I'm in my 40s now; I was a big lowercase-only typist back in the '90s and much of the '00s. I still do it when using messaging platforms, but tend to use proper capitalization elsewhere, like here.
Funny how it's coming back, with the younger generation embracing it. Everything cycles, I guess.
i've been writing lowercase only since the 90s and i'm a first year millennial
the genz kids are just the first ones who made it broadly acceptable... thank god, because it's a waste of brain cycles without added information - and i'm a native german speaker where it's even more stupid
Well then, police budgets would go down! And if police budgets go down then you are less safe!
Having no crime is more dangerous for politicians then some baseline of crime. If there is no crime they can't run on a hardball anti-crime platform and ignore everything else. If you run into a situation where there is no crime, it's easy enough to go invent some, generally focused at the young and poor.
>Can you imagine what would happen if we used the same resources to talk people down instead of rile them up?
The same exact persistence of the establishment and status quo but with less violence and crime and political unrest to justify their budgets with, hence why they're using it to radicalize and not calm down people.
To some extent I feel the same about video games too.
I watch my ~9 year old Nephew play games on his Switch and he swaps between games every ~5 minutes.
I think as a 90s kid we had a hand full of games for our Gameboys, N64, etc. but had to wait for a holiday to actually get new physical content. Now it's easy and cheap enough to just download a slough of digital games (with fast resume and what not) and hop between them like crazy.
I have an 8 year old and I just curate the hell out of things he's allowed to play, and limit time consistently and ruthlessly. Right now he gets 10 minutes/day for video games, and his options are Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, and Braid. He's happy to play the games provided, and I'm happy that he's basically choosing between a math test, chess, and logic puzzles.
I give him another 20 minutes a day of creative time that he can use for things like TinkerCad or drawing apps. He only takes me up on it about half the time.
I do a similar thing with video content. He can choose from a very limited list of educational-ish shows (1 per day). Total screen time is under an hour/day, and I don't feel like any of it is brain rot. It does take more work up front for me on the curation end, but we don't need to revisit options all that often.
Those are all great slow-paced single-player games with a lot of depth. There are no dailies, loot boxes, battle passes, or activity feeds. They're entirely self-contained with practically no link to the Internet dopamine sludge machine.
They’ll surely enjoy playing fewer games rather than an avalanche of content that will leave them disoriented, bored and anxious. It happens with adults too.
I had just a conversation with parent who said she allows her kids to play videogames only because it's the only thing they are able to do with focus. At the same time she is worried that they seem to be unable to listen even 4-minute pop hits from start to finish. They only listen "best parts of hits" – intro, beginning of first chorus, bridge and skip to next piece.
My impression is that's a problem with Google Shorts.
Google has been trying to get me to watch Shorts since they introduced them with little effect.
One day they offer me a video of a Chinese girl transforming into a nine-tailed fox on Shorts which was a good choice for me. After that they want to show me endless AI slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into all sorts of things on America's Got Talent always with the same music, the same reaction shots, etc.
I tend to look at the recommendation problem as a classification problem [1] but one thing that challenges that is that the answer to "do you want to see more content like this?" is different for content that is 5% of your feed (you relish it) to the very same content if it is 95% of your feed (you're disgusted.) My own answer to the diversity problem [2] is to k-Means the content into 20 clusters and rank the cluster independently so I am always operating at the 5% point.
With ordinary YouTube content I frequently get introduced to something like Techmoan or Jay-Z videos that I can binge with relish the same way I can binge episodes of Shangri-La Frontier season 2. But shorts don't do that for me.
If I was developing a recommendation-based content site based on short content in 2025 I would take a cue from Yostar games and make it so people are actually discouraged from sitting in really long sessions but rather you get them to keep coming back frequently to graze. I'm amazed at how a mechanism like oil in Azur Lane can rescue you from a grindy task right when you are starting to get sick of it forcing you to either engage with some other part of the game or real life for a while. There are a few of us who will spend the holiday break playing Dynasty Warriors 9 or Asgard's Wrath 2 and realize we spent a few work weeks worth of time playing a game, but even then you burn out, I think mobile games are more successful at getting more people to spend more time with games, often with content that is thinner.
[1] ... actually every problem, Hot Dog/Not Hot Dog is not a joke in my pod
[2] which I haven't seen in the literature. I used to think that I didn't understand or believe many ideas in the recommender literature such as "negative sampling", now I think the recommender literature is frequently wrong
Just like modern casino slot machines aren't actually fun despite being made by the exact same companies as very fun arcade and home video games, it's just more efficient/profitable to optimize for the easily addicted.
A casino makes most of it's money from addicts, so why waste any effort/money on making actual "good" anything when they can just press harder on the addiction buttons. Everything in a video slot machine is optimized around pressing the very specific dopamine buttons in a gambling addicts brain, to the point that it is WORSE for those who are less prone to gambling addiction.
In the exact same way, google doesn't care if you watch shorts, you are less profitable than the user who spends all day doomscrolling. So the content isn't optimized for you explicitly because the optimizations that make it more addictive for problem users, and therefore more profitable, are diametrically opposed to making "good" media.
The creative mind behind Spongebob wanted to finish after one season. "It's done, it's good, I like it as art". But Nickelodeon couldn't let that happen because it was a cash cow. So it's gone for like 8 slop filled seasons, that everyone recognizes as "worse" than the first season.
But "Good" has never been as profitable as "Addicting", so any market where you can sell something "Addicting" will be completely filled by addicting slop.
Well I know a lot of people who are addicted to TikTok or who bring disgusting foods to parties that they saw on TikTok or who are deluded they are going to be TikTok stars, I don’t know anybody who is addicted to Shorts though maybe there is one somewhere.
Just found out that my Spotify client added a Shorts-like feature where instead of playing my entire playlist, it just plays "excerpts" from the songs!
And at the opposite end of the spectrum - I've been using Suno AI to literally extend pop songs I like where the originals are only 60-90 seconds because of gaming the Spotify algorithm :-)
Well. On my desktop the feature always plays silently, so I figure something in my firewall is blocking some IP or domain it needs to play sound (despite the fact that regular Spotify playlist plays just fine).
So I would say this feature has so far been worth to me exactly two HN comments.
> They only listen "best parts of hits" – intro, beginning of first chorus, bridge and skip to next piece.
I know adults who do this. I believe it's a lack of patience created by always available convenience. When nothing is hard it's not worth the focus.
Growing up there was no next/skip/shuffle - pick a radio station and deal with it. That or dub to tape which takes effort, and skipping also takes effort. Same with video games, as another poster mentioned we only got one game at a time so that was our focus. You had the new game and a few old games. Deal with it.
No ones has to deal with much of anything anymore and companies know this. And people dont seem to mind because its so addicting.
Yikes this is terrifying! What have we done to people? This needs to be setting off alarms. I don’t know how anyone can be okay with this, let alone work at a company that contributes to it. Amoral it is.
Uh, we monetized attention? Like, most of the people on this very board did this.
When you monetize something like that, of course it sets off an arms race and puts pressure on everyone's resources of attention.
The attention economy needs to be eradicated.
A newspaper of yesteryear couldn't print infinite ads. They had roughly a set number of pages, mostly down to the economics of printing itself, and had to find the most valuable advertising to fill that space with.
In the modern day, you can create more space. No longer do you have to curate advertising to ensure it is getting everyone reasonable value, because instead of having a competitive market, everyone just created digital heroin.
Imagine how awful the world would be if literally any shithead with a few dollars could slap a sign down on your front lawn that completely blocked your view and there was nothing you could do about it.
Don't imagine, because that's the very world software developers have built
Your comment mentions that your nephew swaps between games every 5 minutes but it doesn’t say why that is bad. Or maybe I don’t see how the argument follows.
I think GP means it as a symptom. If you can't remain on a single game (which is supposed to be a highly entertaining, dopamine-optimized experience) for more than 5 minutes, what is the likelihood you can stick with any harder task in everyday life for longer?
Plenty of valuable things are less exciting than a video game in their first 300 seconds, and last much longer than 5 minutes.
When I was a child, my parents had me work on a lot of puzzles. They saw this as a way to build attention span, ability to focus, and persistence to achieve long term goals (not to mention that we had the coolest, most intricate puzzles). I would probably work with my children work on something a bit more constructive and realistic, but the point is that as children we build intellectual habits and attention span from what we do, and being unable to focus on highly addictive stimuli for more than five minutes is a symptom of a strong deficit. One might even consider it an intellectual disability.
You can put 80 hours or more into an AAA game so I think you get more entertainment out of an expensive game than you do out of a movie that costs $12 for 2 hours.
Trouble is today's AAA game competes with yesterday's AAA game on sale or an AAA game a little older than that used at Gamestop for $10 minus your $5 pro discount. Or a mobile game that will suck in more people for longer that costs most players $0.00 but finds enough people who crave what premium currency can buy (or who just find a $5/month subscription enhances their fun) that they are dominating the industry in terms of revenue and leaving the business folks wondering if they can afford to go on developing AAA games.
> a mobile game that will suck in more people for longer that costs most players $0.00
You realize that most mobile gaming operate on the same aspects of exploiting addiction, manipulating young people, and so on, who don't understand the value of money or have a distorted perception of how much things cost.
Somewhere between 1% to 5% of all the players that play the game are addicted or hooked into addiction through the use of dark patterns, behavioral manipulation or intentionally misleading game mechanics. They account for a "whale's" portion of the revenue.
Yeah, but many of them are good games, otherwise, in an industry that is often failing to connect with fans. Nikki is heartwarming, Arknights is a tower defense game in a decade that hasn’t had any, like it not Azur Lane has inspired more fandom than almost anything, I meet so many players that got into Genshin Impact who aren’t playing tired JRPGs.
- if the kid cannot play each of cheap games for more than 5 minutes straight, likely cost >$80 total, does it make sense to buy them multiple games?
- if answer to above is `false`, does it really matter if the game in the bundle cost $80 if bought separately?
True, but I don't think Calvin Ball rewards the brain as much as YouTube or video games (a personal take of course). Loads of people of all ages are "suffering" from shortened attention spans with YouTube, TikTok, games, etc. but I haven't heard of any having the same with Calvin Ball.
I have the fondest teenage memories waiting for Halo midnight releases.
For Halo 3 we had LAN parties in the back of pick-up trucks after rushing down to GameCrazy (Hollywood Video's game store chain which was attached on the side) after middle school in Canyon Park.
Halo Reach was the Lynnwood GameStop after a friend begged his parents to let him stay out late that night.
So many friends and memories. I miss those energetic meet-ups!
> Notably, within minutes of DOGE personnel creating user accounts in NLRB systems, on multiple occasions someone or something within Russia attempted to login using all of the valid credentials (eg. Usernames/Passwords).
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