Your comments on the national debt are if anything understated. You mention debt as 8 x revenue then change your word to "income" and say the debt has a call on 8 years of the governments "income". But. Revenue is not income. While there are differences between countries and companies, finance is finance. The USG has negative free cash flow. you can only pay down debt with free cash flow. We have none of this. the national debt plummeted at one point under Clinton and now we are were we are. You can print money and deflate the currency and the debt. You can try to issue more bonds but we have alienated most foreign buyers or we could have more than a balanced budget ie revenues exceed expenses. This will never happen. We are in analogous situation as Japan with its massive debt and weakening currency. If it raised rates to defend the currency its debt service will go up so they are trapped.
Basically, this is one of those cases where democracy is not well setup to offer a solution. Too many incentives for the opposite party to promise the public that they'll reverse cuts and kick the can down the road.
Yes, household/personal income is up relative to previous generations.
But what else is up?
Homeownership? (That's way down)
Child bearing? (Most people have less children than they want)
Student debt? Yes, a lot.
Speaking of my mom, who was a quintessential boomer. She got divorced from her first husband in 1980ish, drove across the country to a new city, lived in a YMCA type thing for a bit, but nevertheless owned a new home, had a new husband, and had a new child within a year and a half.
That doesn't happen to millennials. We have more "money," but more precarity as well.
The reason the release of GPT-5.5 didn't cause widespread cyberattacks isn't because the defenders have won cybersecurity. (Anyone working in cybersecurity right now would find that claim laughable.) It's because GPT-5.5 is nowhere near as good at hacking as Mythos, and the people saying otherwise are wrong.
"GPT-5.5 did a bunch of things, but did not ‘independently produce a functional full chain exploit against real world targets.’
Exploit development judgment was the bottleneck. For any given isolated and specified task, GPT-5.5 is damn good, but it can’t synthesize and plan like Mythos."
"This reinforces that even very strong performance in narrow cyber tasks is not that dangerous, the same way that AI being able to do any particular narrow job task does not automatically mean you’re about to be fired. They can’t fire (all of) you until the AI knows which narrow job task to do next, and which way to do it."
We know Mythos was a big deal because it found real serious vulnerabilities in real widely-deployed software. If GPT-5.5 could do that, OpenAI would have demonstrated it. They didn't.
I thought all the pessimism is downstream of the housing market. What do statistics like rent burdened households look like?
Data point from outside the USA: Auckland has a median wage of appx. NZD70,000. Take home pay would be 55,000. Median house price is just over a million NZD.
Renting is cheaper but comes with *severe* compromises, as in, whatever house you live in now is only ever be temporarily and may go away with a 42 day notice.
Vulnerabilities are not immune from AI slop. Finding more does not equal finding “better,” more destructive ones. It’s going to be annoying, getting flooded with noise I have to deal with. But it doesn’t automatically increase the overall real threat level.
Great Noah. I love the public order story, but still think you need to make a distinction based on gender. There are cities where women feel demonstrably less safe than men. This is usualy a function of tolerance of what an only be called 'creeper' behavior among, well, male creeps.
Japan scores highly on public order, but is far from a single female tourist destination due to the creeper factor.
Your father so obviously raised a balanced honest decent open minded human being. It’s so clear in the years I’ve been reading you. I am sorry for your loss.
Commiserations Noah on the loss of your father and I hope you are ok. When you are ready it would be wonderful to read your post on him.
Your comments on the national debt are if anything understated. You mention debt as 8 x revenue then change your word to "income" and say the debt has a call on 8 years of the governments "income". But. Revenue is not income. While there are differences between countries and companies, finance is finance. The USG has negative free cash flow. you can only pay down debt with free cash flow. We have none of this. the national debt plummeted at one point under Clinton and now we are were we are. You can print money and deflate the currency and the debt. You can try to issue more bonds but we have alienated most foreign buyers or we could have more than a balanced budget ie revenues exceed expenses. This will never happen. We are in analogous situation as Japan with its massive debt and weakening currency. If it raised rates to defend the currency its debt service will go up so they are trapped.
Basically we are doomed.
Basically, this is one of those cases where democracy is not well setup to offer a solution. Too many incentives for the opposite party to promise the public that they'll reverse cuts and kick the can down the road.
The road ends somewhere
The one about millenials is misguided.
Yes, household/personal income is up relative to previous generations.
But what else is up?
Homeownership? (That's way down)
Child bearing? (Most people have less children than they want)
Student debt? Yes, a lot.
Speaking of my mom, who was a quintessential boomer. She got divorced from her first husband in 1980ish, drove across the country to a new city, lived in a YMCA type thing for a bit, but nevertheless owned a new home, had a new husband, and had a new child within a year and a half.
That doesn't happen to millennials. We have more "money," but more precarity as well.
The reason the release of GPT-5.5 didn't cause widespread cyberattacks isn't because the defenders have won cybersecurity. (Anyone working in cybersecurity right now would find that claim laughable.) It's because GPT-5.5 is nowhere near as good at hacking as Mythos, and the people saying otherwise are wrong.
That chart from the AI Security Institute keeps getting taken out of context. Zvi Mowshowitz explains, albeit somewhat tersely (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/86zcwvuBpE4vxAeQz/gpt-5-5-the-system-card#Cybersecurity__9_1_2_):
"GPT-5.5 did a bunch of things, but did not ‘independently produce a functional full chain exploit against real world targets.’
Exploit development judgment was the bottleneck. For any given isolated and specified task, GPT-5.5 is damn good, but it can’t synthesize and plan like Mythos."
"This reinforces that even very strong performance in narrow cyber tasks is not that dangerous, the same way that AI being able to do any particular narrow job task does not automatically mean you’re about to be fired. They can’t fire (all of) you until the AI knows which narrow job task to do next, and which way to do it."
We know Mythos was a big deal because it found real serious vulnerabilities in real widely-deployed software. If GPT-5.5 could do that, OpenAI would have demonstrated it. They didn't.
I thought all the pessimism is downstream of the housing market. What do statistics like rent burdened households look like?
Data point from outside the USA: Auckland has a median wage of appx. NZD70,000. Take home pay would be 55,000. Median house price is just over a million NZD.
Renting is cheaper but comes with *severe* compromises, as in, whatever house you live in now is only ever be temporarily and may go away with a 42 day notice.
Vulnerabilities are not immune from AI slop. Finding more does not equal finding “better,” more destructive ones. It’s going to be annoying, getting flooded with noise I have to deal with. But it doesn’t automatically increase the overall real threat level.
Great Noah. I love the public order story, but still think you need to make a distinction based on gender. There are cities where women feel demonstrably less safe than men. This is usualy a function of tolerance of what an only be called 'creeper' behavior among, well, male creeps.
Japan scores highly on public order, but is far from a single female tourist destination due to the creeper factor.
Your father so obviously raised a balanced honest decent open minded human being. It’s so clear in the years I’ve been reading you. I am sorry for your loss.