← Back to context

Comment by everdrive

10 hours ago

It's no surprise. The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s has completely fallen apart as time and time again tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime and partisan hatred. (which itself, of course, is stoked to the absolute maximum in part due to technology trends in the past 15 years or so)

The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money, distracted driving. Nearly every single service becoming worse over time, etc. Since then, the tech CEOs has been sidling up to the halls of power and effectively begging to help destroy privacy as thoroughly as possible.

I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worse by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes. There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.

So a few years ago, nearly everywhere you went people are talking about how thoroughly AI was going to transform society. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing it. Of course people are wary. Big tech has been a net negative in very loud, intrusive, and obvious ways in _most_ people's lives. And now they're saying they're going to radically reform society.

The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal. For sure, if they really how the power to radically change everything, they would change it for the worse and would never spend a moment worrying about the damage they had done.

>The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal.

What even is the optimistic outcome if they are right? What are we all working towards? Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? Because I legitimately can't see a realistic outcome that actually benefits society as a whole. It all ends with very few obscenely rich people getting even more obscenely rich. But I guess we could tell an AI to put ourselves in the new Marvel movie to pass the time since we no longer have any jobs.

  • > Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness?

    I don’t get this. It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no secret formula to any of this. The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.

    • > The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.

      Foreign militaries investing in autonomous warfare does not assuage my concerns about my country investing in autonomous warfare.

      Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s? The benefits of computing really have gone to the captains of industry.

      10 replies →

    • You could say that about any big tech product and yet we've all seen power and wealth become concentrated on an incredible scale since the 60s. The immense resources needed to train frontier models gives the few companies that can manage it more of a moat than most tech products. So empirically I expect that we'll see the current wealth hording keep going at at least the same rate.

    • >It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing.

      Isn't that what happened? There was enough competition among computing companies that they weren't able to completely monopolize all the productivity improvements, but the financial benefits were mostly captured by the capital class in one way or another.[1]

      TVs might be cheaper today and we all like watching Netflix, but I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.

      [1] - https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...

      11 replies →

    • >It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense.

      Not only is that exactly what happened, they weren't satisfied with accumulating most of the wealth produced by it, they've also taken it upon themselves to take over democracy and media and act like a state within a state. You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s(https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/)

      People who used to have good jobs can now drive for Doordash and what the last wave of digitalization did over 30 years the AI gurus now promise to do in 10 again, and not just to the working class. The only reason to be optimistic is that they're snake oil salesmen.

      3 replies →

    • The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now.

      I want to be optimistic and agree with you, but I don't think the parallels are as strong as you say they are. We already have Anthropic withhold Mythos from the public, the governement now allowing the use of Fable, I don't think its farfetched to think that the US will start regulating access to Chinese/open-source models, pricing for compute isn't slowing down. The problem isn't AI, but who controls the compute that powers it.

      7 replies →

  • I'm legit pretty excited about applying AI to accelerate biological and medical discovery.

    It's already happening right now, still in relatively mundane ways, but there's so much to do.

    • How much of American society will get to share in the benefits of those new biological and medical discoveries when we don't have any health insurance because we lost our jobs to AI?

      19 replies →

    • The problem is, at least in theory, that it entirely changes the calculus of how advancements take place. In the past, when the pace of advancement was stronger the primary factor was the cultivation of a culture that valued prestige and knowledge over monetary gains. It didn't really matter how much money you threw at a problem because the bulk of the people responsible for advancements weren't interested in obscene wealth. Obviously those people were well compensated but any number of entities could provide that compensation. It was about bringing prestige to your lab / school / town or even country.

      If AI becomes a primary catalyst for advancement it further moves the needle in the monetary direction.

      That redfines advancement to mean something different than what is beneficial to society to be what is monetarily best for the owners of said advancment.

      2 replies →

    • I don’t understand this logic, what would LLMs do here? Is thinking the bottleneck, or money to go and test all the ideas people have already thought of? Are we really missing the cure for cancer because we just haven’t thought about it enough and letting an LLM churn on all the data will figure it out? All the research is probably in its training set already, so why hasn’t it come up with the cure?

    • Yes, that's very nice. But that's very different models from LLMs and slop image generators. AI as a term has been butchered beyond recognition; when mentioning the current harm of AI investor hype and job automation, people are talking about generative models using LLMs or prompt based input, which have seen little to no use in "accelerate biological and medical discovery"

      Sure, the transformer is great for making larger neural networks with better learning potential, which are improving protein folding models a fair bit. But do we need the combined budget of the Apollo program or interstate highway system (adjusted for inflation) per year, to develop better molecular simulation models? (no, the most advanced ones run on mundane hardware and trained just fine on pre 2020 infrastructure).

      So while it's true that; "AI" ((primarily) Neural network based deep learning techniques) are wonderful tools to make society better; slop generators absorbing the entire energy budget of a few small nations to generate infinite propaganda, linked-in posts and shrimp Jesus is only tangentially helping in that goal while destabilization civilization in the process.

    • I don't think that is realistic. But, it can write your child's essay for them.

    • I fear that at this rate the oligarchs will use medical breakthroughs to keep us alive and laboring against our and nature’s will like what industrial farming has done to chickens and other livestock

      1 reply →

    • Superhuman abilities for the wealthy tech oligarchs, economic indentured servitude and slums for the rest of us.

      Tens of millions of people in the US alone cannot obtain basic healthcare today, how would this outcome change for them because AI solved it? The only solid paths are regulation or prying the machine from the hands of those who hold it. GLP-1s are only widely available globally affordably because the patent expired, for example.

      3 replies →

    • Does accelerating biological and medical discovery require over a trillion dollars of capital to be misallocated while Americans do not have medicare for all or universal childcare?

      Who is exactly going to benefit here because Americans have been given a rotten deal by neoliberalism for the last 40 years.

  • What are jobs for?

    Should we have them?

    Should they be mandatory?

    What does it mean to have to work to eat, is this a good setup?

    Does everyone have to work?

    Should they?

    • Who do you think will be answering these questions in a future in which these AI companies visions become a reality? Because they already have a huge influence on society and that will only increase as the tech improves.

      The most optimistic answer I can think of is that they will eventually agree to share their wealth under credible threats of violent revolution. That's the most optimistic outcome I see, they concede to threats of violence rather than needing actual violence.

      4 replies →

    • These are the right questions to ask. I think about stuff like this often, and just as often people I discuss this with think I'm off my rocker. I, on the other hand, think some can't see past what they have been programmed to see. It's sad really, our lives are finite and much is wasted on a less than optimal layout.

    • I'd answer: No, we should not have to work to eat, they should not be mandatory, and no not everyone has to work.

      But those problems need solved first before completely upending the current system. The system does need changed, but that change must happen before mass unemployment, not after the fact.

      12 replies →

    • How much do you trust the current US administration to guide us into a future where no one needs a job in order to get health care, food, shelter, etc?

    • Maybe figure out the answers to that before forcing everyone into an economy where they still need to work to make money, but any worthwhile jobs have been automated away.

      The other question, of course, is what happens to the political power of the newly disposable?

      2 replies →

    • No, but what are the odds of the robust welfare state that would be required to actually enable some sort of post-work society taking shape here in America? I'd truly like to be optimistic but, politically we have been moving in the opposite direction ever since the end of the New Deal, and the oligarchs who control the technologies are not exactly benevolent.

    • No. But capitalism requires them. I'm down to end capitalism, but maybe we should figure that out before we destroy the thing that kinda-sorta made it work?

  • Most optimistic outcome: Hardware & software advances keep pace; Open weights & locally runnable models keep pace with frontier (at least the open weights part seems to hold), making AI advances widely available to anyone; Individual productivity skyrockets, having knock-on effects in most industries, slowly allowing less and less people to do the work required to maintain the basic needs of our civilization(s); UBI utopia achieved.

    Do I think that's likely? No, but mostly because it would require parallel uprising of the global working class, which doesn't seem to materialize.

  • If they're right:

    * Use AI to eliminate all white collar jobs.

    * Combine AI with robotics to eliminate all blue collar jobs.

    * Combine AI with military hardware to kill any rabble who may become threats to the ruling class.

    The most optimistic outcome is that it doesn't happen in our lifetimes. Aside from that, the best you can hope for is that the ruling class enslaves the rest but treats them well enough that most don't realize they are slaves (e.g., the Eloi from the Time Machine).

    I'm cautiously optimistic about the former, but I expect the resources required by the latter will far exceed what the greed inherent to the ruling class will allow without first purging a significant fraction of the population. All we can hope for is they stop the purge before it takes everyone not in the ruling class, but given how many ultra-wealthy individuals already see the rest of us, I wouldn't bet on that.

    • Well the most optimistic outcome is that our democratically elected representatives start acting in the interests of all they represent, not just those with a lot of money.

      Ok, you didn’t need to laugh that hard.

  • One not-so-bad outcome would be that open weight models get better, smaller, more efficient, and easier to use while hardware gets faster, more efficient, and more widespread. Imagine when mobile CPUs have the GPU/NPU power of today's discrete GPUs and models are smaller and faster than today's models.

    That allows really powerful local-first AI applications, rather than being beholden to AI providers. With the advance of coding agents, anyone can build their own applications.

    The downstream effects of widespread local AIs is a rise in AI slop that feeds the distraction machine and attention economy as well as surveillance. I don't know what the solution to those is, but the local experience is going to be powerful.

This... this... this! This resonates soooo deeply with me.

The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people. It's often impossible to look at individual people and say, "they're the cause of this damage." I believe that some form of evil (this word feel inadequate) emerges amidst these large systems that is incredibly hard to pinpoint. It's why dissension is so fucking critical. Tech companies continue to profit from the status quo and we need courageous people who disrupt that.

  • > The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people.

    I don't think that's the case. The people running these companies certainly aren't good people and everyone else in any position of power is either happy to hurt anyone and anything in exchange for a paycheck, or they're willing to take the money and turn a blind eye to the things they know are wrong. It's difficult to know where people stop being complicit. The amazon warehouse employee who is forced to piss in bottles or wear diapers to keep their job isn't really the problem, and I'm sure many of them hate the company they work for, but the company only works because of their efforts.

    • I did say "ostensibly" ;)

      Agreed that power nearly always corrupts. It does so in often subtle and slow shifts. In general we have a paucity of leaders who wield their power on behalf of the oppressed.

      The truth is that the "bad" leaders need powerful help. They need someone to come alongside them and love them into the light of the damage they've caused by drifting into complacency. And I'm not talking about "nice" love here, it might initially look more like shame.

    • > “The people running these companies certainly aren't good people”

      That is an heavy understatement. After reading some biographies and books about the tech elite… it's just much weirder and sickly than i ever imagined. Strange cults, religions and beliefs. Surprisingly high stupidity mixed with intense hate of humans. Straight up anti-social anti-human behaviour… and drugs, so much drugs that lead to psychosis. Narcissism and superiority… you would have hard time finding anyone moderately nice to hang out with. It's a real curse that the system pushes up people like this.

      2 replies →

    • Most currently poor people would have the exact same failings if they suddenly found themselves with vast power.

      One of the most important political developments in history was the realization that you can’t just replace a bad king with a good king. They all eventually go bad. Instead you need checks and balances to distribute power and make sure it’s not concentrated in only a few hands.

  • Too many tech people only focus on developing enhanced capabilities and find philosophy, let alone moral systems like religion, useless or absurd.

    But with powerful AI models the philosophical and moral and religious questions have become impossible to ignore.

  • I think that CEOs of those companies are ethically challenged people, narcissists and sociopaths.

    They are not evil and there is no evil emerging in big systems. It is that in the above have advantage in winner takes all economy and use that advantage to gain more advantages. So they end up on top. And once they are high enough, law dont apply to them. Which makes them go even higher.

    • > I think that CEOs of those companies are ethically challenged people, narcissists and sociopaths.

      Likely true in many cases!

      > there is no evil emerging in big systems

      That's a very definitive statement!

      What brings you to the conclusion that there aren't forces at play that we don't yet have a good name for or don't yet have the scientific means to study?

    • The vast majority of people suddenly become ethically challenged narcissists and sociopaths if given too much power.

It's beyond tech. Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive. The technology for delivering bad news and highly-engaging outrage-bait has developed much faster than our society has been able to adapt to it.

Just as americans don't trust AI or the tech industry, they don't trust any public institutions.

The fundamental problem is not AI or tech or institutions being bad. The fundamental problem is that the way we distribute information about the world has a deep negativity bias. This exists because the information economy is supported by advertisement, which requires attention to profit, and attention is easiest to attract with negativity. "If it bleeds, it leads" has been true forever.

  • It's scrollable algo video. This is at the root of essentially all of our current cultural woes. I was in denial about this for a long time, but atp it's undeniable.

  • > Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive.

    Hardly surprising given we are not collectively making sufficient change to avert climate disaster. There’s no negative bias or spin there - the majority of climate scientists agree that we’ve passed the tipping point.

> tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives

This. Many of us are cogs in these machines doing the harm...to ourselves and others around us.

The thing is, these companies can't exist without employees. But employees need the companies for money to pay the other companies.

> I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worst by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes

This aspect isn't talked about enough. We discuss plenty the direct impact of social media on its users, but little about how it effects even those who don't use social media at all, by proxy. Little is said how it's impossible to escape being profiled and having shadow profiles on these products just by virtue of everyone else in your life around you using them.

That's a huge problem. There is no possible way to opt out, at all.

> And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes.

Yeah... It's actually not so hard for me to just not take part in social media. The big struggle is that what I'd like to leave more than anything is a world born of its influence. The small percentage of people who are willing to go outward to places beyond the bounds of ten or so websites/apps of the Internet are still vastly influenced by them even when they reach outside. And despite that it would only take a handful of people "defecting" to form a nice tightly knit community, it's hard to find that many people with a common thread tying them together that aren't afflicted with behavior influenced by social media.

I don't want to just have places on the Internet that are actually "secretly" kind of like offshoots of Twitter/Reddit/Discord communities. That's almost not better and yet it's what a lot of attempts at "hey we're doing forums again" tends to feel like.

  • It’s like trying to give up smoking when all your friends still smoke. Even if you do give it up you either also give up your friends or still reek of cigarettes.

  • > It's actually not so hard for me to just not take part in social media

    Unfortunately that’s not quite as easy for people in creative professions that must now use social media to promote themselves and their work.

> ... tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime

Not so fast. Violent crime has been declining for about 30 years. Tech has been ascendant in that time.

This comment resonated with me in a way that few pieces of writing do. My only complaint is that it’s perhaps too short. I get the impression that you could turn this comment into longer post (with citations) and I encourage you to do so.

I think social media is almost an oxymoron, as a medium is something "in the middle" and social contacts should be direct and not mediated (IMHO).

> There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.

I will never forget Ruchi Sanghvi’s remarks at the Female Founders Conference talk in 2015[0]:

> It [the News Feed] became this virtuous cycle that we all dream of: consumption and production that just kept on giving. […] Even though everyone said they hated it, engagement had doubled.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01FjJyBAOUE#t=6m29s

> The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money

I think that should read "all so that a very small number of people can make a very large amount of money"

I think the main reason for this outrage is partly a confluence of factors some of which you pointed it.

But my money/theory is on what I call `alonliness` specifically due to lack of labor mobility: There is no good rapid transport connecting american interior towns to big cities and people don't want to move due to a variety of factors(real estate debt, cultural affinity to area). To be clear these people are alone but not necessary lonely(there is that going on too in other segments of the population). And once you don't understand or never had the opportunity to understand something(or rather only experience its bad side effects), you distrust it at best and fear and hate it at the worst.

If you ask people 1:1 IRL who live in communities where the main source of employment is not whatever Silicon valley businesses are. They will ask you questions or make comments like " 'those' jobs are not real American jobs!" or "Aren't you afraid of getting thrown on subway tracks in NYC?". These are actual questions i got from people there.

These give an indication of the disjointedness of the sets in the venn-diagram of of the socio-economic equality and what creates such psyche. I am not sure why some think its a PR/Comms problem for big tech.

> a constant drip-feed of outrage

I say this as someone highly critical of social media. I'm not sure you can entirely blame Social Media for this. The fact is, outrageous things are happening constantly throughout the world. We just didn't hear about most of it before Internet connectivity and the reach of social media. It's not like social media suddenly created outrage. It's just informing people about the existing absolutely outrageous things happening. Are the algorithms tuned for outrage? Sure. But that doesn't mean these outrageous things are not happening.

Back in the 1960s there was widespread outrage over the Vietnam war, but no social media drip to blame it on. The difference was: The outrageous acts were getting press and constant attention, through non social media channels.

You can either be 1. ignorant / not paying attention to the state of the world, 2. paying attention but deliberately ignoring the state of the world, or 3. outraged all the time.

I'm not saying it is good to be outraged, but that's our world. The state of the world is absolutely outrageous, and a normal human being should be feeling outrage at what is constantly being done.

At the moment, the main visible effect is disruption in the job market.

Everyone knows it's just another stake in the coffin.

> The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s

Anecdotally, my optimist and disappointment has a lot less to do with flaws in the technology, versus outcomes that rested on the social / political / power-dynamic side of things.

For example, instead of everyone being able to command the digital factory of capital-equipment on their desk (or in their palm) to pursue their personal interests and welfare, the devices feel like tools of someone else who considers you a resource to be exploited, and they can command people to beat you up if you use "your" property "wrong".

To cast things out in a future-direction, imagine being excited about the dawn of practical spaceships, and the disappoint when--somehow--there are no limits on launch pollution, monopolies abound, and the average migrant to cleaner worlds must enter into multi-generational indentured servitude.

Life is like a supermarket. You are supposed to seek out the good things. You can't stop and stand and rage in the first aisle, which is filled with ultra processed food for the masses. You have to seek out the good ingredients in the back and make an effort.

You can't get stuck in life being disappointed in average people. You have to seek out good people. And good places and good things.

Or stay in the cranky cynic rabbit hole. God knows there are unlimited amounts of other cranky people to back you up. Maybe even the majority?

  • You are naive, you don't seriously expect people to "seek out the good ingredients" do you? When the shit ingredients are addictive, cheaper than the good ones and more available? The entire premise of these platforms is use whatever edges possible to get more ad money, they do that by getting people addicted to their phones and using psychological tricks that have been refined through over a decade of A/B testing to be effective.

I wish we could unplug AI especially when you watch videos of tech folks saying it could destroy us. Umm well then.

Yet i guess it's here to stay and AI needs us, our human content to stay relevant and thrive. Personally, I think it should pay all of us (set up some system or systems) for every piece of content we create daily & choose to publish. THat way we all thrive for keeping it relevant and it thrives alongside us. Wrote about one idea / a system that would get us paid for the daily content we produce via living each day https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...

But, again I'd be happy if all of society and cultures unplugged it!

People just forget the before times. No one wants to go back to printing out driving directions or emailing photos. We take all these things for granted now but I am 100 certain the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions of lives through downstream butterfly effects.

  • I am not so sure. The world of printing out driving directions or emailing photos sounds a lot more calm. Also, simply quite enjoyable. The current world is cramming too many events in too little time, it seems. Stress is quite bad for health so I am not so sure about these hundreds of millions of lives saved. It may also have costed quite a few.

    • By the way, I am old enough to remember that world. When I was young, people had fat books with maps of most large and medium size places in the country.

    • nah, that was ass. i think the really major negative has just been scrollable video. all these other things - uber, airbnb, grocery pickup, etc. have largely just made my life better.

      4 replies →

    • nah, i distinctly remember family road trips as a kid. Driving was super stressful with my mom yelling about missing an exit as she reads the map, getting lost in a not so nice neighborhood, etc.

      you're romanticizing the past

      3 replies →

  • It's possible to have both internet maps and photo web sites, and not have unregulated* social media.

    *Or rampant or whatever other word you feel fits the current state of social media.

  • How does not printing directions save hundreds of millions of lives?

    • Oh man I can tell you're young. Those directions weren't always right. You couldn't just pull out your phone and find the nearest hospital if something happened during your trip. Or call 911 and have them find you by GPS. And that's just one casual convenience you take for granted. People used to drive around asking random people to use their phone in emergencies. Not exactly fast when seconds matter.

      2 replies →

  • That's because you're measuring yesterday's worlds with today's demented expectations.

    Because there was no faster way to do it, it was okay to wait for someone to send you those photos via email. If you were late for a meetup somewhere new, that was okay because people knew you might have missed the street a few times stopped for directions etc.

    We have more convenient things, sure. But they come with increased and rather frenzied expectations.

  • It was always an option to have the technology without the bullshit. We can have GPS without allowing Google or Apple to track our every movement. We can have useful websites without allowing the people running those websites to mine every scrap of data we upload and sell our private information to anyone willing to pay for it.

    It's not a requirement or law of nature that every technology sold must be used against the customer, we just haven't reached a point where we say enough is enough and outlaw such consumer hostile practices. Instead we've been allowing the corporations who seek to screw us over at every opportunity to gain more and more influence over the governments that could constrain them making it harder for us to fight back against the abuses we're subjected to.

    • Everything you just said is readily available now. You can use a FOSS OS on a mobile device with an offline mapping program. They were available before Google Maps was even a thing on Android 1.x. I know because I used to download them and use them without even having mobile internet in rural areas. The only thing stopping you is yourself.

  • Those were wonderful times, I see no problem with driving by a paper map, emailing photos, and sending gpg-encrypted e-mails, which all the surveilling scum could go fuck themselves about, at all.

    Convenience is the glue that got all the frogs stuck to their boiling pots.

    > the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions

    Oh wow, are you sure it's not billions?

  • Has it? If we've saved hundreds of millions, then I would argue simply the amount of money spent in AdTech could have saved billions.

    The Internet of the 90s and early 2000s was amazing. The Internet today is a dumpster fire of attention hoarding, regurgitated content and, now, slop.

    Society as a whole may be better off without a lot of the convenience features we have, but I also don't agree that it's all or nothing. We could have an amazing tech relationship today. But a select few wanted to monetize it for themselves. Here we are, welcome to the free market.

  • Yes, I am from the olden times, the dark times… Times of fear and terror, printer not working, having to write things down by hand, ach, the horror… Today much better, says me, yass the foundations of democracy and fabric of society has been eaten away like by millions of worms, teenagers constantly fighting with mental illnesses, lies and disinformation, young strong lads drug or gambling addicts… but, the minor conveniences, my lad! Ach, those I would not live without. The minor conveniences…