I find it absurd that someone can create an unregulated market like Kalshi, and then all of us need to be beholden to it, even though the idea is stupid. How is it possible that someone can create a product that none of us agree on, and now everyone else has to conform to the rules around it because of the problems that it creates. I would rather Kalshi get shut down than the precedent of allowing this to control employees or people.
> images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal.
No, ALL CONTENT is asymptotically approaching 0. This includes photos, videos, stories, app features, even code. Code is now worthless. If you want better security from generated code, wait 2 months and it will be better. If you want a photo, you just prompt and it will generate it on the fly.
AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP. Do you want a movie where Deadpool fights The Hulk? Easy. And just like how ad technology knows your preferences, each movie will be individually tailored to YOUR liking just so that your engagement will increase. Do you like happy endings? Deadpool and Hulk will join forces and defeat Thanos. Do you prefer dark endings? Deadpool and Hulk fight until they float off into the Sun and get atomized but keep regenerating for eternity.
If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look. This is the world we are facing now, where authenticity is meaningless. And while YOU may not prefer it, think about the kids who aren't born yet and will grow up in a world where this exists.
> AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP.
> If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look.
Sure, but why would any of this media have any emotional significance?
The reason we enjoy media of friends and family is because it depicts a moment in the life of our loved ones. A fake image or video of them is of absolutely zero value to anyone.
The reason we enjoy cinema is because a talented group of people had an interesting story to tell and brought it to life in a memorable way. Me, or a random person with no filmmaking talent, prompting a tool to generate a particular scene wouldn't be interesting at all. Talented individuals will also rely on this technology, of course, but a demand for human creativity will still exist, possibly even stronger than today, once everyone is exhausted from the flood of shitty Deadpool vs Hulk videos.
I suspect the same will eventually happen with every other product these tools are currently commoditizing, including software.
All of this seems like a neat technology in search of a problem to solve, while actually introducing countless societal problems we haven't even begun to acknowledge, let alone address. But it sure is a great money and power grab opportunity for giant corporations to further extend their reach. And they have the gall to tell us it will bring world prosperity. Most of these sociopathic assholes should be prosecuted and jailed. And you, dear reader who is generously employed by these companies, are complacent with all of this.
It won't have any emotional significance to those that remember how the world was before. But there's billions of kids that are going to be born that won't know anything except AI-generated content. They will find emotional significance to it.
My kids don't know what a dial tone is. They don't know dialing 7 digits instead of 10 or 11. They don't say "bye" when we get off the phone and none of their friends do either, they just hang up. They don't sit through movies because their expectation is that they can start it back up whenever they want. The world is changing and just because we experienced something doesn't mean that the next generation will value it.
[Any] task is much easier if you have the tools. Do/did you have a baby monitor? A technological tool, that allows you to "monitor" the baby while not being within an arms reach.
Do you have an A+++++ oven with three panes of glass? It's [relatively] safe to touch and instead of monitoring if a child is somewhere near the oven you have to monitor if the child does not actively open the oven. That's much easier.
I remember how my sister and I set up Google Family and fully locked down my niece her phone with app restrictions, screen time restrictions and a policy of accountability when we need to extend the screen time.
It worked really well up until she got a school managed chromebook for homework with no access controls.
Can't your router block by Mac address? Just limit the Chromebook to allowlisted sites. And also school-issued computers are known for Spyware and even worse. It should probably be segregated in a separate network or vlan.
over 10 years ago, I had an intern from Harvard CS tell me that privacy is irrelevant unless you're doing something that you want to hide. I was gobsmacked that someone would not cherish their privacy but since then I've realized many don't care at all and have the same attitude that "I don't have anything to hide."
Well that's your mistake right there. You hired someone from Harvard. Unless you are hiring that person to use their connections to market your product, there is no reason to hire someone from Harvard. They just bring bad ideology and STDs from Russian hookers to the table and nobody wants that.
PS This post is partly satire, I will leave it to you as to which part is serious.
Many of my school colleagues started smoking around 10-11 years old. All of us had tasted alchol by then, and some of them were definitely drinking the occasional beer. Older kids sometimes brought porn magazines in school and would show younger kids too (still talking about pre-highscool here). Now, this was childhood in Romania in the 1990s and early 2000s, soon after the fall of communsim, so maybe not so applicable everywhere else, but still - I doubt that there is any problem for a resourceful 8-10 year old even today to get some of these things.
The older kids are often the easy source for the younger kids. At 8 I had already seen a Playboy and knew kids who had seen harder stuff. I could have easily gotten a teenager to get me cigarettes (and drugs, but I didn’t know what those were really). I had also already tasted alcohol. Any of this I could have stolen from any number of places.
There’s also a difference between “saw my first” and “saw a playboy once.” I need you to understand I was a good kid whose parents cared until they divorced some years later. And yet I had multiple sources of access to this stuff without looking for it. Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.
Again, if you occasionally caught a glimpse of a playboy, that’s not a significant problem.
If you were regularly smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and reading porn magazines at 8 yeas, your parents fell down on the job. An 8 year old doesn’t have the wherewithal to hide that from parents who are paying attention.
> Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.
Yeah a kid with the mind of an adult could access all kinds of illegal material.
Making it illegal to rob a bank doesn’t mean that’s it’s literally impossible. It’s about stopping enough people from trying that society functions.
The state of the world before the internet was that it was hard to keep a kid from ever glimpsing a titty, but it was relatively easy to keep a kid from having regular access to hard core porn-much, much easier than it is now. My take is that as a society we need to figure out some way to make this easy enough for parents to do that it becomes the default. Just like drugs, alcohol, and porno mags.
Another issue is that online porn and algorithmic brain rot is free (at least enough of it is). With IRL contraband, lack of money is a big limiting factor for kids. The IRL equivalent would be if the local liberal let 8 year olds checkout hard core porn DVDs.
Yeah. Anyway, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs were very accessible to me despite being a good kid with parents who cared in a world where those were all legally forbidden to me.
All this talk of “glimpses” is you trying to read too deep into a single example.
I’m not using my adult mind to figure out how I could have gotten this stuff as a kid. I’m using my adult mind to recognize that if I had been motivated as a kid, there are additional ways I. as a kid, would have been able to figure out how to get it.
I’m not throwing my hands up in the air and saying this is impossible or that we should just open up access. I’m saying requiring ID for access wasn’t effective before and it won’t be effective in a world with easier access. Yet the cost of that is quite high. Scan these threads for actual ideas, I’m not arguing for any particular one but there are plenty of them and some I think are good.
>Yeah. Anyway, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs were very accessible to me despite being a good kid with parents who cared in a world where those were all legally forbidden to me.
Were they accessible to you, or do you just think they were accessible to you? How many of these teenagers who would let you try a cigarette would have been willing to keep supplying you cigarettes regularly. How many would have been willing to keep buying you alcohol?
>All this talk of “glimpses” is you trying to read too deep into a single example.
No, it's glimpses, because it's about at the very least semi-regular access, not preventing every single child from having tiny amounts of alcohol. Look at my reply the other poster in this thread. There are dozens of studies that show conclusively that minimum age drinking laws reduce alcohol use among children, and reduce alcoholism later in life.
>I’m saying requiring ID for access wasn’t effective before
But yes it was effective. Read the studies. Minimum age drinking laws have been shown almost universally to be effective. Not at stopping every child from drinking but at harm reduction.
>I’m using my adult mind to recognize that if I had been motivated as a kid, there are additional ways I. as a kid, would have been able to figure out how to get it.
The level an effort an 8 year old would have to go through to get regular access to cigarettes and alcohol in the US, would require an enormous level of motivation which almost no 8 year old has, and it would be outright impossible to do without a semi-observant parent noticing.
That's the whole point of making it hard to do.
It takes much less effort for a kid to walk to the library and check out a hardcore porn DVD than it does for him to convince an 18 year old to buy one for him. Most kids just aren't going to go through the hassle of doing the latter, but they'd do the former in a heartbeat. All things being equal, greater motivation is required to overcome greater obstacles.
I’ve told you that access was not a problem at all. All your questioning is because you can’t grasp my lived reality. You think I’m mistaken, but actually I just don’t care to try to convince you because you’re already so sure.
Disinterest was what really “saved” me from these vices but lacking that, it was my parents. I also had access to perfectly legal things that were bad for me that I actually wanted and it was my parents who helped me there too; no mandatory ID required.
You don't know that you had access though based on what you said. You think you might have had access looking back.
>I could have easily gotten a teenager to get me cigarettes (and drugs, but I didn’t know what those were really). I had also already tasted alcohol. Any of this I could have stolen from any number of places.
You never tried it so you have no idea how well it would have worked. You really think those teenagers would have kept giving you cigarettes for free? You didn't even know what drugs were so I don't know how you could possible know there were teenagers you knew who would have just given them to you.
Again I'm sure you could have stolen a few cigarettes, or a few bottles of alcohol. But your parents would have smelled both on you or caught you quickly because 8 year olds are idiots. Then they would have cut your access to teenagers or locked up their liquor better. And because of age restriction laws, that's all it would take for them to keep you away from it.
It doesn't sound like you have kids and it's probably been a while since you were 8, but you are severely overestimating the ability of a 2nd grader to get away with anything.
>but lacking that, it was my parents
Of course it was your parents. Mandatory ID laws aren't going to stop terrible parents from letting their kid have a beer every night before bed time. They make it easier for well well meaning parents to do the right thing and keep their kids out of stuff they shouldn't have.
Again minimum age and ID laws have been proven to reduce access and reduce alcohol and cigarette use. Even if you were some kind of criminal genius 2nd grader capable of stealing a few bottles of wine a week, you would be an outlier. There's no room for debate that these laws have their intended effect.
There’s “no room for debate” in your argument because you’re basing it on false assumptions, trying to gaslight me, moving goalposts and you personally don’t care about the trade offs. It’s very easy to be right when everyone else is wrong. Congrats.
There are clearly trade offs with any law, but your argument was never that the benefits aren’t worth the price it was that minimum age laws don’t work.
There’s no gaslighting going on here. “As an adult Looking back to when I was an 8 year old, I belong that had I been motivated I could have acquired alcohol and cigarettes” is not a persuasive argument that most or even many 8 years olds have access to alcohol and cigarettes.
It’s not even a good argument that you had access because you don’t know that you did.
“I think that I could have got teenagers to get me cigarettes” is not good evidence that you had access to cigarettes. Maybe there were teenagers who would have given you enough cigarettes to feed a habit. Maybe the first 5 you asked would have told you to get lost and you would have given up.
We’ll never know because you didn’t try it. But again even if you had,
the evidence shows that minimum ages laws substantially reduce the number of cigar smoked by kids, and the rate of kids who smoke.
If you want to make the argument that the price of making people show ID isn’t worth that benefit then fine make that argument. But you can’t make the argument that minimum ages laws don’t have their intended effect.
There absolutely is gaslighting here. I think now that some time has passed you should probably go back and re-read this thread. I can't be clearer about the fact that I accessed these things young without trying and continued to have access if I had wanted it. My comment about looking back as an adult was about even more access that could have been available to me if I had gone looking.
So even if you don't believe I have the capacity to understand that a teenager I know (who was also a child) who was doing drugs, smoking, etc., would absolutely have gotten me what I wanted; it doesn't follow that I didn't have the access I actually had. "We'll never know" is false. I know, because I was there.
As far as minimum age laws not having their intended effect, again, it's easy when you're the one saying what all the arguments are...
you are writing this as if you were never a kid yourself... there is absolutely nothing I wasn't able to "get" as a kid - some stuff I had to jump through some hoops but end-result would always end up being the same. if I wanted to watch hardcore porn, there was a way, if I wanted to smoke a cigarette, there was a way. if I wanted to drink, there was a way. and make it "forbidden" made it ever more appealing for me to get it as a kid. I grew up in society where alcohol was not a big deal, I was buying alcohol for my parents when I was 6-years old, would get sent to the store to get stuff and among the stuff was always beer and sometimes wine if my parents were expecting some guests. most of my friends growing up never thought of alcohol as something cool, we had easy access to it so it was like a rights of passage or anything like that and it showed, just about no one was doing any drinking while we were teenagers. when I came to america junior year of high school I was stunned at home much effort my schoolmates were making to acquire alcohol - could not really understand what the big deal is until I realized that was because it was forbidden and acquiring beer etc for a friday evening chill made one a cool kid.
the only barrier I have ever had to doing stupid things was the wrath of my parents. the punishment(s) levied when I did stupid shit was always such that I would very seldom-to-never-again consider doing whatever stupid shit I did. it always starts and ends with parents. you can put in whatever "laws" you want (which will always get weaponized politically at some point either immediately or at a later time) but end of the day the buck starts and stops with parents...
1. There is no scientific evidence that the "forbidden fruit" theory is correct. Studies of minimum drinking ages show a near universal reduction in drunk driving deaths, alcoholism, and crime rates.
If you care to google it there are dozens of additional studies that all say the same thing.
2. You're writing this as if you don't understand what it's like growing up in a country where 8 year olds don't have easy access to alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs.
And you're writing this as if you don't understand what it's like growing up was a kid growing up in America specifically. My young children and the young children of everyone I now could not regularly drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes without their parents knowing about it. When I was 8 I couldn't have done either regularly without my parents knowing about it.
Again this isn't about stopping every single kid in the world from ever trying alcohol. This is about making it harder for them get and easier for parents to enforce.
>end of the day the buck starts and stops with parents...
That's a completely unrealistic view of the world and it's just flat out wrong on the face of it because every study we have on the subject shows that minimum drink age laws reduce harm--they work. If it were solely up to the parent they wouldn't work.
The easier you make it for parents to do the right thing, the more of them will do it.
- they will honestly tell you that they'd be very happy to see you dead when you impose restrictions upon them (people who are older will of course possibly get into legal trouble for such a statement)
- they will tell they they wish you'd never have given birth to them (or aborted them)
- they will tell you that since they never wanted to be born, they owe you nothing
I raised kids. Never had to deal with anything like what is described. Sounds like someone read some questionable books on parenting, unfortunately followed the bad advice in those books and this is the result.
And this entire thing is about bad parenting. Its always easier to just give the kid a tablet and go back to whatever you were doing. Its always better to actually interact with the kid. That trade-off of time is important because if you mess up when they are young, you spend a lot more time handling issues later on. That time you gained by giving them a tablet will get payed back someday, usually with interest. That's what is happening here.
As a father of 3, one thing the wife and I had to learn over the course of the first two is that the modern world holds parents to impossible standards and a "fuck off" attitude is required for much of it.
We've had pediatricians shame us for feeding our kids what they're willing to eat and not magically forcing "a more varied diet" down their throats at every meal, despite them being perfectly healthy by every objective metric. There are laws making it technically illegal for us to leave our kids unsupervised at home for any period of time in any condition, even a few minutes if one of us is running slightly late from work/appointments.
Your not-quite-2-year-old is too tall for a rear-facing car-seat? You're a bad parent, possibly a criminal and putting them at risk by flipping the seat to face forward, a responsible parent spends hundreds of dollars they don't have on several different seats to maybe find one that fits better or have their kid ride uncomfortably and arguably unsafely with their legs hyper-extended up the seatback.
Miss a flu shot because you were busy? Careful you don't come off as an antivaxxer.
And all of this and more on top of changing diapers, doctors' appointments, daycare, preschool, school, family activities and full time jobs?
Yeah, when my kids are old enough to engage with social media I will teach them how to use it responsibly, warn them about the dangers, make myself available to them if they have any problems, enforce putting the phones down at dinner and and keep a loose eye on their usage. Fortunately/unfortunately for them they have a technically sophisticated father who knows how to log web activity on the family router without their knowledge. So if anything goes sideways I'll have some hard information to look at. Most families don't have that level of technical skill.
I was almost certainly never going to be a parent for other unrelated reasons, but you have just given me a whole other list of confirmations for that decision that I hadn't thought of before.
> Amazon is very good at bits but has repeatedly failed at atoms.
This idea of bits vs atoms was stolen straight from the CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick. During the infamous Silicon-Valley-TV-Show-esque Las Vegas company offsite, one of his big talks was about how Uber had to not only deal with bits, ie. the virtual world, but also atoms, ie. the real world. That made it a bigger challenge than all the other companies like Google, Facebook, etc where they could dictate their own rules since they controlled everything, but Uber didn't have that luxury.
Just revert the code back to pre-26! This is ridiculous, it can't possibly be this hard and if it is, it just points to the degradation in the quality of Apple software! This is maddening!
This is already the pre-26 bounding box, isn't it? It's the new graphics that don't line up. (Not a great excuse, but the graphics are here to stay at least for a little while.)
> the graphics are here to stay at least for a little while
And that's the reason why I won't buy a new Mac.
Tahoe and Liquid Glass are so horrible that they're going to lose customers because of those. They should realize what they did and just backtrack: it wouldn't be the first time they admit they made a mistake [1].
The magic mouse have been there, almost unchanged, since 2009. That is a lot for a tech product, and retiring a product after 16 years is not admitting to a mistake. For example, the Logitech G5 mouse and its direct evolutions were among the most successful Logitech products, and it didn't last that long.
No, it is not just refusing to admit that the magic mouse was a mistake, it is considering that it is the best ever. That USB port on the underside is still one of the great mysteries though, maybe it is some quirk of evolution, because it is certainly not intelligent design.
In addition to vertical scrolling, the Magic Mouse can do horizontal (or diagonal) scrolling, zooming in and out, and a couple of other tricks. This makes it worthy for the people who need this for their work. There are mice that can do horizontal or vertical scrolling -- but not both at the same time.
People who do their work on large documents (pics in Photoshop, videos, CAD, music, even Excel, etc.) use these capabilities every day, and they like their Magic mice very much. If you are not one of these people (software development, for example, can be done with vertical scroll only, for the most part), it doesn't mean it's a bad product -- all it means it's a product which is not for you.
I don't use Magic Mouse but am very far from expecting Apple to admit "the magic mouse was a mistake" though.
I am using Sequoia and the windows are definitely rounded! Though the radius is pretty small (the curved region is about a quarter of the mouse cursor area), so the fact you can drag it from outside the window doesn't look ridiculous.
How is it not pathetic that Apple can't fix this and bring it back to normal behavior? Who is fighting for this stupid behavior? It's driving me crazy as well.
If you're finding their a bad tool for most jobs you're using them for, you're probably being closed minded and using it wrong. The trick with AI these days is to ask it to do something that you think is impossible and it will usually do a pretty decent job at it, or at least close enough for you to pick up or to guide it further.
I was a huge AI skeptic but since Jan 2025, I have been watching AI take my job away from me, so I adapted and am using AI now to accelerate my productivity. I'm in my 50s and have been programming for 30 years so I've seen both sides and there is nothing that is going to stop it.
Okay, I use OpenCode/Codex/Gemini daily (recently cancelled my personal CC plan given GPT 5.2/3 High/XHigh being a better value, but still have access to Opus 4.5/6 at work) and have found it can provide value in certain parts of my job and personal projects.
But the evangelist insistence that it literally cannot be a net negative in any contexts/workflows is just exhausting to read and is a massive turn-off. Or that others may simply not benefit the same way with that different work style.
Like I said, I feel like I get net value out of it, but if my work patterns were scientifically studied and it turned out it wasn't actually a time saver on the whole I wouldn't be that surprised.
There are times where after knocking request after request out of the park, I spend hours wrangling some dumb failures or run into spaghetti code from the last "successful" session that massively slow down new development or require painful refactoring and start to question whether this is a sustainable, true net multiplier in the long term. Plus the constant time investment of learning and maintaining new tools/rules/hooks/etc that should be counted too.
But, I enjoy the work style personally so stick with it.
I just find FOMO/hype inherently off-putting and don't understand why random people feel they can confidently say that some random other person they don't know anything about is doing it wrong or will be "left behind" by not chasing constantly changing SOTA/best practices.
I try them a few times a month, always to underwhelming results. They're always wrong. Maybe I'll find an interesting thing to do with them some day, I dunno. It's just not a fun or interesting tool for me to learn to use so I'm not motivated. I like deterministic & understandable systems that always function correctly; "smart" has always been a negative term in marketing to me. I'm more motivated to learn to drive a city bus or walk a postal route or something, so that's the direction I'm headed in.
On one hand, the DOJ gets shit because it was taking too long to produce the documents, and then on another, they get shit because there are mistakes in the redacting because there are 3 million pages of documents.
What they are redacting is pretty questionable though. Entire pages being suspiciously redacted with no explanation (which they are supposed to provide). This is just my opinion, but I think it's pretty hard to defend them as making an honest and best effort here. Remember they all lied about and changed their story on the Epstein "files" several times now (by all I mean Bondi, Patel, Bongino, and Trump).
It's really really hard to give them the benefit of the doubt at this point.
My favorite is that sometimes they redact the word "don't". Not only does it totally change the meaning of whatever sentence it's in, the conspiracy theory is that they had a Big Dumb Regex for redacting /Don\W+T/i to remove Trump references
The zeitgeist around the files started with MAGA and their QAnon conspiracy. All the right wing podcasters were pushing a narrative that Trump was secretly working to expose and takedown a global child sex trafficking ring. Well, it turns out, unsurprisingly, that Trump was implicated too and that's when they started to do a 180. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
You should consider medication. I used to be against medication, but after talking with a few of my friends who have gifted children, things like ADHD are extremely common. Avoiding medication and letting them spin in the wind is not a good strategy and it destroys their self esteem. Get as small a dose as possible and then wean him off as he gets older and hopefully his prefrontal cortex will catch up and help regulate him.
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