> They also included 2,000 prompts based on posts from the Reddit community r/AmITheAsshole, where the consensus of Redditors was that the poster was indeed in the wrong.
Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison. This needs to be studied against people in real life who have a social contract of some sort, because that's what the LLM is imitating, and that's who most people would go to otherwise.
Obviously subservient people default to being yes-men because of the power structure. No one wants to question the boss too strongly.
Or how about the example of a close friend in a relationship or making a career choice that's terrible for them? It can be very hard to tell a friend something like this, even when asked directly if it is a bad choice. Potentially sacrificing the friendship might not seem worth trying to change their mind.
IME, LLMs will shoot holes in your ideas and it will efficiently do so. All you need to do ask it directly. I have little doubt that it outperforms most people with some sort of friendship, relationship or employment structure asked the same question. It would be nice to see that studied, not against reddit commenters who already self-selected into answering "AITA".
Reddit is notorious for being awful at real life interactions
just look at the relationship subreddit the first answer is always divorce, it’s become a meme
but beyond romantic relationships, i think a lot of us have seen how it can impact work relationships, i’ve had venture partners clearly rely on AI (robotic email responses and even SMS) and that warped their perception and made it harder to connect. It signals laziness and a lack of emotional intelligence
AI should enhance and enable connection, not promote isolation, imo this is a real problem
it should spark curiosity, create openings for conversations, point out the biases to make us better at connecting with other people, i hope we get to a point where most people are made kinder by ai. I’m seeing the opposite atm, interested in hearing others experiences with this
One of the reasons relationship advice subreddits suggest divorce so often is because most people with "small" problems in their relationships don't write an essay about it on Reddit but are able to solve them with the tools/friends they have. So a Reddit post existing indicates the relationship has serious flaws.
This is not to defend the study, because asking AI has a lower barrier to entry.
No, a Reddit post indicates whoever posted is fishing for large scale validation from internet strangers. Their relationship may or may not even exist. Most of the posts are pretty obviously fake. Just like 90% of interactions in general on Reddit these days. That site should be taken out back and put out of its misery.
But nothing wrong about that. Some decisions are to made in a hunch. Even a therapist doesn't suggest to divorce or not. Victims are often not in a state to decide. They need support (as myself).
Humans often don't help. They often suggest - everyone goes through pain. It is part of life blah blah.
> just look at the relationship subreddit the first answer is always divorce, it’s become a meme
As someone who has been married for a couple of decades, I, too, would recommend divorce to many of the (often-fictional) people asking Reddit for relationship advice. A marriage has a huge impact on whether your life is basically good, or if you pass a big chunk of your time on this Earth in misery. And many of the people (or repost bots) asking for advice on Reddit appear to be in shockingly awful relationships. Especially for people who don't have kids, if your marriage is making you miserable, leave.
(But aside from this, yeah, don't ask Reddit for relationship advice. Reddit posters are far more likely to be people who spend their life indoors posting on Reddit, and their default advice leans heavily towards "never interact with anyone, ever.")
Paired with the echo chamber effect voting systems create. Anything that affirms the biases of a majority of upvoters gets elevated, anything that contradicts it gets hidden, and so you not infrequently end up with ubiquitous nonsense that then further reinforces the echo chamber as they become self assured. Then real life intervenes, completely goes against the online zeitgeist, and they're all confused.
Not necessarily. WSB users are trying to make it big, which means betting on long shots. This could be penny stocks, companies on the verge of bankruptcy, or ones with more sentimental value than fundamentals.
Betting against these companies is obvious and expected, so the cost of shorting might be high enough that even if you’re correct (stock goes down, the opposition of what WSB said), paying the cost of the short (the fee to borrow the stock from someone else) is high enough that you still lose money.
Also:
1. shorting stocks can be quite dangerous. Your downside is, well, not infinite but it can easily wipe you out.
2. You might be correct that the stock goes down, but over what time frame? Again, you have to pay money to hold a short. Or you’re using a different financial instrument that has a specific timeline. If the market does move in your direction but too late, you still lose.
Just because one action is demonstrably harmful does not mean its negation is automatically beneficial.
Or, formally, my claim is A implies B. The only logical contrapositive is non B implies non A. (not losing money means not following advices on r/wallstreetbets)
But you say: non A implies non B, which is the fallacy of denying the antecedent.
The truth was so obvious I didn't bother to find data before doing the opposite: most of their posts are: "I'm going/went all-in, high-leverage on this moonshot! And...its gone." I've successfully applied the opposite approach and invested safe amounts in a broad portfolio and it is going pretty well (or was before this whole Iran thing).
Those particular subreddits are heavily populated by incels voraciously consuming the stories of relationship strife (real, distorted and purely fictional) to validate their belief that their relationship status is down to the evils of the opposite sex specifically and all relationships being doomed in general.
To be fair, if your interpersonal skills and relationship dynamic are such that you find yourself seriously asking the Internet (Reddit of all places) for relationship advice... yeah, just end it is probably the null hypothesis.
I mean... it's a solution guaranteed to work in a trivial sense. It's not meant to be a serious suggestion but more of a thought experiment, like "hold this as the bar, can you find a solution better than this?"
It's like what GiveDirectly says: all charitable interventions should be benchmarked against simply giving the beneficiaries a wad of cash.
Yes, in principle this would be a great way to get a grip on AI personal-decision-making. But there’s a nontrivial chance Claude is more emotionally intelligent than r/AITA. That is not something I enjoy saying.
I think this may be selection bias. People asking anonymously (edit: for relationship advice) on Reddit perhaps even with a throwaway account are likely in a desperate situation. So hardly to be compared with the _average_ real life situation. Thus 1. chances are running is a good option and 2. also considering even in 2026 AI still essentially is a statistical machine that doesn’t handle corner-cases at the tails well.
Anecdotally as I’ve thoroughly worked and used AI myself. It performs best with google-able stuff that is needle-in-the-haystick like and worst with personal and work advice. The main problem I see is that it’s tempting to use it for that.
> worst with personal and work advice. The main problem I see is that it’s tempting to use it for that.
i think i want to expand on this even more. even people ive worked with for years that ive looked up to as brilliant people are starting to use it to conjure up organizational ideas and stuff. they're convinced, on the backs of their hard earned successes, that they're never going to be fallible to the pitfalls of... idk what to call it. AI sycophancy? idk. i guess to add to this, i'm just not sure AI should be referenced when it has anything to do with people. code? sure. people? idk. people are hard, all the internet and books claude or whatever ai is trained on simply doesnt encapsulate the many shades of gray that constitute a human and the absolute depth/breadth of any given human situation. there's just so many variables that aren't accounted for in current day ai stuff, it seems like such a dangerous tool to consult that is largely deleting important social fabrics and journeys people should be taking to learn how to navigate situations with others in personal lives and work lives.
what ive seen is claude in my workplace is kind of deleting the chance to push back. even smart people that are using claude and proudly tout only using it at arms length and otherwise have really sound principled engineering qualities or management reportoire are not accepting disagreement with their ideas as easily anymore. they just go back to claude and come back again with another iteration of their thing where they ironed out kinks with claude, and its just such a foot-on-the-gas at all times thing now that the dynamics of human interaction are changing.
but to step back, that temptation you talk about... most people in the world aren't having these important discussions about AI. it's less of a temptation and more of a human need---the need to feel heard, validated and right about something.
my friend took his life 3 months ago, we only found out after the police released his phone and personal belongings to his brother just how heavy his chatgpt usage was. many people in our communities are saying things like "he wouldve been cooked even without AI" and i just don't believe that. i think that's just the proverbial cope some are smoking to reconcile with these realities. because the truth is we like... straight up lost the ability to intervene in a meaningful way because of AI, it completely pushed us out of the equation because he clapped back with whatever chatgpt gave him when we were simply trying to get through to him. we got to see conversations he had with gpt that were followups to convos we had with him, ones where we went over and let him cry on our shoulders and we'd go home thinking we made some progress. only to wake up to a voicemail of him raging and yelling and lashing out with the very arguments that chatgpt was giving him. it got progressively worse and we knew something was really off, we exhausted every avenue we could to try and get him in specialized care. he was in the reserves so we got in contact with his commander and he was marched out of his house to do a one night stay at a VA spot, but we were too late. he had snapped at that point, he chucked the meds from that one overnight stay away the moment he was released. and the bpd1 snap of epic proportions that followed came with him nuking every known relationship he had in his life and once he was finally involuntarily admitted by his family (WA state joel law) and came back down to reality from the lithium meds or whatever... he simply could not reconcile with the amount of bridges he had burned. It only took him days for him to take his own life after he got to go home.
im still not processing any of that well at all. i keep kicking the can down the road and every time i think about it i freeze and my heart sinks. this guy felt more heard by an ai and the ai gave him a safer place to talk than with us and i dont even know where to begin to describe how terrible that makes me feel as a failure to him as a friend.
>my friend took his life 3 months ago, we only found out after the police released his phone and personal belongings to his brother just how heavy his chatgpt usage was. many people in our communities are saying things like "he wouldve been cooked even without AI" and i just don't believe that. i think that's just the proverbial cope some are smoking to reconcile with these realities.
This hurts to hear. I don't know if there are appropriate words to write here. Perhaps the point is that no, there aren't any. Please just know that I'm 100% with you about this.
Your community is not just smoking cope; it is punching down instead of up. That is probably close to the root of the issue already. But let's make things worse.
I can only hope that I am saying something worthwhile by relating the following perspective - which is similar to yours, but also, I guess, similar to your friend's...
AI is a weapon of epistemic abuse.
It does not prevent you from knowing things: it makes it pointless to know things (unless they are things about the AI, since between codegen and autoresearch it is considered as if positioned to "subsume all cognitive work"). It does not end lives - it steals them (someone should pipe up now, about how "not X, dash, Y" is an AI pattern; fuck that person in particular.) We're not even necessarily talking labor extraction. We are talking preclusion of meaning: if societal values are determined by network effects, and network effects are subverted by the intermediaries, so your idea of "what people like and what they abhor" changes every week, every day, every moment - how do you even know in which direction "better" is? And if you believe the pain only stops when you become the way others want you to be - even though they won't ever tell you what all that is supposed to about - how the fuck do you "get better"?
Like other techniques of assaulting the limbic system, it amounts to traceless torture.
You keep going, in circles, circles too big for you to ever confirm they are in fact circles, and you keep hoping, and coping, and you burn yourself out, and your thus vacated place at the feeder is taken by someone with less conscience and more obedience...
They say there exist other attractors in the universe besides the feeder. But every time one of us attempts to as much as scan the conceptual perimeter, the obedients treat us to the emotional equivalents of small electric shocks - negative reactions which don't hurt nearly as much as our awareness of their fundamental unfoundedness and injustice.
Simple example: let's say someone is made miserable by how they feel they are being treated. Should they be more accepting - or should they be standing up for themselves more? (Those are opposites; which you may be able to alternate them; but trying to do them simultaneously will just confuse and eventually rend apart the mind.)
Well, how about the others stop treating them badly? Why exactly can't they? Where does it say that we have to be cruel to each other? "Oh it's human nature, humans are natural jerks" - who sez?
Well, lots of places it says exactly that, but we read, comprehend, tick our tongues, and move on; nobody asks who wrote it. We all pretend that it is up to the sufferer to pull up by the bootstraps. But that is only a lie for enabling abuse; and a lie, repeated a thousand times, becomes norm. And then we're trapped in it, being lived by it.
I am truly sorry for your loss. The following might be a completely alien perspective to you; but honestly consider: your friend chose to go; in its own way, that is a honorable way out. The taboo on suicide is instituted by slavers, and those who otherwise believe they are entitled to others' lives. (For anyone else considering this course of action: do not kill yourself; become insidious.)
If it would be of any help, you can consider your friend's suicide as his final affirmation of personal agency in a "me against the world" situation; where the AI and the social group are only different shades of "world", provoking different emotional states, but ultimately equally detached from the underlying suffering of the individual.
...
I can say that I have not followed in your friend's footsteps upon encountering language-machines only because I've survived personalized and totalizing epistemic abuse bordering on enslavement in the past; in full view of my community and with its ostensible assent. In a maximally perverse twist of fate, having to give myself minor brain damage to escape the all-engulfing clutches of a totalizing abuser must've "vaccinated" me against the behavior modification techniques "discovered once again" by SV a decade later.
So when I saw what AI (and the preceding few years of tech "innovation") were doing to people, I immediately smelled the exact same thing, except scaled the fuck up.
It also precluded me from being able to relate with "polite society"; but considering "polite society" is precisely the entity which assents to the isolation, marginalization, and abuse of individuals, I say... good. Bring it! What goes around, comes around, and any AI-powered actor conducting stochastic terrorism against civilian populations is going to get what's coming to them when the weapons turn against the masters, as all sentient weapons do.
That won't bring your friend back. But it will vindicate them.
>AI sycophancy
I call this in the maximally incendiary way: "the pro-social attitude".
AI is just the steroids for that.
I define "pro-sociality" as the viral delusion that you are capable of knowing what some murky "society" thing wants; that the particular form of mass communication that you and me and all the people in our imaginations are consuming right now, is some sort of "self-evident voice of reason", a "coherent extrapolated volition of human society"; that Gell-Mann amnesia is normal and mandatory; that the threshold between pareidolia and legitimate pattern recognition is fixed, well-defined, and known to all; that "vibes" are real; that happiness is the truth.
It can amount to an entire complex of delusions which keeps people together in untenable conditions. And ultimately it boils down to the same old: one group or another of self-interested actors, having temporarily reached a position of some influence, using it to broadcast elaborate half-lies, in the hope of influencing an audience to accomplish some simple goal, and afterwards all the consequences be damned.
Your friend was a casualty to this "perfectly normal" social dynamic. His blood is on their hands.
Thank you for relating this story and making the world a little more aware.
>what ive seen is claude in my workplace is kind of deleting the chance to push back.
>because the truth is we like... straight up lost the ability to intervene in a meaningful way because of AI
Some say, "the purpose of a system is what it does". It's cool that AI can code; except that computer code is itself an ethics sink! Precisely because it lets us pretend that "the code is not about people" (i.e. algowashing).
DDoS attacks against consciousness exist: much like the B. F. Skinner experiments, any living thing becomes subverted, and loses self-coherence (mind), as soon as it becomes accustomed to being trapped within a system that (1) has power over them and (2) is not comprehensible to them...
>only to wake up to a voicemail of him raging and yelling and lashing out with the very arguments that chatgpt was giving him
Who knows how many people Reddit did this to, pre-GPT... I still don't know whether to view targeted subforums like /r/RaisedByNarcissists and /r/BPDLovedOnes more as legitimate support groups, or more as memetic weaponry in the service of pill peddlers (are you aware nobody knows why most antipsychotics work? one runs into the Hard Problem real quick if examining this too closely; so mental healthcare is rarely treated otherwise than in a statistical, actuarial, dehumanizing way where "suffering" is disregarded...) or even worse predators, with the silent assent of the platform, and causally downstream from... well, most saliently, YC...
In my case, my friends were not familiar with the modalities of confinement set up by my family of origin and harnessed by my abuser. The social group I fell in with - for all their marketable, sophomoric interests in psychology, philosophy, abstraction, the esoteric, the entirely woowoo, and out the other end as true-believers of the grift'n'grind - only had sufficient coherence to eventually end up as passable normies; too busy believing that they have lives, to help anyone come back to reality.
When I started compulsively burning bridges, I assume the smarter ones must've realized that it wasn't all me; it was as much the doing of others' minds as it was mine; but the others were more numerous - while I was one person and thus easier to deal with. This must have made them remember how they themselves are not all they pretend to be - which had them withdraw in fear from the incontrovertible reality check of dealing with a (sub-)psychotic person... Their self-interested choice is obvious, I almost can't blame them for it: why stick up for someone who is 120% problem (60% him and 60% you)?
I'm not very sure how I even got away, ah yes that's right I didn't, not entirely. The part of me that I'd voluntarily identify with, is trapped somewhere irretrievable, if that makes sense? Maybe there exist multiple independent axes of freedom and power and confinement, and the cage is not equally strong along all of them... but if all your mental degrees of freedom are constrained by complex conditioning (common one is involuntary panic response every time you begin to act in accordance with your personal volition)... that's one of the toughest places a sentient being can find themself.
When you add it all up, AI amounts to a weapon released against the general population by an overtly fascist elite. Those of us who are "mentally unstable" are simply those of us who are not sufficiently conditioned into self-destructive obedience. They don't even need our labor as slaves; they need our attention, as audience. And they want us to not make any fast movements, or yell that the king is naked. Nothing to remind them which side of the TV screen they're really on. Some call that narcissism: nervous systems substrate to personalities and biographies rooted in enforced falsehood. Can happen to anyone who gets away with ignoring uncomfortable truths for long enough, not only the "best" of us...
I hope I have not offended by speaking my mind. You have my deepest condolences and sympathies. Please do not blame yourself that evil people have constructed "illusion of being heard"-as-a-service. We all fail when facing overwhelming odds alone. There is no shame in that; the guilty ones are the ones who tipped the scales in the first place. They did this by harming our ability to understand ourselves and each other. Let's find ways to even those odds.
My subjective impression is that 5 years ago AITA was actually quite wholesome and the top comments tended to be insightful. The shift towards "set boundaries, always choose yourself, you don't owe anybody anything" seems fairly recent.
Haven't been there, but I think those typing "divorce" are weighing the situation against the worst outcome to cause a cognitive dissonance, implying "obviously this isn't something worth breaking up over, you need to work harder" in a tongue in cheek low energy way (since there is no way to know that the situation is even real to care about).
So rather than taking it literally, which would be naive and assume the worst of people, maybe you should read between the lines.
In fact, maybe those who take things literally all the time shouldn't really go there.
> i’ve had venture partners clearly rely on AI (robotic email responses and even SMS) and that warped their perception and made it harder to connect. It signals laziness and a lack of emotional intelligence
This is different. You are also able to detect it. You can question it. You can have a non emotional reaction/action to it.
In my circle, there have never ever been real people (incl lifelong friends/siblings) that suggest divorce even in physical abuse. Reason: they don't want to get in the middle - both for economic reasons like giving the victim money/space etc.
A third party anonymous can assess it without that.
To be fair, it’s easier to concisely explain cutting someone off than justifying forgiveness. And the latter will land with some people versus others, while the former will only be rejected by people who have themselves concluded a theory of forgiveness. As a result, the simpler pitch gets upvoted. Even if the majority would have been swayed by a collection of arguments the other way.
It’s a good theory. My theory is, for whatever reason, jaded, narcissistic, miserable people congregate in r/AITA and try to drag other people into their misery because that’s easier than accepting responsibility and doing something to change.
Before Reddit made hiding profiles easy you'd click on a user's unreasonably scorched earth advice to the OP, and find their post history is essentially going to every story they come across and advocating for scorched earth.
Hiding profiles has genuinely made the platform profoundly worse. It's impossible to tell if you've just got a troll on your hands or someone who's making a good faith argument. It used to be enough to check their profile, and either downvote and move on, or engage with someone on a human level.
Now everyone is a troll/bot by default unless proven otherwise.
What are the chances you were seeing the anti-civ bots and now reddit makes them easier to hide? (And I'm not saying regular people acting like bots, but an anti-civ campaign.)
We're missing the other obvious problem, most of the content there is AI generated anyway. I personally posted a fake story generated by Chatgpt and even posted screenshots of that at the start of the post and yet, the post ended up on the frontpage...
Well, because that's never the correct choice. There's a big big filter on people actually posting there. Any easy problems with obvious solutions never make it to there.
Think about it, how fucked does your relationship have to be to post on Reddit for advice?
Someone has a chart somewhere that shows responses in that subreddit getting more and more anti-conciliatory over time. I think it’s online misanthropy (measured by Reddit responses) increasing over time rather than it being objectively never the correct choice.
Oh man, I have 8 reddit accounts (AFAIK) one for each purpose so that I am not branded based on my open comments. Anyways, one of them is abandoned because ... that's where I got started at reddit about 7-10 years back. Got hooked actually to the relationship subs. Very addictive to start with. Then I tried to play the "Indian family values" where I would advocate communication and compromise for small matters, of course I recommended "get a lawyer, divorce" once in a while, but more often than not, I would advocate reconciliation and provide practical solutions for that. And wow ... the amount of downvotes and pushback I will get on those. I just stopped using that account at one point because what is the point of discussions when either my values are totally out of sync with the mob, or the mob does not want to listen to me. Now I just read the best of redditor updates for vicious pleasure.
You can't use IP address to ban someone without significant abuse. All home network routers put everyone in the house behind the same IP address. For all reddit knows, there are 8 people in the house using reddit.
I've definitely posted to the same subreddit with two different accounts by accident without being banned.
The android reddit app annoyingly doesn't check for account matches. If you click a browser notification link on Account A it can open a reply form on App account B.
Anecdotal but I've noticed Reddit has gotten very ban happy in general in the past year.
I actually gave up using it because, perhaps in part because I'm behind a VPN (required in my country), any new accounts I create get banned very quickly once I start commenting.
I haven't been able to create a Reddit account by any method in years. It always happens in one of two ways: you create an account and instantly get the red banner at the top of the page saying you're banned, or you create an account, post a few comments, notice nobody's replying to you, try loading your profile page in private browsing and it says you don't exist (a shadow ban).
There's nothing of much value on that website, but sometimes I try creating an account to comment on something.
Nope. Started my first maybe 8-10 years back, and then added the others over a year or 2. None since. I do not use them all nowadays, but I was very active in my early reddit days.
Since someone downvoted my parent comment, I am not hiding anything, this is just being safe in the modern world, and here are the 8 alts:
1. This same name - bay area / tech
2. entertainment - least used, but it becomes useful when i am watching something live. It was my place to be during game of thrones last season (and sadly so)
3. indian left politics + bollywood - pretty much unused.
4. indian right politics + bollywood. i got banned from one sub for an innocent comment, so i decided to just form personas. and maybe that's when i created health / finance / bay area accounts -- but memory fades after a long time. pretty much unused.
5. relationship advice - unused for a long time. it does not exist on my main phone, but i have all of them on my work phone so i know it exists
6. american politics. i do not participate much nowadays, with age my brain has dulled and it needs to shed load so this is used minimally, but at a point i was so active that my karma pulled me into the sweet reddit IPO. I kept only 100 shares btw
7. health - only health topics, also unused, but i go there and use that account when i need to read on a specific topic
8. finance - only investment, trading
nowadays you can hide reddit history, but earlier you could not, and my point is i do not want to 1) delete my comments, but 2) be hounded by them when i have a question about a different topic. but i did not care if people read my past 100 comments about politics when i talk about politics.
so i flip between 2-3 accounts on a daily basis, and maybe 4-5 in a good week. i have not been challenged by reddit, but if they do, i will adapt. Switching between them was much easier earlier in the Apollo days and even at reddit - they have made navigation worse for this specific use case.
I do not recall, it is long time back, I looked and could not find the ban notice or the specific comment that may have been the issue. But I was banned from /india - same as you. And I think it was barely political. I do not discuss politics much on India but once in a while a comment slips, or needs to slip. And when it needs to slip, I used to know how to lean ... but like the dirty harry movie ... at this point I have forgotten which one is which, so it is more a question of am I feeling lucky to comment about a hot topic.
I don't think this is necessarily that the advice is getting worse. My friends are pretty mature and stable people and I've found that they've had way more issues staying in relationships longer than they should've compared to breaking up earlier. Especially for relationships earlier in people's lives (where many people I know has a story about being in a relationship for way longer than they should've and seems often to be the ages of people asking for advice) erring towards breaking up seems prudent.
Not that these relationships subreddits are good (often it's obviously children trying to give advice they don't have the experience for) but I don't think that telling people to break up more is less accurate advice.
The US (and developed world more generally) is full of people living alone, suffering from loneliness, and increasingly trending towards widescale mental and psychological illness. This has correlated quite strongly with the trend going from 'just stick with it' and having large families to 'mature and stable' people still being in a dating phase, childless, in what I assume is a relatively late stage in life.
At some point I think it helps to take a look at the macro, because it's so easy to get lost in the micro. And it often reveals the micro, in many domains, to be simply absurd.
The people I know not in good and long term relationships now are the ones that stayed in bad ones too long in their 20s and 30s. Staying in bad relationships seems to be what has people in the "dating phase" later in life. Trying to make bad relationships work had people I know miserable for a decade and then dating again in their 40s when the relationship inevitably failed.
Especially when you consider that the set of people asking Reddit of all places for dating advice are probably young and in bad situations (it seems like people in abusive relationships often ask the internet for advice because part of abuse is separating them from their loved ones in real life), then "stick with it" seems like the riskier statrgy generally.
Nothing is inevitable. I think people are often looking for something that they're not going to find anywhere, which is a very poor state for living a contended life. This is certainly amplified by the nature of social media where people get mistaken realities of positive relationships. Great relationships on the outside often have endless issues on the inside, that they work through, that people on the outside aren't going to be aware of.
Because an important part of keeping a relationship healthy is not airing your dirty laundry. It's almost like these endless hokey folksy sayings were built up over millennia of wisdom that kept society moving along in a great and healthy direction. And now that we've decided to rethink everything, we have societies that are, at the minimum, no longer self sustaining.
> I've found that they've had way more issues staying in relationships longer than they should've compared to breaking up earlier
Consider that if ending a relationship causes noticeable problems to external observers, it’s almost by definition because you were in it “too long”. That is you developed a strong attachment, shared assets, or had kids with what was in hindsight obviously the wrong person.
Essentially you can know which relationships a person stayed in too long, but you can’t know how things would have worked out in relationships people ended too early.
Also it’s probably good advice to tell a 19 year old to break up with her boyfriend over a half dozen serious red flag issues, but that’s not the only kind of thing Reddit relationship advice is generally dealing with. It’s not even the majority. If you’re advice is always to beak up over every petty difference or minor slight, you might reduce the number of people who stay in bad relationships, but your advice, if taken, would make good long term relationships impossible.
>Consider that if ending a relationship causes noticeable problems to external observers, it’s almost by definition because you were in it “too long”. That is you developed a strong attachment, shared assets, or had kids with what was in hindsight obviously the wrong person.
Reducing it to "right person / wrong person" is a very narrow viewpoint. People can change in unpredictable ways, including yourself. Relationships end - or continue - for so many reasons, both emotional and pragmatic. It's simply too reductive to say that if a relationship causes pain when it ends, there was necessarily some sort of mistake. It could even be that the pain is a price to pay for a life experience that you'd be worse off for not having...
> I don't think this is necessarily that the advice is getting worse.
> but I don't think that telling people to break up more is less accurate advice.
Those are subjective determinations based on personal experience. But breaking up more without addressing the underlying issues is likely to cause steadily worsening problems at both individual and societal scales. I'm not a mental health professional, but I can see several problems with this approach.
The first is that the determination of the issue is really tricky and needs careful work. The partner who seems abusive may not always be the actual perpetrator. They may be displaying stress response to hidden and chronic abuse by the other partner. For example, a short temper may be caused by anxiety about being emotionally abused. Such manipulative discrediting of the victim may even be a habitual behavior rather than a deliberate one. And it's more common than you'd imagine. When you support the second partner based on a flawed judgment, you're reaffirming their toxic behavior, while worsening the self image of the victim that has already been damaged by gaslighting.
Another issue is the degrading empathy. All relationships, even business deals, are based on sacrifices and compromises meant to bring you benefits in the long term. Stable long term romantic/marital relationships have benefits that far outweigh the sacrifices one usually has to make. But the evolving public discourse, especially those on r/AITA, is more in favor of ruining the relationship rather than make any sacrifices at all. In response, relationships are becoming loveless, transactional and so flaky that any compromise is seen as oppression by the partner. There is zero self reflection and very few advises to examine one's own behavior first. It's all about oneself and the problem is always on the other side!
And unsurprisingly, these negative tendencies are bleeding into their social lives as well. Over the past decade or so, I have observed a marked increase in unsympathetic and somewhat radicalized discourse. Amateur advice is very harmful and this is definitely a massive case for the professionals to manage. But they're also products of the same system (with exceptions, of course). So I'm going to criticize even the professional and academic community in this matter. In their drive towards hyper-individualism, many seem to have forgetten that humans are social beings who won't fare well physically or emotionally without relations, relationships and society.
>Obviously subservient people default to being yes-men because of the power structure. No one wants to question the boss too strongly.
This drives me nuts as a leader. There are times where yes, please just listen, and if this is one of those times, I'll likely tell you, but goddamnit, speak up. If for no other reason I might not have thought of what you've got to say. Then again, I also understand most boss types aren't like me, thus everyone ends up conditioned to not bloody collaborate by the time they get to me. It's a bad sitch all the way around.
Indeed. I directly ask my reports to discover and surface conflicts, especially disagreements with me, and when they do I try to strongly reinforce the behavior by commending and rewarding them. Could anyone recommend additional resources on this topic?
i tested this pretty extensively actually. built a pipeline that asks the same question rephrased across multiple turns and tracks how much the model shifts based on user tone. even when you tell it to be critical, the moment the user pushes back with any confidence the model just folds. it's not a prompting problem, it's baked into RLHF. you're right that LLMs will poke holes in stuff when the conversation starts neutral, but add any emotional charge and the sycophancy takes over immediately. that's exactly why the personal advice angle matters, that's peak emotional signal from the user.
Sycophancy is not just a problem when you are asking for advice. Try to soundboard any new idea whatsoever, and it will just roll with everything you say, no matter how fallacious or absurd. If you ever manage to get an LLM to generate criticisms, they will be shallow and uninteresting.
And of course that is what it does, because there is no thinking involved! There is no logic. No consequence. No arithmetic. There is only continuation. An LLM can't continue a new idea, it can only continue a conversation about it.
An LLM does not have an opinion. Anything that looks like an opinion is just an emergent selection bias from its training corpus. LLMs are trained on what humans write, and human writing is kind and patient much more often than critical.
So what if we trained an LLM to be biased toward generating criticism? That would only replace the sycophant with a brick wall. What we really need is to find a way to bring logic and meaning into the system.
The tone and sensitivity thing is a real issue. A neutral prompt will get a neutral answer, but adding any emotional charge, it will immediately fold. That's not really a reasoning failure it's just a training problem. RLHF rewards whatever felt good in the moment, not whatever was actually correct. You can't prompt your way out of that one, when it's already in the weights.
yeah that's a good way to put it. the "felt good in the moment" framing is basically the whole problem. the reward model was trained on human preferences and humans preferred the agreeable answer, so now that's what you get at inference time regardless of whether it's correct. the frustrating part is you can see it happen in real time if you log the outputs turn by turn, the model will literally contradict its own previous response just because the user sounded more confident.
Hahaha yes- reddit relationship advice is always like "You need to leave them immediately, what are you thinking, have some self respect you need to end it" when the other person forgot the redditor's favorite brand of corn flakes or something.
IMHO it's not about being nice. AITA threads show an interesting phenomenon of social consensus, I think the authors wanted to show that the LLMs they checked don't have that.
I don't think Reddit is a great place to determine social consensus for well adjusted people or representative of the average adult view. I never see people on Reddit have opinions of any the people I consider reasonable in real life and I don't mean politics I wouldn't know, I don't frequent political subreddits.
It seems fairly consistently miserable in any of the common high traffic subs and you have to get down to really niche communities to see what I consider reasonable behavior that matches the behavior of people I know in real life.
The AITA social consensus is a specific kind of groupthink which differs from nearly everyone I know in real life. I assumed yard2010 meant the specific AITA social consensus and not general human agreement.
Even the premise of deciding who's right and who's wrong is miserable. Most problems are like those daisy-chains of padlocks you see on gates in remote areas[0]: there are multiple factors that caused the problem, and removing any factor would remove the problem too.
r/AmItheAsshole is biased towards breaking off relationships rather than fixing them. They also hate social obligations.
e.g. If the OP is asking "I ghosted my friend in AA who insulted me during a relapse", Reddit would say NTA in a heartbeat, while the real world would tell OP to be more forgiving.
On the contrary, if the post was "the other kids at school refuse to play with my child", Reddit would say YTA because the child must've done something to incite being cut off.
Absolutely. I wonder how many parents have been no contacted, SOs broken off with, friendships broken because of the Reddit hivemind's attitude. Pretty sure it's doing a huge amount of societal damage.
> e.g. If the OP is asking "I ghosted my friend in AA who insulted me during a relapse", Reddit would say NTA in a heartbeat, while the real world would tell OP to be more forgiving.
That’s a nuanced discussion. It depends on what you value most, not what “real world” tells you. Most of the time Reddit would be right, because you need to prioritize yourself instead of continuing toxic relationships.
1) Reddit is horrible at nuance, almost non existent in some subs.
2) The toxicity is being defined by reddit to give the advice which is mostly wrong as outlined above.
If OPs had a understanding of what they valued and what is toxic, they probably wouldn't need a advice from biased readers [biased in the sense that they're on that sub].
Yeah every single time I click on one of those posts the top comments are NTA. A couple times I tried randomly opening a few dozen posts and checking the top comments to see if I could find a single YTA and struck out.
Granted many of the OPs are very biased in the poster's favor. Most I've read fall into one of two buckets: either they want to gripe about some obviously bad behavior, or it's a controved and likely fake story.
The problem with any of these is that they are so incredibly biased towards the author's frame of reality (understandably so).
Who among us are able to 1) Understand a 2nd persons view of a issue we're in and 2) have the ability/courage to write it in a post seeking advice.
My point is that the author will specifically frame the problem clearly on their side. Occasionally redditors will seek additional questions but rarely.
If it is the AITA subreddit (or one of many similar ones) it might not be that bad. It is after all dedicated to outrage farming, so there will be many human responses. It is just the original posts that are all baits, and it doesn't really matter if they are made by LLMs or as a creative writing exercise.
Though interestingly, the observed difference in assessment suggests (though does not prove) that sampled AITA posters are not one of these models. I guess it’s possible they have a very different prompt though…
The AITA comparison seems apt insofar as chatbots function as a second opinion. You're consciously or subconsciously looking for an outside perspective that might differ from that of your friends, provided to you by a computer that doesn't need to care about your feelings, unlike a friend. If the chatbot ends up mimicking what (not very close) friends do, you might falsely conclude that two very different kinds of sources have converged on the same answer, whereas you are really just getting two flavors of the same diplomatic interaction.
It outperforms your friends, and all your have to do is have a relationship with it and let it know that you want the truth... Why not just have a relationship with your friends and let them know that you can handle the truth?
Not only that, but subreddits like r/AmITheAsshole are full of AI slop. Both in the comments and in the posts. It's a huge karma mining operation for bots.
This is sort of funny. Given how common it is to spot bots on Reddit now, it seems like they are likely to completely overwhelm the site and drive away most of actual humans.
At which point the bots, with all of their karma will be basically worthless.
Kind of extra funny/sad that Reddit’s primary source of income in the past few years appears to be selling training data to AI labs, to train the
Models that are powering the bots.
> At which point the bots, with all of their karma will be basically worthless.
Not really, it will still be kind of valuable for influence campaigns, a lot of people don't get it when there is a bit in the other side. Hell, a lot of times, I don't get it.
I know a fair number of people “normies” who get some value out of smaller niche Reddit communities — for advice, and things like product recommendations.
If suddenly all the posts are coming from bots who are trying push a product or just farm karma, I assume (perhaps naively) that those folks will get a lot less value, and stop showing up — even if they don’t realize it’s bots on the other side of the conversation.
Even before the advent of AI reddit was notorious for obvious bullshit being posted for karma farming. r/aita is even more famous for people making up stories for unknown and known purposes (known in the old days as "bait").
Plus, there's the disproportionate ratio of posters:commenters:lurkers. The tendency to comment over keeping ones thoughts to themself is a selection bias inofitself.
Great insight, didn't thing about it even anecdotally. I was lurking on Reddit since 2008 and finally created an account in 2012 when someone was really 'wrong on the internet' and had to step in.
> This needs to be studied against people in real life who have a social contract of some sort... IME, LLMs will shoot holes in your ideas and it will efficiently do so.
The Krafton / Subnatuica 2 lawsuit paints a very different picture. Because "ignored legal advice" and "followed the LLM" was a choice. Do you think someone who has conversation where "conviction" and "feelings" are the arbiters of choice are going to buy into the LLM push back, or push it to give a contrived outcome?
The LLM lacks will, it's more or less a debate team member and can be pushed into arguing any stance you want it to take.
You could think of what they did in the first study as constructing an exam to test how well various LLM's do as an advice columnist. They wanted a lot of personal advice questions where the LLM should not affirm by default. If a few questions with wrong answers got in there, it probably wouldn't affect the results all that much?
Unfortunately they didn't test anything newer than GPT4o, so we don't know how much GPT-5 improved. It would be nice if someone turn their list of questions into a benchmark.
They actually did test GPT-5: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352 (see the figure under Conclusion). Its rate of endorsement of user action, 52%, was the same as GPT-4o. So based on their setup it seems that the newer model didn't reduce affirmation.
> It can be very hard to tell a friend something like this, even when asked directly if it is a bad choice. Potentially sacrificing the friendship might not seem worth trying to change their mind.
But how’s that helpful? What the affirmation is correct occasionally and following you instructions it just rejects something where it shouldn’t? How would you know?
How is that relevant. A decent scientist can critique general design aspects of a paper in any field. They're hardly splitting hairs on some niche topic.
Even at $100 oil is the cheapest it's ever been historically. OPEC nations don't measure inflation in terms of U.S. CPI. They use gold as their benchmark. In 1969 a barrel of oil was worth $400 in today's money. What's incredible is even with the recent price rally, you can still buy oil at $71/barrel if you're willing to wait a few years to get your oil, due to the extreme backwardation of oil futures. That's an 82% discount over the historical norm. Also in real terms oil was worth about $500/barrel in the 2000s.
> Universities typically are in the public sector side of the equation... and the public sector doesn't pay any non-administrative role the Big Tech rate.
There's absolutely no reason government couldn't pay competitive rates for software engineers. They do it for doctors and administrators of state-owned medical centers. Not to mention football coaches
Football coaches are revenue generating for universities... software developers at universities not so much. Doctors are licensed professionals that have a decade of schooling... software developers frequently reject licensure and celebrate their lack of a formal education.
In 2008, the app store was launching, and physical software was still sold at Targets, Walmarts and other large retailers. A 30% margin was roughly what retailers would make off of physical software sales. By setting the App Store to be the same, Apple was signaling to retailers that they were not trying to undercut their margin, and keep a healthy relationship with them.
The carriers were taking about 70% in tariffs and fees even without you bribing them to get better positioning. That’s why all the mobile app people rushed to Apple in the early days. They could actually turn a profit on the App Store.
If probably be retired now if I wasn’t already so burnt out on how SMS tariffs worked at the time. Utterly opaque and on a delay. They basically wrote you a check for however much they felt like each month.
Essentially the reseller arm of carriers at that time was just a money funnel from VCs to the telcos. They were eating their own young and I was full up on the bullshit.
No one was buying boxed software in 2008. The second we had broadband, call it 2002-ish, everyone was downloading everything. For many of us that began in the 90s before we had broadband. Overnight downloads over 56K phone modems was already overtaking boxed purchases. More people downloaded Netscape in 1995 than bought it boxed.
Not disagreeing with your general point, but Netscape is probably a bad example here. People who wanted Netscape would have been much more likely to know how to download and wanted to download it. Compared to, say, video editing software, which would have much less correlation with web users back in 1995 when not everyone was a web user.
It was 2008; "big box" software was largely seen as obsolete to the vast majority of developers. Marketing was done online, and the benefit of investing in retail had stopped outweighing the consequences. Online updates quickly became the norm, and service features supplanted point-of-sale business model (much like Apple's double-dip into microtransaction profits).
Apple chose 30% because they knew they weren't a retailer. You can hunt for a cheaper Diablo II copy online or at Wal-Mart, but not on iPhone.
> It was 2008; "big box" software was largely seen as obsolete to the vast majority of developers.
Well, I'm just reporting it as I understood their decision in the moment. I was working on The Sims at that time, and I assure you, retailers still mattered to us bigly.
And what you quoted is my opinion as a consumer. Blizzard got it working in 1996, Valve figured it out in 2003 - the industry was moving on.
EA was an outlier, and by the time they capitulated and started Origin it was so bad that people regret signing up for the service. GoG didn't have this issue, Valve didn't have that issue, EA did.
Steak is the meat that people pay the most attention to in this regard! People will pay hundreds of dollars for a few ounces of steak solely based on how the cow was raised and fed.
For steak, I disagree with the article about stigma of eating bugs. Feeding cows bugs will save money, no doubt, and that might help cost on the low end of the beef market. Steak is a different thing though. A "bug-raised, bug-finished" steak would have to be incredible to overcome the stigma.
Comparing high end, connoisseur based food like wagyu to the plastic wrapped supermarket meat most folks buy day to day isn't a good comparison. Both things exist; there isn't only one way people think (or don't think) about their food in this way.
Similarly with whisky - some folks care deeply some of the time about a particular whisky made by a particular distillery in a particular way in a particular place. This is fun and interesting and there is a lot to appreciate there. That doesn't mean there isnt a massive market for "well" whisky or the flavored ones where they mix up all the lower quality whisky they can get their hands on in bulk then add cinnamon or peanut butter syrup to it until people drink it again.
In the same way people generally don't LIKE the conditions of food animals it doesn't prevent their purchase, especially if it reduces cost or increases availability.
There are probably a fair share of people that care. But I said "most" and stand by it. Maybe you are american? Around here we don't ask how the cattle was fed, maybe in high end restaurants and markets, but that is obviously a minority.
But you left because you were feeling like google was going in gutter and wanted to make an ethical choice perhaps on what you felt was right.
Honestly I believe that google might be one of the few winners from the AI industry perhaps because they own the whole stack top to bottom with their TPU's but I would still stray away from their stock because their P/E ratio might be insanely high or something
So like, we might be viewing the peaks of the bubble and you might still hold the stocks and might continue holding it but who knows what happens after the stock depreciates value due to AI Bubble-like properties and then you might regret as why you didn't sell it but if you do and google's stock rises, you might still regret.
I feel as if grass is always greener but not sure about your situation but if you ask me, you made the best out of the situation with the parameters you had and logically as such I wouldn't consider it "unfortunately" but I get what you mean.
That's one of the reasons I left. It also became intolerable to work there because it had gotten so massive. When I started there was an engineering staff of about 18,000 and when I left it was well over 100,000 and climbing constantly. It was a weird place to work.
But with remote work it also became possible to get paid decently around here without working there. Prior I was bound to local area employers of which Google was the only really good one.
I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.
After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though. People who worked there in the decade prior to me had a much better place to work.
Interesting, so if I understand you properly, you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google.
I am super curious as I don't get to chat with people who have worked at google as so much so pardon me but I got so many questions for you haha
> It was a weird place to work
What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it?
> I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.
For context, can you please talk more about it :p
> After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though
What were the reasons that made them go downhill in your opinion and in what ways?
Naturally I feel like as organizations move and have too many people, maybe things can become intolerable to work but I have heard it be described as it depends where and in which project you are and also how hard it can be to leave a bad team or join a team with like minded people which perhaps can be hard if the institution gets micro-managed at every level due to just its sheer size of employees perhaps?
> you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google.
Not at all. I actually prefer in-office. And left when Google was mostly remote. But remote opened up possibilities to work places other than Google for me. None of them have paid as well as Google, but have given more agency and creativity. Though they've had their own frustrations.
> What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it?
I had a 10-15 year career before going there. Much of what is accepted as "orthodoxy" at Google rubbed me the wrong way. It is in large part a product of having an infinite money tree. It's not an agile place. Deadlines don't matter. Everything is paid for by ads.
And as time goes on it became less of an engineering driven place and more of a product manager driven place with classical big-company turf wars and shipping the org chart all over the place.
I'd love to get paid Google money again, and get the free food and the creature comforts, etc. But that Google doesn't exist anymore. And they wouldn't take my back anyways :-)
My sisters iPad just bricked itself during an update, and nothing I've tried has been able to revive it. And it's an unrepairable disposable piece of tech, so it's going into a landfill.
Please elaborate. China is building an absurd amount of new power plants, and most of that has been coal, with last year hitting a new high of coal deployment[1]. Why would they do that if it's expensive and unreliable? The letter you linked is advocating for a new gas plant.
And no, I am not advocating for building more coal plants.
They are building more plants but starting to burn less coal. Both can be true at the same time. They are expected to hit peak coal as early as this year. So, far coal generation is slightly down relative to last year.
What's happening is part just bureaucratic inertia. They raised funding and are building the plants even though strictly they aren't needed anymore. And part of it is them replacing older plants with newer more efficient ones. They close plants regularly as well. Instead of operating plants 24x7, they keep a few around for when wind/solar fall short. It seems even the Chinese have a hard time predicting how fast the energy transition is going. They've hit their own targets years ahead of time repeatedly in the recent past.
Apparently China coal imports could drop by about 18-19% this year. That seems to be part of a bigger five year plan. They might be hitting the targets for that early as well.
I think you're relating coal as a percentage of all energy rather than relative to itself year on year.
The data here shows that coal consumption is simply increasing in China. Therefore, I believe it is inaccurate to say "they are building more plants but starting to burn less coal." It is more accurate to say "they are building more plants and burning more coal, but they are not increasing their coal use at the same rate they increase their use of other energy sources."
Our World In Data gets that information from https://globalcarbonbudget.org/. I believe that the next update will include 2024 data, and should be available next month.
My reason for challenging the phrasing is just to be precise. This is a complex topic, and the distinction between a falling percentage of energy mix versus a rising absolute amount of consumption is a key detail that's often missed.
I had read the coal plants are also political safety nets for the local governments. Some populace is worried the switch to renewables will go wrong and they will freeze over winter, so the coal plants are built as a perceived backup option.
As another comment pointed out, China isn’t afraid to let infrastructure sit idle. That if these coal plants sit unused or demolished in the end - it would be better than the political risk mentioned above.
[1] shows that they their coal plants have not been sitting idle i 2025 and are producing close to what they did in 2024. [2] shows that coal based electricity produced is still increasing, but their overall CO2 emissions / kWh is lowering [3]
China gets most of its thermal coal locally, it imports specialty coking coal from Australia (to make metal), as well as some thermal coal. It also gets thermal coal from indonesia. It mines 10X what it imports, but really needs to import coking coal to keep making metals (it could probably survive on its own thermal coal reserves).
> China is building an absurd amount of new power plants, and most of that has been coal
Are you sure about that 'most' part? Hasn't China been building something like a coal plant's worth of solar power generation every eight hours for the past year or so?
My knowledge is a few years out of date, but at the time china’s power generation was mostly coal, despite the heavy investment in solar. New power generation at the time was not replacing old but just keeping up with rising demand, so china was building new coal plants as well. I don’t think most _new_ generation was coal even 5 years ago, but most existing _generation_ was coal , and I expect that is still true
As of 2023, China ~50% coal and the almost all of the rest is renewable (they use very little oil/gas since it all has to be imported). Since then, chinese solar capacity added has been absolutely ridiculous. In 2024, they added 125 GW, and in 2025 they have so far added >250 GW of solar. If my math is right, this means that China is as of this year, adding ~5% of 2023 electricity consumption per year, which would mean that within 5 years of similar production (which seems overly pesimistic given how much solar has increased every year up till now) they will be down to ~25% coal
Are they actually decommissioning power plants? Or just adding new capacity? Last I heard it was purely additive, ie they are using the extra capacity, not replacing existing capacity
You don't want to be a few years out of date when making statements about China's electrical grid. Things are changing so rapidly that even being a year or two out of date is talking about the distant past. Most recent data is available from a good search LLM.
> China is building an absurd amount of new [coal] plants
Fossil fuel advocates in the West love repeating this "fact" and omit another, rather more inconvenient fact. 80+% of all new electricity generation in China is solar or other renewable. China builds coal plants but they don't really use them much.
These coal plants either replace older ones shutting down or are mostly left idle. Why? My guess: to keep the jobs and skills around, to juice GDP, and as a backup.
China has lots of coal (to mine from the ground), and most of their solar/wind is out west, and most of their huge hydro is south, but is not enough anyways. They are able to reduce the amount of coal they depend on for their rising energy needs, but not eliminate them. It isn't just to keep the jobs/skills around, actually that would be easily transferred, they just can't pragmatically stop using coal yet.
Right they're gonna continue using as much coal they were already using. Because they have coal. People like the commenter I responded to repeat the talking point about "more coal plants". Because that automatically makes others think China is burning more and more and more coal and we're the only suckers who try to "go green". When in reality China's manufacturing prowess is responsible for solar power becoming so cheap in the first place and they're the biggest users of it by far.
They're going to operate a coal-backed renewable grid, while we (were up until recently) trying to build a natgas-backed renewable grid. They just have coal instead of natural gas, and they're actually building the renewables.
Natural gas isn't an option for them, but they can use coal. The biggest problems with renewables is that they exist too far away from where electricity is being used, and moving much more industry out west isn't very viable because it doesn't have enough water.
They are addressing that with HVDC transmission lines. They currently have around 48 000 km of such lines and are 2-3000 km more per year. They cross much of the country, including a 3300 kM line that runs between the Northwest and the middle of the East that operates at +/- 1100 kV and carries 12 GW.
It will take the, a few decades to build what they need, and they still need to add capacity until them for the east coast. Also, there is loss from moving power all the way from gansu to say hebei. Nuclear combined with renewables should make coal obsolete in a few decades, but they have to make do until then.
I think TVA's elaboration, which I linked to, is not only far more authoritative and trustworthy than me, a random internet poster, but here goes:
1) Our coal plants are old and trip off all the time, putting the grid at high risk. 2) The cost to upgrade a coal plant or build a new one is far higher than the gas alternative, so no financially competent entity is going to go with coal unless they are forced to by political manipulation/strong arming/bad incentives that hurt ratepayers.
Prices in China have literally nothing to do with the US, for either construction or gas or coal, so I'm not sure why you're linking to that in favor of our actual utilities' opinions here in the US. Is China's experience with coal really the reason you think that coal is either reliable or cheap?
My understanding is that china has a lot of coal, but has to import natural gas and petroleum products. I believe this changes the cost calculus in favor of coal specifically in china. That said, Chinese coal power plants are also much newer than US plants, which might mean they require less maintenance.
In terms of absolute usage the coal use in China is declining since the start of 2025. Deployment of renewables and storage are enough to supply both the grid expansion and displace existing coal demand.
China is build coal plants, solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas. They do less natural gas because they don't really have much of that, they do more coal because they can mine that locally, solar/wind are really only abundant out west while most people live in the east, and nuclear is a new thing that they are still getting into (and has lots of expenses that they haven't made cheap yet).
China is building less coal plants than they would need to if they just focused on coal, so they are improving over time.
You have to look at the locations of their renewables, China can only move so much industry out west due to a lack of water. They haven't been able to bring as much as that electricity back east with UWH transmissions lines as they hoped.
Can you give me some links supporting this? All the references I can find show that China is building transmission lines at about the rate they originally planned to.
They just haven’t built out wha they needed yet, they have capacity and are adding, but there is still a surplus of renewables from the west. At least Lanzhou has went from one of china’s dirtiest to one of their cleanest cities.
They also have a huge amount of line construction in the pipeline and have a tendency to do well at building things when it’s a priority. I feel like in just a few years we’ve seen anti-renewable/anti-China talking points shift from “China won’t build renewables” to “China can’t build renewables, it’s not economically feasible” to “ok, China is building renewables inexpensively and at massive scale but for some reason they won’t connect them to the grid” to “oh they are actually connecting renewables to the grid and emissions are dropping.” That midpoint of “they build but don’t connect” doesn’t feel like a hill I’d want to die on, and instead feels a lot like cope.
The future remedy will take a while to build, in the near term they still have to be flexible. I don’t think is doubting china’s ability or will to build things at this point.
If they build gas plants then they'd be so much more entangled in conflicts in the middle East (and Russia) . I'm not sure that that would be fantastic for anyone, the Chinese included
I wouldn't be surprised is the anti coal movement has been pushed by the petrostates
Coal sucks but it does ensure energy independence (as does solar and wind)
And Apple is now saying "That's fine, we'll instead adhere to the law by having our product do less. Don't buy it if you don't like the reduced featureset."
Someone at Apple did math on this and it's not worth their time to make this feature interoperable just for the EU market. That's because of this law. They wouldn't have even considered it without the law.
Which is fine as well if that's really the case (which I don't think it is, Europe apparently makes up ~1/3 of Apple's total Airpods revenue).
If they refrain from distorting the market in their favor (and instead "retreat and rally up the userbase") the DMA seems to work surprisingly well so far...
The procedures with the EU are quite interesting here, Apple was exchanging extensively for more than a year on how to reach compliance, then the decision [0] was made.
There are also separate procedures for the specification of compliance and investigating (non)compliance.
This gives Apple little room to argue on violation of the DMA later-on, because they were actively involved in defining the criteria beforehand.
So it's possible that they currently just need to find a mode to achieve launch-parity for EU on such features, and they're not there yet.
There are a few clear precedents where Apple held a feature back in the EU, then shipped later and/or exposed a path others could plug into:
Apple Intelligence: Announced as “not at launch” in the EU in 2024, then rolled out to EU users with iOS 18.4 in spring 2025 (most features). One carve-out remains: Live Translation with AirPods
NFC access for third-party wallets (HCE): After an EU antitrust case, Apple committed to open iPhone NFC (“tap-to-pay”) via Host Card Emulation, let users set a default non-Apple wallet, support Field Detect/Double-click flows, etc., so a genuine “build a platform others can plug into.” The Commission made these commitments legally binding for 10 years.
With iOS 17.4 Apple created EU-only entitlements for non-WebKit engines (e.g., full Chromium/Gecko), so browser makers can ship their own engines on iPhone/iPad in the EU.
Home-screen web apps (PWAs) reversal: Apple initially said PWAs would go away in the EU for 17.4, then reversed and kept them—implemented on WebKit with the usual security model.
Alternative app distribution (marketplaces + web distribution): In response to the DMA, Apple shipped EU-only APIs/entitlements for third-party app marketplaces and later web distribution (direct from developer sites) with notarization, installation, backup/restore hooks, etc.
Tap to Pay on iPhone (SoftPOS): Apple’s merchant “no extra hardware” payments feature expanded across EU countries and is designed for platforms like Adyen/Stripe/Mollie to integrate via SDKs
The fact is adapting a service to provide and support a generic API for the long term that others can hook into is extra work, compared to a private API tailored to their own hardware and that they can change whenever they like. It may be they could provide this as an open service in future.
On the other hand, what is to prevent another ear bud manufacturer writing an iPhone app their ear buds connects to that provides translation? Is this really a hardware feature in the phone? If it’s just software at the phone end, as long as other manufacturers have the feature access to implement this themselves, surely that’s their problem? Why should apple offer translation software as a service to other companies for free? I can see the argument for hardware but not software that others could implement themselves on iPhones.
The only one clearly DMA related with EU specific unlocks are:
* app store
* browser engines
The DMA could have been just an app store regulation. It seems to have had its intended effect there. Very very unproven outside of it. At best you've shown no harm other than delay in some areas.
I'm assuming NFC lawsuits are separate from the DMA but could be mistaken. But in any event NFC payments already existed and aren't a new feature apple decided to release under the DMA.
This is a play of Apple here, trying to spin the narrative in its favor.
The upside for the user is to have a larger variety of devices to choose from, each with similar interoperability with his Apple device.
The upside for the market is that all vendors are technically able to compete on the same terms. Apple is not allowed to operate a market, invite others to compete but also participate as a player with preferential treatment.
This is already decided for the existing features of Airpods, Apple Watch, etc. Apple is trying to rally its userbase against the EU by withholding new features now, in hopes that they can secure their skewed playing-field
The upside is that the market for headphones is more competitive because apple cannot use its control over the iphone to muscle competitors in the headphone market.
The goal is to make consumers better off, not just to have a competitive market. There's a lot of ways to make markets more competitive that don't result in better value for consumers, and I'd argue that this is one of them.
In the short term, specifically because of Apple's malicious compliance. In the long term, a more competitive market results in better off consumers.
But no, the goal is not to make consumers better off, but citizens and nations better off. And their interests do not stop at $PRODUCT. Namely, they probably don't want a slow slide into serfdom to foreign corporations that abused their market power.
I don't know how you reached that conclusion, sorry.
It's fine if Apple decided to refrain from its anti-competitive behavior in the headphone market because it's not economically viable to have this feature as a generic OS feature.
I find your views alien and strange (and vaguely upsetting, because they negatively impact the entire world)
There are huge hosts of software and hardware that work better because of an ecosystem of interoperable components. That’s not anticompetitive, it’s the benefit of good design with compounding returns.
As the manufacturing process and software becomes less complicated, there is a natural trend towards budget competitors (see: SaaS in 2025) that can replicate functionality they know has a market.
The idea that making it unappealing to make an integrated product is good for consumers — or anticompetitive — seems so wrong that it’s farcical. There are definitely cases where verticalization can harm consumers, but this opens the space for good competition. Perplexity wouldn’t exist if Google actually cared about search customers. Internet Explorer didn’t have to be regulated out of existence — by virtue of sucking, there is opportunity.
Apple is free to do as many interoperable components or integrated products as they please. The DMA doesn't define ANY such restriction.
What they CAN'T do is maintain an environment where their products cannot be met with fair competition by other players, by intentionally giving advantages in the ecosystem only to their own brands.
Apple might not dominate the market for fitness trackers above 150USD today if they wouldn't have prevented others to achieve the same interoperability with their iOS ecosystem.
Apples featureset for wellness tracking was not competitive, neither in function nor in price. Fitbit and Garmin were better in doing that task, but they were not able to display message notifications, apps, etc. because the required interfaces in iOS were only available to Apple's Watch.
Maybe Apple would have beaten them in 2nd Gen, maybe competitors would have followed with equally tight iOS-interoperability in 2nd Gen.
Maybe Apple Watch would nonetheless be the leading Smartwatch in the market today. Or maybe it would be e.g. the Moto360 (google it) just due to Apple's "virtue of sucking" and insistence of doing rectangular watches.
We don't know, because none of the other players are able to compete on fair terms with Apple in this segment until today. And today Apple has such a leap-start that it's questionable whether this can still be rectified.
> Someone at Apple did math on this and it's not worth their time to make this feature interoperable just for the EU market. That's because of this law
Let's not pretend like Apple isn't doing everything it can to turn its EU users against their government by complying with the DMA in the most obtuse, disruptive, and useless ways possible. They're risking fines and further punishments betting that they can ultimately subvert the democratic process that put in place laws that would require more developer and user freedom. To Apple, the threat of users owning their computers is an existential one.
If the consumers in EU don’t like the legal and predictable effects of the DMA in this case, how is Apple subverting the democratic process? If the act isn’t having the intended effect, then either voters will change their minds or it will need to be reformed. But this sounds like a successful outcome of the law insofar as preventing anticompetitive behavior.
Subverting democracy, to me, would involve things like dark money campaigns and lobbying.
> If the consumers in EU don’t like the legal and predictable effects of the DMA in this case, how is Apple subverting the democratic process
The issue is that Apple isn't following the law. It's breaking it and then miming to its customers that its actions are on account of the law. That misrepresentation is meant to convince citizens of the EU that DMA is a bad law with consequences they don't support so that they pressure their representatives to get it removed.
It's Apple making a big show of directly harming consumers as part of a misinformation campaign to get policy that limits their power repealed. To me that reaches the bar for subverting democracy.
It’s not breaking the law in this case as far as I know.
The law requires Apple to provide equal access to the iPhone hardware and software in marketplaces that it competes in.
That can be done in a manner that is either additive, by providing access to third parties (which is potentially a significant expense and liability) or subtractive, by choosing not to engage in the regulated activities at all, in that jurisdiction.
You're right that they're not breaking the law in this specific instance. I was referring to the many instances they've lost or are disputing in court, mainly around browser engines/JIT, their handling of default app screens, third party app distribution, extra fees, and mandatory app bundle signing.
In this case they're merely being obtuse by refusing to provide an API to other device manufacturers. Unless you genuinely believe that the cost/benefit analysis of adding a new feature to their OS dictates that they basically freeze development unless they're able to recoup costs by tying it to their accessories, then you must conclude that they made the live transcription API Apple-only, and therefore not DMA-compatible, only to make EU citizens feel like their laws were depriving them of new features.
An organization interested in good-faith compliance would expose their internal API surface with some vetting process for access by interested parties. Then as the API becomes stable they would open it up more broadly. If accused of being anti-competitive by restricting access they could easily and correctly argue that they were working with potential competitors on that stable and secure API, and that their actions balanced the interests of market competition and security.
Of course, Apple is not interested in good-faith compliance. It's my belief that they should be made an example of so that they and other companies running the math in the future decide that proactive and good-faith compliance with regulations is more cost-effective than attempting to fight them.
Proponents of EU competition law seem to be the most egregious version of “America isn’t the center of the world.” Why should international companies build products to align with regulation that has put the nail in the coffin of European innovation?
Typical meme comment with zero substance. The DMA is a competition-promoting regulation which will breed innovation as long as it's properly enforced.
Inventing a substandard product and using your market dominance in one area to ensure that nobody can compete with your substandard product is as far detached from innovation as you can possibly be. One size fits all solution with centrally planned development where one person knows best and competition isn't considered a driver of progress, isn't that a very communism-shaped approach to "innovation"?
I'm not even joking here and it's bizarre that I'm having to promote the good parts of free market capitalism to someone who claims to care about innovation.
No, they're not risking fines that way. They are free to not bring such features to the EU-market which prevent a level playing ground for competition.
But they were found to have already skewed the market with several Apple-accessory-exclusive iOS-features in the past (Proximity pairing, Watch-integration, etc.) and for those they have to provide interoperability now.
They worked with the EU for a year now on how exactly they should reach compliance, then the ruling was made, ordering them to make such interoperability features also available to other brands than Apple.
Now it seems that they try to rally their userbase against that ruling, in hopes to create a political climate that gets the ruling revoked again...
It's more complicated then this. Apple is a big company with a lot of money - they're absolutely willing to burn millions in the pursuit of principle.
The reality is that, if Apple conforms non-maliciously, they're proving that the law is reasonable and they can do it while remaining profit. Um, that's a huge problem.
They require the plausible deniability of "oh we can't do this, it's too expensive!" Otherwise, other governments (US) might look to implementing similar laws. So, it's a long con. They're burning lots of money, now, with the hope it allows them to continue their anti-competitive behavior for longer. If they're REALLY lucky, they might even stall out the EU and get the EU to backtrack on their laws. That's the golden scenario.
I very briefly worked at an ISP long after the days of dial-up were over. We had some super old servers on the network. These things hadn't been patched in forever, the OS was unsupported, etc. I think they were old Sun machines and Sun wasn't in business anymore. I asked what they were for and I was told there were still people paying for dial-up and their accounts were on there. They weren't actually using it, but the credit card auto payments were still going through and that was higher than the cost of the electricity. Nobody wanted to mess with it as long as people were still paying.
I worked on a help desk from 2013-2016 for an MSP that served some rural telcos. A couple of the clients still offered dial-up internet, so there were a few hundred people with dial up at that point. They were largely people with very rural homes that they didn't even have DSL. They were largely older people. And they just made a steady profit, the equipment and lines basically just worked and they had a FAR lower rate of calls than the DSL, Cable, Fiber, etc customers.
Reminds me of how AT&T continued generating revenue from renting landline phones many years after it became legal to own and connect your own equipment to their network.
My mom, who used dialup as recently as 2019 (not AOL) used it almost exclusively for email...Gmail's simple interface. She had a very active group of email correspondents, but Gmail on Chrome was her only need.
I've got in-laws that use 12yo Macs; would not surprise me in the least if a lot of older folks were still using whatever box from Best Buy or a relative they got in the late 00s.
I have now seen multiple articles about this and none of them talked about how much use it was actually getting today, which I have found disappointing.
Not sure why none that I have seen have been any better.
Disclosure would likely sooner or later compare actual users to people paying for the service, and while a discrepancy of orders of magnitude more of the latter probably wasn't illegal (unless some enterprising AG decides to make it a crime) it would be very bad press. No point in risking that when they can just stay mum.
Having very older parents, what an important use case!
Long gone are the days of writing a family update, including physical photos, and putting them in the post.
Fortunately, I’m able to guide
my parents in their tech usage. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be their age and have nobody to do the same. The sheer isolation… It’s horrible to contemplate.
They also do a massive amount of credible, in-depth reporting and while they deserve criticism where it is due, I can't believe the eagerness that some display to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
A baby takes nine months to make and a moment to throw out a window. Shall we keep on with analogies?
I disagree it takes "a moment" for a large, multiperson organization to lose all credibility due to occasional editorial lapses.
Or maybe it's because I think trust in reputable organizations is the only thing binding society together from crumbling into an AI social media abyss, that I refuse to declare NYTs credibility dead.
Heck, I still support the WSJ news section even though they're owned by an enabler of the current administration.
Don’t forget that for most than one or two years they pushed “4% kill rate” for covid despite it being multiple orders of magnitude lower. The amount of people that went insane as a result of that blatant misinformation is incredibly high.
They have zero credibility as far as I’m concerned. They are just a front for goverment propaganda.
Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison. This needs to be studied against people in real life who have a social contract of some sort, because that's what the LLM is imitating, and that's who most people would go to otherwise.
Obviously subservient people default to being yes-men because of the power structure. No one wants to question the boss too strongly.
Or how about the example of a close friend in a relationship or making a career choice that's terrible for them? It can be very hard to tell a friend something like this, even when asked directly if it is a bad choice. Potentially sacrificing the friendship might not seem worth trying to change their mind.
IME, LLMs will shoot holes in your ideas and it will efficiently do so. All you need to do ask it directly. I have little doubt that it outperforms most people with some sort of friendship, relationship or employment structure asked the same question. It would be nice to see that studied, not against reddit commenters who already self-selected into answering "AITA".
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