It paints a picture of us constantly reshaping our identities, but how much of that is truly up to us? I feel like our choices are shaped by things like family, upbringing, or biology, are we really free to evolve, or are we just rolling with a preset script?
Yes, for sure we are limited by our biology. Someone born crippled will never be an olympic body builder. Someone born stupid will never be a math researcher.
And of course we have a lot of inputs like family, upbringing, schooling, culture, etc which all shape us
However, humans are capable of being inputs into our own system as well. It is not easy, necessarily, but I do strongly believe that we are capable of shaping our own identities as a result of being able to be our own inputs.
We can also choose to relocate, change friend groups, change careers, whatever else we need to do to change our external inputs as well
Of course we are limited by physical reality and limited by things like money and opportunity, our intelligence and aptitude and such, but as long as we can find something within our capabilities, we can shape ourselves into it
For example, I am nearly 40. I have ice skated my whole life but never used to play ice hockey.
I'm never going to play in a pro league, I'm already too old even if I was phenomenal somehow. But it is well within my capability to join a beginner old timers league and play with people my skill level if I want to
The thing about free will is that feeling you have free will is not a confirmation you actually have it.
There are psychological tricks that can be used to manipulate people into acting in certain ways. They're not niche experimental techniques. They're widely used in PR, advertising, politics, and business.
Virtually all of them create the illusion of free choice where none exists.
Almost everyone can be convinced they made a free choice, when in fact they were influenced into it without their awareness.
The irony is that the people who do this to others aren't any more free than their victims.
Which ends up in an interesting place, where everyone feels free but most choices are forced.
What really drives all of these "conscious" choices?
Even if there is a preset script its very hard to see it, given the variety of identities and different environments people get thrown into. Even people who are extremely similar can end up leading extremely different lives.
Tech-free homes are the new rich people flex? Crazy that in 2025, the super wealthy are spending millions on houses with no smart gadgets or Wi-Fi, like they’re living in the old days. It’s not just about hating tech maybe more about buying privacy. No Alexa listening, no data tracking. Is this just for billionaires, or are we all tired of being online all the time?
These "smart" devices are all controlled through the internet... which is insane. I don't want my home to become unusable when wi-fi is down. I want local switches that can be controlled... locally, offline.
The local government here pushes "smart thermostats" which I've had fail twice because the app on the phone couldn't reach the server that day. If I must have digital controls, connect them to a physical network that's isolated from the internet, and a local panel to interact. I don't need an app on my phone.
We can't use the broil feature of our oven, because it is an on-line feature only and we won't connect it to wi-fi... bastards.
"It’s not just about hating tech maybe more about buying privacy."
For the ultra-rich, probably this.
Personally, I don't mind 'smart' tech. But only if used wisely, making life more comfortable, saving energy, etc.
I do mind the 'let random 3rd parties spy on your everyday life' part. 'Smart' could be just "automatic" and/or LAN only. Connected but not to anywhere outside the house.
Also I dislike making things more complicated than necessary. Light on/off? Physical switch does the job. Ok, add TV-style remote if you want. But doesn't need phone app/WAN networking or software updates.
It’s honestly annoying how often experts speak up about this, and still nothing changes. We’re stuck in the same cycle—fear gets in the way, and in the end, it’s our privacy and security that suffer. If anything, this should be a sign to invest in stronger encryption and better law enforcement tactics that don’t mess with the tools keeping us safe online.
There are proxies that can dynamically generate certs based on requested domains so the only mitigating controls would be to either cache fingerprints of certs and alert someone if they are different than what other probe nodes are seeing from the rest of the internet or to pin certificates and hardly anyone does this any more. This is currently a manual process so most people would have no idea until it is too late. These would just be missing entries in the crt.sh logs.
I always try to break out of local optimas I'm in and asking AI to give me other options/insights or even disagree with me. At the end we are steering the wheel and "amplifier" made sense to me.
I'm wondering how an "aggressive" button would look like in an AI, asking it to be less confirmative. Although I guess it will piss some people off since most of the times I just want a direct answer and get on with my code/life.
For me, it was about giving space to grow. I feel that trusting the people in your team and not micro-managing them really helps them explore new things, learn and become more responsible.
Seems pretty cool! The only caveat is that it works pretty well with purer functions that have outputs which can be formatted. Writing these docs for more complex tests returning abstract types not in the built-in library can be overwhelming.
Interested in what your benchmark for accuracy is. I feel like for my searches that I am normally looking at a few different sources and cross referencing them to come to a conclusion about what is best for me. Do you find that AI is good at automatically figuring out what is best for you?
For instance I wanted help cooking Coq au vin yesterday. I’ve cooked it before but I couldn’t remember what temperature to set the oven to. I read about five recipes (which were all wildly different) and choose the one that best suited the ingredients and quantities I was already using.
I asked chat gpt for a coq au vin recipe, and I’ll just say I won’t be opening a restaurant using ChatGPT as my sous chef anytime soon.
