It depends on what you’re searching. If you only ever need really basic information like keyboard shortcuts or “is it & or &&?” then it’s pretty good, and definitely faster. And if it gets it wrong, then the shortcut doesn’t work or the code doesn’t compile and I search again and try the links.
I asked it to parametrize a function and it gave me back the exact same code that I gave it. Tried to get it actually work for about 30 minutes while it pretended to be in emotional distress. Dear google: if I wanted a crying intern, I would hire one.
How is the author of this piece going to cite a graph that shows an extreme increase in time spent at home that begins in 2020 and not mention COVID? We had social media in the 2010s. COVID made spending time outdoors/around other people an actual physical danger for over a year, and the psychological effects of that are lingering. Does anyone remember that one political cartoon where the guy is walking down the street, and everyone around him just looks like a virus particle? I think a lot of people consciously or subconsciously still see the world that way. If you don’t believe, reflect on how you would feel about attending a crowded indoor gathering in 2010 vs now, or how much unease you would feel if someone at the table next to you started coughing.
There should be a name for the amnesia people seem to experience for the covid era. For 2 years, more or less, most forms of social activity were frowned upon or (in some states) made outright illegal. I feel strongly that this has affected our collective psyche more than anything since WW2. My sister (10 years my junior) seems to have had an extremely different early-adulthood from me. The lack of reflection on it is strange...
I believe many people, esp. higher up, are kind of embarrassed of what they did in the pandemic (like treat others like subhumans) and don't want anybody to dig deeper or hold them accountable.
In Germany it seems to be very actively maintained that the past is past and no we don't want to dig into what happened in 20-22.
For me the tragedy is that people quickly forgot about washing hands, masking when sick and strong preferrability of working from home and remote education. We were forced to make progress but mostly went back on it so quickly.
For me it's indeed around COVID where my habits changed. That deserves more attention indeed. Something about the vibe changed. Could be just me, and could be just a coincidence that is happened around COVID. But it's worth considering.
I'd be interested to see how the drop correlates with pets. We got a dog during COVID, she acclimated to a house which never has guests. Now she can't handle guests. Shame on us, perhaps, but anyway there it is.
Where I'm from religious observance went down considerably and permanently - it was declining before the pandemic, but it reached a tipping point only in the early 20s.
Apparently everyone was attending mass largely because everyone else was.
I don't know if it was me getting older, or caring less about startup scene but I agree, when Meetups started up again it wasn't as fun to stay up late and get together masked up to listen to someone talk about a basic web app or api. The vibes might have come back now that we're not masking, but it's a bigger commitment for me now to go in every week. I also feel like groups put a lot of content upfront to talk about their agenda and org functions when it used to be more of a "you're at the [topic] meeting, here's what we have for you today".
If you're stressed out all week and you pick up an infection then your immune system might not settle into fight mode until the weekend, because you can't afford to be down for the count when what you really need right now is to run from the bear, except it's not a bear, it's just the grind.
If there are more potential infections out there than there were before (also, greater population sizes to communicate them) that's a higher concentration of weekends lost to sickness.
That's gonna have an impact on how often you go to a friend's house... squared, because it's both you and that friend. Like the network effect's evil twin.
The chart cutting off in 2022 makes it hard to glean too much.
I no longer worry at all about attending a crowded indoor gathering - those would be impossible to avoid in NYC - but enjoying “a night in” without kids is a distinctly post-COVID phenomenon for myself and many people I know
> COVID made spending time outdoors/around other people an actual physical danger for over a year, and the psychological effects of that are lingering.
It actually never stopped being a physical danger. The only thing that changed is how long it takes for the damage to unfold.
At the start of COVID, people were rightfully shocked that hospitals and morgues were overflowing, and they reacted accordingly. That's no longer an issue (for now) with these latest strains, but acquiring Long COVID and dealing with its effects is definitely still a real concern.
Long COVID is vastly underdiagnosed. You might not get it until your 4th/5th/6th re-infection. That reinfection might also be asymptomatic, and/or Long COVID doesn't set in until weeks or months afterward, meaning people often don't link the two events. People not taking precautions (majority) are getting re-infected on average once per year since immunity from a previous infection typically wanes after 6 months, and there are about two waves per year for any given area.
Vaccines are of limited utility since they don't prevent transmission. A consistently worn N95 in public spaces is the only reliable means of defense, and everybody in your household needs to do that in public for it to be effective within your household.
We still know so little about Long COVID. For all we know, it's just going to be the next (or contemporary) microplastics debate where we just have to live with it until we start really seeing long term effects. But since it's not affecting our ability to make the rich richer, we won't get much serious mainstream support for the issue. Instead focusing on diligent work in labs in the background.
All that said: I don't do it myself, but I don't judge people who choose to mask up regularly when going out in public. It's a semi-normal thing in Asian communities, and I have two close (non-Asian) friends who do it. If nothing else, COVID de-stigmatized that practice here in the US.
As somebody who masks regularly in 2026, I definitely don't judge people who don't. Most people don't know the true risks, and even for those who do, the two lifestyles come with some important tradeoffs that I don't think should be forced on anybody, one way or the other.
I’ve only ever heard people talk about Long Covid online, I’ve never met a single person in real life that has ever claimed to have it or has any of the supposed symptoms. Everyone has been infected 1 or more times at this point. If I was never online I wouldn’t even know it existed and I honestly don’t think it does exist.
I’m not a Covid denier or anything either. I masked up and stayed in during the pandemic, I got the vaccine, etc. I had original first year Covid confirmed by a test, and I’m positive I’ve had it at least once again since then though didn’t get a test confirmation, so I’m 100% positive Covid is real (I feel like this is an obvious statement but I’m sure some people out there believe it’s a hoax or something). However I’ve seen exactly zero evidence other than online anecdotes that Long Covid exists or ever existed.
If it’s “vastly under diagnosed” I should personally know multiple people with it and should likely have family members with it (at least extended family) and yet I don’t. Not a single person. Honestly I think it’s one of those terminally online things that gets repeated a lot but only online.
I have a friend who had to stop his career and move back in with his parents in his 30s. After an infection he was suddenly unable to read or do anything that requires visual fixation without intense pain. It took years to find a doctor that was able to help him at all and he's still not back to normal.
This is an online anecdote so it will make no difference to you if you keep choosing not to believe it. But the idea that it is a purely online phenomenon with no real-world basis is absurd. It's been 6 years and there is a preponderance of evidence. The most common estimate is that it affects 400 million people worldwide.[1] Whether or not people want to talk about this to you in person is a completely different story. Covid is a societal red line that no one wants to bring up.
Why did you friend assume it was the Covid and not some other issue? How did the doctor help him?
That 400 million number is BS though. Here is the methodology:
> After acute SARS-CoV-2 infection, an estimated 400 million people globally and 17 million, or 6.8% of Americans, based on Household Pulse Survey, experienced Long COVID symptoms, such as fatigue, cognitive impairment, body pain, headache, dizziness, sleep disturbance and a myriad of other symptoms and signs spanning multiple body systems [1, 2]
They surveyed people after the biggest societal disruption in 50 years and found some of them were tired.
This is why people don’t take long COVID seriously. It’s just a catch-all for feeling off.
Post-viral syndrome is a thing common to most (all?) viral infections. For example, I got pretty sick in 2014 with some strange illness, maybe it was a bad flu or perhaps mono. Then for the next few months it'd seemingly resurface and cause little flare-ups of fatigue, nausea and a vague malaise. Just as it seemed to be fading I went on a lengthy post-college trip I around Asia where I'd spend multiple days a week feeling completely at ease hiking all day and partying all night but also had completely random days where I swore I felt like I was coming down with a flu and the littlest things would get my heart to race. When I came home the docs said it seemed like some sort of post-viral reaction then it resolved itself shortly thereafter. Covid doesn't seem to have been special other than that it gets tons of scrutiny and everyone got to experience it at once. Sometimes an overactive immune system will react in a counterproductive way and take a long time to get back to baseline, much like an army regiment that never got word that the war is over.
I actually do know someone irl who got long covid and became significantly disabled. He has to use an electric wheelchair to get around now. It’s a serious situation
A former IRL colleague had long covid issues including hospital stays. They posted about it for a stretch on Twitter but generally didn't talk about it, and then almost everyone I know through Twitter dispersed. Then there are a few people who I only know online but their symptoms are more 'months of brain fog' than being stuck at home or catatonic. So there might be more cases in your network where people are just not vocal about it.
Part of the issue is it's unclear what long covid is, if it's the same thing as chronic fatigue syndrome, and who even knows enough about this to be worth listening to
It's just another post-acute infection syndrome that can occur from pretty much any contagious illness (flu, etc.). Most people reading this have probably experienced this. Ever had a cough that persisted multiple weeks after the rest of your illness went away? That's not because your cold permanently damaged your lungs or even that the virus is still around. It's because your immune system will sometimes get confused and continue to wage war in your throat (or whatever it thought was infected) long after the virus has been eliminated.
After the shots (2x moderna, 1x pfizer) I was quite f'ed up for a long time. It took maybe a year until my physical endurance started coming back towards normal, my sweat was no longer smelling like after a bad flu.
The one or two Covid infections I had after that also weren't great.
I can totally believe that if you aren't a super healthy person that Covid can cause long termish problems in some that take a long time to fix.
There are doctors who have all those patients, and I don't think they spend all day just making it up.
> I’ve only ever heard people talk about Long Covid online, I’ve never met a single person in real life that has ever claimed to have it or has any of the supposed symptoms.
Probably for the aforementioned reasons: people aren't making the link.
Long COVID can lead to major bodily dysfunctions including heart disease, stroke, kidney impairment, neurological issues, autoimmune conditions, etc.
People are getting sick more often and not just with COVID, because recurring COVID infections have nuked their immune systems. There are studies proving how it impacts T-cell depletion, etc.
> If it’s “vastly under diagnosed” I should personally know multiple people with it
Are you not aware of your blatant contradiction here?
I'll take you seriously when I see scientists and doctors masking up and taking the precautions that you COVID truthers still cling to. Go to an infectious disease conference. They don't look like people who think like you.
You'd be surprised how many doctors and scientists would drink, smoke, and use other drugs in spite of being fully versed in what this does to their patients.
Or how many medical professionals continue to be medical professionals while knowing it has an elevated risk of suicide.
It's not hard to find the science backing my claims. As for why doctors don't mask, they're humans too, and just as susceptible to propaganda and competing forces like wanting to "return to normal" or simply having kids in school and assuming getting them to mask is too tall of an order (frankly, it is imo).
Here's a Canadian researcher who still masks and explains how the many 'mistakes' were made in order to convince people to throw caution to the wind:
But that didn't make the threat go away. People just pretended that it did. Group psychology is weird like that. Further compounding matters is the fact that neverending COVID reinfections impacts the part of the brain responsible for executive function, making it that much easier for people to not care. The more common and palatable term is "brain fog." Toxoplasmosis has a similar known reinforcing effect.
Life is a set of tradeoffs. The actual occurrence of Long Covid (which can also occur with influenza and other infections) is rare.
My personal calculation is the reward of enhanced expressiveness when interacting with others is worth the risk of infectious disease in 2026. In 2020, the variables were different!
> The actual occurrence of Long Covid (which can also occur with influenza and other infections) is rare.
Again, it's undercounted. Furthermore, LC is more comparable to AIDS than it is run of the mill influenza in the systems it affects and how. Also, note it took years of denial and lag before people finally acknowledged the long-term damage that AIDS caused. Except here it's not sexually transmitted but instead airborne year round.
Anyway, do you what want. I'm just pointing out most people have been misled, so they can't even make informed decisions. People with LC live with this regret.
Looking at credible sources, it appears that long covid occurs at rates around 1 in 20 to 1 in 30, which is high. It's rational for people who have elevated risk factors to avoid under-ventilated / unmasked gatherings.
This statistic doesn't match what's published, but I am not an authority and don't have the expertise to critically evaluate published studies on the topic.
The fun thing about science is that it’s not hard to find science backing X claim, and one can keep going on about that, while ignoring all the science backing not X claim.
Yeah that’s the fun thing about science, you can pretend to address things too. Seriously though, there is no way I am trusting some random researcher making a youtube video…like what is that. I am a researcher and I can make nonsense youtube videos about things too and throw some science flair around it for good measure.
The risk absolutely has gone away. Vaccination, acquired immunity, and the general drop in the number of effected people have plummeted COVID cases down to below the noise floor on risk analysis. If you go out and get sick, chances are it's just the flu, just like was true every year before the pandemic.
If you are letting fear of disease get in the way of living a healthy and fulfilling life today, that's an unhealthy trauma response.
>If you go out and get sick, chances are it's just the flu
This is demonstrably untrue.
We in the US are in the 13th covid wave since the pandemic started from tracking wastewater data which is our most accurate way of determining transmission (fortunately at a much smaller peak as of right now than most waves)[1]. The past four years have had far higher covid transmission rates on average than the two years we consider societally "when covid was happening". It does not strictly follow seasonal patterns like the flu, we routinely get summer waves that peak quite highly. The flu does not do this.
Millions of Americans have ME/CFS like symptoms after covid, some extremely severe.[2]
...only lasts 6 months or so, wanes, and a new variant arrives
> the general drop in the number of effected people
Long COVID is severely underdiagnosed
> that's an unhealthy trauma response
The precautionary principle is a rational response, especially what we already know about the widespread systemic damage that repeat COVID infections cause.
The only reliable protection right now is consistent N95 usage in public spaces, and very few people are doing that (though some certainly are, as I see them every day).
it means “my love” but sometimes we also use it like how american southerners say “bless your heart” or africans say “my brother in christ”, so that might why you have a negative connotation of it
Additionally, everyone seems to have forgotten that covid can leave lingering mental symptoms for years after “recovery”. I wonder how much of the mental fatigue/ brain fog that people blame on tech is actually from covid…
It's not just COVID, either. You can get brain fog effects from a variety of things. The first and biggest is sleep apnea (woefully underdosed).
Plenty of things can develop as you grow older. Some of them may have been present all your life and you only start to notice them when your body is a little less resilient. Food sensitivities, for instance -- eat the wrong thing, trigger a major release of histamines (which trigger both the stomach acid and a whole-body response). Too much of that releases other neurotransmitters, too, and you can get Depression and Fatigue too. (And then try changing the whole way you eat while at the bottom of a depressive slump where all the easiest foods are the likeliest triggers!!) Autistic people (plenty of us in tech) are especially predisposed to many of these inflammation-related issues.
If you're brain fogged, see the doctor... and be prepared for a long slog of self advocacy, and maybe shopping around.
Whenever I see people doing this kind of thing, I always think “if they were serious, they would downgrade their internet service plan”. Watch how fast the “addiction” leaves them when they’re paying by the MB
I’ve been looking for an MVNO cell phone plan in the U.S. that offers data at a max speed of 512 kbps (or something similar that is fast enough for most legitimate uses, but a little painful), and I haven’t found anything. Seems like an opportunity. However, I can waste plenty of time on sites like this one, and it is functional on a 16 kbps connection.
The exact words matter to people who people who don’t use it to write for them. A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner/etc. That’s who I imagine would be most affected
>A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner
People developing a para-social (pseudo-social?) relationship with a corporate robot have far bigger problems than the word-chooser in their robot "friend".
I have, and I still do this occasionally. I don’t believe the plant on my desk (I don’t have a rubber duck) is intelligent. I don’t need it to be intelligent, either.
I also do it with a LLM every now and then and, while it’s feedback is more useful than a toy’s, it does not need to be intelligent either.
Even intelligent people have demonstrated they are not immune to the damaging effects of AI sycophancy. The most recent example that comes to mind is Hank Green.
LLMs never are limited to "exact words", because their output is inherently probabilistic. The method Anthropic (along with Gemini, who has been using the exact same watermark for at least a year) uses doesn't bias the output token distribution, just reseeds the PRNG in a way that can be detected after the fact: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark#which-s...
> The exact words matter to people who people who don’t use it to write for them.
Right. If the exact words matter, using a non-deterministic LLM is a terrible idea in the first place. I hope these people never try putting the same prompt in different sessions.
Also, now I am curious. How would these people interact with other humans? Is there anyone on earth who would provide the exact same reply, down to every single word, if we asked them the same question more than once?
How would you ever know if you've been affected? How, indeed, would you know at all whether the word you get next is different from some different word next?
“Plankton” is a category including a lot of things, most of which are more important in their current role than they would be viable as a protein source for humans. A lot of plankton is microorganisms made entirely out of silica or calcium carbonate (probably not nutritious for humans). A lot more is the eggs and larvae of fish and crustaceans. If humans started eating this, it would cause ecological disaster even faster. I think at some point we’re going to have to normalize eating bugs, at least those can be farmed easily…
I’m assuming the (duck emoji) is the bot for when no one else in the lobby? Glad you included that. However, I’m not sure why “niggas” is one of the words it uses… Moderating users is one thing but I would hope at least the bot could be inoffensive…
