Ask ChatGPT “based on what you know about me. draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like” past your responses below. thanks again @mreflow & @danshipper

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, our fastest and most cost effective model, is now stable and ready for scaled production use!! It comes with native reasoning capabilities, a 1 million token context window, and is priced at ($0.10 in / 1M) and ($0.40 out / 1M).

The absolute best parts of the United States are the places that are so harrowingly desolate, abandoned, and isolated that no one cares what you do. Want to camp under the water tower in the middle of town? Go ahead, no one minds. Building a cabin? "If you're crazy enough to stay here," they might tell you, "then we figure you know what you're doing." Places where you can pass months without hardly seeing anyone unless you want to. Where everyone's a "character." No jobs, no visitors, no traffic, no crime, mostly just wind and silence and rusty trailers and weeds -- a blank open canvas for a few weird, rugged souls to enjoy. All the feverish clipboard-waving, nail-biting niggling bureaucrats, abstruse rules and regs, fretting over appearances and so on that exists "elsewhere" -- there's not much room for that sort of thing in places like these. This is the only genre of American place that has blown my mind ten times out of ten. My memories of time in these places have tattooed my heart; I can't shake my love for them. If such places didn't still exist, I'd certainly declare this country to be completely hopeless. Thank God they're still out there, weird as ever.

The end of identity-as-utility opens the door to identity-as-play. If AI dissolves the need to “be good at math” to survive, maybe what emerges is a world where math becomes music again—resonant, curious, unnecessary in the most beautiful way. A post-utility renaissance begins.

We do stand at the edge of a pronounced crisis of identity, but, only in the fact that it will happen simultaneously for so many. This has happened again and again in small ways to you, and to everyone ever. In my philosophy undergrad, I was lucky enough to have a prof named Litke who is one of the rare few philosophers that actively had classes taught about his works while he was still alive (and oddly enough, one of the best garlic collectors/cultivators in the world) But his passion was the philosophy of self. And one thing he spoke about frequently was this concept of “the long body of self” He gave the example, that when he was in highschool, he was a top swimmer, and expected to go a top college on a swimming scholarship and do a degree biology. However, in his last year of high school, he was in a car accident that severely damaged his shoulder, and broke both his legs leaving him in a wheelchair for months, and never able to swim again at his top form. He had always defined himself as “a swimmer” with that internalized language. His friends were his swimming friends. His girlfriend was a swimmer. He could no longer swim. He no longer spent time with his swimming friends, and eventually they and his girlfriend drifted. His identity came crashing down. Until he built it up into something new. It was around then he discovered his love of botany and of philosophy. But to each of us, these identity arks happen many times in our lives. How you defined yourself as a child or a teen likely doesn’t match how you’d define yourself now. We build up a new version of self, only for it to come crashing down, and we eventually build back up a new identity. In this on-going loop-de-loop pattern. The thing is, none of these were really our “self” They are externalities we defined ourselves as, and the self is what you see if you were to turn that set of loops 90 degrees and look through the collective snapshot of life. Each one taught us something, and led to the next one, but none are defining. After all, did you call yourself a mathematician because there was no one better than you at math, or did you think you weren’t good at arithmetic because a calculator could add faster than you? No of course not. You being good at math, and you understanding math, has in fact not changed. The productivity output of math in the world has changed - but you have not. (Plus let’s remember, even if people can output the math they can’t apply it if they don’t understand it) You as a person are more than any one part or talent, and this is also a talent you still retain and do uniquely well; and those who are both top brass at their talents and apply it with unique perspectives are more likely to be more productive with AI rather than replaced by it. Because the one thing that any system will struggle with is the same thing we humans do: originality. And you are good at originality, and at a thirst for pursuing it. So in your life, in a thousand little ways, and in a handful of large ways, you will redefine yourself, but it is only the collection of those experiences that are “you” and that is always a unique and valuable thing. And know that after each crash, no matter how bleak it can seem - we always do redefine ourselves and often it becomes so natural that we struggle to remember the ways we identified ourselves in the past. There will always be human experiences to have. There will always be new ways we define ourselves. There will always be new places we fit in the world, no matter how out of place we feel. And you will always be good at math. 🫡

the openai IMO news hit me pretty heavy this weekend i'm still in the acute phase of the impact, i think i consider myself a professional mathematician (a characterization some actual professional mathematicians might take issue with, but my party my rules) and i don't think i can answer a single imo question ok, yes, imo is its own little athletic subsection of math for which i have not trained, etc. etc., but. if i meet someone in the wild who has an IMO gold, i immediately update to "this person is much better at math than i am" now a bunch of robots can do it. as someone who has a lot of their identity and their actual life built around "is good at math," it's a gut punch. it's a kind of dying. like, one day you discover you can talk to dogs. it's fun and interesting so you do it more, learning the intricacies of their language and their deepest customs. you learn other people are surprised by what you can do. you have never quite fit in, but you learn people appreciate your ability and want you around to help them. the dogs appreciate you too, the only biped who really gets it. you assemble for yourself a kind of belonging. then one day you wake up and the universal dog translator is for sale at walmart for $4.99 the IMO result isn't news, exactly. in fact, if you look at the METR agent task length over time plot, i think agents being able to solve ~ 1.5 hour problems is coming right on time. so in some way we should not be surprised. and indeed, it appears multiple companies have achieved the same result. it's just... the rising tide rising as fast as it has been rising of course, grief for my personal identity as a mathematician (and/or productive member of society) is the smallest part of this story multiply that grief out by *every* mathematician, by every coder, maybe every knowledge worker, every artist... over the next few years... it's a slightly bigger story and of course, beyond that, there is the fear of actual death, which perhaps i'll go into more later. this package -- grief for relevance, grief for life, grief for what i have known -- isn't unique to the ai age or anything like that. i think it is a standard thing as one appreaches end of career or end of life. it just might be that that is coming a bit sooner for many of us, all at once. i wonder if we are ready

My friends and I used to hang out on the beach near a big youth hostel and watch people pass by on the boardwalk. One of our favorite games was called 'German or Gay.'

"In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. No matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger – something better, pushing right back." - Albert Camus I return to this quote often, and a lot recently, going through some rough challenges. I love you all ❤️

> invite things into your life that you can’t handle yet, because you want to become a person who can handle them > it works! You have more capacity! > you keep doing it > …realize there’s no ceiling, just increasing challenges, so you’re constantly immersed in what you can’t handle, even tho you can now handle 500x more than you could years ago, > …where do you set a line and decide to just… stop? Just stay at the zone you can now handle and stop hoisting yourself past it?

Had one of our biggest wins yesterday We met with our wealthiest client, income wise (over $7mil this year in income alone) We had talked to his CPA a couple times and he did not like us being involved in tax He mentioned he has never worked with a financial planner on his clients taxes before and does not see a reason for us to be involved This makes sense, he is in his 70s and traditionally financial advisors do not touch this stuff Then we met... We came with: - all the income numbers, sources, and types - all the planning moves being made - the estimated taxes - QBID planning - Donor advised fund rec and impact - solo numbers figured out for both spouses - cash balance plan mapped out The meeting ends and later in the day we got an email from him saying that the meeting went super well, that he loved working with us, and we should get more meetings scheduled on the calendar He saw value in 2 parties being involved, both coming with numbers (we had some extra info he did not know about since we meet with our clients 4-6 times a year), and working together to ensure everything gets done The financial planner and CPA/EA should be working together for their clients Especially when it is a high complexity situation

If cities don't soon, a private company will. #privatepolicing e.g. Sign your car up to the app, circling private police force keep and eye on your vehicle and your stuff. Interrupt crime through -- filming? non-lethal interactions? LOTS of mace??