and community building I would have few qualms about AI.
Instead it's created swamps in the art community, choas and bloat in the FOSS communities, a stronger sense of mistrust with traditional search, a deepening of the Dead Internet Theory, more broken tools to scrounge through... where is this supposed "benefit" I'm getting out of this?
Bear in mind it takes very few individuals to create a LOT of this sort of low-quality AI content. That makes it hard to judge how many are using Agentic methods vs "only Advice" vs "no AI."
"some" do not a system make. "Some" people succeed in the current educational system, but others would argue people succeed "despite" the system, not "because" of it.
It seems we're about to get a massive stress test of such a theory.
I don't see why it doesn't count. It shows we still value the service but it is out of reach for anyone who can't afford it. It lost in the same way much better food outings went out if business while McDonald's thrives. By making society arguably worse and punishing quality.
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