This thread is cluing me in that I need new wording to describe my rare consumption of alcohol.

I have a glass of whiskey a couple of times a year

I mostly just tell people I don't drink at all

If I tell people that I drink "rarely", they put it into their own framework based on how often they drink themselves. Heavy drinkers might assume "rarely" means one night a week. Moderate drinkers might think a couple times a month

Same. To people who regularly drink, I don't drink at all.

When I was young, I would always get asked why. I'm pushing 40 now, and people rarely ask anymore.

It’s tempting to anthropomorphize a company like Google, and assume that every behavior is part of some evil master plan. Just as often, it’s some small group of people within the company making a dumb mistake. I’d guess there is some team tasked with reducing the “app spam” problem, where there the store and (app review process) is crammed with thousands of near-identical apps, torturing the naive user with ads as they attempt to perform basic functions.

This targeting of this warning is over-broad, preventing honest new app developers from getting traction. That’s bad for the long-term health of Android’s app ecosystem, and a competitive disadvantage against iOS. There’s probably some other team at Google who is responsible for improving the development experience for Android, who hates this new warning.

Talking about the harmful outcomes of this warning, it’s good to get the news far and wide and try to get it fixed.

Analyzing why the thing got pushed in the first place, it seems to me a symptom of the challenge of coherently managing a hundred thousand employees.

The common pattern of requiring three days a week of in-office time makes it much harder.

When a large institution is faced with uncertainty about the future, it’s both feasible and prudent to make plans that account for multiple future outcomes. In this case, it makes sense to do both of the following:

1) Fight the administration in the legal system.

2) Plan for the case where some of those legal fights are lost.

What does it mean, concretely, to plan for that case? It doesn't sound like there's any risk of a scenario where, like, Columbia can't pay maintenance staff and all the buildings flood. If the US government freezes them out of grant funding, then the research funded by those grants won't be funded any longer - there's no careful planning you can do to make that less true.

Supposedly there are hundreds in Concord.

In pure math at a school like Harvard, the standout kids like the ones in that quote are probably trying to become tenured math professors. There are very few such positions available. You can shoot for the stars, and if you succeed, make about the same as the average software engineer. More likely, get stuck a postdoc. So most students give up pure math at some point. If you realized you weren’t cut out for it in freshman year, you got a head start over the people who got a math phd before finding out the hard way.

This pressure didn’t exist in computer science because there were plenty of tech jobs for anyone competent (not sure if that’s still true in 2025). And you didn’t need to be a genius to build something cool.

Math can also be taught very young with compounding effect, but you’re very unlikely to be exposed to the coaching and expertise at a young age. Of course the few in the world who combine aptitude with exposure are the kind of people you will find at Harvard. If you’re not one of them you may be a decade behind.

I also had a math professor who believed in extreme differences within the research community. He said only a top advisor would actually be engaging with real research and be able to bring you with them.

> More likely, get stuck a postdoc.

I still can’t understand why the outcomes for math Phds are so bad. They have extremely general intelligence which is applicable to any jobs I’ve had. I think it’s some combination of being unable to sell, unable to explain what they do, and still having their aspirations defined by professors.

It's because it's considered settling for lesser to "sell out to industry."

Kinda reminds me of the old "amateur athlete" paradigm.

It's not that you can't get a good job with a math PhD, it's that you can't get a good job and the respect of your peers/community. I'm sure there are plenty of companies that would be thrilled to hire math PhDs, they just don't also offer a ton of opportunities to work on cutting edge (math) research and publish papers.

Is it actually that hard to jailbreak? Maybe the prompt is a creative writing exercise, and a much simpler version would have worked?

Given the number of folks going hard at it to find an exploit, I assume it's become rather difficult given the few successes.

When I was a kid, an adult told me that I should stop using “basically” as a filler word because people will interpret it as an insult to their intelligence (ie. “You’re not smart enough for the whole thing, so I will just tell you the basic version”). I’ve been attentive to the way other people use the word ever since, and I think they have a point. Some people say it very frequently and don’t mean anything by it. But a good chunk of the time, it does seem like there is a status game going on when people use that word.

The other side of that is offering a ‘basically’ version out of respect for the listener, assuming they have more important things to do than listen to a detailed nerd-rambling of something they aren’t interested in. Listener/speaker can expand on the details or ask questions later, if needed.

It’s possible to mean it either way, or to hear it and interpret it either way.

This seems like a highly overwrought analysis where the adult formed a mental model, began assuming the motivations and intentions of others with certainty, and passed on this "lesson" a malleable mind who had no reason to debate it.

The idea that people use this word as a subtle/unintentional insult to others' intelligence rather than as a synonym for "essentially"... I just don't know how people arrive at such ungenerous conclusions so confidently.

>But a good chunk of the time, it does seem like there is a status game going on when people use that word.

I find that's basically never the case and generally if they are playing some sort of status game, the entire conversation is condescending, so worrying about one normal phrase is pointless.

I prefer "essentially" ... pretty much the same meaning but it's more like a sign of respect "I'm summarising this point to its essence for brevity, as you are perfectly capable of filling in the blanks yourself".

Some cultures or regions use the word "basically" more frequently than others. And if there one thing I don't want to do is judging whole populations because of the way they traditionally use the language.

Quite a tangent, but what if we apply this logic of informed consent to property? If a person without a will dies, should we leave their house abandoned until it decomposes? Automatic organ donation is like probate for bodies.

I thought that was because the lab meat competes with farmers. I can’t think of any similarly situated rival to the lab bodies for organ transplants that would lobby against it.

Don't underestimate the vast imagination and pervasive insecurity of the corrupt.