All to prevent my siblings and I from wasting our summers on Runescape or Miniclip or something. Looking back, the hours we were playing each day is nothing compared to the hours he spends scrolling through crap these days. My dad worked in such an intellectually stimulating job before, so it's baffling to see that he chooses to do this all day. I imagine most older parents are in the same boat these days. It has made me hate social media, YouTube, short videos, et al. even more
The richest, most powerful organizations are spending billions every month to make it more addictive, to reach more people.
Homebound and housewives used to watch hours of game shows and soap operas all day.
If a kid liked to read, some parents would tell them to "get your head out of that book and go outside."
It's just something to do to fill the boredom.
If you never practice making and having friends, how are you ever going to have them?
the real estate shortage is driving two effects; places not optimized for revenue are being priced out of existence, and workers need higher wages to pay housing costs which squeezes these places further and results in things like shorter operating hours even if full closure doesn't happen.
"Hey come over to my place" also works.
"Let's grab dinner."
If they weren't constantly driving themselves to distraction most people would be able to make at least 1 or 2 friends at work or from a shared hobby, based on the experience of all the decades prior.
The US not having "third spaces" went into the founding story of Starbucks. The big difference today is people not even having friends and no longer knowing how to even do so, thanks to the addiction machines. Why risk rejection when you can just go back to your scroll?
amongst the people I know, a fair amount are not able to willing or host events because they have roommates who they are not necessarily friends with; and amongst those lucky enough to live alone, new build apartment sizes have been shrinking.
This is old but even with the mall apocalypse, we haven’t had a reduction from 20+ sq ft per person to the 3-4 normal in Western Europe and Japan. https://www.businessinsider.com/retail-apocalypse-is-still-i...
I would actually say the (indoor) mall apocalypse is a contributing factor since for all their faults, malls were third places in a way that strip shopping centers are not.
At least for retail the problem is moreso that lenders and landlords are playing hot potato with inflated rent and extend and pretend; some(most?all?) commercial loans go into default if rent goes below a certain amount
It takes some... special mindset to be polite to not see it literally everywhere, the scale and intensity of it, the addiction of kids especially. They have no freakin' defenses and often didn't experience normal life, ever. Ask any child psychologist about their opinion of screens among kids before say 14, and even afterwards.
It can be fought, we are quite successful so far with our kids and we have quite a few parents around us with same mindset, but we have to lead by example.
Easiest is to unplug from active social cancers (fb, instagram, tiktok or whatever kids are addicted to these days). Ignore most of the news, read about topic from source far away from place/country affected. TV can serve some quality content but one has to do some effort, no ads. Computer games are a waste of time and life (I know, I've wasted half of my childhood with them, 100x that for any online gaming), if one is bored then get a sport, passion, read a book, force yourself into some social action, whatever is vastly better. Then comes along junk food, again parents lead by examples.
Life is freakin' short, its pretty sad view to waste it on all above in more than a minimal fashion. Its sort of life success in 'look I am not a homeless person or heroine addict', but just a good fat notch above that. Literally anybody can do better.
Thinking about it, my overall position is to maintain a balance between dopamine from long-term sources and short-term ones. I think long-running creative projects that make you think are generally good whether they are digital (see: 3D animators/artists) or physical - it's just personal preference which one you tend towards. The types of games I try to limit are those with temporary rounds/matches/etc... unlike a Minecraft world, there is no cumulative aspect, no long-term planning apart from your own increase in skill. Despite that, the short satisfaction from momentary successes in each game keep you playing.
I just hate seeing them in hands of kids who should get development pressures from anything but glowing interactive screens, and generally folks who form addictions very easily (I am simply on the opposite side for whatever reason, when comparing to many peers in various drugs but also general mental habits... but I feel if I fell for it hard enough my defenses would weaken across the board, probably permanently).
Is what I describe so unreachable for you that you make your words make sound... unkind?
I am also doing these passions while helping raising 2 small kids: hiking, sport climbing, via ferratas, skiing, ski touring, diving, and recently abandoned paragliding due to brushing death in pretty bad accident. Those take way more time and effort than coming here. I spend almost 0 time in front of TV, don't have consoles, play like 1 game per 2 years, offline and on desktop PC only (last one was Baldur's Gate 3).
I wonder if there's any statistics comparing deaths and injuries from drunk driving versus distracted driving over the past 20 years or so. Is it a comparable at all?
First, TVs were stationary. Unlike smartphones, you couldn't take them wherever you went. If you were wealthier, you could somewhat compensate for this by having multiple TVs, for example in the bedroom in addition to the living room. But whenever you stepped outside your house the TV did not come with you. Places like doctors offices or hotel lobbies might have them in waiting rooms but that was really it in terms of the average person's exposure.
Second, TV programming was not explicitly designed to be addictive. Sure, studios wanted people to watch their programs because that's how they got ad revenue, but they had neither sophisticated tools nor the methods to dial addictiveness to the max. They did not have algorithms, for example, to serve you personalized content based on your tastes and desires. You picked from a limited selection of what was available in that week's programming.
Third, TVs did not have built-in mechanisms to demand re-engagement when you had them turned off. No such thing as notifications. At best you had blurbs about what is next on the program, but those were both channel-specific and also required your TV to be on. So people were not constantly bombarded with micro dopamine hits like they are today.
I could go on, but yeah, your rebuttal does not stand up to critical scrutiny. What we have today is a global scale addiction. It is absolutely nothing like TVs or newspapers/books before them.
Whereas the plethora of web/apps can provide simulations for all those different circuits in your brain, as you move between them each satiating a different aspect of your personality. And then when you've got time to really "relax", you can still turn on TV in the background to be engaged in multiple low effort stimulations at once.
All three of which I have seen people walking on the sidewalk while reading, btw.
That's why me having a butter knife is of no concern, but they certainly won't give me the nuclear launch codes.
The quantity and availability of "visual entertainment" for me as a child of the 70s pales in comparison to what my young kids have available to them. As parents we're continuously fighting it, including shutting off the router at set times.
That's literally what an addiction is.
> people not knowing how to spend their free time in other ways
Are two indications how it is difficult to stop something.
Not touching alcohol for 12 hours a day does not mean you are not an alcoholic.
If someone stops drinking for a long enough period, with no urge to return to drinking, then yes, they aren't an alcoholic. You just made up a silly 12 hour window so you could beat a straw man to death.
When you are staring at a wall all day, you can probably think of a lot of other things you could do and did. When you stare at a wall all day, and think of nothing and enjoy it, then I would say you have mental problems. The problem isn't that you do something for a long time, the problem is that you can't think of something else or can't control you to do something else, even if you want.
But with targeted advertisement, it feels a lot more like they're trying to get inside your mind to steal your money.
And with content on social media, it feels specifically engineered to make your life as bad as possible. More fear, more anger, more racism, more sexism. Here's some big boobies, now look at this disgusting immigrant. Isnt Earth awful? Aren't these guys ruining everything?
It's just something to do to fill the boredom.
(That's to say: Just because something was mildly bad in the past doesn't mean that the current, somewhat similar, thing in the present isn't horrifically bad. The issues are orthogonal +- 5deg max)
Many places have “supervised consumption” sites or decriminalization now that has gone very poorly, I think in retrospect having opium dens for those who choose to live that way might have been a better alternative to the current state.
I am VERY online, but I don’t usual traditional social media. I mostly read Hackers News and a DC parenting forum which is pretty no-holds bar, but is a website out of the 90s so not really capable of infinite scroll or dark patterns (other than the addictive and open ended topics).
I also read a lot of news like NYT and watch TV like Apple TV, but it’s hardly the dopamine drip of TikTok or Instagram. Yet I am ashamed of my 8 hours of screen time despite my best efforts. I used to reach out to friends more but as I get older it feels intrusive and hard to make conversations.
There's just something about having a beautiful OLED screen, the tablet-like shape, touch interface, and access to all of human knowledge/news/entertainment. I remember when people used to have a tv on when they lounged around the house, or cooked, or cleaned. My parents even had a little special splash proof CRT TV in the kitchen.
The modern screens are just that, except also much more convenient and with million times more content, and personalized, and wireless ANC headphones if you like. This is it, this is peak human information environment. It's not a conspiracy of corporations.
Much like obesity is primarily driven by abundance of calories, another fight we won with our natural environment. The highly processed foods and marketing are just barely making a dent at the edge, and are largely a zero-sum game between food manufacturers.
I’ve had success consciously worsening my experience, doing stuff like reducing color intensity with accessibility options or using the web version of an app for added friction, which is ridiculous but here we are.
Reducing color intensity is a great idea to worsen the experience, I’ll give it a go. Yet first thing I do after wake up is checking Hacker News and the design is probably not at fault. Still some self improvement to do.
0 still security updated! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270108
But not only that, also my work iPhone got recently upgraded from an old SE with small screen and laggy performance to the new 16e, and I found myself more eager to check work emails, ms teams than ever before.
I don’t think that’s a good development, but at the end it’s my responsibility and my own decision on how I use those devices. That also means I will probably downgrade to a worse iPhone instead of getting the best available.
I know some people have gone back to carrying a digital pocket camera, but I haven’t really bought into the idea for convenience and because I think taking it out has different social implications.
It definitely does, but in my experience a standalone camera is usually better received than a phone.
I think it’s got to do with the implication of easy shareability. Pointing a phone at someone always brings to mind the idea that the photo can be sent anywhere within seconds. Are they going to post you on their instagram story? Are they going to send it to their friends and laugh about you?
The friction to sharing photos is so much higher with a standalone camera that I think a lot of people feel much more comfortable with one pointed at them.
Then again, that same friction quickly becomes a problem for the user - I know I’ve lost a lot of my photos just because I couldn’t be bothered to connect the camera, transfer the photos, organize them, back them up etc.
Selfies or phone pictures are quick and people mostly don’t react, but cameras make us pose, subconsciously. At least I feel a phone gets me more natural photos, that work better as memories of the moment.
The lack of instant online backup is also a good point, I don’t know if that’s on the table on newer models.
That's it in a nutshell, I think. We had television at home since I was maybe 10 years old but the content that would interest a kid was very neatly time-slotted to small segments of each day (with Sunday being essentially an entertainment desert to a kid).
So TV was boring most of the day so we went outside, or if Winter, found ways to amuse ourselves indoors. I drew pictures, played board games with my sister, wired up a circuit with my 65-in-1 electronics kit…
Whatever it was that made humans enjoy books, newspapers, magazines, movies, tv shows, written correspondence, phone calls, etc, is now available times a million, 24/7, in your pocket, essentially free (if you don’t count externalities ofc). Plus the ability to handle a huge number of admin and business tasks from anywhere. Not hard to see why it’s so addictive for almost everyone.
And I just checked their site, and what do you know... https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-inventors-kit-for-micropyt...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-rise-and-f...
"... Sodium cyanide can dissolve gold in water, but it is also a deadly poison. “Atomic” chemistry sets of the 1950s included radioactive uranium ore. Glassblowing kits, which taught a skill still important in today’s chemistry labs, came with a blowtorch."
It's hard to believe but initially the content was much thoughful, with actual cultural gems produced for it. Then that content got pushed further and further late at night and eventually disapeared. We can categorize that trend as some kind of "natural erosion" but that'd be ignoring the various forces that fought to change that medium, one of which may be lazy humans relinquishing their soul to the beautiful screen, but another sure one is profit seeking through selling advertisement.
Also, I remember a time when bringing a handheld video game at school would be terrible for a kid's social status. Now it's socially acceptable to spend time in video games.
I don't remember that time. Even the "jocks" loved Mattel Football. And what else were they going to do in school, pay attention to the teacher? ;-)
Ye Discovery channel etc used to be serious. By todays standard I guess MTV would be considered fancy.
Something we could not have imagined a few decades ago.
If you can’t install it because you’re using chrome, switch to a real browser :)
But yeah it's kind of delusional to put a blanket ban on code you could read yourself.
uBlock origin is 307k lines of code. Yes, you could read it all, but its an impractical task.
Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting uBO is untrustworthy, but just because a piece of software is open source doesn't mean it is practical for an individual to audit the code themselves.
How do you keep track of this? Yes you can read the diffs, but not really practical.
I'll just wait until Firefox ships with a secure sandbox for extensions.
I'm sure typing this comment and sending it over the internet involves billions of lines of code running on countless pieces of hardware. Of course there has to be some level of trust somewhere.
Who is getting obese from fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, and the like?
People will eat a whole bag of salted potato chips or a whole container of ice cream in a sitting, but who eats a whole bag of oranges in a sitting?
I suppose that for any given action, there's likely always someone who will do it, but in any case a bag of oranges has significantly different nutritional properties than a bag of chips. How many oranges are we talking about, and what size oranges?
I could too... if I wanted to. For me at least, oranges are not the type of food that inspires me to binge. Do you seriously not understand why people tend to binge on certain foods and not on others? In any case, 5 oranges is at most maybe 400 calories, very low fat and sodium.
> I'm not obese.
Which is my original point: "Who is getting obese from fresh fruit"
Compared to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we have a practically unlimited supply of fruit, but I don't think thats really the problem.
"Screen addiction is an apocalypse"
"Screen addiction is a genocide"
...
No, that's not possible. Your comment will be seen by a tiny minority of people on the internet and is a drop in the ocean. The impulse to persuade social change works in small groups, and the frustration you're feeling is completely feckless on the internet. (ie, if you were saying "can we stop [thing] in a small workplace you might actually have success. Out here on the internet this is really impossible, and is a mismatch between our intuitions and reality.)
/s
Fully agree with you comment. I am shocked that the hyperbole with the classic "greedy corporations are eating us alive" empty narrative got so many upvotes here
Sugar, anyone?
Yeah we know sugar is bad. The article's about screens. It's not really important whether sugar addiction or screen addiction is bigger. This isn't worth fighting over.
They can both be bad and you can post an article about sugar for talking about sugar.
> Screen addiction is a pandemic. The biggest one humanity has ever seen.
I disagree, sugar is bigger than screens.
And instead of complaining about my answering another comment, you can write an article about complaining.
But the copious amounts we're ingesting these days? It's actually terrible. A major contributor to the coronary disease epidemic.
Highly processed foods and fast food aren't just bad because of sugar. If you read the nutrition facts, they're extremely calorie dense and contain huge amounts of saturated fats.
Just swapping your sugar intake for steaks and cheeseburgers won't save you. It feels almost like one of those "get rich quick" schemes.
Doctors HATE this one trick! (Just don't eat sugar)
No, actually, you'll still be obese if you do that. You need to eat greens too, and live an active lifestyle, and limit your saturated fat intake, and eat less animal products.
We're not addicted to sugar, the "sugar cravings" are mostly to combos of carbs and fats.
Eating enough turns off my "sugar cravings". Eating lots of protein makes any craving for sugar disappear (I survived last Christmas by not eating any cakes, just lots of meat).
Glad it works for you, but that's not universal. I'm pretty much addicted to sugar, regardless of what else I eat. So I have to not buy it in the first place - that way it's just not available.
Grab a fistful of whatever candy you're thinking about when you say that and put it in your mouth. Then once you've done that, try doing the same with pure sugar. Tell me if you think you got different amounts of sugar in your mouth or not.
It's not the first time I hear this soundbite, and while it perhaps sounds cool as a TikTok comment, it really doesn't make much sense in reality.
Take pure sugar, add to hot water to make a thick syrup, add food colouring, cook at two hundred and something degrees. Hard candy.
Most other candy recipes are similar, and over 50% sugar by weight. Sugar is the main ingredient by weight after water of many drinks.
You're being deliberately obtuse if you continue to insist on comparing a bag of sugar to something made mostly of sugar. It's like saying "You like steak? Ok, go lick that cow then tell me you like steak!" - it's a straw man argument.
Then I did something like "3 pieces weigh 18g with ~11g total sugars and 17g total carbs so about 61% sugars"
I've been told to use an offhand rule of fiber vs sugar as a ratio. For every 1 gram of fiber 'up to' 50 of carbs ~ calories, with lower better.
Fiber also has other benefits https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/healthy-eating/fiber-helps-diab...
(plus some other quick search results)
https://www.calculatorultra.com/en/tool/carbohydrate-to-fibe...
https://www.everydayhealth.com/diabetes/the-ratio-of-fats-ca...
> I've been told to use an offhand rule of fiber vs sugar as a ratio. For every 1 gram of fiber 'up to' 50 of carbs ~ calories, with lower better.
I don't think this really captures the concept of "sugar". Here's ordinary sourdough bread: https://beckmannsbakery.com/collections/sourdough-breads/pro...
Serving size 38g, 22g carbohydrate, 0g fiber.
By the time you're saying that most of what everyone eats is nothing but sugar, you've taken things too far. Grain isn't sugar.
(I'm really curious what the rest of the bread is. The nutrition facts note 4g of protein, but that leaves 12 grams, or 32% of the bread (!) unaccounted for.)
Maybe other minerals, salt is some but not 12g of it.
The difficulty I have with this idea is that they would have to also not count as "carbohydrate".
> Maybe other minerals, salt is some but not 12g of it.
Sodium is reported to the microgram, so we know that salt is 0.5g of it.
For one third of the bread to be "minerals", I'd start to worry that it'd be more like eating a rock than eating bread.
EDIT: it has been brought to my attention that the missing weight is water.
https://www.nerdscandy.com/nerds
(Serving size: 15g, of which sugar: 14g. These numbers are rounded pretty badly. Compare https://crdms.images.consumerreports.org/f_auto,w_600/prod/p... , in which 2.5g of "total fat" break down into 0.5g of polyunsaturated fat, 1g of monounsaturated fat, 0g of saturated fat, and 0g of trans fat.)
A sister product, Runts, reports 13g of sugar in a 15g serving size. Spree appears to be the same thing as Runts, but in a disc shape instead of a stylized fruit shape.
Skittles are 75% sugar at 21g per 28g serving size. They have to be soft and chewy, which I assume explains the difference.
Some other chewy candies:
Sour Patch Kids report 80% sugar (24g / 30g).
Swedish Fish report 77% sugar.
Going back to the "it's just sugar" candies, Necco wafers report that one 57g roll contains 56g of carbohydrates, of which 53g are sugar.
> especially since the rest is corn syrup.
Huh, you might be on to something. Karo corn syrup doesn't appear to report its amount by weight. But its nutrition facts report that every 30 mL of syrup contain 30g of carbohydrates, of which 10g are sugar. So corn syrup will drive a wedge between reported "carbohydrates" and reported "sugar".
So what is the difference, exactly? Depends on what’s in the other 40%, right? It would be a bigger difference if the other 40% was made of fats or proteins or fiber, but in the case of Jolly Ranchers and many other candies, the other 40% of calories is cornstarch, which isn’t sugar but is made of glucose chains and breaks down into sugar when digested. Cornstarch, like sugar, is 100% carbohydrate. https://www.soupersage.com/compare-nutrition/cornstarch-vs-w...
@saagarjha didn’t claim candies are pure sugar, they said it’s surprising how close they are to pure sugar. And 60% sugar + 40% flavorless cornstarch + flavoring and food coloring is close to pure sugar with food coloring. Close is a relative term, so when arguing about it, it’d be helpful to provide a baseline or examples or definitions. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than meat or broccoli is. Jolly Ranchers are much closer to pure sugar than even a banana, which is also 100% carbohydrate calories. I don’t know how to argue that Jolly Ranchers aren’t close to pure sugar. Maybe you can give an example?
BTW, the current product website says Jolly Ranchers are 72% sugar: https://www.hersheyland.com/products/jolly-rancher-original-...
I wouldn't say that we breath "too much".
Here in Singapore almost every restaurant and hawker is obsessed with jacking their food up with sugar. Worse though is that if they don't the local Singaporean "foodie" hitmen will annihilate the restaurant with poor reviews on Google Maps for being "bland".
So eating out is a no go. Cooking again unless you're obsessed with reading packaging or make everything from scratch yourself you're instantly adding more sugar than you know.
I have a suspicion that now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter because apples are way way sweeter than I remember growing up and a lot of the oranges my mother in law buys for me also are blindingly sweet. And yet I feel there's a certain fragrance missing from these sweet fruits...
Yes. But it's not by injecting sugar into fruits like many people think.
Farmers including the one next to my rural alt house:
- Take consultancy of agritech and selectively breed variants that are sweeter [0]
- Optimize min(fruits/tree-or-vine) to concentrate sugars in remaining fruits. [1]
- Ethylene-based post-pluck ripening to convert some starch to sugars and make it sweeter. [2]
- and more. Richer the farmer, the more sophisticated the techniques.
If you want truly fresh natural fruits, buy from a poor farmer directly and pay for logistics yourself. They have to be poor because well, they have to sell at market rate. Tragedy of the commons and all that. And logistics chains depend on fruits being fairly resilient. The logistics loss for natural fruits is 30-50% depending on the fruit. So yeah you need to pay 3x as well.
[1] this technique leads to lesser minerals, polyphenols, vit c etc in fruits. "Crowding out".
[2] this technique leads to less fiber formation since there's no time for polysacs to form. Major reason for fiber deficiency today according to agtech person I know is that people are eating fruits the same way their grandparents did, but whoops, you don't get enough anymore.
[0] They are bred to naturally do the above two things. Mostly, they are bred to autocatalyctically generate ethylene earlier.
If your country is in the business of exporting fruits, then the farmer has to compete with the whole world, and the tragedy of the commons mentioned above goes global. So every effect mentioned above multiplies 2-3x. Because it has to be even more logistics friendly, supply has to be really uniform due to expensive GTM, etc,.
sure sounds like someone needs a 10kg bag of sugar to be emptied down the back of his shirt on instagram live
glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆) + oxygen (6O₂) → carbon dioxide (6CO₂) + water (6H₂O) + energy (ATP).
Not only do we live in food abundance, commercial interests exploit our hardcoded desire to seek out energy rich food to make more profit from us usually by pumping sugar into everything.
This can be as innocent as competing for repeat business at your local restaurants or engineering your food to optimise for the bliss point[0] in order to subvert your natural satiety mechanisms and maximise the addictive quality of the product.
Sugar and its derivatives like HFCS are everywhere. Your sauces and condiments are swimming in it. Subway bread was so high in sugar it couldn't be legally called bread in the UK.
My own personal favourite anecdote was from someone senior in McDonalds:
"we find from our studies that children do not like a meaty beef flavour in their patties so we deliberately choose a bland patty mix while adding sugar to the buns and smothering the burger in ketchup because kids love sweet stuff, unlike our competitor Burger King. Once the habit is conditioned from young, they will be a customer for life"
Case in point, my wife loves the idea of McDonalds and admits every time that the reality is always disappointing but she is still drawn to it due to nostalgia.
Given that a lot of the developed world has obesity problems which puts a strain on public resources, it's really important to get a grip on our sugar consumption
Japanese food is definitely healthier in many respects although there's still a lot of sugar hiding in sushi for example, and oyakodon, teriyaki and katsudon sauces are also often quite sweet.
Shabu shabu is better but so are most hotpots in a clear soup
Portion size, saturated fat, excessive salt, sugar, sometimes alcohol, low fiber— the industry has defined itself as an extension of the junk food industry. Which is ironic! Because pretty much the only food I would be willing to pay a premium for would be healthy food, demonstrably healthy food.
* The worst addictions, i.e. all the ones really worthy of the name, punish you (or kill you) if you stop.
What they do in their free time is their business, but it often even messes with human interaction. I've been midsentence with them in person when they'd just pull out their iPad for a quick scroll, completely oblivious that I was even there or talking to them. What's weird is that it almost reminds me of a person taking a quick vape or smoke... I'm not even sure they realize why they're doing it.
The addiction didn’t get me through them… on the other hand, here I am posting HN comments instead of doing something productive so it did reach me through my phone.
I feel like there are worst ways to spend time on devices than reading/responding to HN.
I know it can be addicting/a distraction, too, and I try to limit my time with it.
But I don’t feel that the highs and lows are near as bad here vs. other forms of social media & content consumption.
Does anyone have any advice on how to deal with this? I have a relative that does this all the time and it's beyond infuriating.
It's even gotten to the point where we'll be having a family discussion, they'll pull out there phone to text, come back to Earth, and then get furious with us because we don't fill them in to what they missed and restart the conversation at the point where they stopped listening.
When I was younger, a mix of both fixed that nasty habit of mine.
Would it be better if she sat at home with the TV on and a paper book? No, I don't think so.
This is also where the leisure time went. Keynes predicted 15 hour workweek, we decided to just have kids and the elderly not work at all.
I'm confident TV off and book is better than youtube, for the purpose of maintaining and agile mind.
I think overall, the internet is taking up more of their time than books/tv did in the past (just as it does for me), but it also gives them access to quality content within their niche interests.
(Yes, I'm aware that they push whatever the users click onto and whatever makes them profit; I don't care, I still believe they should push the best content).
Fiction books are full of outright lies =)
But even nonfiction books tend to fail fact-checks: https://reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/cwa4uv/how_acc...
Sapiens is a good example of that kind of mass market crap. I’m currently reading After the Ice by Mithen and The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow which are much better attempts at pop-academia takes at early human history. Even just the notes section of those books is a goldmine for sources that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else outside a dense textbook.
Now with AI it’s easier than ever to stick to the good (nonfiction) stuff. Ask it for book recommendations and then ask it to search online for criticisms/reviews of their accuracy. I used to double check the sources for the reviews but never found any broad strokes inaccuracies.
Well one could make the same argument for other sources of media.
As far as SNR goes, I think you're overextended there too. A good science video on YouTube can communicate information through diagrams and animations that only textbooks even try, and animations often work better for me than long winded paragraphs of explaining something.
I think arguing whether one spends time reading a book vs watching a YouTube video is a silly exercise. The more important question is what book/video one is reading/watching.
So from the perspective the GP's point that books have a more than deserved reputation for being a better way to spend your time has some validity imo.
I think Sapiens is an interesting case, because, in my situation, I listened to the audiobook and enjoyed the experience. I enjoyed it so much that I started to question everything I was hearing and spent at least twice as many hours checking what the author said than listening.
To the point that now I completely forgot the content of the book, but learned about so many things that I would probably had no reason to learn about without the book. So it acted as a gateway with me. Meanwhile I know of other people who took it as gospel and are now living with a polarized mindset.
Source: https://zenodo.org/records/5907061
>the notes section
Why not just browse Wikipedia if notes are what you're after?
Thank you for that recommendation! Looks great.
I wonder if it makes sense to just avoid reading anthropology books until the field settles down a little more.
Books are mostly for comprehension and critical thinking.
The problem with facts is that they're a bit anti-critical thinking. They're just true - there's no debate, or philosophy, or introspection.
Fiction makes you think. About the world, about the future, about yourself, about who you want to be, about what life is about, about why you exist, about love, about injustice, etc. Facts don't really do that.
A good computer game makes you think too.
The strategic play in this game is very deep: https://store.steampowered.com/app/646570/Slay_the_Spire/
If I had a kid, I would be tempted to have them play Slay the Spire as a homework assignment, to teach practical arithmetic and critical thinking. (No reading wikis or discussion forums; you have to figure out the best strategies for yourself!)
>About the world, about the future, about yourself, about who you want to be, about what life is about, about why you exist, about love, about injustice, etc.
This statement is also true for movies, TV shows, AskReddit discussions, etc. Yet they don't have the same cultural cachet as fiction.
Fictional work is very valuable, in a unique way that non-fiction work, whether the medium be video games, literature, or television, cannot capture.
What books are you reading? And why are you reading them, after having read the cover and being able to read the summary?
Most books I read have a lot of information, if they didn't I would stop reading.
https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Steam-Money-Industrial-Revolutio...
https://www.amazon.com/Rents-How-Marketing-Causes-Inequality...
https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/...
Oftentimes such books will repeat their core points over and over, or include a lot of detail which feels irrelevant/overly technical and I will soon forget. In my experience, it's surprisingly common for books written for a general audience to include technical details and descriptions which are only meaningful for a specialist. Even though the book is hundreds of pages long, and there's plenty of room, the author still doesn't provide the necessary background knowledge to interpret the technical details they're including.
>Most books I read have a lot of information, if they didn't I would stop reading.
Any tips on finding such books?
That's a tiny slice of the books on the market though and these are books that weren't already proven to be good by the test of time. I don't think most books sold are recently released by a huge margin. The only publication where recently released matters are specifications, papers, documentation and news, but these tend to be mostly online or digital these days.
What books are you reading? And why are you reading them, after having read the cover and being able to read the summary?
What are you referring to by fewer alternatives? Isn't there way more ways / activities / infrastructure to spend your time these days than before?
My grandparents who lived in a city could walk down the street, get groceries, and easily meet friends for a snack or chat. Even when they were alone, they were part of a community. My parents' generation all live far away from each other, struggle to get out of the house, and are scared of strangers.
Twitter is also the best news app. You get the info, trend, and critical commentary (with people you follow boosted for you in the comments) all in one go.
Amazing analysis.
Wow. Everyone always had kids. Capitalism is why you have no time at all to live AND why you that's your fault.
I'm done with HN for the day.
Are you convinced that people’s lives get better and that workers get paid more, every time, with less regulation? What about e.g. planned obsolescence or web enshittification or any other strategy where a company can increase its profits by making its product worse? What about mass consumer advertising that constantly manipulates people into buying stuff they don’t care about and wouldn’t have bought before by making them feel like it will give them unrelated things like status or family? Market competition doesn’t solve these problems, it spreads them.
> you could live like an irish immigrant
I think our society builds what we want to a really large degree. People get taught to feel like getting rich or middle class or whatever is what they should be doing, or like having the expensive car is important. We don’t pop put of the womb knowing what the hell we should want and we learn to want a whole lot of shit we could go without. Also, you’d really struggle to construct that lifestyle for yourself. The only places where land would be cheap enough to be proportional would be sparse places where most work would be hard to find. You’d still need to drive to your jobs presumably, since you wouldn’t have a computer, so you’re paying for a beater, maintenance, gas and insurance. you would probably want to avoid a salaried position because the vast majority of them are gonna want you to work more than 15 hours a week, which cuts you out of a lot of the best paying jobs. I’m not saying you couldn’t do it, but you’d have to have a lot of knowledge to do it. There’s a real barrier to entry there.
They basically wouldn't travel to anywhere quality, high speed internet isn't present.
And in the even worse cases they don’t even get up to go to the bathroom anymore. They just let it all loose.
Youtube and big tech will have to answer for this eventually.
I've resolved to accepting the fact that most people are just content with any form of brain rot because the alternatives are too mentally taxing. Technology has just enabled brain rot to distill into its current form, but the demand has always been there.
We were not built with the capacity to handle the sheer amount of stimulation the modern world has. You have to put in a lot of effort to not succumb to natural desires that would have been adaptive behaviours until recent history.
I can't bring myself to feel much sympathy for the ones that fully realize this, and yet go full speed to their addictions, even push it to their kids since good parenting always take a lot more continuous effort. We keep discussing this mind cancer for a decade here, its not something shocking on any level for anybody who gives a fraction of a f*k about their quality of life or mental health. The rest has bread and games for the poor, version 2025.
If no one ever did, why would YouTube be different ?
Go watch an episode of 25 Words or Less on your local broadcast station and watch how much slop is peddled on the show between the colorful noises (dear God those horns in the jingles are pure torture). They've fully tied in slop mobile games (some Solitaire game) into main gameplay advertising, they pull in horribly grainy live video from elderly "superfans" joining along from home, it's all just one giant slop machine before the evening news.
Although they also got us Ataris in the early 80s and internet access in the late 80s, so they were technology forward through their whole lives. So maybe they lived more like late Gen X...
My boomer parents and their friends are all staring to their phones wa-a-ay more often than I’d consider healthy. At least as much as my millenial/xennial friends.
Social media and attention stealing algos are addictive and unhealthy, regardless of the age group. If anything I’d say that gen-x is uniquely positioned - old enough to have experienced the world without the internet, young enough to see the consequences of it.
I am not alone in this.
Yes, my first screen addiction was probably the NTSC broadcasts from a black & white childhood, but all those paperbacks counted too, Heinlein and Fleming and MacDonald et al.
Even my early career as a software engineer was motivated by a self-indulgent escape from reality. I preferred the small world of intense coding in 6510 cycle shaving loops, to the expansive reality that surrounded my basement. The outside world went on without me as my screen addiction grew all the way to 640x400.
Now people enjoy an escape into the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). I've been living there since the print versions were only 12 cents each.
Nowadaze everybody I know have become as addicted as I've always been. But is it a problem for society? Or is shared fantasy the actual basis on which our society is built?
A quote from an author I like, Matthew Crawford: "Attention is the thing that is most one’s own: in the normal course of things, we choose what to pay attention to, and in a very real sense this determines what is real for us; what is actually present to our consciousness. Appropriations of our attention are then an especially intimate matter."
I can't really envision a solution, frankly. On a personal level, I have tried dozens of strategies to use my phone less, including deleting many of my social media accounts, and regrettably, its still an issue. My best guess is legislation that bans machine-learning algorithms on newsfeeds. But there are billions of dollars and a dysfunctional government (speaking U.S. here) motivated against that outcome.
I’ve never scrolled hours away on HN.
I made a rule for myself that I would never go past page 2 of HN. So, each morning, I see 60 items, and if none of them interest me, then I just move on with my day. I think that's why I never became addicted.
* HN is text-only
* HN lacks infinite scroll
* HN adds new content slowly
* HN is cognitively demanding
My guess is that these factors are most important. If you held them constant and added a recommendation engine in HN, I doubt HN would become considerably more addictive.
It kinda reminds me of cigarettes. A similarly addicting thing that largely disappeared in the US when it became unfashionable/shameful. Is there a way to make this happen for phones, I wonder.
What if technology is just evolving us into something else? I can imagine in 1000 years from now our cyborg versions would be walking around with screens inside their brains not thinking twice about it.
I don’t think I’d like that world at all. And I hate what screens have done to my current world. But shit, maybe there’s no stopping it.
—N. Molesworth (1956)
Old people can‘t be left alone with internet devices and online banking.
I wonder if I will ever become that dumb too when I am old…
It's not very nice to call that "being dumb". Imagine that you live for 60 years in a country speaking English, and in a matter of a couple years, most of society switches to Mandarin. You may well struggle learning Mandarin as a 60 years old, and you wouldn't like being called "dumb" by young people who grow up with it.
The ones I know who fall for this stuff the most have always been gullible. They were getting taken by cell phone tower investment scams and anti-vac hoaxes decades ago and the only real change is the medium.
Going through such changes when you are in your twenties or when you are in your sixties is extremely different.
An interesting example I have is working with younger software engineers: those who studied and graduated after clouds existed. It has surprised me more than once, with different people and in different contexts, that they had trouble imagining that one may not always have a fast internet connection or access to a cloud.
I wouldn't call them dumb for that, though.
And my point is that they don’t have to learn anything new to avoid getting scammed. Their existing skills of “understanding that moving pictures might be fake” and “don’t give your money or private info to strangers who write to you” will suffice. Unless, of course, they never developed those skills and have been getting taken their whole lives, which seems to be pretty common.
> Their existing skills of “understanding that moving pictures might be fake”
This is not an existing skill. The existing skill is a life of learning how other people may try to deceive them. But then the baseline shifts faster than they can imagine, and suddenly their skill is useless.
For instance, humans tend to put more trust into eloquent people, because it usually is synonymous with education. Not that it is a perfect rule, but it is a useful one. Or it was, before LLMs. Now suddenly anyone can sound eloquent. It's not just older people: VCs suffer from the exact same problem. CEOs pay way too much to get bullshitted by McKinsey and the others.
> “don’t give your money or private info to strangers who write to you” will suffice
Don't you give your money to your bank? How do you know they won't leave with your money or that they won't bankrupt next week? Should I call you dumb if you have been unlucky enough to be in one of those banks?
Trusting eloquent people just because of how they sound has always been a way to get scammed. Exposure might be higher now, but people who are getting scammed by eloquent SMSes today were probably getting scammed by friendly, educated-sounding people offering "an incredible investment opportunity" or to "help with the ATM" decades ago, or Amway, or chain letters.
My bank doesn't qualify as "strangers." I have an existing business relationship with them. That relationship started when I reached out to them, not vice versa.
But it's not your choice to make.
And really, how many people don't understand why they should use a password manager? Or can't be arsed to learn how to use one? Or don't understand how to parse a link like https://microsoft.updateeleven.com?
Are they dumb or do they lack practice? I bet they lack practice because they don't really give a shit about that. My grandmother is 100, she doesn't spend 6h a day swiping TikTok, and she doesn't grasp the concept of AI-generated videos. But she can knit infinitely better than me. Should she call me dumb because I can't knit?
Because people don't give a shit about stuff you care about doesn't make them dumb. Maybe you don't know much about music, or painting, or dinosaurs, and that does not make you dumb.
First, older generation having lower IQ than newer is neither the Flynn effect nor its reversal. The Flynn effect compares historical test results to current ones; not old people vs young people but old people when they passed the test long ago with young people passing the test now. If elderly people are loosing IQ points it's most certainly because of age not because they have had a lower IQ all along.
And the reversal of the Flynn effect states that younger people are actually the one having the lower hand on this comparison.
I don't think they're dumb either. But I do think they've been convinced, and manipulated, very hard, to just turn off their brain and power of discernment.
They've lived in a world where it was hard to make convincing fake videos, and where it would only be worth doing in contexts like movies or maybe propaganda. Suddenly, photorealistic videos pop up everywhere.
Also I don't know if you've seen a circus before, but animals can do very impressive stuff.
> But I do think they've been convinced, and manipulated, very hard, to just turn off their brain and power of discernment.
Again that's harsch. If we're talking about believing in a video that shows cats doing something that could happen in a circus (I haven't seen the video, but why not), then they are believing in something that does not matter much; it's just fun. There are young people that truly believe that the Earth is flat, I don't know what's worse.
It's the same thing entirely: people trusting images and signals from control apparatuses to override the signals from their own senses.
Some form of that has been going on throughout history. Basic socialization involves replacing a part of how you see the world, with a simulation of others' simulation of an imaginary "everyone" expects to see things.
If this sounds weird, that's because it is. And, not only is it difficult to think about, but once you manage to imagine it you may find it viscerally terrifying. So you don't. (It's why you don't remember early childhood.) Granted, none of that has ever happened at this... no, not "scale"! It's never happened at this resolution, i.e. ability to discern.
Machines make decisions billions of times a second along constantly evolving, networked rulesets; consumers are afforded to elect rulemakers once every few years in avoidance of mass tantrum, and otherwise are free to vote with wallets and feet for whichever evil they consider the lesser one. Which one can be said to be in control?
Ultimately, it's not terribly important if the cat dances or what shape the planet is. What matters is whether you will go kill when your phone gives you the "kill" command: https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series
Two 60ish ladies are sitting in the cafe next to me, one isn't able to figure out where some thing on the phone had arrived from, the other one isn't able to explain to her friend that it came "but from the phone itself!"
Of course, from some slopmonger, data harvester, ad broker, spammer... but they spent their lives without having to learn about the shape of the earth; why would they want to know who makes the phone do things "on its own"?
Why would they want to know that the Free Pleasant Stimulus of the "cat and baby video" is not For Realsies Real? I'm not saying they don't actually need to understand that, but nobody ever tries to explain why would they want to.
Society is mighty and benevolent, one can go through life and even raise kids without ever learning about object permanence. So they do, and when in their sunset years when they ask "who stole the money", society is only happy to provide a culprit for that, too. Remember that very few of the phone scammers want to be there, either.
Hopefully full dive VR will be ready by the time I'm that old.
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion-features/meet-real-...
Archive today and even archive.org are not working with safari on this iphone. I'll have to debug.
FWIW, I'm senior, and when you're not 100%, you just sit and read or listen to the radio (preferably classical music). Being a techie and infovore, Hacker News fills the bill. Where else do you get links to WWII proximity fuses (schematic included) or high tech gambling cheat devices. And programming languages, something of interest to me since "Computer Lib: Dream Machines"?
I felt great yesterday and hiked a lot, but some days, the connected screen replaces the ipad over the piano and the camera screen. Screens all over. Grabbed a sunrise this morning before just chillin most of the day.
It's an ugly addiction that mirrors what we've seen with alcoholics and schizophrenics, whereby they point a finger at anything but the actual problem, and any remedy that the have, or are given, they adamantly avoid and refuse.
YouTube, like other social media, is driven by pushing and pulling on the right emotions in the right way to get you hooked. Sexy, funny, happy, cute, sensational, sad, scary, angry. Enough Sophia Vergara, cat videos, UFOs, doom and gloom, bias-confirming politics, etc, and you'll have someone watching all day long. It's not like what it was when an elderly person watched daytime soap operas and gameshows, this is a dopamine-fueled additive binge. We've seen several really bad cases where it's almost everything that the lonely elderly person does. There's no more "journey" or "investment" when you can simply flick to the next video that tickles your fancy in that moment.
These are the people I'm sincerely concerned about, and they have zero reason to go seek help. It's not an issue to them. In fact, they'll fight tooth and nail to claim anything else is their problem except this.
It's almost as though the first generations to enjoy television weren't ready for something this addictive.
Personally, I despise YouTube, despite growing up in the heart of the Silicon Valley. That platform serves a handful of purposes for me, such as helpful tutorials the rare time that I need them and epic Mongolian folk metal music videos.
The stuff that you mention. You can literally say "Not Interested" on the video and it will show you less of content. I see none of it.
And if you click on one, by mistake or curiosity, now you've sent a signal that you like it and will get much more of it in the next batch of recommendations.
"Oh you didn't skip this video on a topic you usually don't watch? How about we make that topic 50% of your next however many videos?!"
I go out of my way to block accounts that post stuff I don't want in my feed and pretty much all of them see that as an invitation to give me more of the same content. Likely because I "interact" longer with the content since it takes clicks to block the account.
I don't see that at all. I use YouTube most evenings (I watch YouTube instead of TV).
I do have like traditional news media sometimes on the third or fourth row and you can dismiss that quickly.
> And if you click on one, by mistake or curiosity, now you've sent a signal that you like it and will get much more of it in the next batch of recommendations.
You fix that by simply pressing "Not Interested" a few times. It can be annoying. It isn't the end of the world.
The idea that YouTube pushes a political point of view is itself a falsehood pushed by people holding a particular point of view.
I actually ended up disabling watch history all together and I’ve installed an extension (Unhook) that hides the sidebar recommendations, Shorts, and other useless features.
That doesn't happen. Firstly you literally click on the video and say "don't recommend channel" and you will never see a JRE episode again.
Also, just by how you phrased that whole paragraph. I don't believe you are telling the truth.
None of those characters are "alt-right". "alt-right" essentially means White Nationalist.
You cannot tell me that Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are White Nationalists because of their support for Israel and one of them is Jewish. White nationalists really don't like Israel and Jewish people. They however were labelled as "alt right" to smear them, by other political commentators and publications who are typically on the left and American.
You would only use that framing if you were listening to those commentators and/or publications that used similar phrasing.
Also Jordan Peterson actually talked about addiction on a Joe Rogan podcast and it was one of the things that put me on the road to dealing with my drinking issues. I stopped listening to Joe Rogan about episode 1000 after they stopped being live and were prerecorded.
I have plenty of criticisms of them now. But I Jordan Peterson did help me at least indirectly. I don't watch either of them anymore and haven't watched them for quite a number of years at this point.
https://www.youtube.com/c/WatchWesWork
He fixes up a lot of different type of vehicles and actually explains in detail what he is doing. A lot of car stuff is just people like do a dyno test of like suped up car, I don't find it very interesting. I end up just blocking those channels.
I really think that people are nitpicking a system that works reasonably well for the most part.
You are either lying, or have no idea what you are on about.
You can't deny what is right in front of everyone to see.
Firstly. None of that is alt-right. It is America Republican slop rage-bait. Alt-right specifically means White Nationalist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right
> The alt-right (abbreviated from alternative right), or dissident right, is a far-right, white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s before increasing in popularity and establishing a presence in other countries during the mid-2010s.
White Nationalists literally hate the Jews, Israel and anyone that support them.
- Ben Shapiro is a Jewish Neocon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism)/
- Jordan Peterson supports Israel and last time I checked worked for the Daily Wire. The Daily Wire was co-founded by Ben Shapiro.
- Joe Rogan is 90s style liberal who is into UFOs, Big Foot and other kooky shit. He literally named his comedy bar "The Mothership". Nothing about that is White Nationalist/Alt-right.
None of them are White Nationalists, nor would they be accepted by White Nationalists. So you are 100% incorrect on that.
Secondly, The Ben Shapiro Ownage stuff was popular circa 2015-2018. Guess what was popular before that? "Hitch Slap", which was Christopher Hitchens basically berating people are various religions.
I've not seen any of that content described in years and it fell out of favour back in 2018-2019.
> You can't deny what is right in front of everyone to see.
It isn't though.
None of the ownage videos have been popular for years and quite honestly I don't believe you have seen them unless you've specifically gone looking for them.
I have tested whether this does come up on a fresh browser profile using a VPN set to the US (as I am in the UK). I used several different locations in the US. I didn't see one of these videos.
I believe you and others are lying because they have a political axe to grind.
A lot of white nationalists love Israel. Saying they don’t is like saying a lot of fascists don’t love fascism (aka Israel). A lot don’t and a lot do.
Similarly there are plenty of people who are progressive except for Palestine/Israel (it’s a known saying). And plenty of conservative or right wing people who are not progressive except about Palestine.
> You would only use that framing if you were listening to those commentators and/or publications that used similar phrasing.
Projection
No I am using the terms correctly. You (from later on in your reply) aren't.
> Political labels can work if you and the other person are educated on politics (95%+ of HN isn’t) but otherwise focusing on labels mislead the convo and vibe.
These are specific political positions that are held by prominent members. Calling Ben Shapiro a white nationalist is simply idiotic. If you aren't informed about it, maybe you should not make strong claims about it.
> A lot of white nationalists love Israel. Saying they don’t is like saying a lot of fascists don’t love fascism (aka Israel). A lot don’t and a lot do.
No they don't. No white nationalist would support the Jews or Israel. I am sorry you are simply showing your ignorance.
As an aside, Fascism is a wildly misunderstood and misused term. I actually loathe ever talking about it today because like the term "Nazi" it has been totally misused by idiots. You do not understand the term fascist.
> Similarly there are plenty of people who are progressive except for Palestine/Israel (it’s a known saying). And plenty of conservative or right wing people who are not progressive except about Palestine.
Obviously there are splinter groups in any organisation that believe different things. Those people btw are referred to differently.
> Projection
No at all. I am just calling it as I see it. I also lost any good will I would have had with you in the conversation as a result of this jab.
- Same streamer, different video
- Different streamer
- Far right pundit blasts immigration
- Video game streamer
- Video game streamer
- Video game review
- Same streamer, similar content
- Ben Shapiro OWNS Liberals with FACTS
- Video game streamer
- Video game streamer
It's obvious that some slots are simply reserved for whatever YouTube thinks will enrage/engage. Nothing I do seems to stop this. I can click "Don't Show Me This" until I'm exhausted, and next time around, while they might not recommend that exact channel, they just fill these slots with different ragebait. There's no way to say "Don't recommend this shit or anything like it."
1: https://www.npr.org/2018/11/05/660642531/right-wing-hate-gro...
The point of my comment though, was that it’s not just video game content leading here, it seems to be any male leaning hobby, including weightlifting, sports, tabletop gaming, etc.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/the-curious-case-o...
Can't look up a movie or a gadget without getting a thumbnail with big red letters saying that the thing sucks, this despite me avoiding review/reaction content like the plague.
I can't get it to stop recommending a video I've already watched...it thinks I want to watch it again I guess.
Now you get baited with Member Only videos too. I'm already paying you $30 a month...
I don't think that is the case. If I click Not Interested. Similar video don't show.
> Now you get baited with Member Only videos too. I'm already paying you $30 a month..
To members? Or to YouTube to remove ads? If it is the former, you have shown YouTube that you are willing to pay for memberships, so they going to recommend them.
Not that they have any more morals or self control, they just seem to have a comparatively awful algorithm that brings up the same 14 videos over and over.
There is real gold on youtube, like for example the math explainers by 3blue1brown. But if you ever tries opening a private browser window and opening and see the video recommendations it looks like a platform only containing mindless trash, with the mental nutritents contained in a piece of cardboard.
And there are people who like precisely that: Mindnumbing somethings that just keep your brain from having a single thought.
Home page? All videos I've seen. Sidebar? All videos I've seen.
The only way for me to find any new content is literally to search. It makes zero sense.
Using YouTube (or any video thing) for programming topics drives me nuts, the presenter never goes at my pace.
Many older people I work with would love to have more required interactions move away from the phone screen.
This was actually a big issue in my office leading to work from home being rolled back. The boomers want to be in the office so other people are forced to socialize with them, and they don’t want to be home because many of them seem to resent their spouses.
IMO it’s a terrible trade-off. What they lack is true relationships and friendships, and they're filling the void with idle workplace chitchat for the illusion of connection. I’d rather be at home. I’m getting paid to work, not provide social support for lonely boomers.
It's unfortunate, but for a lot of people, their job is all they have.
(And like with many of these things, holding senior executives personally liable helps ensure that the fines or whatever are not just waved away as a cost of doing business.)
The brewery, the bar nor the bar ever made me drink. I chose to drink. I also was the one that chose to stop drinking. BTW drink is as dangerous or more dangerous as many illegal drugs IMO.
> Making tech companies answerable for having developed algorithms that serve up hours of obvious brainrot content at a time would go a long way.
You get recommended what you already watch. Most of my YouTube feed is things like old guys repairing old cars, guys writing a JSON parse in haskell and stuff about how exploits work and some music. That is because that is what I already watched on the platform.
The argument I’m making is that it’s not beyond the pale for YouTube to detect “hey it’s been over an hour of ai bullshit / political rage bait / thirst traps / whatever, the algorithm is going to intentionally steer you in a different direction for the next little bit.”
What YouTube recommends to you is more of what you already watch. Removing stuff the you describe is as easy as clicking "Not interested" or "Do not recommend channel".
Also YouTube algorithm is rewarding watch time these days. So click bait isn't rewarded on platform as much. I actually watch a comedy show where they ridicule many of the click-baiters and they are all complaining about the ad-revenue and reach decreasing.
Also a lot of the political rage-bait is kinda going away. People are growing out of it. YouTube kinda has "metas" where a particular type of content will be super popular for a while and then go away.
I don't go down the political rage bait video pipeline, nevertheless next to any unrelated YouTube video I see all sorts of click/rage-bait littered in the sidebar just asking to start me down a rabbit hole.
As an example I opened a math channel/video in a private mode tab. Under it (mobile), alongside the expected math-adjacent recommendations I see things about socialist housing plans, 2025 gold rush debasement trades, the 7-stage empire collapse pattern ("the US is at stage 5"), and so on. So about 10% are unrelated political rage-bait.
Moreover, everyone is seeing different things for different reasons, even geographically. For example I recently discovered this: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-d.... If you look at exhibit 8A, section 3.5 (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1366201/dl) you'll see various targeting, e.g. particularly swing states/counties.
I hope more awareness is made about this
Grab a bodhran or banjo and head to a local folk jam everyone!
It's so bad that they'll click on a link to see the latest slop, and ostensibly get one of those webpages that says they have 47 viruses and call the number. I politely told them that they shouldn't click on those links anymore.
To which they said, well, if I shut my phone off when that happens, can I keep on doing it?
It's like that Star Trek the Next Generation episode where they all get addicted to that game. It's creepy and sad.
So I would better prefer them playing three-in-row. I think after some time it even would be possible easier to "sell" to them playing some kind of minecraft with grandchildren.
Also, I vividly remember parks in Georgia (country!) crowded with elderly loudly playing chess and domino, instead of watching "who deserved to die by our god-chosen almighty army today" crap.
> Alarming and misleading news may be a particular threat to the elderly, who are twice as likely as under-25s to use news apps or websites.
Millions of people are addicted to watching Fox News paint a picture of the urban US as a war zone that rural and suburban residents should avoid at all costs. That doesn't even include the right wing AI slop on social media sending similar messages. One could argue that this is affecting Trump himself, whereby domestic policy is shaped around what he sees on TV and social media (where was he seeing videos of "bombed out" Portland, anyway?).
young folks on social media create a lot content (posts/photos/videos) meant for their peer group to consume, so their feed is a mix of authentic peer-generated content and whatever mass-produced stuff sneaks into their feed.
older folks do not share nearly as much. maybe a text-based facebook comment once in a while. so when they log and consume from their feed, they aren't watching things created by their peers -- they're seeing content that professionals created for the purpose of broadcast.
My black, middle-class, Democratic-voting father and stepmother who certainly were alive during the early 90s (when I was a teenager and actually on the south side Chicago streets, in danger) think that crime is higher than ever before. Democrats have absolutely spent most of their time trying to convince them that it definitely is, except when targeting Republicans, or trying to defend terrible mayors.
Tough on crime is almost the only thing second-term Democratic presidents run on. Focusing on crime, at whatever level, is always a suitable distraction for the dumb middle-class (R or D). The only thing that comes in second is focusing on poor people's diets. There will always be crime, and always be people eating badly; and are you pro-crime and pro-junk food on your dime?
> One could argue that this is affecting Trump himself, whereby domestic policy is shaped around what he sees on TV and social media (where was he seeing videos of "bombed out" Portland, anyway?).
More than argue. It's not just him, though, it's completely out of touch wealthy people who think of politics as a hobby, and are constantly bombarded with local news that consists entirely of crimes. There's no concept that the fact that they heard about 2 murders and 10 robberies today within a metro area of 10 million people doesn't give them any understanding at all of current crime prevalence. Or that they hear about street crimes, but don't hear about domestic ones. Or hear about violence but don't hear about financial crimes.
They've all got a story of somebody they know who was affected by street crime, too. One incident that a hundred people get to cite.
Trump also is just consciously playing middle-class dimwits like everyone else.
