My own website has a bulletin board that offers a personalized list of messages after you login: whatever threads you have not yet read. And so do many other websites of this style. So this cannot be a differentiating aspect.
Not intentionally - but in the past I did have advertisements to finance it , which I had to stop since that is enough under a lot of jurisprudence to qualify as running a for-profit, which usually means less leniency from judges.
So it is advertisements where we should draw the line -- websites with advertisements should require age checks?
Why did you cherry pick advertisments from my reply and run with that?
It clearly isn't just a singular data point that is a True or False that would include a site in the ban.
Perhaps it should be, "If I had a 12 year old daughter, do I want her to have easy access to pornography, self harm material and the ability to receive private messages from a 45 year old registered sex offender?"
I get your point - "Where is the line in the sand?" and it's a valid point but no need to argue in bad faith.
> Perhaps it should be, "If I had a 12 year old daughter, do I want her to have easy access to pornography, self harm material and the ability to receive private messages from a 45 year old registered sex offender?"
If parents are concerned about this, why let them on the Internet? Why not use parental control systems? Why not teach your children healthy sex education, how to deal with their feelings, and to tell old creeps to fuck off?
Because it is the ad network that I chose 30 years ago that was doing any of the types of tracking you mention. In fact, all of the ad networks from 30 years ago would be considered as doing "teen tracking" today. I do not know how you can do tracking without doing teen tracking, barring precisely I troducing age verification on every single website. And I also do not know if there is any network out there doing advertisements without tracking -- certainly none of the major local news websites use it.
I do think the "wont somebody think of the children" arguments are in bad faith though, and I say this as a father.
These 80yo lawmakers have kids and grandkids and advisers. They know how social media works.
They hate social media because it gives people the power to talk in public about them with near impunity. They want to go back to the old days when if you wrote a letter to the newspaper about potential corruption or wrongdoing among the "more equal animals" you'd get pulled over for a light out whenever you went through that town for the next 20yr.
>If you think you have even near impunity on social media, I have a bridge to sell you. Even a town to go with it.
I specifically said "near" impunity. If you do something bad enough they'll come after you but even then if your gripes are legitimate that's likely to amplify it.
Surely you're not honestly claiming that there is not a significant practical difference between modern internet criticism and the old ways when messaging that could reach the broad public was far thoroughly gated by people and things that had more stake in the power structure.
I wouldn’t say it was gated. More like it was costly. And people having the means to do so was a very small set and prone to agree with the status quo.
But even now, a lot of messages are lost on the internet. And the internet is only decentralized for messages propagation, not for access.
For the record, that is exactly my point . I do not want yet another sword of Damocles for websites, even less if it depends on the mood of a clueless judge.
We live in such a capitalistic world by now, that most people’s happiness is, if they want it or not, tied to money. And I think society is moving further towards this.
Having kids would be a large financial burden and given my projection, would mean I wouldn’t be able to guarantee a decent living and the mental stability, because kids are brutal and societal pressures are very hard to free yourself from.
I grew up very poor and only very recently I was able to get out of debt i racked up just to survive (and sheer ignorance/living above my means, because I had nothing to lose and no perspective). I would hate myself of putting a child in that position myself.
If money wouldn’t be such a dominant force in current society, I’d very much consider having children.
>We live in such a capitalistic world by now, that most people’s happiness is, if they want it or not, tied to money.
This is how people feel, but that feeling has to be wrong. We know from history that people lived with much less and they were much more mentally stable than we are today. To be fair, if everyone is poor, it's probably very different than just you being poor in a rich society.
social media means people have realized how poor they are relatively. otherwise we are not in a substantially more capitalist world in the west and people are only more affluent than in the past.
obviously social media cannot explain everything about fertility, but i suspect it explains a significant portion of modern economic discontent among the professional/middle+ classes
I tend to disagree, I think a lot more in our society has changed due to the commodification of basically everything combined with the capitalist tendencies to pervert and corrupt anything, as there is no limit to greed. I think the housing market, food pricing and many more aspects of live have started to outpace the average workers wage to a point where it’s hard to be optimistic about a brighter future. The dream of ownership, a car, a family has gotten significantly more expensive in relation to incomes. At least from the POV of an European
Do you mean poor countries? I believe fertility is most closely related to education of women. If they have other options, many choose not to have a dozen kids like our ancestors. It's both hard on their bodies, and they typically get stuck with almost all the domestic and child care duties.
I know this is an anecdote and very subjective but I've really never discovered something that I loved with a recommendation algorithm.
Whether it be videos, music, livestreams, books... Everything that I've considered a "10/10" has been recommended by a human or a non-personalized algorithm—such as "Most popular". Whether that's a direct recommendation by a friend, a comment on HackerNews, someone that I already follow that mentioned the thing in question.
My RSS client fetches my YouTube "subscriptions" and it's been years since I've been on the homepage.
I’ve had some great recommendations from YouTube. For example the video below, called “The Squirrel and the Peanut”, which by just adding some well chosen classical music to some found footage of a squirrel getting a peanut turns it into a moving story of overcoming your fears told in a mere 1:32.
I agree that the algorithm isn't always the best. Interestingly however I occasionally get "legendary pulls" (I think that's a gatcha term?) on youtube - a 1990s stop motion video of some legendary niche Japanese animator, or some other 8+ years old video in 240p that's absolutely amazing.
But "fortunately" for me, on my main account, my feed is 80%+ decent stuff - science channels, AOPA safety videos - stuff like that. But my other account has absolutely terrible suggestions on the algorithm, so it probably varies a ton on how much and what you watch.
> Everything that I've considered a "10/10" has been recommended by a human
Have you ever found a 10/10 on your own?
If so it's possible you were recommended that by an algorithm but you just didn't register it, because a human recommendation is more of a memorable event.
If I've ever did, it's after having been recommended something. For example if someone sends me a song and then I go to the "most popular" songs from that same artist. Sometimes I would stumble upon something I like even more than the recommendation.
For example if it's a genre that interests me I would search "[genre] mix" on YouTube. In which case it's usually mixed by a human.
Granted I have very specific tastes in music and 98% of the time I listen to things I've already listened to hundreds of times... I sometimes try the song radio but it's not to discover a "banger".
As much as I dislike Spotify, I've definitely discovered some 10/10 tracks or artists that I would've been unlikely to have found out about otherwise. I don't know how well it still works these days since I switched to Qobuz years ago (which is great in everything except personal recommendations), but Spotify's algorithms, especially for Discover Weekly, used to be amazing. There was an article about all the kinds of stuff they do, and it included things like recommending less frequently played tracks with acoustic similarities to your favourites, and tracks presented on music blogs that also featured music you like. The stuff the engineers got to play around with there before the service started getting enshittified, basically.
Luxury watches are analog. Maybe people 50 years from now won't even know if the clock is telling the time correctly and will just wear the watch to show off...
The future is now. I personally know someone who does that. It's a fancy watch that only gets worn sometimes. And it's an automatic so it needs to be moved for it to keep running. So when they wear it every few days it is completely out of sync and they can't be bothered to adjust the time.
It is purely an accessory and completely useless for telling the time.
No judgment, but it just seems silly.
Apparently the correct way to solve it is to store the watch in a cradle that keeps it moving perpetually.
I think parent commenter was talking about random people "working"[1] for charities and stopping you on the street. If one wanted to donate, why would they do it through a stranger on the street and not directly to their website?
However, if you give a homeless person money and they go buy drugs, I think you effectively made them poorer. I would advise giving them food instead.[2]
[1]: Word in quotes because there is no way to verify their identities.
[2]: I've literally seen a person asking for money get offered free fries at McDonald's and denying them. Beggars don't get to be choosers.
Let them buy what they need I think. They dont have the ability to stop being addicted in 60 seconds because logic. If that were possible we could collapse the entire weight loss industry, gambling, need for AA and NA meetings, entire narco infrastructure at the click of a finger.
Yeah I admit I am in two minds. Id rather the state give them clean safe pure drugs and then help them get off the drugs with naltrexone or whatever is best.
Outside of drugs and drink they can spend it how they like. They choose the food or maybe save for a hotel night.
Not every homeless person needs or wants food at every single time. Certainly not fast food fries covered in salt that get nasty if not eaten right away, that’s not a meal.
Sometimes a homeless person needs a blanket, or a bus ticket, or just a safe place for a few hours.
If you don’t want to give money, that’s your prerogative, but don’t simply assume food. Ask.
However, understand the context: the beggar entered a McDonald's and asked clients that were currently eating for money. He got offered the fries of a woman who didn't finish them. So there was no poisoning (I think this is very much an American problem, where I don't live) possible—except if you consider McDonald's to be poison in the first place.
In my experience, people don't give cash to beggars anymore. Everyone has their reason, but I think the fact that a lot of beggars were not really in need hasn't helped. But I think many would be open to give food or donate useful objects instead (which they don't have at hand when being begged).
> However, understand the context: the beggar entered a McDonald's and asked clients that were currently eating for money. He got offered the fries of a woman who didn't finish them.
Consider the beggar’s context too. How many times per day/week must they go into that McDonald’s? Leftover fries are probably what they get offered the most. You can accept it a few times, but after a while they provide neither pleasure nor sustenance.
> In my experience, people don't give cash to beggars anymore.
Anecdotally, seems about right.
> But I think many would be open to give food or donate useful objects instead (which they don't have at hand when being begged).
Again, I agree, but I don’t think anyone asks either. One possible workaround would be to donate to your local food bank or another organisation you trust, then when asked by a beggar direct them there. Though that could be another can of worms depending on where one lives.
The person denied the fries without adding anything and left. This makes everyone who heard that the beggar didn't need food. Otherwise he'd have asked for something else (even food from the supermarket nearby).
I have on several occasions offered to pay for food at a nearby sandwich shop or fast food place for beggars who were asking for money for food. None of them accepted the offer.
I once exited an excellent Indian restaurant in San Diego with a bag of takeout food I had just picked up. Someone approached me and asked me for some money “to buy a burger”. I offered him my food bag and said it’s really good, fresh, and I just picked it up.
He took the bag, waited until I wasn’t looking, then set it down on the sidewalk and walked away. He was not interested in food, nor was he hungry.
Then why are almost all of them aggressive when I say that I won't give money but offer food instead?
You say "Ask"? I did. I just heard some rehearsed story Oh, your son is sick?" With what exactly? What kind of drugs he need, I can help? Result -> anger. I get more aggression from asking and trying to get helpfull than simply saying "no." I have tons of examples.
Why do they NEVER ask for a job? Why don't they ever offer to do the manual labor I was doing? I would be glad to let them do it and pay for it.
One time they stole my phone. A guy just came near me with a sign, put it on the table while begging, and simply garbed it and have runned away. That was end of I line for me.
Why do they reek of alcohol or drugs?
I used to offer help to people, but after they stole my phone, I just scream "NO." I never want to be stolen from again. I donate to some charities, but that is the end of the line for me. I don't want to pay a guy that is begging out of habit just to buy drugs. I don't want to pay women sedating their children or using them on the street just to earn money. Just watching them beg behind the building.
My main point is that I never could understand the aggression towards the homeless until I was stolen from. My street was filled with alcoholics living in cars, screaming random stuff, and fighting with passersby and each other.
Do you really think they want an answer, or anything else other than buying their drugs?
I was really hating people like me, but in the end I was discovered why do they react with defense and aggression. But of course I would be glad to pay for food nonetheless and try to help with anything expect money and I pay for charities that try to provide medical healthcare in places like Gaza, but I don't believe that people in London (for example) need more and places like Gaza.
Who am I to judge what they do with their money? I couldnt possibly know if they are allergic to something. Also not every homeless person is an addict. Even beggars can have agency over their resources. An addiction is not for me to solve, first things first should be to cover their basic needs, only then you can work on an addiction. Money is the easiest thing to give.
You should know that for an addict, the “next fix” is the first “need” that gets met. I am not convinced it is ethical to supply money to a pipeline to drug dealers.
Weed is legal where I live. They don't fund drug dealers. They fund local business.
Though that local business currently funds some sketchy Chinese crime ring so.....
I just don't care. I'm not trying to "save" them, I'm throwing a little expendable resources at a human being and hoping it somehow makes their miserable life a little less miserable and sometimes drugs and alcohol are exactly that.
I've had half a mind to just hand out joints before, but I actually think they DON'T want that.
When I want to help "rescue" homeless people like that, I give money and resources to local institutions that know how to do it.
I really don't think panhandling has ever really fixed a homeless situation. It's not exactly a job you can put on your rental application. What do I care whether the dude who spends every day on the same street corner at 0 degrees smokes some weed or not? Why should literally anyone care? I haven't seen him in a while, so he might just be dead now.
Meanwhile the people who are "temporarily homeless" rarely get to take the good panhandling spots.
I know all too well how close I have come to that exact life, and how much people like you would sneer "Oh he's just an addict, not worth compassion"
Addiction is rarely fixed by homelessness and suffering for starters.
I dont give a shit about a pipeline of drug dealers but I give a shit about humans. They are victims of a state that let them down. Them freezing to death or whatever doesn't show them drug dealers, its simply ignoring a person in need. But doesn't surprise me that people in a tech forum have little to zero empathy or pull some tinfoil hat theory out of their ass just so they can justify not giving anyone anything.
Because fast food restaurants get a lot of foot traffic and they’re less likely to be aggressively thrown out. Another popular place to beg are subway stations, but that doesn’t mean they need a ticket.
Did anyone ask what the money was for? Did anyone offer to buy whatever it was they needed, even if a meal at a better place? Or was the interaction to simply offer fries (probably the least filling, cheapest, far from healthy choice that they likely have been offered dozens of times already) and then do nothing when they refused?
Their point is that despite being the designers of such systems, they prevent their own children from using them. Akin to a drug dealer not consuming what he sells.
>“We do limit their time on YouTube and other platforms and other forms of media. On weekdays we tend to be more strict, on weekends we tend to be less so. We’re not perfect by any stretch,”
>He stressed “everything in moderation” is what works best for him and his wife, and that extends to other online services and platforms.
>YouTube’s former CEO Susan Wojcicki, also barred her children from browsing videos on the app, unless they were using YouTube Kids. She also limited the amount of time they spent on the platform.
So they're not completely banning their kids from using YouTube. The current YouTube CEO uses a time limit. The previous YouTube CEO uses a time limit and limits usage to the YouTube Kids app.
The issue is that the business models of these platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, tik tok) are based on maximizing engagement. And maximizing engagement in this context means spending ever increased amounts of time on one platform over another or over doing offline activities like reading a book and going outside.
So the tech leaders preach moderation but the design of all these apps are built to be addictive and to maximize the time that other people and other people’s kids spend on it. It seems to be poor kids who have overworked stressed parents who seem to spend the largest chuck of time endlessly scrolling on these apps harming their minds and mental health and so on
That’s because internet addiction isn’t sufficiently taken seriously as a society, even for adults. We haven’t fully adapted properly to this reality on a social level because it’s very new so people are panicking. It will eventually become standard parenting and as far as I can tell it already is becoming standard. More adults need to look at their own behaviour to fix their kids.
Every cellphone already comes with the ability to limit those things. It doesn’t require coming home from work early to toggle parental controls at a certain time.
My kids aren’t allowed on YouTube. I run a local system that mirrors approved channels to our home server and serves them through Plex. Creators lose ad revenue; that’s unfortunate. The alternative was nonstop ads on children’s content and a recommendation system pushing garbage. That trade-off was unacceptable.
I always think if I had kids this is how I'd do it also. I'm an adult who I think has fairly decent critical thinking skills and also is familiar with the state of technology etc etc. Well, I was following the news on 3I/ATLAS and I caught myself watching a youtube channel that I genuinely thought was Michio Kaku, I'd heard him talk once and it sounded and looked like him, so I put it on, switch tabs and listen as I work. I didn't notice it was AI (in retrospect I should have) but after a couple of days of watching it, I started to think...either this guy is worse than Avi Lobe or this channel is fake, the channel was fake and the content was, probably.. 2 or 3 steps removed from reality.
Regarding ads, wouldn't YouTube Premium solve that? Regarding recommendations, YouTube kids allows you to select certain videos, channels, or collections, and only allow your kids to view those that you've selected.
> I run a local system that mirrors approved channels to our home server and serves them through Plex. Creators lose ad revenue; that’s unfortunate.
Have your home server note when the kids are watching one of your mirrored channels and launch a browser on a computer the kids cannot see that is watching the same video on YouTube without an ad blocker.
The video creators then get exactly the same ad revenue and view counts they would have gotten had the kids used YouTube.
Same here as well as for other streaming. They want to watch the show more than a couple times, I’ll download it. No way I let my kids get brainwashed by these people with their weird algorithms they don’t understand themselves.
Those ads are optional. You can just pay for it. Its actually pretty good value for the money.
Edit: I forgot to mention Family Link. Once you have a family membership (maybe even before?) You can also use Googles family link to enable a restricted mode that hides adult content for specific accounts.
You actually get a pretty great experience for the whole family for about $20/month.
Ads are only half the problem. The real problem with kids using YouTube is it's too easy for them to access any of the content on the platform.
If I could pay YouTube for the privilege of using an app where I choose exactly which videos are available, and no other video will ever appear on or can be accessed from that app, then I might pay for it.
IMO the only way YouTube can be kid-friendly is if there is an app where the primary utility is the ability to whitelist on a per video basis. There could be convenience methods like whitelisting an entire channel's videos with one action, but the whitelist needs to be built around a per video model.
Last I checked, they had nothing remotely like this as an option.
I can't speak for your adolescents, but my kids make generally good decisions. I don't relate to the kids are stupid automatons with no agency or valid opinion mindset that is so prevalent with HN contributors. If your kids would only ever pick junk food, maybe that is a reflection on you more than them?
I myself was recently an adolescent, and still know many adolescents myself. My take is coming from my anecdotal experience, and the behaviour I've observed from my peers. Perhaps your kids don't show that side of them in front of you? I know my peers and I certainly didn't go out of our way to advertise such activities to our parents when we were younger.
That misses the point by a mile and a half: nobody let's their children eat unlimited amounts of chocolate. They do, however, let their children access Tiltok, Youtube, etc.
Except that's not true. Plenty of parents let their kids have unlimited access to junk food and candy. Neighbor kids come over and they don't know what to do because I only have water, fruit, and pretzels. I have been to so many parent's houses who have whole pantries of just sugary snacks.
I wanted to eat unlimited junk food when I was a kid but my parents wouldn't let me.
You can change it even to unlimited protein shakes. It is the same point. It is almost like kids are kind of stupid if you let them do whatever they want.
could you highlight what in the original article made you think they were banning their kids from social media entirely? or were you trying to explain something else?
Although I hate social media with a passion and would be fine if the government banned it outright, I don’t think this is a fair reading.
Do toy manufacturers let their kids play with their toys 24 hours a day and not go outside or do homework? Video game devs? Parents are supposed to help their kids limit their time in everything.
There are actually some pretty big risks especially in terms of like motor development, and considering now they’re adding a splash of AI to everything and a ton of toys have screens, well.
Giving the llm access to Ghidra so it can directly read and iterate through the Sudoku puzzle that is decompile binaries seems like a good one. Ghidra has a cli mode and various bindings so you can automate decompiling various binaries. For example right now if you want to isolate the physics step of Microsoft flight simulator 3.0 codex will hold your hand and walk you through (over the course of 3-4 hours, using the gui) finding the main loop and making educated guesses about which decompiled c functions in there are likely physics related, but it would be a lot easier to just give it the "Ghidra" skill and say, "isolate the physics engine and export it as a portable cargo package in rust". If you're an NSA analyst you can probably use it to disassemble and isolate interesting behavior of various binaries from state actors a lot faster.
Yes I extracted the physics engine from Ms flight simulator 3.0 (C) and ported it into my own project (rust) in Ghidra as a complete novice from having never opened the app to working code in rust in just over three hours. It helped a lot that I have previous experience with writing my own similar software so I knew what to start looking for, and also Ms fs 3.0 is only about 9500 loc, much of it is graphics.
But yeah codex will totally hold your hand and teach you Ghidra if you have a few hours to spare and the barest grasp of assembly
I don't know about life-changing but to me there are two major benefits that get me really interested:
- Augmenting CLI with specific knowledge and processes: I love the ability to work on my files, but I can only call a smart generalist to do the work. With skills if I want, say, a design review, I can write the process, what I'm looking for, and design principles I want to highlight rather than the average of every blog post about UX. I created custom gems/projects before (with PDFs of all my notes), but I couldn't replicate that on CLIs.
- Great way to build your library of prompts and build on it: In my org everyone is experimenting with AI but it's hard to document and share good processes and tools. With this, the copywriters can work on a "tone of voice" skill, the UX writers can extend it with an "Interface microcopy" skill, and I can add both to my "design review" agent.
Small use case but I’m using skills for analysing and scoring content then producing charts. LLM does the scoring then calls a Python script bundled in the skill that makes a variety of PNG charts based on metrics passed in via command line arguments. Claude presents the generated files for download. The skill.md file explains how to run the analysis and how to call the script and with what options. That way, you can get very consistent charts because they’re generated programmatically, but you can use the LLM for what it’s good at.
I have made a skill that uses Playwright to control Chrome together with functionality to extract HTML, execute JS, click things and most importantly log full network requests. It's a blessing for reverse-engineering and making userscripts.
HackerNews has an algorithm but it's not personalized—i.e. everyone sees the same thing.
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