Shoutout to LEEP for (being recognized for) their great work in South Africa ! https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2026-04-09-your-three-legged-pot-could-slowly-be-poisoning-you-health-department/

Some women on the Facebook support group "Cluster Headache Patients" comparing labor pain to cluster headache pain: * "Honestly, I had a natural childbirth and a cesarean and cluster headaches are 10 times worse than both." * "2 unmedicated births for me. Would rather do that every day than have another cluster" * "every day though, really?" * "yes. I'd rather go through childbirth without pain relief than CH." * "tenfold worse than popping a baby out" * "Nah, labour/giving birth is a walk in the park compared to ch […] I was in labour with my son for nearly 3 days, then the midwife had to break my cervix with her hands, but I'd still rather do that again than have another CH" * "Labor pain doesn’t even come close to CH! I’d choose labor pain ANY day over suffering from another CH" * "CH is a million times worse" * "I had 4 children, 3 were natural. CH is worse." * "I'd rather have a baby. And my placenta tore during all natural childbirth." * "I gave birth to 4 different babies. The smallest being 8lbs 14oz. The biggest being 10lbs 15oz. I would much rather give natural birth all over again than a CH." * "I've had three babies—one was overdue and born with his arm over his head. Having a baby is still cake compared to clusters."   These are just a few. They go on and on. (So far only one woman claiming childbirth was worse, who "nearly bled out in childbirth, got an episiotomy with zero freezing/drugs.")

Just noticed that I tend to up/downvote and agree/disagree vote more or less depending on what the current vote count is at. Standard herding bias at work. Hoping that saying it out loud will make it weaker, and maybe other people can relate.

Many people hold up 'AI As Normal Technology' as a reasonable "normal-people" case against the doomer position. I actually think it's wrong on a number of ways and falls flat on its own terms. I think I believe this for reasons mostly orthogonal to being a doomer (except inasomuch as being a doomer makes me more interested in thinking about AI). If anybody here is interested in fighting the good fight, it might be valuable to do a Andy Masley-style annilihation of the AI As Normal Technology position, trying to stick to minimally controversial arguments and just destroying their arguments with reference to obvious empirical and logical arguments. I suspect it won't be very hard. Eg here's a few obvious reasons they fail: 1. Their central empirical mechanism is already wrong: their story is that AI diffusion will be slow because this is the path of previous technologies like electricity, but consumer and developer adoption of LLMs has been faster than essentially any technology in history (eg Anthropic at 30B ARR) 2. They completely ignore that AI will obviously do a ton to assist in its own diffusion: Even if I take their arguments that diffusion is what matters and I rule out software-only singularity by fiat, I still don’t think I or anybody else should buy their causal mechanisms. Like the single most obvious way in which AI diffusion might be distinct from previous technological changes is afaict unaccounted for in their arguments, even if I presume a diffusion-first model. 3. The reference class is unargued and load-bearing: The whole thesis rests on AI being like electricity or the internet (decades of diffusion) rather than like smartphones, SaaS, or cloud (years). 4. They have no framework that can engage software-only-singularity-style arguments. Their entire ontology is built around physical-world deployment friction. This practically assumes the conclusion! 5. The position is self-undermining for their vibes if you take it literally. 1) If AI really

Sharing an overview of the CEA Online Team's Q2 OKRs (we run this Forum)