csnover

> they did not control for medication or supplements

The only way this would matter would be if phones were banned and then also those other interventions were withheld in order to perfectly counterbalance the expected effect of the phone ban. Do you have some evidence that Iceland suddenly decided to reduce these interventions between 2018 and 2023?

This point isn’t even mentioned in the limitations section of the study, so why are you making it? There are more significant potential limitations to this study that they did describe, including the fact that “we also lacked objective measures of in-school smartphone use and therefore could not determine whether bans reduced actual phone use”. (Though that doesn’t exactly matter either, since if the bans aren’t actually stopping phone use, then they are still ineffective, just in a different way.)

> Alternate interpretation: when it's dark for half the year your mental health isn't dominated by phone access.

This is a nonsensical interpretation that seems to me to betray a lack of understanding of statistics. The planet doesn’t experience any more or less sunlight in the winter between 2016 and 2023, so has no bearing on whether or not there would be a detectable effect from an intervention.

I’m unaware of other technological revolutions where the largest group of opposition was among young people[0]. Was there a great youth revolt against the telephone, the television, and the computer? I don’t recall anything of the sort.

[0] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/gen-z-turning-a...

By “human” language, they mean “English” language. This is a study of English only, using these sources:

> The NRC VAD lexicon … English Fiction (1900 to 2019) from the Google Books project … Jane Austen’s six novels … The majority of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories … The New York Times (1987 to 2007) … Wikipedia (English language, March 2019 snapshot) … RadioTalk (transcriptions of talk radio broadcasts in the United States, October 2018 to March 2019); and Twitter (approximately 10% of all tweets identified as English in 2020).

(2003)

> The dev comes as self-serving

What, do you not include links to every single one of your social media accounts in every single post you make on GitHub? I think this is a very cool and normal thing, and not a concerning red flag about narcissistic tendencies at all.

It was a systematic review, not a “singular ‘research study’”. A newer 2019 Cochrane review[0] found about the same:

> The evidence was limited in applicability and was incomplete. The included studies only presented data on gingivitis, plaque, and adverse events; most did not measure or report other important outcomes such as periodontitis or interproximal caries. … Additional use of floss or interdental brushes compared to toothbrushing alone may reduce gingivitis or plaque, or both, and interdental brushes may be more effective than floss. The evidence is low to very low‐certainty, and the effect sizes observed may not be clinically important.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6953268/

Phoenix launched right at the peak of IE’s market dominance and that name lasted about a year, so if you are remembering it that way, it was very early. By 2005, Firefox had ~10% global market share; by the time of the first Chrome release in 2008, Firefox had ~25% global market share[0]. So the OP had plenty of time to switch away from IE before Chrome showed up.

In any case, nobody got to quit dealing with the misery of IE6 until some YouTube engineers did a little caper[1] that gave everyone else an excuse that their big brain business bosses would finally listen to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#/media/File:Brows...

[1] https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Social programs to help towns experiencing economic depression would inject money, training, education, etc. which would create opportunity for new growth and development in areas with a low cost of living. When people are too busy just trying to survive, they are not going to be working on inventing the next big thing, and they certainly are not going to support tax dollars going toward investments for tomorrow.

> Is principle the only valid reason to want to do something? Why is it unacceptable that people be motivated to do things because they want the results?

No, not at all. I myself am not a “the means is the end” kind of person. If I just wanted to puzzle out solutions with nothing to show for it, I’d do the crossword. But, in my experience, caring only about results leads to myopic short-term solutions that create bigger long-term problems. For instance, if you’re in pain, I can “cure” that by shooting you in the head. A quick positive result for getting rid of the pain—but at what cost? For thinking work, AI seems to be shaping up to be a lot closer to a bullet than an analgesic.

All I was saying is that human motivation does not exist in a single dichotomy, and that ecosystems that develop around mutual effort create benefits beyond the mutual goal. You can’t get all those benefits without humans doing the work, but there’s no extrinsic motivation for humans to do the work, so very few will bother, and the ecosystem dies. (I hope it wasn’t ‘load-bearing’.)

Anyway, the benefit of reconstructed source code is not even about preservation, it is in enhancing the user experience beyond mere preservation. We’ve been preserving software using emulation alone just fine for quite some time. If you are actually worried about preservation, you might consider how much the Wayback Machine is getting blocked these days because of AI scrapers. Or how an AI agent might apologetically wipe out some irreplaceable archive. Or how nobody in the future will probably be able to care about preservation much as the one-two punch of climate change and AI descend on us. It’s always those damned long-term consequences from short-term thinking, you know?

Would you consider that you have perhaps both misstated the parent’s claim, misrepresented the study you are quoting, and failed to offer any counter-evidence in support of the parent’s actual claim?

The introduction from which you cherry-pick excludes a refutation of claims about media violence and aggression, not because they are valid[0] or causal, but because their analysis was focused on answering a different question. It is that different question which seems relevant to refuting the parent’s original claim.

If you can offer some actual evidence for the actual original claim, not this differently stated claim, I would certainly be interested in that.

[0] First, these claims apply only to non-interactive media, which a chatbot is not. Studies on video games more consistently show no or negative correlations. Second, they almost certainly are not real. The last study I cited explicitly mentions how these prior lab results do not seem to transfer to real life outcomes. And I cannot write a dissertation here about the flawed methodology of many of these aggression studies and the outright fraud of people who conducted some of them, like Fredric Wertham (whose fraud was not uncovered until 2012).

I know I am late to respond here, but I would say that I feel like this is the wrong framing. It’s like asking if someone plays football because they like to kick a ball or because they like trying to win the game. The answer is yes, and ….

When people work on projects like these, it is often a communal activity, for the love of a shared mutual interest. Friends are made, technical expertise is gained and shared, people learn from the code and from each other, and ultimately something fun is produced. We are a social species and it feels good to help other people, and to feel supported in our efforts by others. It gives us the feeling that we matter, what we’re spending our time on matters, that our interests are not merely selfish, that we are not alone in the dark.

In any ecosystem, different specialists fill different niches, and you can’t have a vibrant ecosystem without all of them. For projects like these, the place where the reverse engineers finish is where the mod tool developers take over; where the mod toolers finish is where the artists and game designers take over; where the artists finish, the fans and beta testers take over. Some fans might even try their hand at helping with one of the other parts, and learn how to become good at it, and now you’ve got a pretty good stew going.

LLMs poison the entire ocean, kill all the coral and destroy all the ecosystems. This is true in RE, but it is also true in OSS. If you try to do something human, the moment it becomes interesting to someone with tokens for the yes-sir machine, they will steal all that momentum for themselves. Contributing to and actually using the human version, then, becomes something one would only do out of principle. That’s a very shallow pool to try to survive in compared to an entire ocean.

> That claim runs contrary to basically everything we know about human psychology

Here are three studies that show no or inverse correlation between simulated media violence and actual criminal violence:

1. “Results suggest that societal consumption of media violence is not predictive of increased societal violence rates.”[0]

2. “… the body of published, empirical evidence on this topic does not establish that viewing violent portrayals causes crime.”[1]

3. “We find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies. … The substitution away from more dangerous activities in the field can explain the differences with the laboratory findings.”[2]

What is the evidentiary basis for your opposing claim? Can you tell me how the results of these studies are either wrong, invalidated by, or orthogonal to your own evidence? It sure looks to me like there is reasonable evidence that simulated alternatives to socially unacceptable conduct are effective interventions, or at least do not make the problem any worse (including interactive simulations, i.e. video games).

[0] https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12129

[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2003.10.001

[2] https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2009.124.2.677

> Nah, I don't buy for a second the reason is economic.

Mass Mutual, 2024: Of those surveyed who plan to remain child free, 43% cited “inability to afford children”[0].

Pew, 2024: Of those who feel it is unlikely that they will have children, 41% of people under 40 cited “can’t afford it” as a reason they are not having children, versus only 22% for those 40+[1].

Morning Consult, 2020: 41% of adults without children cite “it’s too expensive to raise children” as a reason; 24% say it is a “major reason”.[2]

BadCredit.org, 2024: 86% of adults who have delayed having children did so for financial reasons[3].

The Morning Consult survey may be particularly useful if you want to look at just one, because it has more granular age cohort breakdowns which show a clear trend for younger people not having children for financial reasons.

[0] https://www.massmutual.com/global/media/shared/doc/q3_2024_m...

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/reasons...

[2] https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2020/09/2806512...

[3] https://www.badcredit.org/studies/plans-to-have-children-in-...

> There are billion-dollar companies with teams of advanced psychologists crafting the most addictive experience possible … It's industrialized and predatory.

Sorry, I thought this was a discussion about gambling, not Facebook and TikTok and YouTube and Whatnot and OpenAI and EA and Roblox and every other company that invents a problem (oh no, your hair isn’t shiny!) and uses psychological manipulation to sell you a solution. :-)

Jokes aside, the fact that this sort of predatory behaviour is showing up in multiple industries with broadly similar characteristics (giant corporations with immense wealth concentrations who are not part of the communities they serve and whose only interest is in sucking up all the money) suggests that there are some deeper problems here, and that focusing on the gambling industry is focusing on a red herring (or perhaps the most obvious canary to date, to stick with bird metaphors).

> Saying it's only about mental health and despair is framing it as an individual failing

Not at all! Despair is the outcome of a broken system.

> Just use a magnetic hard disk and your data will be fine for many decades if not centuries.

A few months ago I needed to pull from an offline backup. The disk, which used CMR and was purchased new from an actual computer supply company (i.e. not Amazon), was burnt in for about 72 hours before it was loaded up with data and shoved in a padded box. Ten years later, the drive was pulled, and there were so many media surface errors that most of the data was unrecoverable. (I haven’t bothered opening the drive to see if there is some obvious sign of what exactly failed.)

In my case the backups were created in multiples using two different brands for exactly this reason, and the second copy was fine. But I wouldn’t say it’s the case a single magnetic disk can take the place of BD.

Mechanical disks are also getting expensive. The disk purchased to replace the failed backup was being sold at three times its original release MSRP. Some of this is due to the AI hysteria but some of it is also that the market is shrinking and becoming K-shaped.

There is a huge difference between a clearly identifiable, robots.txt-respecting, largely symbiotic search engine spider versus this new AI-driven casual sociopathy of firing shotguns of deliberately masked bots at sites in ways which benefit no one except for, maybe, the bot-owner.

I agree with you, though, that the future has almost certainly already been decided, and see the eventual outcome of all this selfishness to be mandatory device attestation to access most services on the internet—which will of course never be allowed on any open platform. AI engineers who believed in freedom to compute (or just individual freedom more generally) have committed perhaps the greatest self-own in the history of our species to date.

From [0]:

> The funny thing about scoring systems is they are kind of little dictators. They tell you what you’re supposed to want and value. And that’s the weird thing. Scoring systems are little definitions of success and failure. I think one of the biggest differences is that, in games, those definitions are temporary and playful and under your control. And if you don’t like it, you can throw it away and you never have to play again. And in institutions, they’re authoritarian. […] After a period of time, [metrics] seem to drain what’s genuinely valuable from the system because they point people at something that’s very easily and mechanically checkable and measurable.

[0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/673-the-score/transcr...

Oh, I understand what you are saying now. Thank you for clarifying! I agree that executives these days do seem to persist in operating according to the shareholder value myth, despite it being a myth, and despite a bunch of them seemingly admitting to knowing better in 2019[0].

That false pledge certainly suggests that rather than being controlled by the dogma, they perpetuate it so workers and citizens accept turpitude as inevitable and necessary. The carrot is the stock option; the stick is the myth that everyone will get in big trouble if workers refuse to put shareholder wealth first.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Roundtable#2019_corpo...

So your contention is that a Cornell corporate & business law professor wrote and published a book and ignored all of the de facto case law that disproved their thesis? If so, do you have a rebuttal of the thesis by another subject matter expert that you can offer as a citation?

> Willingly getting sued by hostile shareholders is in itself not acting in the best interest of shareholders

Really? So if I am a hostile shareholder demanding massive workforce reductions so I can get a $1 dividend today, even though this action will make it impossible for anyone to get a $10 dividend tomorrow, it is in the best interest of shareholders for the company to capitulate to my demand? What if other shareholders are employees? Whose best interests are served then?

As far as I am aware, the answer to your question is ‘no’[0].

> Contrary to what many believe, U.S. corporate law does not impose any enforceable legal duty on corporate directors or executives of public corporations to maximize profits or share price. The economic case for shareholder-value maximization similarly rests on incorrect factual claims about the structure of corporations, including the mistaken claims that shareholders “own” corporations, that they have the only residual claim on the firm’s profits, and that they are principals who hire and control directors to act as their agents.

[0] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

> I can not however change American society, our economic structure, or political dysfunction single handedly, can you?

Luckily this is only about fixing health care, so much easier. ;-) And, no, neither of us can single-handedly fix the more proximal causes of the problem, but you and me and around 268 of our best friends could.

I have no crystal ball and I am no genius. All I know is that an LLM will not make the inpatient beds come back once a hospital has been gutted by PE. It will not make the drugs suddenly affordable for the patient who needs them. It will not fix the terror and suffering caused by the system. It will not offer a genuine human connection. But it might give ammunition to the next guy who wants to “save money” by defunding 988, or discourage the next generation of mental health providers from choosing this as a discipline at all.

Obviously something must be done. But could the effort you spend on developing another hack atop the broken system instead be spent on getting the right people into the right places to fix the right problems? At the least, I’d ask “what would cause me to change my mind about this?”, and then work to make sure that there’s no way that thing could be true.

Thank you for the conversation, I appreciate it.

> I think the ethics of allowing people to suffer due to economics while ignoring a technology that can help them is worse, no? Telling them to seek a health professional when none are available is worse ?

Not necessarily. Half-measures—especially those that try to offer technological solutions to social problems—allow the actual root problems to remain unaddressed, fester, and grow. The ACA was a hack for a failing system, and then when that quit working, more hacks were added on top, and on and on. LLMs are just another hack that let the can get kicked down the road once more.

If and until actual meaningful health care system reforms happen, the rich will continue getting their $63,000 14-day concierge service from Mass General Brigham whenever they feel blue, and the rest of us will end up getting Doctor Amazon telling us to practice deep breathing and buy some supplements.

> I would replace the start menu with a Raycast clone. Most people want to open files, ask a question or run an app they know the name of, not scroll a list of things they might never use. If you add in semantic search users don't even need to know the app name.

So I’m looking at the Raycast web site, and aside from the UI being a little different, Raycast seems like it is itself a clone of the already long-existing KDE Plasma start menu (Kickoff) and KRunner? I guess the only thing missing from the KDE one is “AI”. Is there something I am missing about how Raycast is some innovation not already realised in the Linux desktop?

> If we can't do full extendable tags then at least add user defined groups/tags like Work and Games and Photos to make finding things easier. People remember what a file is better than where it's stored.

Extended attributes[0] already exist if you want. But, as the linked wiki page indicates, filesystem attributes are fragile. And what is the tangible benefit? In practice, users can already just dump all their files into a random directory and use Baloo or whatever. Which is probably better anyway since it’s easier to have a D-Bus API with multiple user-space implementations than having to wipe and reformat to use a different filesystem if you have some problem with it.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Extended_attributes

The additional reporting at [0] about his alleged behaviour in internal channels along with his public posts on social media really reinforces this same feeling for me:

> “oh, since I’m a pirate now, I fucking curse. after 42 years of never uttering a curse word, it’s kinda fucking fun. if this is a HR problem @caron please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with @Mark Davies.” […] Mullenweg also posted that the Automattic Slack “smells funny, like turncoats” and said he was going to hang out in the WordPress.org Slack instead.

Good luck to everyone in the blast radius.

[0] https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-swears-for-th...

> Hey gang

“How do you do, fellow kids?”

> After thinking about it

Just say the thing.

> kinds of outcomes

What outcomes specifically?

> nipped in the bud

“stop”

> I suggest this probably happened because

“I think”

> ball dropped

“failure”

> must be the responsibility at the VP/Executive

What does this mean? Fire the VPs who failed to do their jobs? Say what you mean.

> ensuring smooth handoff

“doing their jobs”

> rethink and extend

“fix”

> engender a culture of design

This is a meaningless phrase.

> different kind of thinking

What kind of thinking?

> or a process to be fixed

Processes are how things get done! If programmers push garbage into the list of installed applications, that’s a process failure. If a product team makes a download available but it can’t be found on the main web site’s list of downloads, that’s a process failure. When things get done wrong it’s definitionally a process failure. Process also doesn’t flow from culture, they each exert influence on the other. Bad process will lead to bad culture as much as bad culture will lead to bad process.

I will reiterate what a sibling commenter already said: Nothing about this mealy mouthed corporate jargon liberally drizzled in passive voice comes across as candid. Effective communication does not look like this. Effective communication is assertive. It offers direct actionable advice, or asks direct questions which result in actionable answers.

Short of blindly outsourcing the work to an LLM and checking to see if its hallucinated problems are actually problems[0], how can more laymen (without the ability to run replication studies, and without degrees in statistics) learn to more easily identify questionable/potentially fraudulent research like this?

This is a question that has been really bothering me for a while. I have a short list of things I’ve learnt to check, but it’s all stuff I’ve picked up in a very ad hoc way (reading and listening to these kinds of critical analyses, mostly). For example, until now, I wouldn’t think about implausibly large Cohen’s d, despite this seeming like an easily generalisable rule that anyone could eyeball. But without being told, and without the reference points given in the article, I wouldn’t have a clue. And I would like to have more of a clue. And I would like other people to have more of a clue. How?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49484925

I don’t agree with the parent that the solution for SEO spam is paying for the search engine (I think there are other good reasons to do this though), especially since people have been doing things like naming their company “AAA Auto Repair” to be first in the phone book since before computers ever existed. But the person you originally replied to does have a point in blaming Google for the problem. Most SEO spam sites make their money from ads, and Google are the ones who run the ad network, which means Google are the ones funding them and creating an incentive for them to exist.

> Finally, anonymity didn't exist for my grandparents.

Your grandparents could walk to the next town over and give themselves a different name and nobody would ever know who they were. They could get a job, be paid in cash, and deposit that money in a bank account with no KYC. They could drop a letter in a public mailbox without a return address, or put up posters at night, or make phone calls from public telephones. Nobody would know who did it, and there would be no surveillance footage to review after the fact, no digital footprint to trace. They could write a letter to their local newspaper to be printed with a fake name, or publish a book or story or magazine under an assumed identity. There were no ALPRs, no automated facial recognition, no built-in vehicle telematics, no drones, no smartphones to track anyone’s movement, no doorbell cameras on every block, no video tapes, no serial numbers hidden in the printouts from copy machines, no DNA analysis, no databases instantly searchable with the click of a button.

Feel free to make a value judgement about whether what we have now is better or worse than the past, if you want, but don’t invent history to rationalise it. The internet did not invent anonymity. It used to be the default.

Man, this sucks. I doubt there’s anything that I can say to get people to stop doing things like this, but the eventual outcome here isn’t going to be freedom for you to scrape sites that are trying to avoid being DDoSed by bots, but instead that we all end up in a world where device attestation is required to do practically anything online. And for what?

> There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.

I will never forget Ruchi Sanghvi’s remarks at the Female Founders Conference talk in 2015[0]:

> It [the News Feed] became this virtuous cycle that we all dream of: consumption and production that just kept on giving. […] Even though everyone said they hated it, engagement had doubled.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01FjJyBAOUE#t=6m29s