I'm troubled by the premise that further right on the "demanding" scale makes parents "wise". At some point, an increase in demanding things of your children seems unwise to me.
> Maybe the world would be better if we just didn't have a service that allows everyone to shout whatever is on their mind in to the internet void?
The older I get and the more syndical I seem, the more I agree with this. The problem is its no longer just "the internet void". That would suggest that nobody ever reads some of the nonsense.
It should have been obvious though when you give everyone an opinion that their ramblings are some kind of 'insight' and should be heard. It's exhausting, I hope the next stage of social media is it's boycott.
I remember the backlash to livejournal among the web forum community that I frequented over a decade ago.
Little did we all know that in just a few years the entire internet would pivot to the most inane, short-form, self centered and low information content possible, and that most people would become addicted to it.
Personally, I enjoyed old!Twitter, and am glad that there are two (or charitably three, but I don't really _get_ Threads) viable replacements. No need for you to use it, naturally, but I'm glad it's there.
Seems like many people disagree, but at least a few of us know this is correct. More people will learn the same lessons eventually, though not likely enough people to stop history from repeating.
If you are autistic (for example) I'm guessing human interaction can be extremely difficult and very stressful and triggering. Machines are much more amenable and don't have loads of arbitrary unwritten rules the way humans do. Maybe the idea of being entrapped by bureaucracy introduced by machines will be better than the the bureaucracy introduced by humans?
The difference between a standard human-written algorithm and machine learning is exactly that inability to find the rules transparent, predictable, and not arbitrary.
I can see this but I think humans are much more random than most LLMs - they lie, they have egos, they randomly dislike other humans and make things difficult for them. Never mind body language, networks of influence, reputation destruction and all the other things that people do to obtain power.
I think LLMs are much more predictable and they will get better.
Hard agree. It's our generation's smoking. Zuckerberg's recent PR glow-up is just this generation's Marlboro man. An acceptable face on something much more sinister.
Social media that tech workers in the 30s and 40s were exposed to was never any more intense than a bulletin board or a chat room.
Social media now is a very different beast. It's designed to be addictive, and it generates engagement through polarization.
Is banning social media for children a punishment for the child? Some parents would argue the opposite, that it's a good thing that the child isn't developed enough to realise yet.
Take all the issue with prosecutorial discretion that you want, but don't pretend that an adjustment in the misdemeanor/felony threshold by $450 means theft is no longer a crime.
> the real problem that got Trump in office was normalcy bias. what we're dealing with is so bad that if you tell people who don't already know, they assume you're exaggerating.
This is understated IMO. In almost every other democracy in the world, 1% of the mess that comes out of Trump's mouth would deem him utterly unelectable on account of how crazy he sounds. The US seems to lap it up though.
This is true, and it's probably because he now operates in an altered context — the narrative of persecution, especially by those perceived to be 'elite'. Without that, all Americans would see through his nonsense just as the inhabitants of democracies elsewhere do.
His opponents have done a very bad job of not making it look like everyone's simply biased and out to get him, and he's capitalised on that.
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