Parents who wish to have both the child and themselves remain sane are already watching over the way their offspring uses the internet.
Truth be told the worst kind of content is nominally child friendly - just incredibly addictive and overstimulating. We're all so preoccupied with preventing our children from looking at gore or porn or even meeting predators online that we forget that those who stand to make money on addictive content will pull every lever necessary.
We should assign one or two adults to children who provide for them, and prevent various dangers, including online ones, from reaching them. It sounds like a lot of effort, but it is also the most important task on the planet.
A generation of kids have grown up with just such assigned adults, who overwhelmingly did not apply sufficient oversight to the kids' use of social media.
In large part that's because, if they'd done so, the kids would've been socially isolated from their peers, at least the most normal ones with the most normal parents, which are the kinds of friends most other normal parents want their kids to have.
It's a collective action problem, except instead of "I can be better off if I ignore what I know is best for society", it's "if I ignore what I know is best for my kids psychologically, they will still have friends, and social media brainrot is a lesser evil than socially isolating my kid from all the normal kids at school."
And also, giving kids social media interaction devices is a convenient form of babysitting. It reduces up-front effort of parenting.
>In large part that's because, if they'd done so, the kids would've been socially isolated from their peers, at least the most normal ones with the most normal parents, which are the kinds of friends most other normal parents want their kids to have.
I never had any of the popular social medias when I was growing up, and I wasn’t isolated from anybody aside from the one bloke who insisted on doing all his texting via instagram. I’m in uni now and people kind of laugh when I ask them for a phone number, but if anything it’s improved my social status.
>And also, giving kids social media interaction devices is a convenient form of babysitting. It reduces up-front effort of parenting.
This is the real issue to me. Parents are overworked and exhausted because you can’t support a family on one salary, so there’s no more stay-at-home parents. I was extremely lucky in that my mom’s firm got bought out when I was in 5th grade and she retired on the severance package. Parenting is a full time job and society needs to treat it like one. If stay-at-home parents got a salary from the government, 90% of what’s wrong with kids would be solved (and the falling birthrate issue too).
> Parents are overworked and exhausted because you can’t support a family on one salary, so there’s no more stay-at-home parents.
This is a natural consequence of women joining the workforce en masse. This isn't a social comment, but rather an economic one. It made couples have much more buying power, so they could bid massively more. They they worked stressful jobs for the next 30 years to pay the bank back, while the older person they sold it to got loads of cash.
And single women (or mums), who this was supposed to help, now instead of working extra hard to compete economically against single-income households, now have to compete against two-income households.
Hard disagree. It’s the “phone kids” with behavior issues and their parents are usually similar. It’s time to get serious about stupid people being stupid and not calling it “normal”.
So do we get rid of all laws which distinguish children? Why bother with limiting selling alcohol to children if we can just let the parents do it?
My problem is I don’t think anyone is (seriously) suggesting we get rid of the laws protecting children in the physical world, and having nieces and nephews, they nowadays spend more time in the virtual world than the physical world, often with their friends so it’s hard to track what they do.
It isn’t working, and the assigned adults are asking for these changes.
What is the next step?
Ok, that sounds snarky, but this is where we are. Parents are asking for age controls, and governments are happy to give them what they want, with them getting an added level over privacy.
The existing paradigm is on-device parental controls. It's worked for the past 30 years, and the alternative is forcing everyone to show government ID to use websites.
I mean its been what three decades of internet without age verification and people can't really point to specific issues with it, just sort of gesticulates that they must be there despite the millenial generation being about as well adjusted as any other. I would say seeing a pulverized squirrel on the road with the brains scattered about in real life is far more traumatizing for a child than seeing even human on human violence and gore on the internet. Movies have done a lot to desensitize that sort of thing when it is served on a screen versus in real life where you can smell it and walk all around it.
It's all relative. When I was 20, I'd consider myself old at 36. Now when I am 36, my definition of old has shifted and it's now somewhere past 50. I guess "old" for a person is just that person 10+ years older :)
Hire excellent programmers who spent their lifetime learning how to write good code and build systems, and then the code is easy. Hire some bad ones and watch them struggle and fail and learn why maybe coding is not that easy. AI doesn't change this, it just shifts failure modes a bit since the volume of code produced is now larger, and AI-enabled bad programmers are still bad.
I remember a tennis survey where something like 70% of respondents believed they could win a game against a Tennis pro player (I can't find the source anymore, but it was discussed on Andy Roddick's podcast). If you watch Roger Federer effortlessly and elegantly make beautiful shots, it's very easy to fall into this trap and think -- it must be so easy, right?? Are people falling into the same trap watching Claude Code regurgitate CRUD apps for them?
The scope and complexity of the change is crucial here. There is a sweet spot where spec-driven agent offers great value: the change is small and simple enough that you can describe it reliably with a spec (i.e. you have complete understanding how to do it), while implementing it yourself is a lot more work than writing the said spec plus reviewing and correcting the agent.
For me currently this sweet spot is TINY. It's so small that my usage of Claude Code has dropped to almost none. It's simply more practical to let myself have the agency and drive the development, while letting AI jump in and assist when needed.
Comes to germany, does not like it, makes a picture of a middle finger to Bundestag. This smells like ragebait low effort content I come to HN in order to avoid!
I was initially dismissive of the photo, but it is part of a series, titled "Study of perspective" that Weiwei has been adding to since 1995. He has been giving the finger to many symbols of imperialism and authoritarianism around the world for 30 years.
If one picture is unimaginative and vulgar, I don't see why doing it 30 years somehow makes it "art". It makes me think he's just angry and rude, just like I'd think about someone who goes around flicking people off for 30 years. In a post-modern perspective that's "telling truth to power" or something, but that's just sophistry.
While I chuckle at the fact Ai Weiwei choose to dump on Germany while enjoying unbothered refuge here, this sentence I disliked the most.
It reeks of over-thinking, philosophical elitism.
As someone who was raised by parents born in Communist Romania, talk to anyone born in an Authoritarian regime and they’ll tell you what the absence of freedom means like.
When it comes to assessing freedom, I’d stick closer to German-Romanian literature Nobel prize winner Hertha Müller.
Coincidentally, just like Ai Wewei she’s been living here in Berlin and seems not to feel particularly unfree.
When I was younger I had a few different sources for finding music - a couple of friends who were really into music and I knew they were investing time and searching for it, so I always wanted to hear what they recommend, even if it didn’t match my taste. There was also a curated website and a forum dedicated to alternative genres, like hardcore or post rock and other “edgy” stuff, where I liked to hang out. I knew this is where people really passionate about music gathered and it was interesting to see what they like and what they recommend. It was always driven my community, by people I liked or loved, or trusted their judgement.
Needless to say you get none of that with algorithms. Spotify does recommend some good songs for me regularly and I often add them to “liked” but it’s much lonelier now. Music used to connect me with other people and now it’s just me and my Spotify.
Pretty much listened to what "my crowd" in college listened to. It spanned out in various other directions over time--some by organic discovery via music festivals and the like, some via friends. Mostly don't concern myself too much with "discovery" these days.
mixcloud has been great for this for me. so many people post their mixes and their radio shows there that there is always something new to explore, and searching for something slightly off that i know i like leads to people using that in a mix so i know we're at least partly on the same wavelength when i start to listen.
And then eventually you end up with a list of mixtape makers/DJ's/radio show hosts you trust which is cool, really feels like a world radio show at times.
How do you make money by developing a web browser? You build this immensely complex piece of software and then have no choice but to distribute it for free. It seems like with the current browser landscape the only viable business model for companies building browsers is to make your money elsewhere while investing some of it into the browser development.
Eh, more the wider cultural effects of them. Vibe coding, everyone now creating kitchen sink apps that do everything under the sun, k8s everywhere, agents everywhere. It feels like a big part of the industry has lost all focus and is sprinting towards some endless vague panacea instead of focusing on solving specific well defined business problems.
It’s always been a bit like this but it feels particularly bad since AI hit mainstream coding tooling. Just my 2c :)
i think we need to come to terms with the reality of coding challenges in the interview process. i know i hate them personally, and dread having to interview again because i'll need to open leet code and remember how to do stupid shit like DFS on a graph, or manipulating linked lists. at the same time, a job opening for a SWE is opening soon in our company and we'll have to somehow filter people, and the job market is such that we'll get MANY applicants, most of them probably wrong for the job. i will probably end up giving them coding challenges (not necessarily leetcode, but some coding challenge for sure), because i need a way to grasp their problem solving and coding skills. i don't know a better way to do it in a condensed time frame of a 1 hour zoom call.
The stories of geniuses suffering from depression and other mental illnesses sure make remarkably interesting reads. It’s a pity he didn’t get psychiatric help, this could have been a boring story of an aging scientist taking care of his plants.
