Why aren’t intelligent people happier

I found this nice article today that digs into the subject. Check it out.

The article suggests that we’ve been measuring intelligence the wrong way, which leads to poor correlation with life success metrics. Most of our intelligence metrics (like IQ) focus on how well someone can solve clearly defined problems. Real life rarely works that way. Living well, building relationships, raising children, and so on, depend more on the ability to navigate poorly defined problems. As a result, you can have a chess champion who is also a miserable human.

The article goes further and states that AIs can’t become AGIs because they’re only operating with human definitions (training data), and well-defined problems coming from prompts. AGIs would have to master poorly defined problems first.

GPT-5 is out

I tried it in an 8h coding session. It performs worse than Claude 4 for me, and it’s slower. It made me wait for 10 minutes at a time. Eventually, I gave up, used my brain to understand the problem properly, and hand held Claude to a solution, which took about 1h. I think I lost most of my time with GPT-5 in loops where it fixes one thing at the expense of another while the general approach looked sufficiently sound to fool me but not sufficiently sound to eventually work in all cases.

This might be due to high traffic and not because the model is worse. I’ll give it another chance when the hype fades.

Pay to Crawl

Cloudflare introduces a private beta to a service where engines are required to pay to access the information on a site. It made me think.

AI breaks the open web model in at least three different ways.

  • First is that the open web gets filled with AI-generated garbage
  • Second is that any word posted anywhere, from websites to DMs, may be used to train models, and then later retold and sold as AI
  • Third is that the lack of transparency of how the models work is a fertile ground spreading precisely controlled lies (in the shape Generative Engine Optimization – GEO)

While the first and third don’t bother me much yet, the second bothers me a lot. I feel like Google broke the pact it made with the Internet to provide neutral web search in exchange for profiting from paid search. Now website owners need to pay so their content is crawled, so the different AI tools can present it as universal knowledge. Useful or not, many AI tools feed from the web and give content creators nothing in return. Here’s Cloudflare’s product idea – to charge crawlers, make it less unfair.

However, even though this is a step in the right direction, it still doesn’t feel right, even if there was a way to enforce it.

When BMW designs a car, they charge per car sold, not per car design stolen.

AI Generated Billboards

Sofia has lots of gambling ads. What recently made an impression on me is that 100% of the men advertising gambling are somewhat recognizable humans. 100% of the women advertising gambling look AI.

Flying coins, flying red things, oddly shaped arms, airbrushed flawless faces with exaggerated features. AI.

From left to right:

  • Marian Valev – actor, famous with his role in the successful Bulgarian TV show Undercover
  • Fiki Storaro – pop-folk singer
  • Dimitar Berbatov – the second or third most popular orb-kicker in the history of the country, depending on how far back in time we want to go

They all look real — shadows under the eyes, gray hair, wrinkles.

Is it a coincidence? I took most of these photos weeks ago and have been looking for an exception ever since. I haven’t found one.

John Oliver on AI Slop

For whatever reason, I mostly watch videos about tricky math but this one caught my eye despite being so out of my element. It’s wonderful. John Oliver talks about generative AI spam.

I also no longer read blog posts that use AI imagery as long as I can recognize it as AI, which normally takes me a few milliseconds. I know the image may represent an idea and it might be clever, good, it can be anything. I just stop and move on with my life.