My observation is that people who are smart (or think they are) tend to express themselves via trying to be overly correct - on everything. And that gets exhausting.
People who try to be too precise and accurate, pay it with their happiness and peace. There is no better therapy than bullshitting with friends, just rolling with it instead of trying to make it all 100% perfectly accurate.
Would be interesting in your observations on the other side of this, but to me it seems related to those studies showing the trough of happiness is on average the mid-30s to mid-50s.
Most studies ascribe this to being the overlap of peak career hustle, childrearing, taking care of aging parents, and personal health scares all hitting at once.
Putting aside the obvious emotional toll, to me it looks/feels like a dearth of free time. Personally I find it hard to find blocks of time to do anything "for myself" that are more than 30-60 minutes. Video games now, compared to my youth, seem to be much deeper and entail much longer time commitments.
i certainly played less in my 40s/early-50s than i do now, mostly due to lack of free time and other commitments, so i totally understand what you and the parent are saying.
but i never stopped playing entirely. in those 30-60 minutes where my wife would watch her weekly show, i would pick up where i left off in a game. i find most games today are pretty well-designed around being able to play in spurts, even if the game is long + deep.
for longer story games, though, i usually keep a notebook beside me to jot down some context to help me pick it back up if i know it will be a while (mainly because my memory isn't what it used to be).
That is a lot more Star Citizen players than I expected.
Also that Factorio chart is weird: https://steamdb.info/app/427520/charts/#max .
I don't think I even saw another game with such steady player count. It is horizontal line after 1.0 to DLC release, and after DLC to present.
The real killer is the inability to commit the time needed to actually get into something. Games that I used to bang through in 2-3 days now take 2-3 months, if I finish at all. It's all just a bunch of random pockets of 1-2 hours here and there, and you can't even really get into it because as soon as you do, it's time to stop and might be days before you come back.
+1, that's why I don't do Single Player (story-driven) games anymore.
But a MP game (currently "The Finals") for me, works much better. It's easier to pick up for a few hours and then drop again for a long time. Sure, you might not be hyper competitive but that's fine.
Also works pretty well for racing games (like Forza MotorSport / Horizon) imo.
It's probably more personal circumstances than age, and your priorities definitely shift as you get older. I'm not in my 40s yet (mid-30s) and my decisions around games I want to play has changed.
I get to play games maybe a few hours per week (mostly in the weekend), so the idea of starting a new Assassin's Creed and spending 80 hours (many months) on a singleplayer game is pretty unappealing. (TBH, I was never super into SP games, but the appeal now dropped to 0).
At the same time, I've been having a blast with "The Finals" since launch and it's pretty much the only game I play. Easy to pick up and play 1-2 rounds :)
Not true. I just bought No Man's Sky on a Steam sale a few months ago and have been having a blast with it - only very occasionally neglecting my adult duties because of it.
I am working on a framework that allows creating very complex SaaS products with AI, that actually work. Very complex = +100k LOC of one-shotted AI-generated code. Codename o2p - outcome-to-proof.
It is a research-first method for designing or reviewing SaaS products. Its central question is:
What customer outcome matters, and what evidence proves that the product delivers it?
Idea or existing product
→ Research real customers and current work
→ Identify their Jobs to Be Done
→ Design the minimum safe workflow, define the interface and system behavior (with a sophisticated scoring system)
→ Validate the workflow
→ Implement vertical slices
→ Observe proof of customer progress
I love DeepSeek V4 Flash since the pre-0731, now even more. It is the first model that is truly too cheap to meter.
But I find it having a pretty significant problem with tool calling - no idea why, but tool calling with it is SLOW. As long as the model is reasoning, all good. But give it a bunch of tools and it becomes extremely slow.
Not sure I agree. It might sound like theater if you expect it to solve your security issues. But it is extremely good at finding undocumented or broken processes - these processes tend to hide the biggest offenders.
So far every single test I've done has worked correctly, I put a lot of work and time into preparation and planning, each workflow was designed, researched and optimized before implementation. The specification was already a massive document, so it is not a one-shot by no means.
I might check it and if it turns out to just be extremely bloated, I will re-write it from scratch. But before I do that, I might as well give it a chance.
No, LLMs have not plateaued, and each of the latest releases has been a proof of that.
Fable 5 is a model you instantly FEEL how smart and superior it is.
GPT 5.6 Sol is a HUGE incremental improvement in multiple directions and dimensions.
DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731 is a huge improvement over the preview version, using exactly the same architecture.
Kimi K3 gets open weight models very, very close to the frontier.
I felt taken by the change in the system model personality and writing style compared to opus, but I also found it to be much less impressive than I was expecting - let alone that the cost was incredibly high when not given for free.
Are you sure your reaction is not primarily to the improved ergonomics of Fable?
Having invested in a machine with 128GB of RAM, I would love seeing something a bit larger than 27B / 35B, possibly a 54B dense model or 70B MoE would be much closer to the Qwen 3.8 Max experience.
All of us with a 96gb rtx 6000 would love to see a 70b moe. Maybe they are waiting for OpenAI and Anthropic to IPO so they can short their stock and release. Local LLM is going to get very interesting in the next 2 years.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere Virginia. Like many of you I was a nerd, and I had no outlet for that nerd-dom until I spent all summer working for money to buy a C64. I taught myself assembly, and was a high school intern at NASA Langley where I learned about parallel processing, was introduced to the idea that people would actually pay you money to program computers, and had a tour of their space robotics lab.
When I went to college the guy two doors down from me in the dorm decided he wanted to build a robot, and he recruited me because I knew how to code. We spent freshman year working on a six-legged frame walker which we dreamed would explore Mars someday (this was in the late 1980s, long before the first Mars rover). It didn't work for crap -- the late 1980s were a disaster for makers, we had to source everything from the hardware store or Radio Shack. It was also the most amazing thing I'd ever done, and from then on I was an aspiring space roboticist.
I managed to not fail out, but it was close.
I went to grad school at the University of Maryland's Space Systems Lab under Dave Akin ("Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design"), where I learned control theory and a ton of hands-on skills and got to scuba dive supporting the development of Ranger, which could have been the first US satellite servicer except we could never find a launch for it. I graduated with a PhD in aerospace engineering in 2003, and got hired by NRL, where I worked on RSGS.
I need to use this thread to mention the Polish payment system Blik. It is one of the most convenient payment systems out there - you generate an ephemeral 6-digit code in your banking app, copy it to the vendor, confirm, done. Works P2P with phone numbers, too.
Interestingly, it would be the perfect system for payments using AI agents - the agent tries to pay, asks user to provide 6-digit code, submits payment request. User confirms via banking app. Done.
There's an interesting angle to BLIK vs Wero. While I believe QR codes are more convenient it is actually possible to give BLIK over the phone. Which means that youngsters (or fraudsters ;)) have access to their guardians' money over the phone line.
There is also a Blik feature to pay in one click - merchant remembers your payment and allows making subsequent payment without code, just by confirming transaction via banking app.
There are similar payment options across the EU. There is Bizum in Spain which works in similar way (and also offers phone-to-phone transfers).
There is EMP association (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Mobile_Payment_System...) which both BLIK and Bizum and bunch of others (I'd say majority of Europe) are members of that are already working on integration and Spain and Italy already work.
Basically with Wero on decathlon.de the DACH is discoveryng local-digital-payments and are excited about something that the rest of Europe enjoyed for a long while ;)
Blik is convenient for making transactions through phone calls. Stores have payment terminals that accept blik codes, I just shared the code to the cashier while ordering flowers from abroad and accepted the transactions in my bank app on my phone.
People who try to be too precise and accurate, pay it with their happiness and peace. There is no better therapy than bullshitting with friends, just rolling with it instead of trying to make it all 100% perfectly accurate.
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