Can we please have some calm, stable, boring years please, before I'm dead? The last 5 years have already been "wild" enough. The world is unrecognizable. I'm unprepared for further wildness.
Excluding the batshit insane political side, I don't actually think it's been as nuts as people think, or at least not uniformly so.
I have a lot of friends in the tech sector, but outside the FANNG/silicone valley/startup bubbles. It's been largely business as normal across the board. Twitter and social media warps our perspective I think.
It depends where you lived. In my city (harshest/longest restrictions in the world), we were not allowed to leave the house for more than 30 minutes a day for 2.5 years unless we were out buying groceries. No large gatherings allowed at our homes. Mask usage enforced everywhere in public.
In the city in my country reknowned for having a much higher level of hypochrondria before the pandemic, imagine the mental health issues my city is going through now.
Stow the propaganda. 1) it's not over, the pandemic continues and will likely continue for a long time 2) it's already the fifth deadliest pandemic in known history. "Quarter pandemic" is an insane thing to think let alone say out loud.
1. It is pretty much over. Covid has become (for me at least) indistinguishable from a common cold.
2. Gemini says covid-19 killed 0.086% of world population (over several years). That's about as mild as it gets. More than sharks, but less than anything that usually kills people, like air polution (estimated about 0.095% yearly), cancer (est 0.12% every damn year) or cardiovascular disease (est 0.25% a year). Peak covid was still killing less than business-as-usual cancer or cardiovascular disease.
As far as pandemics go, the deadliest ones kill double digit percentage of people who contract them. That's two orders of magnitude more than covid. Even the single-digit percentage pandemics must be extremely rough. We were lucky[0].
[0]: Not the ones who died or have lasting consequences, but "we" as humanity, were rather lucky with covid. It could've been something much worse.
Ringing up expensive grocery items as cheap SKU at Whole Foods self checkout...
Going on shopping sprees and then calling the credit card company to report it as fraud...
Buying a fancy dress to wear for a few nights out and then returning it...
All things people close to me have done, or continue to do on a regular basis
Talking about a relatively "privileged" class of people here- multiple homes, multiple cars, kids in private school- not struggling single moms working double shifts to put food on the table.
> Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about microplastics in the past 10 years.
> You will be outcompeted if you waste your time reinventing the wheel and optimizing for stuff that doesn't matter. There is some market for safe, environmentally-friendly products, but you can clearly see that the companies that make them are struggling.
- https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault: sandboxes AI agents in a MacOS limited user account, and also uses sandbox-exec to limit access, though fence has more strict limitations
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