The major benefit of legalization of something like marijuana is that you nix a lot of criminality associated with the drug being illegal. You also wind up with a better quality product, labels that help with dosage, potency, etc.

The no-holds-barred legalization of gambling apps has none of these benefits, and almost everyone I've talked to, no matter how libertarian their instincts, seems to agree we've gone way too far. I think (and hope) we'll see a backlash on the gambling stuff that pushes legal gambling out of the insanely public and accessible places where it currently lives.

> The major benefit of legalization of something like marijuana is that you nix a lot of criminality associated with the drug being illegal.

These days, if you exclude ‘possession’ and ‘selling’ from weed-related crimes, there’s almost nothing left. Weed is commoditized and is one of the few products that has gotten cheaper over the last 6 years.

There’s very little violence in the weed trade, the profit margins aren’t high enough for people to murder each other like they are for cocaine, heroin, and meth.

agreed - s/marijuana/dangerous drug of your choosing/ - the point is more about the differential between the purported benefit of legalization / decriminalization of "sinful" activities and the actual outcome in the specific case of gambling

It's heavily tolerance dependent, and tolerance grows quite quickly with any kind of regular use, so it's really hard to come up with one number.

I've got this new account and a Substack page where I'm writing about, idk... metaphysical stuff? Spirituality, religion, psychedelics, tarot, and so forth. I was inspired largely by the Weird Studies podcast, but there's a bunch of actually interesting writing and media in this space right now.

I deliberately separated it from my public internet persona (which is connected to my real name) in the hopes that I could write about weird, woo-y, or controversial topics without worry. I've got a few articles half baked and have been having fun engaging with a different subset of the Substack crowd than my normal tech focus would show me.

Of course the stats show that the one article I did that touches on AI has done an order of magnitude better than anything else.

Anyway this is just kind of a weird sideline project, a sort of release valve for stuff that wouldn't fit in on my "professional" site, but it's been a fun thing to spend some time on.

Another thing that's cool is that I largely stopped _writing_ a few years back. I always enjoyed writing but of course as a dev most of my stuff had a technical/tutorial bent to it. Writing weird little "what do I think" essays has forced me to exercise a writing muscle I really hadn't stretched for a long time and I've enjoyed it.

There's only a handful of things up now, it's nothing special really. Link in my bio, if you see something you like I would love to hear from you!

Hey there. I've just subscribed to your substack. Very interesting stuff on there. I just launched a game today (Trophle @ trohple.com) and I'm planning to launch a substack tied to it (Trophle field notes) where I'm going to do a deep dive into my puzzle topics the next day. Anyway, just wanted to say, I like your vibe.

Thanks! Glad you found something you liked. Got a couple good posts in the pipeline so stay tuned.

I definitely struggle with both sides, or maybe multiple sides. On the one hand most of my daily output at my job is coming from AI these days. On the other hand I find the explosion of AI-generated "writing" (and other forms of art) to be aesthetically abhorrent. And I've just recently started a ... weird sort of metaphysics / spirituality / but also AI related writing project, so the difference between creation with and without AI is in really sharp focus for me right now.

I wrote an article about this, but honestly I don't think I really captured the totality of my feelings. I really haven't decided where I land. I'm definitely using the tools for economic purposes, and I even have some "pure-fun" side project stuff where I'm getting value from it.

Here's the article if that sounds interesting, would love to discuss the whole topic with anyone who's finding themselves of two (or more) minds on these sorts of issues: https://hermeticwoodsman.substack.com/p/why-i-let-ai-write-m...

Honestly, all the ones I've known have been super sweet dogs. I can never quite bring myself to fully trust them, but frankly I never fully trust any dog.

There is something so wildly cool about having an idea, modeling it, and a few hours later holding a physical instantiation of the thing that previously just existed in your head. Something we software people don't get to experience often enough.