“Turning 20 in the probable pre-apocalypse” by Parv Mahajan

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Recorded21 Dec 2025

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Master version of this on https://parvmahajan.com/2025/12/21/turning-20.html I turn 20 in January, and the world looks very strange. Probably, things will change very quickly. Maybe, one of those things is whether or not we’re still here. This moment seems very fragile, and perhaps more than most moments will never happen again. I want to capture a little bit of what it feels like to be alive right now. 1. Everywhere around me there is this incredible sense of freefall and of grasping. I realize with excitement and horror that over a semester Claude went from not understanding my homework to easily solving it, and I recognize this is the most normal things will ever be. Suddenly, the ceiling for what is possible seems so high - my classmates join startups, accelerate their degrees; I find myself building bespoke bioinformatics tools in minutes, running month-long projects in days. I write dozens of emails and thousands of lines of code a week, and for the first time I no longer feel limited by my ability but by my willpower. I spread the gospel to my friends - “there has never been a better time to have a problem” - even as [...] ---Outline:(00:34) 1.(03:12) 2. --- First published: December 21st, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S5dnLsmRbj2JkLWvf/turning-20-in-the-probable-pre-apocalypse --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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