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While I don't doubt that social media can drive some of these mental health issues, I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process.

I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular). Most of the little extra time I had remaining would go to additional extracurricular activities that had the potential to enhance my college application. I only really got to socialize by talking to my teammates on our runs.

As a result, even when I had extra time I was so burnt out and stressed from everything else that I felt consumed by anxiety. I would sometimes start crying spontaneously after I got home in the evenings. Things only started getting better when I started seeing a therapist and worked on my issues over the second half of my high school experience. Not everyone is so lucky.

If we want a healthier society, we need to take a step back and give teenagers a chance to actually live life. Sure, less social media would help, but it won't solve the root of the problem. Today's society demands so much from adolescents for so little in return. It's very easy to think that you're a failure if you don't know exactly who you are and what you want to be at age 17, and that's not a fair expectation for any 17 year old. We shouldn't be surprised that many break under this kind of pressure.

There's a 19th century German philosopher that would agree with you (as would I): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation#...

ChatGPT also doesn't really understand the recipes it's giving you, so I don't know if I would trust it to make something tasty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT8KoWpqUgg

I mean, California already has both a massive homelessness problem and a major housing shortage. The prices from the latter have driven a ton of migration out of the state. Is your solution to just do nothing?

The best way to become a tech entrepreneur is either to start incredibly wealthy, or build a product yourself. I wince at the number of non-technical folks that have deluded themselves into thinking that they can "do the business side of things" when in reality that means bringing nothing to the table, save their money.

OP's case is a warning to these folks. He actually brought negative, not zero, value to his startup because he grossly misread the market he was trying to enter. I worked at TripAdvisor for a while on their tours product, and even years ago we were already doing what OP was talking about.

I think these startups look at aging like a disease and want to treat it in a way that doesn't necessarily require an incredible amount of effort from people. Somewhere between nothing and spending all your time just to extend your time.

Nice read, and well argued.

Tangentially related: does anyone else feel like ChatGPT's default voice is just... super bland? I read the "op-ed" the author linked in the article (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/12/9/porios-chatgpt-...), and the writing style lacks the kind of variation in structure (or content, really) that keeps opinion pieces interesting. It feels like a polished middle-school essay.

Neat idea for a project, and kudos for getting everything up and running!

Tried it once or twice, and the results are very hit or miss. "70s african funk without synthesizers" includes some stuff that matches the prompt, like Ofo the Black Company, but also includes more misses than hits: Herbie Hancock, War, Prince, the Ohio Players, and Sly & The Family Stone are all American. Seems like it latched onto "funk" and really went for it there. It's fun to give the bot a more vague prompt and see where it goes though.

Ultimately, my favorite musical "discoveries" have come from friend recommendations, or editorials like the Quietus or Bandcamp Daily. There's something about the social aspect of a personal recommendation that appeals to me, even if it's not as optimized as an algorithmic one. Many people don't have that sort of relationship with music though, so I could see something like this being pretty useful.

Another thing to consider: head over to your local Goodwill and snag a cheap-ass CD player and a few CDs. I don't know your experience with audio but I used a similar set of speakers for years to stream music through Spotify, and the difference in audio quality between streaming and a CD blew me away. HQ audio files that you have locally will work just as well.

Either way, enjoy the new setup!

Essays might not be the best way to assess reading and writing skill, but this article's reasoning leaves a lot to be desired. The author seems to value an essay insofar as it demonstrates reading comprehension, and not as a vehicle for teaching writing skill. Students need to understand what they are reading to write an essay, but the writing itself is another skill entirely that the author here doesn't seem to address. I read a lot of my peers' works in college and came to the conclusion we need to encourage more writing skill, not less.

> Students get more points for good typing and clear sentence structure than they did for actually thinking deeply, questioning the status quo or changing their minds.

I hear this all the time from engineering types. Writing well means finding a clear, compelling way to communicate your ideas. Sure, we should try to avoid hiding bullshit behind a façade of flowery prose, but a great idea communicated poorly is useless.

> If you grew up in a household with verbally agile family members, you probably did way better on essays than your peers, but not due to much effort on your own.

And? If you grew up in a household with engineers, you probably did better at math. I don't get how this affects any one given assignment type over another.

> it'd be nice to have better treatment options.

No disagreement with you there. By "perfect screening" I assumed a "perfect" patient set where problems brought up at annual checkups lead directly to tests which lead to detection, but perhaps that's a naïve assumption to the point of uselessness.

Still, I think it's easy to write off screening advances as skewing the data set vs. actually saving lives, when they do in fact help people that otherwise could have been much sicker.

I get what you're saying: it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison since better screening means we're comparing cancers of different severities. I don't necessarily see that as a problem, though, since a lot of these earlier screened cancers would have become more advanced cancers down the line. If our testing were perfect such that we could detect all cancers early enough to stop, that would functionally be a cure, no?

I would only prompt someone for their gender when it's really necessary, and then use the reasoning for that necessity to form the prompt. For instance, how we ask someone to selecting a character trait in a video game should probably differ from how we ask them a similar question on a medical form. Gender can surprisingly tricky, and I don't believe there's a good "one size fits all" approach to this question.

In the broadest sense it's almost always better to attract customers by simply building a better product rather than some form of trickery, like making subscriptions unreasonably hard to cancel. Sure you might leave a little bit of money on the table in the short term, but as the author mentions it's hard to quantify the long term cost of being a bit of an asshole.

The prevalence of these sorts of tactics demonstrates the extent to which we've MBA-ified the tech economy away from what people used to like about it.

It's 6500 hours since the start of the channel in 2017, not just in a single year.

"Interestingly, we recorded inflammatory foci predominantly in the right heart, which may suggest a gradual blood-stream derived dilution effect and based on this finding it is at least tempting to speculate that inadvertent intravascular vaccine injection may be contributive."

Does this indicate that the authors believe aspirating the vaccine during administration would reduce the risk of myocarditis? I don't have a biological background so I would be interested in hearing someone else's take on this but that sentence seems to indicate that the authors think ensuring correct administration would lower the risk of post-vaccine complications (which from what I've seen, remains low but non-zero). If that's the case, then perhaps the issue isn't as much with the vaccine itself as how it's being administered.

Supercars absolutely depreciate in value minus select limited releases (which holds true for non-supercars as well). Look at standard Lamborghini Gallardos, Ferrari F430s/458s, and Aston Martins of any model and you will see that some of these cars are worth less than half what their original buyers paid for them.

True, but it never really seemed to me like the two were competing with each other, except maybe in the case of something intentionally gory like Mortal Kombat. The detachment from physical injury makes it feel less like a fight and more like a non-combat sport. Could just be my bias showing since I've never liked UFC.

You've got some great points here about companies trying to bootstrap esports out of nothing. Ideally, the activeness of the community would determine what games can support professional play; bottom up, not top down.

As for pacing and viewing experience: I'd whittle your list down even further if we're talking about the ideal esport. Most MOBAs are way too visually complex for non-players to understand what's going on. I always thought that fighting games made the most sense for a mass audience. Even if you don't have intimate knowledge of how a particular fighting game works, it's easy for anyone to understand what's going on and parse visually. You can see the entirety of the action instead of having to jump around from player to player. And some fighting games (looking at Smash Bros, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter) are wildly popular already.

Note that the author of this thread is comparing to European-style trucks. I am not a trucker so I would be interested to hear whether American-style trucks have similar flaws, or whether these are specific to the Tesla Semi.

So you shouldn't have empathy because it's a waste of time and emotion? That seems like a depressingly selfish outlook on life. I understand not trying to get up in arms about everything but to just ignore it...

Another good point. Might be fine for a private seller but I could see how it would be difficult for dealers.

I mean, I'm not exactly advocating for everything to be neon yellow and pink everywhere all the time. I'd just like something to break up the colorless-with-accent (usually something desaturated as well!) monotony that's everywhere, lest the whole world end up looking like Mirror's Edge. It's a balance.

Where the pendulum lies might just be a matter of fashion.

You make a really good point, and while the color-price discrepancy remained true in my story for the 'stock' cost yellow and red vs. neutrals, my sample size is 1 model of car so it's hard to say how true that stays across the board.

Is it really though? Logic would dictate that while the market for a non-neutral color might be smaller, supply would also be smaller which should cancel the demand side out.

Anecdotally, and this might be a poor example because it's an enthusiast car and not something that most people are going to be encountering, I was looking at used Porsche Boxsters earlier this year, and the more interesting colors actually commanded a premium over silver or black cars because they're much harder to find. I do wonder how that translates to something more practical, but I have a hard time believing that it would negatively impact resale value to a huge extent.

I know rationally why a manufacturer would want to limit their color palette. I just wonder why people were more willing to pay for color in, say, the 80s than they are now. Look at the paint colors available for an early 80's Corolla [1] compared to the same car today [2]. Perhaps I'm overanalyzing but I think it's a symptom of an increasing tendency to emphasize things like insurance premiums and resale value over any kind of humanity or personality.

We see the same thing in modern interior design. Just like many of today's cars it's black, white, and grey. If you're lucky, maybe a neutral color or two. Inoffensive, but soulless.

[1]: http://importarchive.com/toyota/corolla/1980-1983/paint

[2]: http://importarchive.com/toyota/corolla/2014-2018/paint

Don't mind the "wet putty" look specifically as much as I hate the related lack of color available on cars these days. What happened that made everyone want bland, boring colors on everything? Liven up, people!

I mean, decentralized app stores have existed for decades without blockchain. I don't see how its introduction helps anything.

> If Cash App charged a fee to transfer money, Apple would claim their cut of that fee.

They do, at least for rapid transfers to banks. It was perhaps not the greatest analogy on my part since transfers within the app are free, but I fully understand what Apple is claiming here. You don't see them claiming Cash App's transfer fees, or bank fees, or other similar charges.

Honestly, I hate web3 but this move is absolutely bullshit on Apple's part. I think it goes a step further than just "30% of IAP money" since there's no download or product that the user is really buying. It would be like Apple demanding fees for Cash App or some other related service.