1,103 karma · joined July 25, 2012
twitter: @jakesimon email: jacob.anthony.simon@gmail.com
* the number of people creating software
* the number of people who are educated in creating software
* the number of people who are paid to create software
Jokes aside, I think you’re valid but if you take the macro view, it’s clear that there are now more people doing some form of engineering, the same way the digital camera led to more people doing photography, and so on.
I think we can make separate distinctions around the act of consuming vs creating—a lot of vibe coding is beginning to look more like “consuming software” but that’s not what I was intending to describe here.
I think it probably just boils down to whether the word is functionally necessary to understand the meaning of the sentence and how the language evolved...
For example, in French you don't usually pronounce the "s" at the end of a plural noun and lots of singular nouns end in "s", so the articles become necessary for determining if you mean plural or singular. In English you pronounce the "s" clearly and very few singular words end in "s", so you just don't need the article to distinguish anything, it becomes functionally redundant.
There’s also a reporting bias here I’m sure - if Meta is better at reporting these cases then they will become a larger percentage, etc.
2. Grassroots marketing about potential risks of social media
3. Maybe better parental consent via existing regulations like COPPA
Like to me “online shopping addiction” is probably a more realistic and analogous problem to gambling, so maybe online advertising to teens could be regulated, but the jump to child abuse is so far outside Meta’s actual business model that it feels over-reaching to go there.
For example, it says "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms." But the source it cites actually says 79% of online social media cases occurred on Facebook and Instagram. So this stat is probably just a reflection of Meta's market share of social media.
I think I disagree with this step. Facebook causes a kind of indirect harm here, and is used willingly by teens and parents, who could simply choose not to use it. That's different from, say, a factory polluting a river with toxic chemicals, which needs government regulation. Basically "negative externalities".
But after playing around with their theme builder[1], I think there's real value here - you can quickly spin up a custom-ish set of Tailwind components. I'd rather it output an actual component library though more like shadcn.
Didn’t realize how widespread that type of spam was until now. Why hasn’t someone implemented better spam detection at Apple like we have for email? It would be nice if they could classify texts as spam, promotions, etc and organize them the way Gmail does.
To be clear, it's not to say that AI itself is a scam, but that the finance departments are kind of misrepresenting the revenue on their balance sheets and that may be security fraud.