They invented self-healing concrete far superior to anything we use today and it took us 2000 years to realize we’re really smart morons. Romans built things to last, we build it to crumble.
1. There are more open-source hardware devices available today than ever before. Your demand to legally "force" your pov is just authoritarian.
2. LLMs are obviously useful- it's not dumb to train them.
3. Coding is now democratized- it is now easier than ever for anyone to write a program
And while compute likely is being overinvested in now (i.e., the price is artificially inflated, supply is being dramatically increased, etc.), the likelihood that this is a temporary shortage and, in the event of 'hype' deflating, an impending surplus -- I don't think we yet have to fear the inability for one to personally compute.
These rulings are stupid and if generalized would make doing business impossible. Parents should parent their kids. That law is so board - "public morals"? Should every porn site be taken down?
The world would almost assuredly be a better place if 14 year olds were looking at playboy magazines instead of having easy access to every fetish under the sun. It has distorted many a young man’s ideas of intimacy and sexual relations.
I am no expert, however, the former requires and stimulates the imagination, whereas the latter doesn't do that, everything is shown and nothing is left to the imagination.
From my experience of the 'stumbleupon' (a link-sharing site from many years ago), I would describe the saucy pictures women collected/liked as erotica rather than porn. Clearly porn would not make it to Stumbleupon, however, erotica tended to be collected by women rather than men.
This is just anecdotal observation from a few years ago.
Fundamentally, Western culture objectifies women (for profit) whereas other cultures don't necessarily do that, to consider porn as degenerate.
There is also local culture. Compare the boy that has strong women in their life and attends a mixed school with the boy that has older brothers but no sisters, goes to all-boys schools and is exposed to 'DJT locker room talk' (that would not never wash at the mixed school). The former is going to find porn to be cringeful and boring, whereas the latter gets hooked, particularly if they have a weak father figure that is into porn.
In the USA there is an incredible amount of sex and violence in the media. Just because it is all around, American women are going to be 'ambient' consumers of porn, with partners that think that watching porn with their partners is okay. I am not disputing your 'third of consumers' statistic, however, there are parts of the world where women have some 'immunity' to it.
As an aside, we all have our price and I did do some work for Playboy many aeons ago. I thought this would be a career limiting move, however, the Playboy people behind the camera were all women, extremely intelligent and a joy to work with. We didn't have full nudity, with the women in front of the camera being down to earth, friendly and not what I had 'feared'.
Playboy also had the articles, some of which would not be touched by the mainstream media, enabling Playboy to be a platform for whistleblowers, whilst giving some 'plausible deniability' for readers.
> Fundamentally, Western culture objectifies women (for profit) whereas other cultures don't necessarily do that
I don’t know if this is true. I’m fairly certain that all cultures have prostitutes. And porn is more a function of technology and income rather than geography. Lots of exploitation of women in Asia, Africa, and other non-Western cultures.
Of course, this is something that all culture need to work on improving. But understanding reality is a big step to stopping or reducing this objectification.
The topic is specifically sexual abuse, porn vs erotic books.
The commenter tried to play the "erotic romance books are as bad as hard core porn and no one is treating it that way" bullshit.
Women do create political ideologies and movements. They do participate in them too. The topic is specifically who is building and defending sexual abuse networks, who is invested more in defending right to abuse.
The fact the list ends at 2 women who were already named, when the men involved number in the hundreds and are still being protected, kind of ruins your point…
I've got plenty more if you want them. The fact that any exist at all is enough to prove that the statement "women dont create whole networks of sexual abuse" was a lie.
Ghislaine Maxwell was a part od male run male dominanted abuse network. The one which was supported by powerful men in goverment and politicians. Adult women were minority there.
Nice try. But while some women were part of Epstein network, overall it was male network. And pretty ideologically misogynistic at that.
Every person must have some natural violence pre disposition but that needs to be weighed by their ability to inflict it. I could be a super violent guy on a desert island and so never inflict violence. How physically strong you are must come into that which means opportunities for violence go down with physical size. Even if I want to be violent if I'm somewhat rational and don't want to get beat up.
It's not clear to me if women are less predisposed to violence or have on average less opportunity due to average smaller physical size specially compared to men. Though from experience I would say women also seem less pre disposed to violence in the first place.
Size doesn't matter all that much in the modern world. Even toddlers can murder people with a gun. Tiny people can kill very effectively with knives, poisons, cars, etc. The smaller you are the easier it can be to get away with it too.
This is not true. IIRC this factoid comes from the results of surveys asking people whether they had ever been the victims of domestic violence (not necessarily in their current relationships), and it should come as no surprise that relationships comprised of two women have the highest reporting rates of having been subjected to violence over their lifetimes, and relationships of two men the lowest rates. Within-relationship rates of domestic violence for lesbian couples are not higher than for heterosexual couples!
it contained significantly less extreme content. There's studies on kids as young as 12 routinely being exposed to sexual violence, practices such as choking or degrading activity in porn and viewing it as so normal that young women report being expected to take part in it. Fetishes and kinks that were reserved for adults are now normalized among teens.
"In an essay published in The Free Press in August, 16-year-old Isabel Hogben described how, by the time she was in 4th grade, she had seen internet porn featuring “simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism and unthinkable physical violence.” This is not an isolated case: A French government task force on equality recently reported that as much as 90% of online pornography features “verbal, physical and sexual violence toward women.”
Playboy wasn't necessarily a beacon of feminism (although sometimes surprisingly it was) but what young people are exposed to is in an entirely different category.
And I think that's understating it. I have not read a Playboy (is it even still in print?) since I was a teenager. At that time, the pictures showed breasts and maybe some pubic hair. Even the more "hardcore" magazines that were generally available such as Penthouse and Hustler were tame compared to even the front-page thumbnails on Pornhub. There were more explicit magazines produced, but you could only get them in "adult" bookstores and if you were under 18 you could not get in, and if you were over 18 there was a certain fear/shame of possibly being seen there that kept most people away.
If you really wanted it you could get hardcore stuff of course, but it was a lot more effort and cost compared to just opening a web browser. It was not something most people had ever really seen, certainly not among young children and teens.
It also had (has?) articles that were (are?) informative. There are a few photo spreads of naked women. Also some bawdy jokes that appeal to boys of all ages.
Disclaimer: my parents would not have that "birds and bees" conversation with me, so they instead subscribed to Playboy & Penthouse magazines for me.
> The world would almost assuredly be a better place if 14 year olds were looking at playboy magazines instead of having easy access to every fetish under the sun.
That was the world I grew up in. It was not better, it was just less open.
Fetishes aren't what has distorted mens' ideas of intimacy and sexual relations. Fetishes can be a perfectly healthy and consensual form of sexual expression. The problem is the lack of proper sexual education in schools and open dialogue in society because we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy, and they learn to see their own self worth as a function of their sexual prowess, and women as sexual currency.
Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids, and any site about womens' health issues, because "public morals" tends to consider all of it obscene, inherently pornographic or just "icky."
> The problem is the lack of proper sexual education in schools and open dialogue in society because we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy
The UK has a lot of sex education, no such taboos, and is the home of OnlyFans. Are any of the problems you mention better in the UK than the US?
> Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids,
IMO you are too caught up on the religious part of the teaching [ maybe rightfully so ] and less on the actual message.
The reason why this is so important is because of the preservation of the family. It is undeniable that a two parent healthy relationship is best for children regardless of religion. However religion is the proxy that is used to get there.
>The UK has a lot of sex education, no such taboos, and is the home of OnlyFans. Are any of the problems you mention better in the UK than the US?
I don't know, probably.
>There is no reason this has to be true.
The incessant need of moralists and God-botherers to purge society of anything they deem immoral is the reason. You give these people an inch and and a legal pretext and they take a mile.
i consider the negative impact of child exposure to hardcore pornography as outweighing the positives of online sex education and would prefer them both deleted rather than having the former involved
it already is the dominant culture. just look at the birth rate, as well reported damage from hardcore sex eg anal fissure rates, as well the existence of the western term gooning.
> it already is the dominant culture. just look at the birth rate, as well reported damage from hardcore sex eg anal fissure rates, as well the existence of the western term gooning.
When I was about 10, playground rumour was that alllllll men who have sex with men end up in hospital for torn anuses ("my mum says so and she's a nurse!"; I did not believe this at the time, but I was 10 and this was 1993, what was I going to say to that?)
If you think the mere "existence of the western term gooning" says much of anything about changes due specifically to internet culture, you've not seen the ancient erotic collections in museums. The internet makes it more difficult to be ignorant of the diversity of the human condition; in the past it was still diverse, but easier to ignore those differences.
What does seem to have actually changed (though even here it is difficult to be certain) is that our exposure to presentations of "perfection" has resulted in reality being dissatisfying: people still want relationships with other people, but reject potential partners who are in real life anything less than 9/10 on a scale of "how hard did you go on an Instagram filter after also going hard on makeup and even then this is scored on a curve from the best that the algorithm decided to show me?"
Sex education is, outside of some places in Europe, very rare. You'll certainly find such things far and few between in Asia. So not only is it absent in non-Christian nations, but the places where it is present, like Scandiland for ex, tend to be Christian.
Porn, let alone fetish porn, has a big problem because all the actors, including "amateur", are not only 'heavily used' and completely desensitized, but also the sort of people willing to publicly share video of themselves having sex. And so anybody taking any sort of que from there, whatsoever, has no clue what normal sex or normal relations look like.
>Porn, let alone fetish porn, has a big problem because all the actors, including "amateur", are not only 'heavily used' and completely desensitized, but also the sort of people willing to publicly share video of themselves having sex.
Maybe, but none of that is germane to the subject at hand.
It's the responsibility of parents and other adults to keep children away from porn, and to teach them about sex and normal relations. Removing porn doesn't solve that problem because again the problem isn't the porn, it's the fact that porn is serving a role in educating people that society refuses to.
> It's the responsibility of parents and other adults to keep children away from porn
Agreed. And the adults who run the porn sites should not be excluded from that. They should be at least as responsible as the parents, actually more so as they are the ones providing the porn.
“ we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy, and they learn to see their own self worth as a function of their sexual prowess, and women as sexual currency.”
Holy…what the actual…get out of my head. Where can I read more about this idea/how to recover from this type of upbringing? Please?
I think it's important to make a distinction between actual porn sites and sites that just have people talking about LGBTQ stuff. I'm trans and me and my spouse don't want our kids to watch porn.
To be clear, you want me to articulate a point that you fabricated and then attributed to me? I think I’m going to pass, but feel free to continue the discussion with yourself about things I didn’t say.
to clarify, you're suggesting I introduced a strawman argument because your focus on men wasn't mean to exclude anyone else?
that's... interesting. can you instead tell us why you prioritize men's sexuality over others then? or if that's somehow a distortion of what you said too, can you tell us why the focus on men at all?
Lol I have never met someone in my adult life in the usa who was strictly for abstinence before marriage. You are extremely overstating the taboo of it here.
I know dozens. I'm sure I've met thousands. I used to be active in a lutheran (LCMS) church. If that's where you form your social network, you're likely to be _primarily_ around people who believe in abstinence before marriage. And if you're non-religious, you'll have a different social network.
America maybe a melting pot, but if you'll let me abuse the metaphor a bit- there's not a lot of stirring going on. There are conservative churches in every city in the US, and this is still a fairly religious country.
LCMS is more conservative as you know, There is a lot of disagreement between ELCA.
I know of many lutheran [cool] pastors who had earrings, pony tails, never preached a single word about strict abstinence. There are many gay members of the Lutheran church and are welcomed.
LCMS and ELCA are practically different religions, IMO. In fact, my pastor at the time had a long angry rant about one of his peers who gave a speech at an event where ELCA pastors also spoke- he said that speaking alongside them gave the false impression that we condone their behavior (ordaining women, accepting gays), which we absolutely did not.
I'm not religious at all anymore. But I value my time as a devout person, it was super educational, and honestly I got a lot out of it. But I wouldn't go back there even for the social aspects.
Sounds like you're extremely limited in your experiences in the US. Maybe you should sit this one out? Your ignorance is not as good as someone else's lived experience.
Sure, but many schools teach only this. It is the dominant culture by construction, meaning we intentionally made it this way. I only got an abstinence only sex education as a young gay boy. That's dangerous. I had to learn about consent, protection, and HIV on my own as an adult. This is how teens become pregnant and why HIV is still a problem today.
There are many parts of the US that have legislated away all sex education other than abstinence, despite it having the obvious effect on teen pregnancy (and therefore abortion rates where it is legal!)
There are tens of millions of fundamentalists "christians" in the US.
"I haven't personally seen it so it can't be real" is absolutely a wild take in a place as heterogenous as the US, with 350 million human beings, huge diversity in backgrounds.
Have you even stepped foot in a random Christian church? Or "Christian" church? They are utterly insane, and will have a hundred loyal adherents even in rural towns.
The "christian" cults that were common around northern maine included one that banned Halloween and reading harry potter.
There is, right now in the US, a stupid cult of "Catholics" that insist the church's official policy stances after about 1970 were blasphemy, and that they want to go back to pre Vatican-II policy, which includes such gems as Jewish people as a whole being officially labeled at fault for the crucifixion of Jesus
The US has, in it's history, cultivated up to SIX "Great Awakenings", which were events in US past where millions of dumbasses just started following whoever showed up to give speeches in the park, where multiple modern "Christian" religions spawned, including Mormonism and "Christian Scientists" which were literally a harem of morons who fell over themselves trying to please an insane woman who made up stories of former illness so she could claim she was "Healed". Her lies were mostly stolen from a quack practicing Animal Magnetism.
Go look up Ken Ham and the Answers in Genesis folks. Their absurd Noah's Ark gets a million visitors a year.
Insane fundamentalist christians in the US are so big and powerful that they run an entire parallel economy for all their grifty grievance propaganda, where you can buy shoddily produced ripoffs of popular teen movies that have all the writing removed and replaced with "The government wants to murder us for believing in god", because it's essential they keep their kids indoctrinated in a belief that they are forever victims, so they can justify their absurd acts like voting in a literal pedophile just so they get supreme court justices who will overturn Roe V Wade, and as they show with their refusal to actually educate teens about sex and it's risks, they do not care about reducing abortion or unwanted pregnancies, and instead simply want "Sluts" to be made to suffer, which should be the complete opposite of what Jesus Christ would do, as Jesus made a big show of accepting the literal untouchable class of people like a prostitute and lepers.
About 35% of Americans, 100 million people, will state directly that they believe the earth is less than 10k years old. They explicitly believe that God created us as we exactly are now, that evolution is impossible, and therefore that all of science is in a gigantic conspiracy to mislead you, and therefore all of science must be an agent of Satan himself.
The other two options in this poll were "Humans have evolved over millions of years, but god was involved in this process" and "Humans have evolved over millions of years, but God is not involved".
The first two videos listed on PornHub.com are "FUCK THE CONDOM! Skinny Blonde Girl Opens HER LITTLE ASSHOLE FOR MY BIG COCK" and "2 Friends Want to Try an African Dick in the Ass for the First Time While They're Pissed On and Humiliated."
The First Amendment makes this kind of stuff borderline impossible to regulate in the US, but it's pretty obvious that this stuff is harmful to people's brains and that society would be better off it was not available to people (especially minors).
The first two videos listed on YouTube.com are "FUCK THE SCAMMER! Indian Scammer Opens HIS LITTLE WALLET FOR MY BIG COMPUTER HACK" and "2 Friends Want To Try Benadryl Challenge for the First Time While They're Pissed On Drugs"
“Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender “*kids*”
You have to be mentally insane to think porn websites provide health education or that they are the only source in a conservative society for adults, and then you mention kids in the same comment. I’m not sure if you’re being edgy or just trolling.
Many of the people in the US behind attempts to ban "pornography" also classify anything involving LGBT people, including children, as pornographic. It's about the specific definition of "pornography" as it will be in the law, and that's what will matter.
I think they're saying that religious extremists classify sex education (especially gay or transgender related) as porn and try to use porn laws to get it banned.
> How can I parent my kids when every child in the school is a social media addict?
By parenting?
My kids are hyper aware of what social media does, how it works, and how it exploits you. There were lots of conversations about this. There were lots of times that phones got taken away. There was a lot of watching minecraft videos with the kids.
We already did this once before "Its 10pm do you know where your kids are" -- how about some "you have been doom scrolling for 20 minutes, do you know what your kids are doing on their device" ad's! It would go a long way in pointing out where the real responsibility lies.
I regularly discuss with my son what he watches and views online. I also share with him what I view. I'm sure that he hides some things from me, but we have a very open channel and he most certainly know what his father approves of and does not approve of.
Furthermore, I fully expect him to cross boundaries and view content that he knows I would not approve of. That's perfectly natural. But while doing so he knows very well that he is overstepping boundaries. That is a critical nuance.
Following this logic in context of GP's hypothetical, your son would end up taking heroin with his classmates covertly because he knows his father doesn't approve of it...
The point that (I think) GP was making is that it's impossible to raise kids in a different world than their peers. If their peers all have phones, your kid gets left out if he doesn't have a phone. If society bans smart-phones for kids under 15, there's nothing to be left out of since none of them have it.
In the general case of weak parents, I agree. In the specific case of covertly trying heroin, I'd say that would likely lead to a preferable outcome than the child thinking that heroin consumption is acceptable in his family.
Don't need to. There is parental control and much more interesting things to do. The problem with school is that it's boring and it doesn't tire them enough.
By being an actual fucking parent and not a push over who thinks that because your kids friends are doing heroin it's fine for them to do too. I know it's difficult for you to say no to your children. But it's critical for their well-being. And no you cannot wait until the rest of society decides to criminalize the things you want criminalized before you decide to try to be a parent. The dividing line is the limits you personally set versus those society deems acceptable. I mean how fucking pathetic is this question? Do you just bow to every popular demand? Are you literally the kid who would jump off of a bridge just because your friends did it?
This is the human equivalent of "simply write code with no bugs". If you can't figure out how to write code without bugs, you think you can cause a human being in a complex environment to do exactly what you want against all influences?
How effective are you at controlling anyone in your life, including yourself? If we're really honest, we have a moderate amount of control of ourselves within strict limits (sleep, food, water, temperature, hormones, organ function, etc.). We have little to no actual control of others, we can only try to create incentives / structures to coax behavior we desire.
Posted study in comment below, but actually harsher parenting tends to result in more rebellious behavior.
Maybe a counter point: would you work better for a boss that was up your ass constantly and forcing you to work on stuff you didn't want? I've found I'm more effective when incentives are aligned and my boss is supportive and collaborative. Same works for parenting.
Apologies in advance, but this reads like someone who hasn't actually had kids. Keep in mind that people who have kids still only have a small number, and there is luck involved.
You can't decide that they will eat their vegetables.
You can't decide that they are going to be diligent in doing their homework.
And you can't decide whether they take an interest in what society shows them.
Yes, you can open your mouth, spilling out your years of experience, and you can make incentives like offering dessert when they eat their meals.
But that's all you can really do. If there are posters everywhere telling kids to jump off bridges, what are you to do? Stop your kids from looking at them? Just try to talk to them, explaining how big bridge is just there to get your money?
Anyone who has kids knows that they can't control them. You are very dependent on the rest of society behaving.
Honestly this really just reflects on you and what you're capable of doing. All of my children eat vegetables. My middle daughter decided to become a vegetarian at 14. I can absolutely make sure that they do their homework. Otherwise there will be consequences. It's not been an issue. They are smart and get excellent grades. I can absolutely influence their ability and desire to take interests in things. It starts with taking interest yourself. My wife and I read books like they are going to disappear and my children have followed suit. We required our children to do some sort of extra-curricular activities and if they didn't choose them then we would. They learned pretty quickly to pick out things they are actually interested in doing.
All of these things that are somehow "impossible" for you are just facts about how my children were raised. And no, their success or failure is not up to the lowest common denominator in society. It's up to us as parents to raise them and equip them for the world. Not complain about how the world should change so you don't have to tell your kids "no".
This is a simple n=low issue. You get a kid, and they are not extreme. Most kids will indeed respond to parenting.
Don't you ever think about what would happen if your kid was born with a handicap?
You talk like I'm somehow not reading to my kids, or not telling them to do things that are good for them? Have you ever considered that some people will do what you say, and others will not? Do you really think that given any kid, just parenting will get you the outcome you want?
If you are happy with how your kids are, you are not skilled, you are just lucky.
You are even so lucky that you can have the satisfaction of thinking you are skilled.
Well said, it also reads like someone who greatly overestimates their own control in what they think and "decide" to do. We are products of society unless we are truly living completely alone in the wilderness. Someone above said it better, if most students in class had easy access to heroine and were using heroine talking about how great it is, its up to luck whether your kid listens to you or friends, ads, influencers, etc. The numbers are in, and parents aren't winning.
Did people do exactly what their parents said? If so it sounds like they would just jump off a bridge if their parents told them to. Oh wait, you didn't listen to your parents? Ok, so you just did what you wanted, so your parents didn't have control of you? In that case, we can't really say "parents just control your kids" can we? I'd also be curious how well these same proponents would think "abstinance only" works (e.g. tell your kids just don't have sex). The same types usually say "you can't stop it, so we need to have robust education and safety measures".
A 5-16 year old has an undeveloped brain, and they badly want to fit in and have fun, and they have no concept of what long term even means. They are facing a deluge of influences that are spending billions with the brightest minds to influence them. They are surrounded by peers with full uncensored internet access for ~8 hours a day. Like all children they are curious and a bit rebellious against their parents at times. Its just realistic to say "just tell your kids not to do it".
Interesting, so this was effective when you were a child and you only listened and never did anything your parents told you not to? Sounds like if that was effective it might be your personality, but most people aren't like that.
The vast majority of kids will require borderline abuse to force them to do things on a regular they don't want to. If they are forced, it tends to breed rebellion behind their parents back (there's a reason that the stereotype of the naughty "preachers kid" exists).
"""
Similar to findings regarding smoking and alcohol use, harsh parenting is considered to be one of the most important predictors of adolescent involvement in risky sexual behaviors
"""
> If they are forced, it tends to breed rebellion behind their parents back (there's a reason that the stereotype of the naughty "preachers kid" exists).
That's part of parenting - i.e not being agreeable, correct?
This is the truth. You are a parent, not a friend. Yes, there will be attempts at circumvention, these will be detected and punished.
Modern parenting is not science, it is woke b.s. and has led to young people today with multiple psychological illnesses, apathy and the Peter Pan syndrome.
> Yes, you can decide that the child will eat vegetable and do their homework.
You literally cannot.
When I was 5, I was told I couldn't go out and play until I'd eaten my lunch.
I didn't go out and play.
But I also didn't eat my lunch.
> Grow a spine, set rules, and enforce them. That is how responsible adults are made. If not, your children will still be children when they grow up, and you will be responsible for it.
Despite your best efforts, your kids will not turn out the way you wanted.
Yes. But only when they started taking the bus to school and having extra-curricular activities. They had zero portable screen time until they were double digit ages. When they got their iPads, it was made extremely clear that they were not to be used to avoid social situations. It doesn't come out when people are over. It doesn't come out during dinner. It doesn't come out when we're engaged in a family activity. That of course carried over to their phones.
They have zero issues with phones. They even use social media. Somehow they aren't the mindless zombies everyone else's children seem to be turning into. My daughters are in dance and show choir. My youngest plays flute, saxophone and cello. My middle daughter plays clarinet and violin and is learning on her sister's cello. She has a 4.1 gpa so far in high school and just received an award for it. She was one of seven students to receive it out of a class size of almost 600. Because of her musical accomplishments she was invited to play in the UK with other students from around the state next year. They both play tennis and volleyball and have recently taken up pottery. Both are voracious readers who keep testing my limits at Barnes & Noble.
It's amazing what mature and responsible people children can turn into when that's what you expect from them instead of constantly giving into everything they want. All of those activities are voluntary at this point. We don't force them into any of those things. They know that if they didn't do any activities we would find things to keep them occupied like we did when they were younger. So they do a good job of staying busy themselves choosing the things they want to do but still have plenty of time to chat with friends and play roblox and minecraft and even scroll tiktok when they want. Neither of them have a set bedtime. But they know staying up late won't get them out of getting up in the morning so they manage that themselves as well at this point.
We set expectations around them being responsible and mature and they have delivered and have many privileges as a result of it. They have definitely slipped. They are humans. They have bad days and sometimes bad weeks. And when they stop being responsible, they lose those privileges including their phones. Earlier this year my youngest lost all of her electronics for over a month because she's stubborn and still tests things. It wasn't difficult at all to remove and keep the devices from her until behavior changed. The fact that so many parents on HN find it impossible without legal enforcement on everyone is quite frankly fucking insane. But it also seems to explain things like the literacy crisis. These "parents" cannot even take phones away from their children. No way in hell they are making them read.
Sure you can argue the nuances, however this is missing the forest for the trees.
Children don’t grow up in a vacuum. They see how their peers operate, what they talk about, what they are playing with.
Not being able to do that marks you as an outsider.
And when the “toys” we are talking about are phones, video games, and social media, it isn’t just a question of a one off argument or rule.
I have seen a 1 year old, whose parents keep him away from screens and tech, get hypnotized by swiping the screen of an Apple Watch on his aunt’s hand.
SV and Tech had the most money, most people, and the ability to test and scale every idea to figure out what would enrapture adult human brains.
This is not any sort of fair fight. A competition where the old approaches to family and child rearing win against the Tech that has been created.
I agree about being outsiders. Social media (if this is even a well-defined term) is just how people communicate these days. No need for hysteria and banning (I was on Slashdot in the 90s. Was that not social media?).
I think it’s as ignorant to want to ban kids from social media today as it was ignorant to want to ban my generation from video games 30 years ago. The kids at the time thought the adults were clueless people who did not understand technology. Kids today correctly think the same way about adults who are hysterical about social media.
Each parent can decide the time and age boundaries for their kids. But to think a 14 year old is going to accept being excluded from communication with their friends is just laughable.
All popular social media platforms today (snapchat, instagram, facebook) have endless streams of unfiltered short-form media which is designed to addict. I think few people are actually criticizing online communication for kids (though there are concerns about what communities and people they may interact with). The major problem is addicting media which promotes asocial behavior and sucks away the joy and creativity of going through life.
This is a manufactured impression by people who don’t understand these systems and the reality around them. Yes I would have played video games all day as a kid but I had a functional family and friends to engage with. It’s true that if you don’t have functional parents then perhaps all bets are off.
And anyway iPhones provide controls for parents to limit screen time.
A parallel between attitudes about new technologies, does not work when the parallel between the two technologies itself is broken.
I too was on slashdot, back in the early days of 5 digit/6 digit IDs. I’ve since worked in trust and safety, and contributed to research on it, and have played video games enough that it’s the “sport” I prefer.
The evidence and research shows that social media is entirely different than the benign games we grew up with. Zelda, Mario, Golden Eye, Ultima - are not the same as the behavioral skinner boxes that showed up with the advent of FarmVille.
And thats just games - the Skinner box and addictive design philosophy has resulted in direct quotes from people at meta warning their executives that this is going to make life worse for children and teens.
The comparison isn’t between panic about video games. The comparison is about panic about giving kids cigarettes and vapes.
> Still, teens are growing more wary of social media for their peers. Roughly half of teens (48%) say these sites have a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32% in 2022. But fewer (14%) think they negatively affect them personally.
What next? Maybe we should wait for the creators of social media tools to be caught on record saying that they did the tests and know it’s harmful?
However I suspect that nothing I say will shift your position.
Yes, because revealed preferences are different. Meta's properties (for example) have billions of users for a reason (me included).
Some people are prone to feeling bad irrespective of social media. One can also espouse the same view about video games (I don't play them anymore for this reason, but certainly did as a child/teenager).
How many Psychologists did Slashdot hire with the explicit task of making slashdot more addictive?
Meta has entire teams.
It's like believing that cigarettes are fine and shouldn't be specially regulated because 50 years ago everyone occasionally smoked a pipe and it wasn't that big a deal, completely ignoring how the two are incomparable, entirely because the industry made it more addictive to be more profitable
But, to be fair, many companies hire organizational psychologists and other such people to make their products addictive and to understand exactly how to make the most money on you and get the most time from you. Even the rewards program at the grocery store near you is tailored in such a way to maximally please you and keep you shopping there
Many companies got regulated to hell and back, as a result.
There are no meth companies, the cigarette industry is regulated as far as we can take it, opiates and medication is regulated with punitive damages levied (once evidence passes a threshold). Gambling is highly regulated (and prediction markets will be as well, eventually)
I don’t remember off the top of my head, but I believe even reward programs will have regulations surrounding them.
Above all else: What we did with social media, lootboxes and phones, was unprecedented.
The safety people brought up the issues in the firms, and the final decision that had to be taken was to ensure shareholder returns.
Yes, but the social media companies WANT regulation. The absence of it creates a no-win situation where self-regulating cedes grounds to your less scrupulous competitors and not regulating leaves you open to head scratcher lawsuits like this which only apply to your industry and not other industries doing the same thing
This assumes parents aren’t doing their job. As a young kid you don’t have a choice. Social pressure to participate in social media is intense. Either you’re constantly online or you’re out.
Though luck being a parent policing this, you’ll only make things worse for your kid and your own. Only a mandated curfew can help.
I’m very interested in the “harm to minors” aspect of porn. I don’t agree or disagree, I truly don’t understand and I’d really enjoy having someone clearly explain it to me.
Where I’m stuck:
When asked, people tend to kind of hand wave and say “distorted view of sex” or similar. But what, specifically? And how does it harm them?
I’ve tried to think through the pieces myself and I can only come up with things that sound too silly to be the reason. Are we worried they’re going to discover a fetish? Is that bad because it doesn’t align with “missionary sex for the purposes of procreation”? Are we afraid they’ll pick up on the caricature representation of sex and break a leg trying to t-bone their girlfriend? Are we afraid they’ll think they need to slap their girlfriends ass far too much, then get broken up with, become a social outcast, and never get into law school? Are we afraid they’ll get overstimulated and bored with sex as a result, quit caring about hygiene and dating, which will inevitably lead to a population decline and the downfall of society?
I honestly couldn’t find anything that didn’t sound as silly as accusing king fu movies of distorting their view of fighting, which would arguably cause more harm when they try to do “crane style” and get their ass kicked.
I’m looking for the action->action link, not the “messes them up” headline.
I think the person above you is referring to CP, which I think is a very different harm than you’re talking about.
For what you’re talking about, I’ve heard a couple of explanations.
The first is one you pointed out, a largely religious objection to non-traditional sex. They find any sort of fetish immoral and worry porn will push children into fetishes as adults.
The second one you missed and I find reasonable, I just don’t see porn bans as the solution.
The theory is that porn will make children aware of more “extreme” or “unusual” varieties of sex, but it doesn’t endow them with the ability to have an open dialogue with a partner about wanting to do that, whether their partner is comfortable with it, etc.
The fear is that young adults will accidentally pressure their partner into sexual acts their partner isn’t comfortable with. They either see it often enough on PornHub they overestimate how normalized actually doing it is, or they’re young enough that discussing sex with their partner is still uncomfortable.
To be clear, this isn’t a puritan stance. It’s not saying that eg BDSM is bad, but that participating in BDSM should be prefaced by a conversation about safe words, boundaries, likes, dislikes, etc. Without the context of having been sexually active, it’s hard to know what parts of PornHub are “normal” and implicitly agreed upon by agreeing to have sex, and what parts really need a separate conversation.
To me the solution is mostly sex ed, though. Open communication solves most of this. The only ones I think would still be a bad idea mostly hinge around control. Eg CNC is probably a bad idea because the lack of control is part of the appeal, but it could also cause someone inexperienced to not speak up and say they aren’t enjoying it.
Maybe I underestimate the younger folks and times have changed, though.
Mmmm…their comment was a response to someone scoffing at “morals” by rhetorically asking if porn sites should be taken offline too. Replying “The CP ones? Yes, and some have been.” would be a wild twist away from the topic and a nuclear level strawman. Their actual reply was fitting if you just consider that normal porn sites have advertising, thus are profiting from kids browsing it too. It seems they took issue with that aspect, layered on top of “kids watching porn is evil.” At least, that’s what I hope because otherwise I absolutely barked up the wrong tree looking for a reasonable explanation of their objection.
Anyway, thank you for sharing your theory. It’s something that I did touch on, but I buried it in terse humor and it’s easy to miss. It was the “ass smack = breakup” part; they do stuff they saw in porn, partner doesn’t like it, {insert contributing failure}, they break up and societal collapse ensues. Whether the addition failure is “won’t stop pressuring” or “communication failure” or something else entirely, it didn’t matter because whatever it is would be the actual problem, as you pointed out.
I also didn’t want to assume they were being specific to niche or extreme interests since the “harm children” agenda never seemed to take narrow aim at them, hence the age gate laws don’t specify “BDSM or other fetishes.” It had been clear to me for years that Playboy was just as “destructive” as ‘Whips & Chains’, which is why I’m confused.
I think this is a general misunderstanding of how common law legal systems work.
The extent to which these are or are not generalized is decided by judges based on the merits of individual cases, and while a written law might sound broad the way it's interpreted is up to the accepted precedence.
I suspect a porn site would be ok because it's clearly labelled, and isn't trying to entice kids to engage with it. However if you're social platform deliberately trying to increase engagement with under 18s, and then promoting sexual content to them...
Yes. It's ok to say no to porn and gore. I'm tired of acting like we need it to survive otherwise some dystopian genie will be unleashed. Get rid of that shit.
I think a lot of us probably would agree that pornographic content is generally bad for society. I think the hard part here is actually getting rid of it. I think what will end up happening is it moves to a darker part of the web and is completely unregulated. Just look at what happened in the US with illegal drugs. They didn’t just go away, and now we have less safe drugs pretty much freely available laced with fentanyl and other harmful or deadly substances. I know this isn’t exactly the same situation but we should consider what might happen when making something “illegal”.
> I think a lot of us probably would agree that pornographic content is generally bad for society.
I don’t believe that at all, in fact, I believe the opposite. I think a religious minority forcing a parochial view of morality onto people is bad for society.
You are of course free to not view it. Why do you think that you should decide for others what they should view? How do you know better than they do, what they should or should not be viewing?
Society has decided they want to do the thing that you say causes an ill. They don’t think it’s an ill. What right do you have to tell them that you know better for their life than they do?
I suspect this view is actually the majority. Chat Control, the Great Firewall, Indian VoIP control, the Spanish Cloudflare ban and so on point to many societies finding that many things are just bad for society at large. We’re all just fighting over what things are just bad for society at large.
In the US, the first amendment exists but in Germany simply displaying the flag of the Nazi party is illegal. The latter have determined that it’s just bad for society at large. In El Salvador, tattoos on a man are just bad for society at large.
It’s true that refraining does not actually solve the problem. Others must be constrained. Sometimes for their own good and other times for the sake of society.
Personally, I like the way the US is setup but what is truly adaptive isn’t clear to me. Perhaps indeed it is good that one is bone sawed because the things one is saying are just bad for society at large and I should support that whether or not I have said those things.
Only time will tell. I just hope I have some place to live that has something like the First Amendment and that has some of the freewheeling life of the US. Maybe I will only have that if I defend it and if I fail to then by its defeat it will have proven its maladaptive nature.
In Germany it’s not just swastikas that are banned. There are people in the German government who decide what is banned and what is not, and the list is a lot more than [ “swastikas” ] and it only gets larger, never smaller.
To use a tired cliche, 'freedom isn't free.' I used to roll my eyes at that, but I have recently become convinced that the only thing holding us back from a total backwards slide on civil rights is a small number of citizens fighting and speaking up.
Even in this thread, you can see any number of people gleefully encouraging censorship and the stripping of our first amendment rights. I don't mind if they end up living in a totalitarian hellhole, but I certainly won't be going quietly with them.
> Why do you think that you should decide for others what they should view?
Why not? Some people decide for others on abortion, some driving, some alcohol and drugs. Some people decide how much the government is allowed to steal from us.
I’m curious the moral basis for which you have appointed yourself more qualified than the adult viewers themselves about what adults should be able to view in their web browser.
However you put it, the parent (if around) is the closest and most frequent point of contact for any child. A parent doing an OK job would be a reliable resource whom the child can approach with any questions arising from weird "discoveries" online or even in the community. A parent doing a splendid job would proactively educate their child about the world and it's messiness so said child is equipped to confidently handle much of what pops up. A child should be able to recognize and avoid predation when they encounter it.
you know, i feel like the "it's the parents' responsibility" comments that turn up on submissions like this often tend towards phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."
No, society is allowed to decide what is acceptable and what isn't. Acting like trillion dollar corporations do not have a massive influence on American society is borderline mush for brains here.
You basically don't want to punish American corporations, which is just frankly odd. American corporations are some of the most destructive and anti-human organizations on the planet. Being pro-corporation means you have anti-human sentiments, and frankly what are yours? That you think people with poor constitutions or mental acuity deserve to feel mental anguish? Like what is it, just say it and save us time.
Anyone that fights back against a corporation is always seen as a hero for good reason.
If it were a human predator doing the same thing, it would be very obviously illegal, no questions. So to spend hundreds of millions to build a tech that does it at scale is objectively ALSO evil - transitive property here, because it is the same betrayal of ethics and violation of innocents, regardless of "who" is doing it -- AND orders of magnitude worse.
The fact is you are defending pedophilic predation upon millions if not billions of children. What the fuck is your problem.
I don't agree that it's minimal effort for kids to get hold of cigarettes and alcohol, though it's probably not too difficult for older teens to do so.
This comment is stupid and it’s because of people like you that evil organizations like Meta can get away with whatever the fuck they want.
Shame on you
I always try it every few years, but I can never figure out how to get a good ide experience. I’ve tried both VSCode and IntelliJ. I most recently tried to make it work for advent of code last year. Maybe I’m just too used to how good the IDE experience for Java is?
I think that's what it is. D IDE support is bad compared to C#/Java, but it's not that bad compared to C++. I think it's just templates don't play well with proper IDE support because it's hard to reason about the code when half of the code doesn't exist until compile time.
As someone who has been using D since about late 2024, I enjoy the following things about it:
- It has a type system that catches most category errors, without having to think too much about types
- It is quite easy to read and write, and code in it has a high signal to noise ratio
- It provides a GC, but also allows you to write idiomatic code that doesn't allocate a lot (missing from a lot of gc languages, it feels like most GC languages force you to allocate more for every abstraction you write)
- It supports GC style code for things that don't need to be efficient (>98% of the code I actually write)
- I can easily micro-optimize the inner-loop code that does need to be efficient, without having to switch languages or setup ffi. I can also be relatively certain that the GC isn't firing too often in those loops, since the gc only collects when you gc-allocate
- I can use all of the native libraries with C bindings on my system, with practically zero costs for bindings
- Metaprogramming in it is top notch, I feel like every time I needed to do some type level shenanigans, I could do so in a way that actually looked like code in the end, without needing to maintain a code-generator. The way the metaprogramming works also stays fairly readable, it's not like macro_rules! or #defines or templates.
Overall, it has superseded C for pretty much everything I previously used C for, and is a joy to use for a lot of other usecases as well, I've found myself reaching for it for programs that I would otherwise write in python recently. Only major weakness in my daily experience is that you can't compile it to WASM, so I'm still using rust for that. I've considered learning Zig or Odin, but I feel like I would miss the GC for simple tasks, and D is good enough on most axes that I stopped looking for a new one true programming language to write all my code in.
it's an evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary) language; it is in many ways a reimagining of c++ based on decades of observing the latter's flaws and weaknesses in the real world. if you're in the c or c++ ecosystem already you will likely find D a pleasant set of improvements to c++.
So much for "well, C started its life with a single-pass compiler, so it simply couldn't be made to work" justification, which makes it false in two ways: we actually have the sources of the original C compiler, and it was two-pass.
Lua has the same problem with local functions, and Lua was the first language I learned that I still use today. So it feels very natural for me to see local functions with no dependencies at the top, and the ones with the most dependencies at the bottom. (but you can work around this in lua with globals, forward declarations, functions in tables, etc)
So I guess I kind of prefer seeing helper functions at the top and the main logic at the bottom most of the time.
Yes, and mac has various filters under accessibility for various types of colorblindness. I alternate between basically all of them at different times because none work for me in all situations. People are always sharing graphs or charts and invariably there will be some that I either can't distinguish or that I simply can't match up with the legend.
Remapping is a correct term but it might imply simple substitution to some people. Really what needs to happen is a distortion of the spectrum, squeezing the spectrum away from trouble zones.
Something similar is sometimes done with hearing aids. Frequency shifting and compression to try to fit audio into areas the consumer can still hear ok.
The problem in both cases is it makes things look and sound weird and sometimes unintelligible because the brain hasn't learned how to interpret things at these other frequencies.
Yeah, some non-colorblind people mistakenly think we can "fix" it by mapping trouble colors to different colors because they fundamentally misunderstand that we always see like this.
I expect doing this well requires the underlying system to somehow have a clear differentiation between whether a color is mapped to the natural world or not.
In other words, colors assigned to good/warn/error icons can be shifted almost arbitrarily as long as they are consistent over time for one person, but it backfires if you're doing the same shift for colors in a picture of a tree's spring/autumn/fall leaves.
Just use python for all practical programming problems. Lists, sets, and dicts are all you need for most leetcode problems; dynamic typing is convenient; there's good ergonomics for http and other random utility tasks; and pretty much every company is cool with python in an interview. You'll probably only see language trivia questions for languages you claim a specialty in (there's a huge market for C++ specialists, for instance).
Today's politicians can't even be trusted to maintain critical infrastructure, leading to things like the Ponte Morandi collapse, or the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse, or the Carola Bridge collapse, and so on and so on.
They can't even properly maintain fairly trivial infrastructure, routinely leading to at most a few dozen deaths per incident. Why would you assume they'd do any better with nuclear reactors - where a second Chernobyl is the potential result of an incident?
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