Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI

Take the pads away, daddy.

That's what being a daddy is about, preventing harm when you see it occurring right in front of your eyes.

Nobody's gonna do it apart from you.

Why don't you throttle YT on the iPads (via the firewall) so it's unwatchable, then blame Apple. You could make it somewhat intermittent to make it more convincing.

Why? Like seriously. Why? What benefit does this give to your kid?

From your kid’s perspective, the laptop is going to be less useful, more hostile, it’s going to limit how they’re able to talk and relate to their friends.

Outside of your desires as a technologist and personal feelings about Linux, why should your kid want to use it? It feels like you’re projecting the ideals and values of your career onto your kids and then you’re surprised when they don’t share those ideals.

Now they play Minecraft and Hello Kitty which is a slightly less braindead activity than YouTube!

additionally, iPads have strong parental controls. you can limit time overall on the iPad and you can limit time on specific apps.

Now, apparently his son has been watching lego and minecraft redstone tutorials, asking his parents to help him read the descriptions and linked text tutorials so he can build them! Youtube can really be an awesome place, but it's a double-edged sword for sure.

Speaking from experience, I was handed an iPod touch in middle school, and have been addicted to youtube ever since. Although most, if not all, of the passions that define me today were discovered/cultivated on youtube, all too often I'd never engage with them outside youtube. I really feel like I achieved nothing outside of class during high school and college, because I spent all my free time consuming.

What works for me now is using the unhook firefox extension [1] on my mac and android tablet, and then brave browser on my iPhone, signed out and with search history off. Basically eliminating all recommendations, I can still go to youtube with a specific purpose, but can't use it to doom scroll (that's what hn is for). I'd be happy to pay for premium, but not without a way to turn off all recommendations outside of search.

I'd be super interested to hear more details about the firefox plugin you're working on, is it open source?

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

So much of social media is TPIR style gambling for dopamine and worthless knowledge.

https://www.youtubekids.com/

Aside from Google already being polluted to uselessness beyond redemption, the firehose of AI trash just makes it impossible, unless they are both motivated and able to get Gemini to discern between real content and trash (both unlikely).

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose . . .

I'm a bit confused about this comparison. Is there something about Discourse that makes it immune to bots, where Discord is not?

(There's a bit of humor in that Discourse has social media "Share" buttons, which are apparently evil)

We have a school shooting something like once every two days in the US, but can't put children before gun ownership.

I don't know how we survive this.

Machinists and gun makers are well aware how easy it is to make a machine gun or other illegal firearm, but they don't because that knowledge is locked behind experience, norms and expensive machines. This is why it was potentially a big deal when people started printing guns, not because it wasn't possible before to make dangerous or illegal firearms, but now it was an order of magnitude easier.

We have always had conmen, but running a good con was hard and you were limited to one at a time. Now with voice cloning and LLMs it is an order of magnitude easier, and infinitely more replicable.

I'm not sure the world is ready for the golden era of grifting, but I'm also not sure how you could ever stop it.

I think the author's point is that generative AI is a completely different animal than the printing press. The printing press could be used to spread both factual information and misinformation alike, and for various reasons factual information seems to have predominated, and high quality information is at least readily available, even if it's not the majority of printed work. Then there's the Internet, which can similarly be used to publish both information and misinformation. Perhaps due to the lower bar for entry and the speed of dissemination, the balance of information to misinformation and high-quality to low-quality content doesn't favor information or high-quality content as strongly as it does in the world of printed text, but at least the Internet always has the potential to spread factual information and high-quality content.

Then there's generative AI. Unlike the two communication technologies referenced above, AI can ONLY produce low-quality content. It is by design a statistical inference technique that generates content remixed from its training data. Without substantial human rework and rewriting, AI will always produce such low-quality drek as "it's hard to learn volleyball without a ball". And it's increasing promoted as a way to reduce human effort in writing, ensuring that people will continue to use it without supervising it's output, especially if they are trying to mass-produce content to make money. So now we have a new situation in which the majority of content produced going forwards is likely to be extremely low quality and perhaps contain substantial misinformation as well, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The author seems to posit that exposure to this type of content will negatively affect people's ability to learn to produce good, original content of their own, as they are not exposed to even passably good writing from a young age, so they cannot learn to emulate it.

Using the examples of both adults and toddlers to make his point is apt. At least the toddler has no choice.