- https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-afford-a-tradlife
- https://www.slowboring.com/p/affordability-is-just-high-nomi...
- https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-revolution-of-rising-expec...
- https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/vibecession-m...
NYT: US GDP Grew 4.3%, surging in 3rd Quarter 2025 - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/business/us-economy-consu...
WSJ: Consumers Power Strongest US Economic Growth in 2 years - https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-gdp-q3-2025-2026-6cbd079e
The Guardian: US economy grew strongly in third quarter - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/23/us-economy-...
Makes you really optimistic about the future of humanity :)
1 - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu...
>They kind of are though?
Splitting[1] is a psychological phenomena that you'll find often once you learn to recognize it. Google can both be doing great research, and run a significant influence operation.
Do you think Americans' prosperity and wellbeing is tanking?
We can still look at quantitative and qualitative data.
The Economist ran a story in July "What is the richest country in the world in 2025"[1] in which they compared economies in three different ways: GDP per person at market exchange rates, Adjusted for price differences, and Adjusted for prices and hours worked.
Against those three metrics, the US is ranked in 4th, 7th, and 6th positions.
Even these statistics may need further interpretation or further adjustment (the article does a great job explaining why adjustments are needed for places like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Ireland, Luxembourg).
> While you are probably right in that The Economy, technically is growing, it doesn’t feel like it to normal people I know.
Pew's research shows that most Americans rate the US economy negatively, with a strong partisan divide. 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents rat the economy as excellent or good (up 8 points from April) while only 10% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners say so.
Arguments for "better off" than, say, 3 years ago: strong job market, economic growth, reduced debt burden.
Arguments for "worse off" than, say, 3 years ago: high cost of living.
Notwithstanding the pessimism and the visible fact that people are not as economically strong as a pre-pandemic (but certainly much more than 2007 - 2008), I don't know that I would say the US economy is "tanking" OR that Americans are becoming destitute.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/07/18/what-is-...
The Thinking Game Film – Google DeepMind documentary - >>46097773 - Nov 2025 (141 comments)
>The seemingly unstoppable growth of renewable energy is Science’s 2025 Breakthrough of the Year
>Google DeepMind will establish its first “automated science laboratory” in the UK...
>The lab will focus on using AI tools to develop new materials for superconductors, solar cells and semiconductors.
(https://www.ft.com/content/b20f382b-ef05-4ea1-8933-df907d30c...)
...
> 2025 was clearly a year that met or exceeded my expectations on hardware, with multiple platforms now boasting >99.9% fidelity two-qubit gates, at or above the theoretical threshold for fault-tolerance. This year updated me in favor of taking more seriously the aggressive pronouncements—the “roadmaps”—of Google, Quantinuum, QuEra, PsiQuantum, and other companies about where they could be in 2028 or 2029.
...
> at some point, the people doing detailed estimates of how many physical qubits and gates it’ll take to break actually deployed cryptosystems using Shor’s algorithm are going to stop publishing those estimates, if for no other reason than the risk of giving too much information to adversaries. Indeed, for all we know, that point may have been passed already. This is the clearest warning that I can offer in public right now about the urgency of migrating to post-quantum cryptosystems, a process that I’m grateful is already underway.
The system you exist in today is heavily regulated. Perhaps over-regulated. But you don't want to live in an unregulated chaos.
I've been using this for automated password rotation after breach notifications. The agent handles navigation while credentials are injected locally—LLM sees the page but never actual password values. When 2FA is required, OTP extraction happens via local regex, not AI.
~89% success rate on standard sites. Turns 6+ hours of tedious credential rotation into 40 minutes of supervision.
The gap between Google's research and "AI that saves me time today" is closing fast.
https://thepassword.app (Mac app I built for this)