Road Rash 64 is a really underrated game. As you say, the environment is alive, and nearly every race has a lot of potential for wacky slapstick fun. The driving feels really nice and is rewarding to learn.
I hope they succeed, and this is from someone who loves Linux and hate Windows. I want as many positive general purpose computing platforms as possible. No, this won't make Windows perfect, but every step in the right direction is crucial.
Much like politics, you want sane, healthy competitors. Microsoft enshittifying as much as possible might bump up the Linux numbers in the short term, but I think it would be unhealthy for Linux in the long term. You want a major power like Microsoft pushing back on some of these trends, which completely opens the door for small players to benefit from that pushback.
I hope the folks at Microsoft can roll back as much of the slop as possible.
> I think it would be unhealthy for Linux in the long term
Mostly agree until this line. MS enshittifying their ecosystem is the resting state and if you believe in the free market (I don't btw), customers voting with their money or data (since they're the product) should be applauded.
TBF Apple does this too on macOS and arguably iOS. I think a lot of their longstanding pushes to merge the two OSes is hostile to their user base who want stronger separations of concerns; a desktop OS has different requirements and capabilities than a phone or a tablet.
Would love to have a Neo with Sequoia which in itself is a step back from Sonoma, but I haven't truly loved any of their OSes since Mountain Lion.
No one likes when I say this but it's really past time to stop doing anything interesting on your phone. Delete all your apps, set it as minimally as possible. Leave it home when you go for walks, and power it off when you go driving or to the store, or whatever.
how? whatsapp, wechat, telegram, even signal, all require a phone to be used.
if i didn't need any of those apps then sure, but unfortunately there is no way around these apps if i want to keep in touch with certain people that are important to me.
If you need to use these, set the history retention to like no time. That would help a lot. They could still get the contents from the person you are communicating with, but it would require more work on their part. Humans are generally fairly lazy. If you can get the people you communicate iwth to also turn off message retention, that would help. Then they could tell you talked with Tootie, but not what you talked about, at least from the device(s) themselves.
If you “must” use those then keep a phone off in a drawer and turn it on once a day to keep in touch.
If those people won’t allow you to be offline from time to time and aren’t willing to switch communication methods as an alternative, maybe it’s not a symmetrical relationship.
I'm starting to believe this is [a] way forward. Or maybe an approach which is on a spectrum between <everything I have is on a phone behind a fingerprint and a four digit pin> and <I don't own a smartphone>.
Unfortunately, it's pretty common to only have a smartphone as your sole compute device, and increasingly onerous not to own one at all.
>Or maybe an approach which is on a spectrum between
>increasingly onerous not to own one at all.
Yes, and I think this unfortunately demands a grey area. I'm starting to treat my smartphone more like a work device, and there are a few things I do on it:
- My work's authenticator app is there.
- Unfortunately Signal is tied to smartphone usage.
- Practically speaking, people will expect to be able to send you text messages.
- It's still useful for taking pictures.
- My banking app is on there.
Outside of rare occasions, that's really all I use my phone for. I don't carry it around the house. If I go somewhere with my wife, I don't even bring my phone most of the time. I'm "required" to have it, but in principle it's not even mine. It shouldn't be trusted or enjoyed.
Interesting, and not all that implausible. The real test: his personal email should be pretty uninteresting except for stuff like HIPAA, amazon purchases, communications with friends / family. (good for HUMINT) But other than that, there shouldn't be anything in there which should make the news. It'll be interesting to see whether or not that bears out.
If they wanted to maintain access, they certainly wouldn't celebrate it publicly, which is why I assume they want to release information. But, there shouldn't be anything damning to release. ie, there ought not to be if the director is acting professionally. We'll see how the facts bear out. I also suppose it's possible they're just going for any win they can and there's nothing interesting here whatsoever, or it's a really boring secondary address or something.
I think this is actually the opposite of the correct conclusion—just look how influential Patreus cheating on his wife was (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal). I seriously doubt that Kash Patel doesn't have a bunch of skeletons to dust off and show the world; the man is a weirdo (much like the rest of the administration).
EDIT: I actually misread the comment; I think we're likely in agreement. My bad.
I'd like to chime in and say that that Kash Patel, while completely unprofessional and incompetent, is way less of a weirdo than the rest of the administration.
His scandals are all about shirking job responsibilities to party and sightsee. That's not great from the FBI director but its way more normal than the rest of them.
I dunno, a sitting FBI director testifying under oath about details that are clearly false, goes above and way beyond "to party and sightsee". At least in my world it puts him up there together with the rest of the weirdos.
That's not remotely true of his history.. he's a full on Jan-6er, deep into Q-Anon, he was involved in numerous serious scandals during the first Trump admin (Nunes Memo / Russiagate 'parallel' investigation: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/the-men...), he has a number of sketchy moneymaking side-businesses, he was formerly living with a GOP megadonor 'Timeshare Tycoon' as roommates in Vegas (https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/trump-fbi-pick-kash...), he collected enemies' lists for Trump which resulted in firing of most of the Iran counterintel team right before we started launching attacks because they had the termerity to investigate why Trump was showing donors top-secret maps of Iran after he left office..
In the current environment, those are more expecteds than scandalous.
Insider trades around government activities, same-sex behavior, overt racism for example might nudge the needle.
Dig in? Was already aware of his book, and he's made many more weird books. Trump's cabinet are all weird little goblins, some more Nazi than others, like Miller.
Why do you assume I did any digging at all? I just said we might find out some fun stuff in his emails about his weird book, which I already was aware of. Presumably the SAT includes properly written words and sentences, not whatever you spew out.
If I was Iran I'd leak the innocuous stuff first to let them know I had access to potentially more damning things, to try and force the US to the table.
That would only work if there was something damning to Trump or someone in charge of Iran negotiations. Trump has no problem cutting people loose otherwise
From the news I’ve read the most “embarrassing” things in his personal email are photos of him smoking cigars, holding a bottle of rum, and posing in front of a supercar. What a scandal…
I was just reading a X thread that published some of the more notable things and overall it's pretty innocuous. The most "controversial" thing thus far is he took a trip to Cuba
The press was stupid. They were doing stupid gotchas like swiftboats, fake reports on GWB (Dan Rather), but couldn’t care less about things like the CIA and the crack cocaine connection[1], or lots of other things the government gets away with (including Clappers total information awareness unconstitutional surveillance efforts) The press is always carrying water for someone but that someone is rarely the public unless is just pure coincidence.
[1] there was one reporter who dared but the toll from the story resulted in his suicide, some years later. His colleagues poo-pooed his reporting on the connection.
* The Swiftboat thing was completely an ad campaign if I remember correctly.
I remember most media covering it as BS.
* The contents of Dan Rather report on GWB was true. There was one document
which was sketchy, but the whole report didn't hinge on the one document
from an officer's office. (E.g. Ex-senator Ben Barnes's interview is reasonably
indicting: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-barnes-on-bush/)
The media did fall down though. Only one outlet went to the the Officer's
secretary (who was still alive) to ask if she had typed the document.
She looked at it and said (summarizing here) that it wasn't the document
she typed, but it was the same contents.
What's interesting is how easily the media is distracted. What's even more
concerning though, is that when the more centrist major media has tried to
be less gullible, they've been vilified. (E.g. trying not to be suckered
by miraculous appearance Hunter Biden's laptop.)
It's a mess, and the only way out of it is probably limits own media ownership.
Maybe the hackers will release information connecting Patel to the Noem and Lewandowski grift operations with govt contracts. Out of the four companies allowed to bid for the $220 million advertising contract, 3 were linked to Noem and Lewandowski and one to Patel.
There is so much corruption and impropriety in this administration that skeletons don't matter anymore. Looking at what sunk officials in previous administrations provides a sense for just how far gone we are, but it's not an indicator of what future consequences will be.
Like what? We have two presidents, including the current one, that took multiple trips to a pedophile island. What skeletons could be greater than accusations of punching a child in the face after they bit the dude’s penis during forced sodomy?
There is no credible evidence that either of the Presidents you alluded to visited "the island". It's amazing to see conspiracy theories promulgated on HN.
There is lots of evidence that these two presidents were on the pedophile island many times, and one of their wives. That is well established.
There is no evidence released to the public directly linking those two men to specific sex acts by name. There is unnamed evidence released by the US DOJ specifically describing the assault I described in the prior comment. Again, none of this is theoretical, conspiracy, or conjecture. It’s in the documents released by the government that the government has confirmed as authentic.
No doubt you are aware that the claims about Clinton originated with the founder of the Epstein Mythos, Virginia Giuffre, who we know for a fact was a serial confabulator. While she was inarguably one of Epstein's victims, she also made several claims that were demonstrably untrue, she could not keep her own stories straight, the FBI concluded internally that she was totally unreliable and that she was even lying about what the FBI told her, other victims contradicted her, and she was herself forced to recant on several subjects, including admitting that her "autobiography" book was a work of fiction. If you doubt me, feel free to read the FBI memo about her.
In the case of both Clinton and Trump, there is no evidence that either of them visited Little St. James, and plenty of evidence otherwise - for example, Epstein even says so about Clinton in an email.
> It’s in the documents released by the government that the government has confirmed as authentic.
The documents are "authentic" in that yes, a real schizo did really tell the government he heard it secondhand 30 years ago that this happened and also that he discovered Hilary Clinton was behind the WTC bombing. (For some reason, people like you always leave that part of the bombshell revelations out.) I am for total transparency generally, but this whole saga has been a major disappointment for me in that the level of public discourse is so lazy and low that its clear that in a purely utilitarian way, it would have been better to not release it. Hopefully long-term the sacrifice of many people whose reputations are being destroyed over little or nothing is worth it. Every crank call about celebrities is being treated as gospel.
Remarkable that Epstein confined his pedophile activities to a single location.
No, wait:
In 2008, Epstein reached a plea deal with prosecutors after the parents of a 14-year-old girl told Florida police that Epstein had molested their daughter at his Palm Beach home.
Hmm ... would that be the same Palm Beach home that Trump visited a good many times back when he was best of chums with Jeffrey and sending him the nude outline sketches?
> Remarkable that Epstein confined his pedophile activities to a single location
Correct, the vast majority of his criminal activity appeared to be in his Palm Beach home and in New York, where he recruited high dozens to hundreds of high school girls for his personal sexualized massages. It actually appears only a very small amount of his illicit activity ever took place on the island, which makes it all the more ironic that's what the conspiracy theorists focus on.
I was willing to be more than openmminded about the conspiracists' mass trafficking ring (ie, beyond the two people charged) angle, but the ironic thing is about the Epstein files is they revealed it was almost all smoke. Of course, in the conspirational mindset, all contradicting evidence is actually, secretly, when you apply the correct hermeutics, even more damning, or else evidence of a coverup.
> the ironic thing is about the Epstein files is they revealed it was almost all smoke.
and a few massive conspiracy shaped holes - eg: the references to missing content regarding Trump and a few other. Oh, and the shortfall between what has been released Vs what has been indexed, the black paging, and the hints from those that have seen but are sworn to not tell about that which they have seen but cannot recount.
Still, at least we seem to agree that PedoIsland is a misdirect when it comes to determining who did what to whom and where.
I can't see Pam Bondi coming clean here anytime soon.
> the hints from those that have seen but are sworn to not tell about that which they have seen but cannot recoun
The people who were victimized by anyone other than Epstein and Maxwell could come forward at any time, just as dozens of Epstein's victims have. They have some of the highest-powered civil lawyers in America, hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement funds available, and vast swaths of the country behind them.
It tells me that they are afraid of their safety and the safety of their families. They would risking backlash from a billionaire who loves intimidation tactics, who currently has the highest amount of power of any individual in the US, and who has nutty followers who would act on his behalf and let him pretend he was not at all happy about what they are doing.
The people who have come forward about Epstein's abuses have little to worry about because that man is dead and he's a perfect scapegoat for all the the other ultra-rich who took part in the abuses.
If you’re talking about Trump, you may remember that E Jean Carroll won a lawsuit against him. She’s walking the earth and continuing to live a public life.
And again, millions of dollars are available from settlement funds if Epstein was involved, there’s already some of the best lawyers in the country begging to represent you, and there’s people volunteering to pay for your security needs.
You’re also ignoring the many victims that came out before Epstein died.
This is just an excuse to perpetuate the conspiracy theories. It doesn’t hold water. And of course if anything was released from super secret “the files” they’re definitely still covering up, they’d become publicly known.
Surely you see how this line of reasoning is identical to that of any other conspiracy or moral panic.
You misunderstand my point. I’m saying that if there are any credible accusations in “the files” beyond those well-documented ones against Epstein and Maxwell, then the accusers would be known publicly anyway when they’re disclosed.
The whole thing falls apart the moment you examine the actual evidence and think about it. It’s really disappointing that smart people on even this forum get wrapped up into this junk.
> You misunderstand my point. I’m saying that if there are any credible accusations in “the files” beyond those well-documented ones against Epstein and Maxwell, then the accusers would be known publicly anyway when they’re disclosed.
The whole thing falls apart the moment you examine the actual evidence and think about it. It’s really disappointing that smart people on even this forum get wrapped up into this junk.
Did you know that Epstein's hard drives were removed by a private investigator, and that the FBI and DOJ never had them to begin with? They were removed before they were searched by law enforcement.
Surely we are currently clean on OPSEC. There couldn't be any precedent for government officials using private email servers for confidential information!
obligatory - that first famous private server was done because someone wanted a blackberry like Obama had, and was told no by NSA. Man that BB keyboard was good.
I’ve been using a Clicks case since the early days and have personally loved every second of it but it’s definitely an acquired taste. Let us know how you find it.
Are we talking about the same FBI director here? Professional and competent are not how I would describe Kash Patel. Given his overt buffoonishness and the whole administration's disdain for procedure and expertise I would be shocked if he didn't have extremely inappropriate content in his inbox.
Yeah, the fact they announced it proves it’s nothing. I saw a picture of him smoking a cigar. We’ve already seen him drinking beer and acting foolish; probably enough to get you executed in Isfahan, but a giant nothining in the USA.
> his personal email should be pretty uninteresting except for stuff like HIPAA, amazon purchases, communications with friends / family. (good for HUMINT) But other than that, there shouldn't be anything in there which should make the news. It'll be interesting to see whether or not that bears out.
Aren't these the same people who apparently used Signal with a journalist in the chat, and had military conversations in that very chat?
Color me surprised if these people haven't heard of opsec before, and mix their work/personal life all over the place.
Yes, and I wouldn't be shocked if there was classified information in there. I struggled with wording, but what I meant was "you're not supposed to be able to find classified or sensitive information in personal email, but I who knows what will be the case here."
Also wildly illegal to use to conduct government business, especially confidential government business. (and yes the messages were auto-deleting and largely lost before anyone chimes in with technically they could be archived!)
> Signal is one of the most secure communication platforms out there
That might be true amongst the communication platforms available for the average Joe. It is definietly not the most secure communication platform available for someone high ranking in the USA government.
> it is obviously not immune to human error or social engineering
Nothing is immune. But there are systems more and systems less prone to these issues.
> The investigation has led to turmoil within the Defense Department, raising tensions and the firings and resignations of several top DoD officials, including former Chief of Staff Joe Kasper. [...] On May 1, 2025, it was revealed that both national security adviser Mike Waltz and his deputy Alex Wong would be leaving their posts in the National Security Council
Let me guess, the "leak" was intentional just to break a bunch of laws and to cause a bunch of people to get fired and leave their posts?
Signal started being used during the Biden administration, the issue was how they were managing contacts which could be added to groups. They weren't carefully vetting access and a journalist with the same name as another military guy was added to the group by accident.
The public record of a contract to the Israeli company which handled archiving Signal chats for the DoD was done during Biden admin. And it's been well reported if you just Google it:
> Alexa Henning, spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, tweeted last week that “widespread use” of Signal began under the Biden administration, adding that “at ODNI, when I got my phone, it was pre-installed.”
You're missing some key distinctions. The issues are: 1) putting classified information into a non-classified system; 2) putting information that needs to be preserved under laws like the presidential records act into systems where it's set to be auto-deleted. Both are illegal. Simply saying that the Biden administration pre-installed Signal is irrelevant. There are legitimate uses.
Your own article makes this exact point:
> Matthew Shoemaker, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who left the agency in 2021, said that while Signal was used during his time in government, “it was almost exclusively restricted to scheduling purposes,” such as letting their boss know that they’ll be late to work because of personal circumstances.
“That’s why Signalgate is all the more staggering — because these senior leaders were doing the exact opposite of what even my most junior intelligence officers knew not to do,” he said.
You're doing bullshit partisan whataboutism. "well the democrats did it first".
This has nothing to do with adding the wrong contacts. It has to do with putting highly-sensitive material into Signal to circumvent the law around records preservation and as a result creating a situation where it's possible to accidentally add the wrong contact and therefore exposing that information to a journalist.
> This has nothing to do with adding the wrong contacts. It has to do with putting highly-sensitive material into Signal to circumvent the law around records preservation
My comment above already mentions public records of the DoD contracting out archiving of the Signal chat, so it doesn't in fact circumvent laws around preservation.
> You're doing bullshit partisan whataboutism. "well the democrats did it first".
I don't think it's a huge sin for government workers to be using Signal, remote work and messaging is the new norm and they will use something whether we like it or not, and Signal is the least bad option. I don't blame the Biden DoD for experimenting down that road at all, as I'm skeptical they'd build something better internally - and to your hyperpolitical points I don't see large distinctions between these type of tech choices between administrations (the DoD staff largely remains the same even when presidents change).
The issue with encryption and security will always be human security practices come first-and-foremost, technology second. They failed an OPSEC checklist when using group chats and need to implement better identification management. That's the sort of lesson that large organizations frequently need to re-learn the hard way when adopting new (and often better) things.
1. Classified information. Was it legal to put that into the DoD approved Signal build? The media coverage at the time gave me the impression that it was not.
2. Records keeping. Were the Trump admin chats in question properly archived then? I had been led to believe that they weren't. Do you believe that to be incorrect?
> I don't blame the Biden DoD for experimenting down that road at all
The person you're replying to never criticized them for such.
> The real test: his personal email should be pretty uninteresting except for stuff like HIPAA, amazon purchases, communications with friends / family. (good for HUMINT) But other than that, there shouldn't be anything in there which should make the news.
I have no idea why this would be the default assumption for somebody as sloppy and erratic as Patel. Look at how many people were emailing damning stuff to/from Epstein's personal email accounts from their own personal email accounts!
We're just in a bleak time. It seems that many people are scrambling to do the most harm possible. Everyone's building the torment nexus. I'm not sure what else to do but attempt to insulate my family from it.
I'm hoping that someday more people will appreciate the humor in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.
What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. ..."
Whenever I think to myself "how did things get this bad?", I also force myself to think, "how did they get good, in the first place?"
Today, we are building the Torment Nexus. But yesterday, we were building the Vietnam War, the Holocaust, etc. etc. Things can get worse, but they can also get better - we just have to do our small part in making them better.
The left is focused not on the correct thing (albeit a thing worthy of support), and the right refuse to acknowledge the benefit of regulation / legislation and are totally disenchanted with the possibility of politics while they just just blame the left for all their problems.
Certainly some of the high profile cases have been fairly absurd. A mid-tier male athletic transitions, and then blows the female record out of the water and gets gold. What I don't know is whether there are wider stats rather than some really big notable cases. It wouldn't surprise me, I just don't have the facts at the moment.
I was a college athlete. Trust me, this topic has been discussed ad infinitum. People were not even allowed to speak out. In addition, the NCAA meet is very competitive and Thomas pushed someone out of the meet and out of finals. Girls work their entire life for this meet just for it to end this way. It's shockingly sad on so many levels. It's not common, but it's not right that people were not even allowed to speak up. Former swimmers there have done interviews.
Regardless, Lia went from not being in the front of the pack, to being in the front of the pack:
“By the conclusion of Thomas's swimming career at UPenn in 2022, her rank had moved from 65th on the men's team to 1st on the women's team in the 500-yard freestyle, and 554th on the men's team to fifth on the women's team in the 200-yard freestyle.”
65th to 1st in one category, and 554th to 5th in another.
It is fair to say there was a significant increase in rank post-transition.
Yeah, generally you get better in your sport in the 4-5 years you're in college. She was already putting up crazy numbers as a freshman on the men's team.
From Wikipedia:
> Thomas began swimming on the men's team at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. During her freshman year, Thomas recorded a time of eight minutes and 57.55 seconds in the 1,000-yard freestyle that ranked as the sixth-fastest national men's time, and also recorded 500-yard freestyle and 1,650-yard freestyle times that ranked within the national top 100.[4] On the men's swim team in 2018–2019, Thomas finished second in the men's 500, 1,000, and 1,650-yard freestyle at the Ivy League championships as a sophomore in 2019.[4][3][13] During the 2018–2019 season, Thomas recorded the top UPenn men's team times in the 500 free, 1,000 free, and 1,650 free, but was the sixth best among UPenn men's team members in the 200 free.[14]
To focus in on her just-out-of-highschool low ranking, and imply that it's weird that she improved by the time she graduated, is deliberately disingenuous (not on your part, but on the writer's.) She had already won 3 silver medals as a sophomore on the men's team, and was the best on her team in all but one event.
Nitpick: the references 4 of the wiki page point to a CNN article which in turn references times and rankings that don't exist any longer. A little more investigation shows that all of Thoms' titles were revoked and a court case allowing Thomas to the Olympics was also lost. The wiki is badly out of date.
Holy bad faith. OP didn't say Thomas's improved ranking is simply due to "people naturally improving overtime", but because she already was already rising, even between other men. Could you at least argue that point?
Also, if that's a "far left ideology rabbit hole" (it isn't even ideological), I have to ponder what the hell you think is a "right ideology", nevermind "far right ideology".
This power lifter set regional junior records as a young man then quit the sport and didn't compete for 16 years. After transitioning she went on to win gold medals in numerous international competitions as a woman.
At the moment, my strategy is only to own older TVs that have no smart features. Eventually this strategy won't work. When that happens I'll either use a computer monitor or forgo TV altogether.
Being able to find some basis for comparison between two things does not render them equivalent, and this is an extremely frequent fallacy I see with regard to technology discussion on HN.
When it comes down to it, I’m not sure how you differentiate an “addictive” product from a well-made product that I choose to keep using.
When people say that Tetris and Civilization are “addictive” they aren’t implying anything malicious about the development, it’s more of a compliment about the game (and maybe a little lament about staying up too late).
But the addictive nature of social media feels different and I can’t figure out what that distinction is.
I have an instagram account because it's by far the best way I know of to keep up with various small businesses, local or otherwise, that I like.
What I go into the app to do: see if there are any updates from those businesses.
What the app presents me on launch: a bunch of nonsense selected for what will best-distract me. And you know what? Sometimes it does catch my attention for a minute or two!
What the app doesn't let me do: disable the nonsense, or even default to the tab of accounts I'm following. Hell they even intentionally broke ways to achieve this with iOS' scripting, you'd think that'd be niche-enough they wouldn't care, but apparently enough people were doing it that they bothered to break it.
The algo feed is addictive on-purpose. I would turn it off if I could, and there's a damn good reason they don't let you do that. I "choose" to engage with it sometimes, which sometimes gets people coming out to go "oh-ho! So your revealed preference is that you like the feed!" but that's plainly silly, as that's highly contextual and my in-fact actual preference would be to never see that feed again in my life, and in fact I've spent a little time trying to make that happen. It's only my "revealed preference" in a world where I've had to compromise by occasionally losing a couple minutes to this crap because the app won't let me go straight to what I actually want. That's my true preference, the "revealed" one is only ever briefly flirted-with in a context in which I'm prevented from attaining my actual preference.
Consider a person who struggles with eating junk food. They don't keep junk food at home, in fact. That is their preference, to not keep it around, because they don't want to eat it and know they will if it's there. Now concoct some scenario in which, in exchange for something else they want, they have to take delivery of a couple bags of potato chips and a box of cookies every week. And sometimes, they eat some of that before tossing it out or giving it away! "Ah-ha, so their revealed preference is that they want junk food!" Like, no, of course not.
There's a reason these apps have to prevent you from using any part of them except with the presentation they like: because they'd being addictive on purpose, and tons of users do not want the addictive parts, at all, but do want other parts.
People will now say "the algorithm" and "dopamine", explaining nothing. You see, social media is truly addictive because it's been honed to be addictive in some way that isn't specified or known or actually true.
OK, let me try to analyze it:
1. Humans are idiots.
2. We have idiot glitches where we obsess over some particular thing. This is our own business and our own fault, and is impossible to tease apart from just liking stuff a lot and benefitting from it.
3. These glitches tend to accumulate in certain areas, and then some companies find themselves in the position of profiting from human glitchy idiocy, even though they didn't want to be behaving like scammers.
4. Then some of them get cynical about it and focus on that market segment, the obsessed idiots. This can include gambling and social media.
Tetris and civilization are also harmfully addictive, but the scope of the behavior they can hijack is lower. "One more turn" at 2am is harmful. Just not as harmful as something that knows about and interacts with every aspect of your social life and your view of the real world around you like social/media apps do today.
A really well built hammer doesn't make you want to spend all your time using a hammer, it's just good when you need a hammer. That's a well-made product that you choose to keep using.
there's hundreds of good books on all types of addiction, including home shopping network style, gambling / lootbox / gacha, adrenaline, sex, and so on. My spouse, at the beginning of this month, went to a 2 day series of lectures about novel treatments for gambling, as part of their CEU for their license. I know most of HN won't know what i am talking about, so:
In general professionals must be licensed and bonded. The state requires a degree and a test for the first license, then, for my spouse's, something like 8000 additional hours of training, and something like 100 hours of continuing education per year. a CEU is 1 hour of continuing education. you have ~5 years of time to transition your license by doing the above training and CEU - as a rolling window. Doctors, nurses, etc all have to do this sort of thing.
Would any of you put up with that kind of stuff to make $80k a year?
Not to disagree with you, but in the case of Civilization, I do find it addicting in both senses. It is one of two games that I just cannot play, because I will be up until 3am playing. (Puzzles and Dragons was the other one, I think I had to uninstall it the day after I downloaded it)
I think this represents a strong misunderstanding of what addiction is, and how it works. I mean this respectfully, and not combatively -- I expect you have never had problems with addiction.
When it comes to behavioral psychology research, there is a strong understanding of concepts such as behavioral reward schedules; interval-based rewards, time-based rewards, variably-interval-based rewards. People have a very clear understanding of what sort of stimulus is and is not prone to addiction. You can get a mouse in a cage to become hopelessly addicted to pressing a lever for a reward depending on what reward schedule you use, and this does not translate to a mouse who can just get the reward at a regular interval. (or perhaps merely a less-addicting interval) The mouse in the cage pressing a button set to a variable-ratio reward is equivalent to an old person using a slot machine in a very literal and direct way. This also translates to social media with permanent scrolling. So many of the stories such, but the variable interval is the extremely enticing (or enraging) story that just might be the next one.
> Tetris and Civilization are “addictive” they aren’t implying anything malicious about the development, it’s more of a compliment about the game
Because it's a figure of speech, not a clinical diagnosis. Literal and figurative addictions are different beasts.
Intent, premeditation, scale are major differentiators. When they know they will cause harm, they concentrate and fine tune it for the effect, turn it into a firehose, and target it at specific individuals it's very, very different from what random ads, games, of movies do. These companies literally designed their products with the intent to make them addictive and target children, knowing the full implications and ignoring the harm they caused.
You're comparing a drug dealer who only sells to kids to a store clerk who also sells icecream to kids. It doesn't take more that scratching the surface to realize the similarity is very fleeting.
I understand what you’re saying, I personally don’t like or use social media, but I don’t agree that these companies are at fault after reading this article and others. I’d rather be wrong and learn something than think I’m right, so I welcome further criticism.
I agree with you that parents need to ultimately be responsible for keeping their kids off social media. I think there are a few problems here:
- Social media is still somewhat new, and the broader public is only now discovering that it's a clear net negative both personally and for society. Because this is such a new realization, I think a LOT of people have not really figured out how this problem should be dealt with. (both personally, via social norms, but also with regard to laws and regulations.
- No matter how awesome of a parent you are, 100% of your kids friends will have social media and they will introduce it to you kid. That may do less harm than if they have it themselves, but some harm will still be done.
- There are network effects to consider. It's true that it's your personal fault if you use cocaine -- however we also understand that cocaine is so addictive that it really cannot be used safely. Social media is metaphorically the same. It's a personal failing if you're a social media addict, however broadly almost everyone is susceptible to it. In my mind, that is an argument for regulation.
Now that said, I have zero faith that our government can actually build sensible regulation here.
They strategically use patterns that directly trigger the release of dopamine into the brain.
They've created algorithms that use slot machine like experiences that keep kids hooked to the screen.
These algorithms feeds users barely moderated content that feeds their worst instincts. With almost surgical precision when wanting to illicit engagement.
Then when research shows them the harm their causing they bury it, hire lobbyist, and double down.
Switch out a few words up there and you have the big tobacco playbook.
It's not just kids. My parents have spiraled in this way too. Why interact with each other when reels are more exciting? Why pursue friendships if you can experience it parasocially? This has been incredibly depressing, and it's a reason I make sure to value the people in my life. I have a lot of disgust for Meta and Google seeing what they've done to society broadly. All for money
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