Alcohol has been deeply embedded in human culture for thousands+ years, that's why prohibition is a bad idea. Loot boxes are a new invention, if they're deemed too harmful we can just do without them.
People do plenty of illegal things, but we still outlaw them to reduce the rate of people doing those things.
On the contrary, if we accept that people are mature enough to choose to drink, they certainly should be mature enough to spend $20 opening loot boxes. Fewer cases of cirrhosis, drunk driving accidents, and bar fights from loot boxes.
Too much thumos, not enough nous in this conversation...
1. Alcohol may be consumed in moderation for enjoyment with no frustrating effect on our rational faculties. Even the bad effects on health are often overblown. They tend to be chronic and rooted in habitual consumption. Save for people with a predisposition for alcoholism, people generally do not experience compulsive desires for alcohol.
2. Gambling isn't comparable to alcohol. It is intrinsically irrational and inherently exploitative. It is also an intrinsically social and economic phenomenon. It requires the intentional exploitation of one party by another to work.
3. Loot boxes are intentionally designed to manipulate people psychologically for profit. It habituates bad habits by virtue of its very design.
4. While alcohol can be used that way, it is not designed for that purpose nor is its historical pedigree rooted in such malice. I would also claim that its addictive potential is lower all things considered.
So they aren't comparable. It's not enough to say "both A and B can have harmful effects, therefore both A and B are 'the same' for all intents and purposes".
> While alcohol can be used that way, it is not designed for that purpose
Alcohol was not designed. However, marketing campaigns for alcoholic beverages are very much designed. Though I agree that prohibition against drinking won't ever work and would never support it, I do think that prohibition against alcohol advertising and marketing would be a beneficial to society. You are allowed to drink, but you can't try and manipulate people into drinking.
> I would also claim that its addictive potential is lower all things considered.
The addictive potential of alcohol is higher because it is directly chemically affecting the brain. It also causes physical dependencies as well as mental ones. These two often work together and combined are more powerful then the sum of the parts. What is also true is that people who have a genetic propensity for addiction are both more likely then others to become addicted to alcohol, drugs, gambling, or any other usual suspects. Loot boxes are ultimately causing the most damage to the same population subset as alcohol is.
It's amazing how people will jump to something new just because it's there and it's being promoted.
When wireless headphones came out, I looked at my wired ones and asked the simple question: is a tangling cable worse than bluetoth pairing and having to keep yet another thing charged? My answer was no, so I kept using cheap wired ones.
A few years later, now that makes me look rich. Or something.
Bluetooth pairing hasn’t been an issue with the iPhone in a decade. As far as charging, at night is it really a pain for me to stick my AirPods on the same charging pad my iPhone and watch are on anyway
You've probably already done this, but first thing, turn off autoplay and make sure it stays off. Much easier to not get sucked into things when you have to actively click on them.
Turning Autoplay off, and getting rid of ads (Youtube Premium is well worth it across all devices) is a big level up. Blocking shorts is the other thing.
The "ad free option" is also called "muting and looking away". Don't let them trick you into thinking they have the right and control to shove anything they want into your mind.
Sponsorblock offers by far the best experience. It skips over channel intros and outros, engagement prompts, sponsored segments, tangents, etc (configurable per channel) and offers jumping to "highlight" (that is, the most important part of the video).
Highly ironic that the best experience is free, and no paid option gets even close. Tim Cook watching paid Youtube on Apple TV device has far worse experience than some random kid with Firefox and Sponsorblock gets for free.
Why would you want to do that? I'm so happy I can search exactly what I want among heaps of long tail stuff, I would never want to go back to a "live tv" interaction model.
Not the author, but did a LOT of research on this during my time at Disney while working on Disney+ prior to its launch.
This is, effectively, no different than a carousel of algorithm-recommended content. However, UX studies have found users reluctant to watch something recommended to them. It requires making an affirmative decision on time investment. Most people have the experience of a friend recommending a movie or book and still being reluctant to dive in.
The problem is very similar to dating apps, if you think about it. This is why Tinder's innovation on "swipe left/right" took off the way it did. In UX terms it's better to drop users into something and make the cognitive effort be choosing to get out of it rather than choosing to get into it. It's a big part of why TikTok works.
The reason this isn't more common in video apps has more to do with UX norms at this point. Another important thing I learned about streaming at Disney was that no one really cares how innovative the browsing experience is. They just want to watch Frozen. They're used to carousels now, and they're easy to program. This, I think, speaks more to your sensibilities.
I guess it's really not for me though. First thing I do is turn autoplay off, and I'd refuse to use a service that doesn't give me that option. OTOH, I do sometimes find it fun to hunt for good stuff among the recommendations.
Sometimes, it's nice to just sit down and watch something without needing to make repeated decisions about what's on.
I typically share your mindset, but I can see the appeal. There was something nice about the TV that just, ya know, already had something going when you turned it on. I spent many happy evenings in hazy basement rooms enjoying whatever Adult Swim decided was going to be on the TV that night.
I was getting my hair cut the other day and one of the guys at the barbershop was talking about how his wife bought a radio and it's nice to just have NPR going all the time instead of searching for a podcast or playlist. I love radio too but haven't listened much outside of my car since 2019. Back then I had a different work schedule and would regularly tune in to Science Friday and just have the radio going much of the day. Since 2019, I've moved 4 times, had roommates most of that time who wouldn't want the radio playing all day, and just never fully unpacked and haven't set up my stereo system. Mostly I've listened to podcasts on my phone and a Bluetooth speaker or earbuds. Radio is nice, I like it better than TV because it's less distracting to me. Those moving pictures mesmerize me and I find it difficult to look away, which was why I didn't even have a TV for half my adult life.
I used to do that but the shows repeat and at the top of the hour or sometimes multiple times they repeat the same news over and over. I get someone else might be tuning in and not have heard the latest news
Maybe there's some middle ground where instead of a stream it's on demand but continuous. So I go to videostream.npr.com and since it knows it's a single user it can push the news once and then just be shows.
That said, youtube autoplay is the basic concept, it just sucks at what it recommends.
I like that idea, almost like a prioritized queue of content - show me the stuff I'm sure to want to see first, and then just gimme whatever. In the context of NPR, the "stuff I'm sure to want to see" is probably just "the news." But maybe other platforms / distribution channels would have a more specific notion of what deserves my attention first.
I guess this is basically how TV worked in the pre-streaming days - the new episode of whatever hot series aired during the prime time slot, and lesser slots were filled with reruns / resyndicated stuff.
I miss this too, and sort of get it on airplanes where I almost never use my seat back screen and end up watching someone else's instead (yes there's no sound).
I chalk it up to overwhelming choices. Sometimes I just want to watch something but don't want to go through dozens of options and having decision anxiety.
Bonus is sometimes I discover something I never thought I would have liked.
> I chalk it up to overwhelming choices. Sometimes I just want to watch something but don't want to go through dozens of options and having decision anxiety.
This is by far the biggest annoyance with modern TV for me. If I've already decided on something I want to watch, it's obviously great to just be able to navigate to it and put it on on my schedule, to pause it, have no ads, etc.
But sometimes, for better or worse, I just want to plunk down on the couch and turn my brain off, and if I'm in that mode the last thing I want to do is try to find something worth watching on my own steam.
Like, Youtube is great! Yeah, there's a ton of crap, but there's so much on there that would entertain me and be a guilt-free, even edifying use of me time. But having to choose something new every 10-20 minutes? Actively managing a queue while watching stuff? That's - pardon my French - for the birds.
I prefer searching too, but sometimes it's nice to just "put TV on." I do this now with Amazon Prime Video, which has a "Live" feature that mimics a guide akin to Channel Surfer. Also my dad (age 85) struggles with Youtube on our TV because of the decision paralysis.
Sometimes I just want to know "what is popular on youtube right now? What is it that the world is watching?" and Youtube won't tell me anymore. The algorithm isolates me and my preferences from consensus reality. Youtube doesn't want me coming out of my cave.
Have you tried the Explore feed? Mine has Music, Movies & TV, Hype, Live, Gaming, News, Sports, Learning, Fashion & Beauty, Podcasts and Playables. Most of those have some sort of subcategories too. It appears to be regionally determined - I don't see any influence from my data here
For me, the best solution is a mixed one. My Plex has a curated list of tv shows and movies. Then I have Tunarr for "live" channels from own my selection. Best of both worlds.
I just watched 20 minutes on the gardening channel and learned a bunch that I never would have seen with the YouTube algorithm, and wouldn’t have thought of to search for.
For me it’s that usually I can figure out if I’m going to like something way more easily if I’m just clicking through and watching samples of a show. I don’t want to be constrained to a predetermined algorithmic category.
Why would you go eat at a restaurant? I'm so happy I can cook anything I want at home, exactly how I want it, instead of choosing from a set menu made by someone else.
For most situations, I deal with this by keeping dates as strings throughout the app, not objects. They get read from the db as strings, passed around as strings. If I need datetime calculations, I use the language's datetime objects to do it and convert right back to string. Display formatting for users happens at the last moment, in the template.
No-one seems to like this style, but I find it much simpler than converting on db read/write and passing datetime objects around.
It's not really a Linux vs MS thing though. When Unicode first came out, it was 16-bit, so all the early adopters went with that. That includes Java, Windows, JavaScript, the ICU lintaries, LibreOffice and its predecessors, .NET, the C language (remember wchar_t?), and probably a few more.
Utf8 turned out to be the better approach, and it's slowly taking over, but it was not only Linu/Unix that pushed it ahead, the entire networking world did, especially http. Props also to early perl for jumping straight to utf8.
Still... Utf8's superiority was clear enough by 2005 or so, MS could and should have seen it by then instead of waiting until 2019 to add utf8 collations to its database. Funny to see Sql Server falling behind good old Mysql on such a basic feature.
Database systems are inherently conservative -- once you add something you have to support it forever. Microsoft went hog wild on XML in the database and I haven't seen it used in over a decade now.
The old defense of 16-bit chars, popping up in 2026 still! Utf8 is efficient enough for all general purpose uses.
If you're storing gigabytes of non-latin-alphabet text, and your systems are constrained enough that it makes a difference, 16-bit is always there. But I'd still recommend anyone starting a system today to not worry and use utf8 for everything.j
Did this post come out of a freezer from 1998? Who on earth creates databases in Latin1 in 2026?
Nevermind, looks like Sql Server didn't add utf8 collations until 2019 (!) and for decades people had to choose column by column between the 16-bit overhead of "nvarchar" and latin1... And still do if they want a bit of backwards compatibility. Amazing.
"Just use Postgres" (which defaults to UTF-8 encoding unless specifically configured to use something else) is looking like better and better advice every day.
Doesn't help those tied to legacy systems that would require a huge, expensive effort to upgrade, though. Sorry, folks. There's a better system, you know it's a better system, and you can't use it because switching is too expensive? I've been there (not databases, in my case) and it truly sucks.
I don't think openclaw can possibly be secured given the current paradigm. It has access to your personal stuff (that's its main use case), access to the net, and it gets untrusted third party inputs. That's the unfixable trifecta right there. No amount of filtering band-aid whack-a-mole is going to fix that.
Sandboxes are a good measure for things like Claude Code or Amp. I use a bubblewrap wrapper to make sure it can't read $HOME or access my ssh keys. And even there, you have to make sure you don't give the bot write access to files you'll be executing outside the sandbox.
One insidious thing is whitelists. If you allow the bot to run a command like `API_KEY=fdafsafa docker run ...`, then the API_KEY will be written to a file, and the agent can then read that in future runs. That bit me once already.
> If you allow the bot to run a command like `API_KEY=fdafsafa docker run ...`, then the API_KEY will be written to a file
It wouldn't be inherently. Is this something that Docker does? Or perhaps something that was done by the code that was run? (Shouldn't it have stayed within that container?)
But also, if it's not okay for the agent to know the API key permanently, why is it okay for the agent to have one-off use of something that requires the same key? Did it actually craft a Bash command line with the API key set and request to run it; or was it just using a tool that ends up with that command?
What I meant to say was, the agents (like Claude Code) often have a "Allow all instances of this command in the session," and that persists to a whitelist for that session. The mechanic here is actually just a prefix match, so `API_KEY=... diff_command` also matches, allowing the agent to reuse the key without asking me.
This file also sticks around, so I had another agent read the whitelist and the conversation transcript and do other things automatically without approval.
> if it's not okay for the agent to know the API key permanently, why is it okay for the agent to have one-off use of something that requires the same key?
Read commands vs. write commands. I'm okay having the agent fetch info for me, but I want to approve any state changes.
I think when people stop hyping skills and go back to using proper (mcp) tools, it would not be hard to come up with UI to give explicit permissions. It was there from the begining.
Current AI requires a human in the loop for anything non-trivial. Even the most used feature, coding, causes chaos without strict human oversight.
You can vibe-code a standalone repository, but any sort of serious work with real people working alongside bots, every last PR has to be reviewed, moderated, curated, etc.
Everything AI does that's not specifically intended to be a standalone, separate project requires that sort of intervention.
The safe way to do this is having a sandboxed test environment, high level visibility and a way to quickly and effectively review queued up actions, and then push those to a production environment. You need the interstitial buffer and a way of reverting back to the last known working state, and to keep the bot from having any control over what gets pushed to production.
Giving them realtime access to production is a recipe for disaster, whether it's your personal computer or a set of accounts built specifically for them or whatever, without your human in the loop buffer bad things will happen.
A lot of that can be automated, so you can operate confidently with high level summaries. If you can run a competent local AI and develop strict processes for review and summaries and so forth, kind of a defense in depth approach for agents, you can still get a lot out of ClawBot. It takes work and care.
Hopefully frameworks for these things start developing all of the safety security and procedure scaffolding we need, because OpenClaw and AI bots have gone viral. I'm getting all sorts of questions about how to set them up by completely non-technical people that would have trouble installing a sound system. Very cool to see, I'm excited for it, but there will definitely be some disasters this year.
> Even the most used feature, coding, causes chaos without strict human oversight.
s/Even/Especially , I would think. Everyone's idea of how to get any decent performance out of an LLM for coding, entails allowing the code to be run automatically. Nominally so that the LLM can see the results and iterate towards a user-provided goal; but it's still untrusted code.
It's still much easier to verify than to produce, but being willing to do that sort of thing, to enjoy it, or to know how to do it well are very different from loving programming. I think this is where AI butts heads with programmers who are in it for the love of the game.
Getting utility from AI is in the domain of management - the most effective, productive uses I've seen for AI involve elaborate project management scaffolding, hierarchies branching out of an agent.md or some similar setup, with explicit instructions and human oriented breakpoints in the process, so at each stage, the person can look at it all, verify operation of all the subcomponents, accept or reject the PR, and go again.
Normally people just want to vibe their way through a project or process, and that's chaotic specifically because there might be an effectively infinite space of possible legitimate, working completions, but only a tiny finite set of outcomes that could be considered "good". Another much larger but still finite set of "good enough" outcomes end up compounding errors and hitting the user in the face with the mystical salmon of unintended consequences.
Management is all about containing the space of possible outcomes and pushing resources toward a completion that lands in the space of "good", and that's tedious and boring. Even with AI, you're generally working in a space you don't know much about, haven't experienced or learned to enjoy or appreciate anything about it, and don't know enough to correct or guide the AI when it goes off-kilter.
All that to say, we need to automate management so that you can specify a style or methodology at the start and never have to think about it again, and have each AI operate on a strong default that works for lots of use cases. There's really no need to keep the MBAs and c-suite around, what they do is eminently more automatic and methodological than painting or writing poetry. Someone just has to wrangle the right dataset and extract the patterns. Incidentally, this might be one of the only things that gives Microsoft an edge over the next handful of years, since they're riding shotgun and recording everything everyone is doing to get good training data.
As someone who loves programming, I think the distinction is overstated. Part of the reason why doing what I love is slow, is because I instinctively (try to) verify as I go.
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