seltzerboys

i think 'shake things up' is a doing a lot of work to minimize the impact this tool will have for this demographic in particular. especially for non-STEM college students, so in theory students who read/write a lot and therefore are probably sick of reading a lot of mid-tier, averaging slop.

disagreeing with something is part of discourse? booing is a practice as old as the practice of giving lectures in front of an audience. there's nothing 'newfangled' or 'woke' or 'scary' about booing something.

we're all just gonna skim over the fact that this blog is blatantly written by AI? is HN cool with that now

my best friend is a high school english teacher. he said the worst part is kids keep hearing 'it's inevitable,' the complete integration of AI into every facet of life and thinking is gonna happen no matter what anyone says or does. this is the most manipulative and untrue thing anyone could say to a kid scared of a certain kind of future. its it's own kind of misinformation to tell people that something that will take an exorbitant amount of man power, coordination, resourcing, and experimentation to execute on is 'inevitable.'

he also said the people who argue it's inevitable are always the ones with a profit motive lol, which i disagree with only because in tech many people who have an anti-profit motive also say it's inevitable.

i disagree that people would prefer a fascist dictatorship if it meant social media was done away with. i haven't ever seen that opinion anywhere on the entire internet.

however i agree that the CIA and other governments are running influence campaigns on social media. i think that's been proven actually.

the answer, as always, isn't 'destroy decentralized communication' or public discourse online. it's to have tighter regulations on how algorithms are configured. what's pushed vs. what's suppressed because it's obviously intentionally inflammatory/trolling.

this is an issue requiring extreme nuance. but to say that being worried about how social media today affects society is like 'the satanic panic' is kind of absurd.

if you strip social media down to its essential parts it's clear that it can easily cause huge problems for a society. it's basically a never-ending 24/7 stream of information amplified out to anywhere in the world that is:

1. insanely low-effort to post 2. requires NO discernment, proof, credibility, or peer review to post 3. 'viral' in that opinions circulate because other people have interacted with them, not because they are right or meaningful. so bad news, good news, real news and fake news all travel at the same speed, lowering discernment even further 4. echo chambers are baked into the form. people are more likely to interact with content they agree with vs. content that is true or impactful. this creates circles of people agreeing with each other on increasingly niched-down topics.

it is extremely different from newspapers and television.

This article is awesome but it doesn't acknowledge that the problem has been maliciously manufactured by social media companies. they do not have incentive to curb the distortion of extremism and therefore any attempt to do so in a grassroots way will likely not be effective. then there's the bot problem but that is probably easier to address if we actually committed to doing so.

the idea that information can't cause harm is obviously absurd. third parties should not restrict free speech, but that's an extremely simplistic/optimistic view. everything is about trade offs, there is no perfect solution. the truth is probably closer to: exposing young children to disturbing imagery at a young age is not optimal for healthy development, but free speech is important to a functioning democracy.

reading this makes me want to describe the world in a more recklessly imaginative way. what a joy.

"What mattered wasn’t so much the image itself but how it moved. Its value lay in its circulation: whom you could shock, how fast the chat room would combust, how far something would travel before it came back to you like a bad penny."

also, for what it's worth: i did not have access to the early internet. strict parents & computer only available in 'the computer room' where my dad's desk was, so he was always right there. as a consequence, i can't 'handle' movies with graphic sexual assault scenes or similar. i like that about myself tho.

it really is amazing how tedious it still is to get information out of video. unless you want transcripts only, you basically still have to sit there and rewatch recordings to manually find what you need, get screenshots/thumbnails, etc. this is way overdue and huge if it really turns videos into queryable data you can just pull from any time.

Very into this.

I appreciate how you phrased this - I struggle most with 'mundane, daily, repetitive tasks.' Approaching them with intentionality and presence of mind seems good, if not difficult.

quick q: why decaf? have been considering cutting out caffeine for more sustainable/natural energy throughout the day vs. a huge burst in the morning, but haven't committed.

no personal projects in the morning is great advice.

one of my biggest traps right now is using the morning (when i have the most energy & feel most focused) to tinker with my own creative projects. i can look up and it's 2pm and i haven't applied to any jobs, reached out to my network, or worked on any interview take homes.

if i turn around and it's mid-afternoon before i start doing the stuff i need to do, this typically means the day is shot.

i quit my job at my last employer because the onboarding process was 3 solid weeks of day-long trainings

well if people choose not to read or engage with documentation, they're only hurting themselves. in theory, their work performance will suffer when compared w/ others. and if it doesn't, then they for some reason just don't need to engage with existing documentation, so high-reading wouldn't really matter. the consequences of not reading documentation will either become clear or it won't

hiring is probably the main thing. giving some kind of documentation exercise to all prospective devs seems to alleviate concerns about communication