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Something’s Coming

January 6, 2025 Film Industry, Geek Alert, General, Psych 101, Tools

Last week, Dwarkesh Patel put words to an uneasy feeling that resonated with me:

I think we’re at what late February 2020 was for Covid, but for AI.

If you can remember back to February 2020, both the media and the general public were still in normal-times mode, discussing Trump’s impeachment, the Democratic primaries and Harvey Weinstein. Epidemiologists recognized that something big and potentially unprecedented was coming, but the news hadn’t yet broken through.

One of the first front-page articles I can find in the NY Times about Covid is from February 22nd, 2020.

image of NY Times front page, with covid story on left edge

Just three weeks later, markets had crashed and schools were closing. The world was upended. Covid had become the context for everything.

Patel foresees a similar pattern with AI:

Every single world leader, every single CEO, every single institution, members of the general public are going to realize pretty soon that the main thing we as a world are dealing with is Covid, or in this case, AI.

By “pretty soon,” I don’t think Patel believes we’re three weeks away from global upheaval. But the timeframes are much shorter than commonly believed — and getting shorter month by month.

Wait, what? And why?

This post is meant to be an explainer for friends and readers who haven’t been paying close attention to what’s been happening in AI. Which is okay! Technology is full of hype and bullshit, which most people should happily ignore.

We’ve seen countless examples of Next Big Things ultimately revealed to be nothing burgers. Many of the promises and perils of AI could meet a similar fate. Patel himself is putting together a media venture focused on AI, so of course he’s going to frame the issue as existential. Wherever there’s billions of dollars being spent, there’s hype and hyperbole, predictions and polemics.

Still — much like with epidemiologists and Covid in February 2020, the folks who deal with AI for a living are pretty sure something big is coming, and sooner than expected.

Something big doesn’t necessarily mean catastrophic; the Covid analogy only goes so far. Indeed, some researchers see AI ushering in a golden age of scientific enlightenment and economic bounty. Others are more pessimistic — realistic, I’d say — warning that we’re in for a bumpy and unpredictable ride, one that’s going to be playing out in a lot of upcoming headlines.

The sky isn’t falling — but it’s worth directing your gaze upwards.

The world of tomorrow, today

Science fiction is becoming science fact much faster than almost anyone anticipated. One way to track this is to ask interested parties how many years it will be before we have artificial general intelligence (AGI) capable of doing most human tasks. In 2020, the average estimate was around 50 years. By the end of 2023, it was seven.

chart showing decline from 30 years to 8 years, with dashed lines indicating further declines

Over the past few months, a common prediction has become three years. That’s the end of 2027. Exactly how much AI progress we’ll see by then has become the subject of a recent bet. Of the ten evaluation criteria for the bet, one hits particularly close to home for me:

8) With little or no human involvement, [AI will be able to] write Oscar-caliber screenplays.

As a professional screenwriter and Academy voter, I can’t give you precise delimiters for “Oscar-caliber” versus “pretty good” screenplays. But the larger point is that AI should be able to generate text that feels original, compelling and emotionally honest, both beat-by-beat and over the course of 120 satisfying pages. Very few humans can do that, so will an AI be able to?

A lot of researchers say yes, and by the end of 2027.

I’m skeptical — but that may be a combination of ego preservation and goalpost-moving. It’s not art without struggle, et cetera.

The fact that we’ve moved from the theoretical (“Could AI generate a plausible screenplay?”) to practical (“Should an AI-generated screenplay be eligible for an Oscar?”) in two years is indicative of just how fast things are moving.

So what happened? Basically, AI got smarter much faster than expected.

Warp speed

Some of the acceleration is easy to notice. When large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT debuted at the end of 2022, they felt like a novelty. They generated text and images, but nothing particularly useful, and they frequently “hallucinated,” a polite way of saying made shit up.

If you shrugged and moved on, I get it.

The quality of LLM’s output has improved a lot over the past two years, to the point that real professionals are using them daily. Even in their current state — even if they never get any better — LLMs can disrupt a lot of work, for better and for worse.

An example: Over the holidays, I built two little iOS apps using Cursor, which generates code from plain text using an LLM.

Here’s what I told it as I was starting one app:

I’ll be attaching screen shots to show you what I’m describing.

  1. Main screen is the starting screen upon launching the app. There will be a background image, but you can ignore that for now. There are three buttons. New Game, How to Play, and Credits.
  2. How to Play is reached through the How to Play button on the main screen. The text for that scrolling view is the file in the project how-to-play.txt.

  3. New Game screen is reached through the new game button. It has two pop-up lists. the first chooses from 3 to 20. the second from 1 to 10. Clicking Start takes you into the game. (In the game view, the top-right field should show the players times round, so if you had 3 players and five rounds, it would start with 1/15, then 2/15.

  4. the Setup screen is linked to from the game screen, if they need to make adjustments or restart/quit the game.

Within seconds, it had generated an app I could build and run in Xcode. It’s now installed on my phone. It’s not a commercial app anyone will ever buy, but if it were, this would be a decent prototype.

Using Cursor feels like magic. I’m barely a programmer, but in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing, it’s easy to imagine technology like this tripling their productivity. ((Google’s CEO says that more than 25% of their code is already being generated by AI.)) That’s great for the software engineer — unless the company paying them decides they don’t need triple the productivity and will instead just hire one-third the engineers.

The same calculation can be applied to nearly any industry involving knowledge work. If your job can be made more productive by AI, your position is potentially in jeopardy.

That LLMs are getting better at doing actually useful things is notable, but that’s not the main reason timelines are shortening.

Let’s see how clever you really are

To measure how powerful a given AI system is, you need to establish some benchmarks. Existing LLMs easily pass the SAT, the GRE, and most professional certification exams. So researchers must come up with harder and harder questions, ones that won’t be in the model’s training set.

No matter how high you set the bar, the newest systems keep jumping over it. Month after month, each new model does a little better. Then, right before the holidays, OpenAI announced that its o3 system made a huge and unexpected leap:

chart showing o3 performance and cost, both vastly higher

With LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude, we’re used to getting fast and cheap answers. They spit out a text or image in seconds. In contrast, o3 spends considerably more time (and computing power) planning and assessing. It’s a significant change in the paradigm. The o3 approach is slower and more expensive — potentially thousands of dollars per query versus mere pennies — but the results for certain types of questions are dramatically better. For billion-dollar companies, it’s worth it.

Systems like these are particularly good at solving difficult math and computer science problems. And since AI systems themselves are based on math and computer science, today’s model will help build the next generation. This virtuous cycle is a significant reason the timelines keep getting shorter. AI is getting more powerful because AI is getting more powerful.

When and why this will become the major story

In 2020, Covid wasn’t on the front page of the NY Times until its economic and societal impacts were unmistakable. The stock market tanked; hospitals were filling up. Covid became impossible to ignore. Patel’s prediction is the same thing will happen with AI. I agree.

I can imagine many scenarios bringing AI to the front page, none of which involve a robot uprising.

Here are a few topics I expect we’ll see in the headlines over the next three years.

  • Global tensions. As with nuclear technology during the Cold War, big nations worry about falling behind. China has caps on the number of high-performance AI chips it’s allowed to import. Those chips it needs? They’re made in Taiwan. Gulp.
  • Espionage. Corporations spend billions training their models. ((DeepSeek, a Chinese firm, apparently trained their latest LLM for just $6 million, an impressive feat if true.)) Those model weights are incredibly valuable, both to competitors and bad actors.

  • Alignment. This is a term of art for “making sure the AI doesn’t kill us,” and is a major source of concern for professionals working in the field. How do you teach AI to act responsibly, and how do you know it’s not just faking it? AI safety is currently the responsibility of corporations racing to be the first to market. Not ideal!

  • Nationalizing AI. For all three of the reasons above, a nation (say, the U.S.) might decide that it’s a security risk to allow such powerful technology to be controlled by anyone but the government.

  • Spectacular bankruptcy. Several of these companies have massive valuations and questionable governance. It seems likely one or more will fail, which will lead to questions about the worth of the whole AI industry.

  • The economy. The stock market could skyrocket — or tank. Many economists believe AI will lead to productivity gains that will increase GDP, but also, people work jobs to earn money and buy things? That seems important.

  • Labor unrest. Unemployment is one thing, but what happens when entire professions are no longer viable? What’s the point in retraining for a different job if AI could do that one too?

  • Breakthroughs in science and medicine. Once you have one AI as smart as a Nobel prize winner, you can spin up one million of them to work in parallel. New drugs? Miracle cures? Revolutionary technology, like fusion power and quantum computing? Everything seems possible.

  • Environmental impact (bad). When you see articles about the carbon footprint of LLMs, they’re talking about initial training stage. That’s the energy intensive step, but also way smaller than you may be expecting? After that, the carbon impact of each individual query is negligible, on the order of watching a YouTube video. That said, the techniques powering systems like o3 involve using more power to deliver answers, which is why you see Microsoft and others talking about recommissioning nuclear plants. Also, e-waste! All those outdated chips need to be recycled.

  • Environmental impact (good). AI systems excel at science, engineering, and anything involving patterns. Last month, Google’s DeepMind pushed weather forecasting from 10 days to 15 days. Work like this could help us deal with effects of climate change, by improving crop yields and the energy grid, for example.

  • So how freaked out should you be?

    What is an ordinary person supposed to do with the knowledge that the world could suddenly change?

    My best advice is to hold onto your assumptions about the future loosely. Make plans. Live your life. Pay attention to what’s happening, but don’t let it dominate your decision-making. Don’t let uncertainty paralyze you.

    A healthy dose of skepticism is warranted. But denial isn’t. I still hear smart colleagues dismissing AI as fancy autocomplete. Sure, fine — but if it can autocomplete a diagnosis more accurately than a trained doctor, we should pay attention.

    It’s reasonable to assume that 2027 will look a lot like 2024. We’ll still have politics and memes and misbehaving celebrities. It’ll be different from today in ways we can’t fully predict. The future, as always, will remain confusing, confounding and unevenly distributed.

    Just like the actual pandemic wasn’t quite Contagion or Outbreak, the arrival of stronger AI won’t closely resemble Her or The Terminator or Leave the World Behind. Rather, it’ll be its own movie of some unspecified genre.

    Which hopefully won’t be written by an AI. We’ll see.

    Thanks to Drew, Nima and other friends for reading an early draft of this post.

    Which of these answers was written by AI?

    January 10, 2023 Tools, Words on the page, Writing Process

    [GPTZero](http://gptzero.me/) is a new service created by Edward Tian designed to sniff out AI-generated text.

    I’m dubious, in part because I’m not sure I could reliably spot the differences between sentences assembled by humans versus machines. But maybe that’s just my human bias.

    As an experiment, I decided to run a quick, not-at-all-scientific test. I asked ChatGPT to “write three paragraphs explaining what a manager does for screenwriters.” I also looked up the answer for [“What does a manager do?”](https://screenwriting.io/what-does-a-manager-do/) on screenwriting.io.

    Here are the two responses, one written by a human ((Stuart Friedel wrote most of the early screenwriting.io answers.)), the other by an AI. See if you can spot which is which.

    ### SAMPLE A
    > In brief, a manager manages your career.

    > This includes tangible acts, like setting up meetings, giving notes and feedback, and assisting with deal negotiation, as well as the more abstract, like helping steer your career’s direction.

    > Managers, unlike agents, are not required to be licensed by the state. They usually have fewer clients than agents, and often take more personal and less business-focused roles in their clients’ careers. Managers, are allowed to take producer credits on their clients movies, which agents are not.

    > Like agents, a manager typically receives 10% of a client’s earnings. A manager should never ask for an upfront or flat fee.

    ### SAMPLE B

    > A manager for a screenwriter plays a vital role in helping the writer navigate the film and television industry. They can assist with finding and developing new ideas, as well as helping the writer shape their existing ideas into marketable concepts. This often involves providing feedback and suggestions to help improve the story and make it more appealing to potential buyers.

    > Managers also help screenwriters with the business side of things, such as identifying potential buyers and pitching the writer’s work to them. They can also help negotiate deals and contracts, as well as manage any legal issues that may arise. In addition, they can help the writer navigate the many different players in the industry, such as agents, producers, and studio executives.

    > Finally, a manager can also help screenwriters with their long-term career goals by helping them identify opportunities for growth and advancement. This might include working on larger projects, transitioning to other forms of media, or developing a personal brand to increase their visibility and credibility in the industry. Overall, a manager plays a critical role in helping a screenwriter achieve success in the competitive film and television industry.

    For each answer, GPTZero measured the text’s Perplexity — the randomness of the text — across several ranges.

    | | Total | Average | Highest |
    |———-|——-|———|———|
    | Sample A | 41 | 136 | 219 |
    | Sample B | 11 | 36 | 49 |

    That 219 is an example of “Burstiness,” which GPTZero defines as “spikes in perplexity.” For Sample A, the opening sentence has a perplexity of 219, whereas highest perplexity in Sample B is just 49.

    That’s the tell, apparently.

    > Some human written sentences can have low perplexities, but there is bound to be spikes in perplexity as the human continues writing. Contrastingly, perplexity is uniformly distributed and constantly low for machine generated texts.

    After crunching the numbers, GPTZero renders its verdict.

    SAMPLE A (score 66.44):
    Your text is likely human generated!

    SAMPLE B (score 9.93):
    Your text is most likely to be AI generated!

    On both counts, GPTZero got it correct.

    But how hard would it be to fool the system? I spent two minutes editing the AI-generated version into the following:

    ### Sample C
    > Managers can play a vital role for screenwriters. Basically, they help the writer navigate the film and television industry. They can assist with finding and developing new ideas, or shaping their existing ideas. They provide feedback and suggestions.

    > Managers also help screenwriters with the business side of things: who the buyers are and how to pitch to them. They can help negotiate deals and contracts, as well as manage any legal issues that may arise. They help the writer navigate the many different players in the industry, including as agents, producers, and studio executives.

    > Good managers think about screenwriters’ long-term career goals. This might include working on bigger (or smaller!) projects, transitioning to other forms of media, or developing a personal brand. Overall, a manager can play an important role in helping a screenwriter achieve success in the competitive film and television industry.

    | | Total | Average | Highest |
    |———-|——-|———|———|
    | Sample A | 41 | 136 | 219 |
    | Sample B | 11 | 36 | 49 |
    | Sample C | 19 | 106 | 439 |

    The verdict:

    SAMPLE C (score 118.77):
    Your text is likely human generated!

    ## Some takeaways

    – The ChatGPT answer was well-written and potentially helpful for someone who didn’t know anything about managers.
    – GPTZero is looking for patterns a human likely wouldn’t notice, which makes sense. But an AI model trained to provide responses with high perplexity and burstiness would likely evade detection. It’s interesting to see this arms race play out, because adversarial networks are already a fundamental tool in AI.
    – It’s currently very easy to fool GPTZero with just minimal rewriting. If this tool meant to detect AI-generated term papers, students will quickly learn how to evade it.

    The Free Stuff

    August 11, 2022 Apps, Bronson, Highland, Meta, News, Software, Tools, Weekend Read, Writer Emergency Pack

    My friend Nima recently pointed out that most of the stuff our company makes is free.

    That’s probably not a great business model, but it’s always been our culture. We only charge for those things that have significant ongoing costs — like upkeep and hosting — or a per-unit cost to produce.

    If you’re a writer, here are the things we offer at absolutely no cost. As in free.

    ### [johnaugust.com](https://johnaugust.com)
    This blog has been running since 2003. Nearly all of its 1,500 posts are screenwriting advice. The Explore tab on the right is a good way to get started looking through the archives. For example, you might start with the [129 articles on formatting](https://johnaugust.com/qanda/formatting).

    ### [Scriptnotes](https://johnaugust.com/scriptnotes)
    Craig Mazin and I have been recording this [weekly screenwriting podcast](https://johnaugust.com/scriptnotes) for over ten years. It’s always been free, with no ads whatsoever. The most recent 20 episodes are available in every podcast player. Back episodes are available to [Scriptnotes Premium](http://scriptnotes.net) members, or can be purchased in 50-episode “seasons.”

    ### [Inneresting](https://inneresting.substack.com)
    Chris Csont edits this [weekly newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com), which serves as a good companion to Scriptnotes. Every Friday, it has links to things about writing, centering on a given theme. It’s a Substack, but completely free.

    ### [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/)
    For years, I’ve written all my scripts and novels in this terrific app our company makes. It’s a free download on the [Mac App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/highland-2/id1171820258?mt=12). The Standard edition is fully functional, with no time limits. Students can receive the enhanced Pro edition through our [student license program](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/students.php).

    ### [Courier Prime](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime)
    English-language screenplays are written in Courier, but not all Couriers are alike. Many are too thin, and the italics are ugly. So we commissioned a new typeface called [Courier Prime](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime). It’s Courier, but better. Since it’s free and open licensed, you can use it through Google Fonts and similar services.

    ### [Weekend Read](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread)
    Reading a screenplay on an iPhone is a pain in the ass — unless you use [Weekend Read](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread). It melts down screenplay PDFs so they format properly on smaller screens. Weekend Read also has an extensive library of older scripts, including many award nominees. It’s free on the App Store.

    ### [The Library](http://johnaugust.com)
    The [Library](http://johnaugust.com) has most of the scripts I’ve written, and hosts a few other writers’ work as well. For several projects, I’ve included treatments, pitches, outlines and additional material.

    ### [Screenwriting.io](screenwriting.io)
    While johnaugust.com offers detailed articles on various topics, screenwriting.io answers [really basic questions about film and TV writing](screenwriting.io). If you’re Googling, “how many acts does a TV show have?” we want to [give you the answer](https://screenwriting.io/how-many-acts-does-a-tv-show-have/) with no cruft or bullshit.

    ### [100 Most Frequently Asked Questions about Screenwriting](https://gallery.mailchimp.com/2b0232538adf13e5b3e55b12f/files/100_FAQ_About_Screenwriting.v1.2.pdf)
    We gathered the 100 most frequently searched-for entries on screenwriting.io in this handy [85-page PDF](https://gallery.mailchimp.com/2b0232538adf13e5b3e55b12f/files/100_FAQ_About_Screenwriting.v1.2.pdf).

    ### [Launch](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/launch/id1319436103)
    I recorded this seven-episode podcast series about the pitch, sale, writing and production of my first Arlo Finch book. If you’ve ever thought about writing a book, you’ll want to check it out. Free [wherever you listen to podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/launch/id1319436103).

    # The Paid Stuff

    Given all the free stuff we put out, how does our company make money? We sell things.

    ### [Highland 2 Pro](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/)
    Highland 2 Standard Edition is free, but most users choose to upgrade to Pro for its added features: revision mode, priority email support, extra templates, custom themes, and watermark-free PDFs. It’s an in-app purchase, $39 USD. ((Prices may change. Also note that Apple sets international pricing, so some apps cost a little more or a little less in some countries.))

    ### [Writer Emergency Pack](http://writeremergency.com)
    Writer Emergency Pack began its life as a Kickstarter, and is now one of the most popular gifts for writers of all ages. Available through [our store](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread) and [Amazon](https://amzn.to/3Afgahb).

    ### [Bronson Watermarker PDF](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/bronson/)
    Bronson is the app I needed when watermarking scripts for a Broadway reading. Now it’s become the default watermarking app in Hollywood. It’s $20 on the [Mac App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bronson-watermarker-pdf/id881629098?mt=12).

    ### [T-shirts and hoodies](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)
    We used to print and ship our own t-shirts, but we now sell them through Cotton Bureau. We put out a new [Scriptnotes shirt](https://cottonbureau.com/search?query=scriptnotes) every year. It’s definitely not a profit center, but it’s fun seeing merch out in the wild.

    ### [Weekend Read Unlocked](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread)
    Users can unlock their expanded library for $10 USD.

    ### [Scriptnotes Premium](http://scriptnotes.net)
    The Scriptnotes podcast runs out of a separate LLC from our software business. Premium subscriptions pay for the salaries of our producer, editor and transcriptionist, along with hosting and management fees. Craig and I don’t make a cent off it.

    Getting the Razer Tartarus Pro keyboard to work with macOS Catalina and beyond

    November 7, 2020 Geek Alert, How-To, Tools

    As I’ve [written before](https://johnaugust.com/2004/my-new-keyboard-setup), I use this [weird keyboard](https://safetype.com/index.php?) which has helped greatly with my carpal tunnel issues.

    While this odd keyboard is great for normal typing, certain key combinations are unwieldy. So for the past decade I’ve used an external gaming keypad to the left of my keyboard with custom macros set up for some common commands:

    – Select All
    – Undo
    – Copy
    – Cut
    – Paste
    – Paste and Match Style
    – Pasteboard History (which is part of Better Touch Tool)

    When my beloved Logitech keypad crapped out, I switched to the well-reviewed [Razer Tartarus Pro](https://www.razer.com/gaming-keypads/razer-tartarus-pro/RZ07-03110100-R3U1). It’s nicely built! Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer drivers for the current macOS.

    After a lot of googling, I’ve cobbled together a solution. So in the interest of sharing what I’ve learned — and remembering how I got this to work in the first place — let me walk through the steps.

    Note that this doesn’t do half of what a proper driver could accomplish, particularly for gaming. So please, Razer, make one! But if you want to use a gaming pad like the Tartarus Pro for keyboard shortcuts, this does the trick.

    ## How to make the Tartarus Pro work on macOS Catalina

    It’s important to understand that macOS sees the Tartarus Pro as a plain old keyboard. So if you plug it in and hit the 08 key, you’ll see it type a ‘w’.

    Luckily, there’s software that can recognize that and do something useful instead.

    [Better Touch Tool](https://folivora.ai) is best known for getting random mice and trackpads to work, but it does a nice job on keyboards as well. (I’m using the 3.5 Alpha version.)

    better touch tool setup

    Let’s look at the Select All shortcut. You’ll notice the “Assigned Action” is ⌘A. Now direct your attention to the righthand sidebar. That’s where all the real work happens.

    1) For the moment, ignore the “Click here to record a shortcut” section. We’ll come back to that.

    2) You want the shortcut Enabled, so check the box.

    3) You should put a note in this field for clarity.

    4) The HUD overlay is surprisingly helpful. It shows what’s happening, like that you just hit “copy.” I find the Title text to be too large, so I use the Subtitle instead.

    HUD display shows Copy

    5) For Trigger Conditions, you want to choose “Works on keyboards with the same type as used for recording.” Yes, this is a ridiculously long label.

    6) You want it to Trigger on Key Down.

    7) You don’t want it to repeat.

    You’ll do these steps for each key on the gaming keypad you want to remap. Here’s my setup.

    keyboard photo

    I also set key 20, the spacebar, to Undo.

    In theory, you’re done! For a few weeks, this worked great. And then it started having issues. When encountering password fields, my normal keyboard would start triggering keyboard shortcuts. I had to restart Better Touch Tool multiple times per day.

    Basically, the app kept getting my normal weird keyboard confused with my special weird gaming keypad. I needed to call in the big guns.

    ## Enter Karabiner

    I’d long heard of [Karabiner Elements](https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org), a public domain app that can remap any key and do [really impressive things](https://brettterpstra.com/2017/06/15/a-hyper-key-with-karabiner-elements-full-instructions/). But it’s intimidating as hell.

    Here’s what I wanted Karabiner to do: remap the keys of the Tartarus Pro to seldom-used keystrokes so I could then set those as triggers for Better Touch Tool.

    Looking through their user forums, I couldn’t find any perfect matches for this use case, but luckily @bradcurtis had built a [set of custom mappings](https://ke-complex-modifications.pqrs.org/?q=tartarus) (a “complex modification” in Karabiner speak) for a similar purpose.

    Installing them is odd. Here’s how you do it.

    1. Install Karabiner-Elements. You’ll have to give it a ton of permissions in System Preferences.

    2. In Karabiner-Elements Preferences, choose Complex Modications and then Add Rule.

    3. On the next screen, choose “Import More Rules from the internet.”

    4. Either search for “Tartarus” or follow [this link](https://ke-complex-modifications.pqrs.org/?q=tartarus)

    5. Choose the Import button. It’ll ask you whether you want to open the link in Karabiner-Elements. You do.

    6. Click the button to “Enable All”

    Karabiner setup

    If you have the Tartarus v2 like @bradcurtis, you’re done! All of the keys should be mapped to new, less-common keystrokes. But if you have the Tartarus Pro like I do, you need to modify the settings you just imported to change the product ID. This is where it gets frustratingly user-hostile, because it requires you to modify a JSON file in an external editor.

    7. Navigate to ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json — the easiest way to do this is by choosing Go > Go to Folder… in the Finder.

    8. Open this file in a plain text editor (I use [TextMate](https://macromates.com)).

    9. Find and replace 555 (the product ID for the v2) with 580 (the product ID for the Pro). ((If you’re looking for a different product ID, open the Event Viewer in Karabiner-Elements and choose Devices.))

    10. Save this file and restart Karabiner-Elements.

    After doing this, and mapping these new keystrokes to Better Touch Tool, I’m back up to full speed. ((I added one additonal modification, converting key 20 (which is coded as “spacebar”) to Left_Shift-Left_Option-s.))

    Again, almost no one on Earth will never need or want to do any of this. But if you’re the one person who needs this solution, I hope it helps. Please pay it forward by documenting something you’ve discovered.

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