Agreed. Professional sports are the closest institution that society has to a meritocracy. Highly competitive, public, obsessively measured and analyzed. A tenth of a second faster sprint time might be more valuable than even a top-tier socioeconomic background.

The IQ loss from neurological damage caused by COVID wasn't helpful either. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2311330

Interesting to search this page for "4.5".

I'm happy to move to a superior model, but I'm not really hearing enough about significant improvements, and the obvious pressure to release the latest and greatest model makes me hesitant to upgrade. I've been satisfied with the results I get using 4.5 with an "ask ChatGPT" skill that runs the code by ChatGPT 5.4.

Most all perceived improvements in a minor version release are going to be solidly in the realm of confirmation bias by now.

It's a modern version of: "we're firing you, but your last task will be to train your lower-cost replacement".

Possibly related to "showerthoughts", in that removal of stimuli allows for latent realizations to surface.

Or as Arthur Brooks puts it - the shower now is the only place where you dont have your phone on you.

Your comment made me look up "shower phone holder" on Amazon, and I regretted it.

The article doesn't address branding very much, but one of the theories for why laser-focused American brands (like Starbucks, KFC, or McDonald's) do so well in Japan is that Japanese mega-companies are too brand-diluted to compete with them.

AI verbosity is similar to AI sycophancy: a dark pattern, disguised as earnest assistance.

> If Google cuts that out completely, what incentive do websites have to not block the Google crawlers?

Completely, yes, that destroys the incentive. But they can reduce it 80% or 90% or so, to the point that it's just barely worthwhile to allow their crawlers.

Suppose right now there are people making e.g. $60,000/year from their small site, or the same amount as a contributor to a medium-to-large site. If you take 90% of that, now they make $6000/year, which isn't enough to make a living, so instead they go take a job as a construction worker or a nurse or something, and then you're getting 90% of $0.

That's true, those numbers don't work out for Google. But they have essentially unlimited resources to discover the exact threshold at which that person is just barely incentivized to keep their site active. $100K/year, reduced 80% to $20K/year? Still enough for them to keep their site up part-time? Etc.

The bulk of the traffic they're referring is essentially residual profitless goodwill left over from their "don't be evil" days.