For me it's funny to see the discussion is completely black-white, like everyone is hooked.
I have 3 kids, 2 use their phones like half an hour at a time, the other is completely hooked, hours and hours. If I don't intervene he doesn't dress in the morning, and continues until he really can't keep his eyes open anymore somewhere around 3am.
For him I use the parental control on my router. All his devices have time limited wifi, and he has no data in his phone plan. Since I've done this he goes outside more, and has developed other interests. Today he actually prepared lunch for us, a 14 year old boy!
My point is, I think it's better to help your kids use their phones moderately instead of completely blocking. I once heard from an alcoholic who always keeps beer in his fridge. Not to drink it, but to be sure you learn to deal with this shit, and wherever the beer is, you can manage not taking it if you don't want it.
I find the black and white thinking scary and I see as a result of social media. Nowadays you even have to argue for the possibility of nuance because everyone immediately jumps to "for or against" mode.
I strongly believe humanity needs to find ways to slow down, but the prevailing culture is for everything to go faster and faster, which doesn't leave room for nuance and non-emotional reasoning.
I have to say that I don't believe in most people's ability to teach their children critical thinking, compassion, nuance, etc. Most people barely manage to feed their kids and not mess them up too badly on the emotional side.
Former alcoholic, I got similar advice early on. It was life changing.
Blocking social media is no different from existing laws for cigarettes, alcohol and various other substances. Nothing wrong with using them, but we do restrict self-serve access for developing minds.
Sure, kids will find a way. That said, like a glass of wine at dinner, parents are free to share their social media experiences with their kids; safely, supervised, limited.
Don't know if TikTok is the problem, a generation ago (some) kids mindlessly watched cartoons for hours a day.
I think this is mostly about learning to think and develop grit.
As a kid when I wanted to play a game I had to learn dos commands, know how to troubleshoot a non functioning sounds blaster etc. Sometimes took me days to fix.
Doing this develops understanding of a domain, problem-solving skills and grit.
My kid just opens steam and everything works. Any question he has he asks AI. I am really curious what effect this will have on this generation. It is tempting to quickly say "they will be brain dead zombies" but that seems too simplistic.
In my student years I used DC++ just to watch free movies. With the rise of streaming I kind of forgot about it, until I got annoyed.
I don't like the Spotify. Most songs I like are available, but the 'playlist' experience is terrible. A lot of songs are actually part of an album. "Is an album like a playlist on a disk?" my kid asked. No it's not, a playlist is a randomly assembled list of songs, but an album are songs who belong together, they are the album.
And video streaming is the opposite. The experience is nice, but there is so much missing even if you have multiple streaming subscriptions.
Besides convenience there is politics, what if Trump wants a list of everyone who thumbed up 'The White House Effect' on Netflix?
So, after many years I took an old Raspberry 3 and started torrenting again. To my surprise piratebay is still active (although my old account doesn't work anymore, no clue how to provide new content).
I'm really happy, the Raspberry has a Samba fileshare. Just download the VLC app on your smart tv and you can stream anything you like.
I know there are more advanced solutions to torrenting, but I like this simple approach, and it makes me completely independent. Let's start sharing great content again!
I was pulled back into it after a work colleague showed me a Netflix-like website that seems to have all the films ever made. Apparently there's several of those, they're just invisible to Google.
In Germany we can't really torrent from home, so those sites are very widespread. People just watch stuff at work during lunch, after hours when waiting for a colleague to finish, etc...
I'm not gonna pay for Amazon because it's Amazon, or Disney because it's Disney. And I'm about to kill my Netflix, since it's also complains about Apple Private Relay which I'm not gonna turn off as much as I also hate Apple.
Funny enough, even the CTO of a past company I worked was back into piracy, even after his company had a successful exit. People are just tired of those services, period.
$100 billion, what a number. It makes me a bit cynical. The amount of useful developments you could finance in either clean energy, education, nature preservation, medicine, anything.
But no, let's build us a slightly better code generator.
The article states "When that same data is transformed into a knowledge graph"
This is a non-trivial exercise. How does one transform knowledge into a knowledge graph using RDF?
RFD is extremely flexible and can represent any data and that's exactly it's great weakness. It's such a free format there is no consensus on how to represent knowledge. Many academic panels exist to set standards, but many of these efforts end up in github as unmaintained repositories.
The most important thing about RDF is that everyone needs to agree on the same modeling standards and use the same ontologies. This is very hard to achieve, and room for a lot of discussion, which makes it 'academic' :)
For more background on the development read Idea Man from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, a really interesting read (at least the first half of the book, later chapters are describing how he spends his money being a billionaire)
Intel provides processors for many vendors and many OS. Changing to a new architecture is almost impossible to coordinate. Apple doesn't have this problem.
Actually in de 90s Intel and Microsoft wanted to move to a RISC architecture but Compaq forced them to stay on x86.
Apple: m68k -> PowerPC (32), OS 9 -> OS X, PowerPC (32, 64) -> x86 (32, 64) -> Arm. They've dragged giants like Adobe (kicking and screaming) thru most stages.
Windows NT has always been portable, but didn't provide any serious compat with Windows 4.x until 5.0. At that time, AMD released their 64-bit extension to x86. Intel wanted to build their own, Microsoft went "haha no". By that time they've been dictating the CPU architecture.
I guess at that point there was very little reason to switch. Intel's Core happened; Apple even went to Intel to ask for a CPU for what would become the iPhone - but Intel wasn't interested.
Perhaps I'm oversimplifying, but I think it's complacency. Apple remained agile.
Chrome has it, but it's hidden in menus. Android has it as an OS feature with a really unintuitive interface. It also fails the first time you try to read any page, but works the second time... It's clearly not something they want you to use.
True. Firefox's reader view is a one-click button in the address bar, whereas Chrome's is buried in the application menu > More tools > Reading mode. And even then, Chrome only shows the reader view in a narrow sidebar, leaving the messy page open.
That’s a well-remembered video, but I don’t really think it fits with the original comment. What we’re seeing is more akin to already having the plane flying (badly, still crashing frequently and landing in the wrong country) and instead of making it more reliable, everyone is trying different wheels and paint colours.
We’re not really seeing any significant development with this. What LLMs need most desperately (and are far from getting) is reliability and not being convincing liars. Being able to query existing server models from your oven timer is a cool gimmick but not really transformative or advancing anything.
It’s like a reverse JFK Space Effort speech: “We choose to indiscriminately throw at the wall every single LLM-adjacent idea we can think of. Not because it is useful, but because it is easy and potentially profitable”.
Well people differ. Look around at your colleagues, some have dry eyes and lower back pain from working hours without interruption on a boring task.
Others, like myself, are easily distracted, quickly bored and only work hard with a specific goal in mind. Working on smaller tasks makes it easier to not be distracted. I feel this is more important for people with ADHD.
But you are right, in the end it is useful strategy for everyone :)
I have 3 kids, 2 use their phones like half an hour at a time, the other is completely hooked, hours and hours. If I don't intervene he doesn't dress in the morning, and continues until he really can't keep his eyes open anymore somewhere around 3am.
For him I use the parental control on my router. All his devices have time limited wifi, and he has no data in his phone plan. Since I've done this he goes outside more, and has developed other interests. Today he actually prepared lunch for us, a 14 year old boy!
My point is, I think it's better to help your kids use their phones moderately instead of completely blocking. I once heard from an alcoholic who always keeps beer in his fridge. Not to drink it, but to be sure you learn to deal with this shit, and wherever the beer is, you can manage not taking it if you don't want it.