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crowbahr commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban   reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau
skwee357 · 7 days ago
The next step is to outlaw social media in general, and maybe the world will become a bit better.

Edit: in case someone decides to disagree with me, here is a non-exhaustive list of issues that social media has created: isolation from the real world, unrealistic expectations in terms of looks/status/success, dehumanization by turning people into likes-dislikes, dehumanizations by creating influencers whose sole purpose it to pump cheap crap to their "followers", a vessel for state actors to spread the current flavor of propaganda/racism supported by "the algorithm" that creates echo chambers rather than promoting diversity of opinions, dopamine producing machines that glue us to the screens.

There is nothing social in social media, in-fact, it should be called the "anti-social media".

crowbahr · 7 days ago
You do know that HN in in the category of social media right?
crowbahr commented on Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?   martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald
itgoon · 8 days ago
Like another reply says: practice.

How many hours have you spent writing code? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Were you able to achieve good results in the first hundred hours?

Now, compare it to how much time you've spent working with agents. Did you dedicate considerable time to figuring out how to use them? Do you stop using the agent and do things manually when it isn't going right, or do you spend time figuring out how to get the agent to do it?

crowbahr · 8 days ago
You can't really compare those 2. Agents a re non-deterministic. I can tell Clod to go update my unit test coverage and it will choke itself, burn 200k tokens and then loudly proclaim "Great! I've updated unit test coverage".

I'll kill that terminal, open it again and run the exact same command. 30k tokens, actually adds new tests.

It's hard to "learn" when the feedback cycle can take 30 minutes and result in the agent sitting in the corner touching itself and crooning about what a good boy it is. It's hard to _want_ to learn when you can't trust the damn thing with the same prompt twice.

crowbahr commented on Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker   objectiveunclear.com/airl... · Posted by u/azinman2
benlimner · 19 days ago
Note from the developer:

I’m so glad that many of you like this app. I’m a solo dev, actively building between my 9-5 and raising a 9mo.

Please follow along on X https://x.com/benlimner, or join the mailing list for updates/suggestions!

crowbahr · 18 days ago
What data source are you using? AeroAPI?
crowbahr commented on Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use   psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/... · Posted by u/smartmic
tylervigen · 24 days ago
Your experience is at odds with the statistical results of the linked studies covering nearly 100,000 participants.
crowbahr · 20 days ago
The linked study r values are all minor to no effect. -0.37 as an r value is barely correlated. Talk to me when they're up above -.5

How much of it is just constantly being told that SFVs are bad for you?

The linked article is a meta analysis with basically 0 controls that finds a statistical correlation barely better than background noise. Yawn

crowbahr commented on Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts   theguardian.com/society/2... · Posted by u/pseudolus
logicchains · 25 days ago
This is empirically false; the rates of chronic physical and mental illnesses nowadays are are far higher than e.g. 50 years ago, and these are serious illnesses, not the kind of thing that could have been just not noticed.
crowbahr · 25 days ago
That's your opinion, that is not the general opinion of the professionals in the field.

I trust a cohort of scientists significantly more than anonymous strangers online, and you should too.

crowbahr commented on Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts   theguardian.com/society/2... · Posted by u/pseudolus
jacobgkau · a month ago
Because the problem's not a "neurochemistry issue" (that theory's been debunked and the "chemicals" in play have never been known), and the solution is "no better than placebo."
crowbahr · 25 days ago
> Because the problem's not a "neurochemistry issue" (that theory's been debunked and the "chemicals" in play have never been known), and the solution is "no better than placebo."

It most certainly has not been debunked and mind altering chemicals most certainly do work.

SSRIs have _questionable_ efficacy but that's not the same as proven to have none, which is an exceptionally high bar.

This is close minded dogma no better a religion.

crowbahr commented on Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use   psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/... · Posted by u/smartmic
danielvaughn · a month ago
I've gotten sucked into TikTok for the past couple of years, and I can really feel it. All social media is likely harmful to some degree, but TikTok is not like other social media. I've been online since the beginning of the web, and there's nothing else like it in terms of actively destroying your brain's ability to focus.

It's like the fentanyl of attention, the purest distillation of the state of mind we entered into when we mindlessly flipped through channels on TV.

If you use it enough, your brain starts to find it _very_ irritating to focus on anything for more than 5-10 seconds or so. I really can't describe how powerful of an effect it is. I don't know if the Chinese government intended to use it as some sort of covert weapon, but if they did then they're geniuses. It literally makes you stupid.

crowbahr · a month ago
Couldn't be further from my experience. I enjoy it, watch for a bit, or even for an hour+, and then put it down. No noticable impact to my ability to focus at all: 5 hours flies by while coding still.

Idk if I'm built different, but I generally doubt it. I find these statements about brain rot to be either hyperbolic or at very least reminiscent of the "violent video games make you kill people IRL" conversations of the 90s/00s

crowbahr commented on I don’t need a Steam Machine   brainbaking.com/post/2025... · Posted by u/ingve
cubefox · a month ago
> There's a reason everyone else who comes to take on this "market inefficiency" fails.

Yes, network effects, as discussed in the Wikipedia article linked above. It's the reason why Facebook or Twitter are so hard to replace, or eBay, or Amazon. In these cases larger platforms benefit from the fact that everyone else is already there, which makes switching hard. That doesn't mean they are inherently better though. They can even be significantly worse than alternatives, apart from network effects.

crowbahr · a month ago
Ascribing my entire comment to network effect makes me wonder if you even read it.
crowbahr commented on I don’t need a Steam Machine   brainbaking.com/post/2025... · Posted by u/ingve
cubefox · a month ago
> Based on what? Your arbitrary standards.

Based on a strongly and persistently imbalanced ratio of revenue to expenses, which indicates a form of market inefficiency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent#Monopoly_rent (the mentioned network effects are basically what drives Steam rents)

> I still don't understand what's wrong with 30% for everything Steam provides as a platform. It's perfectly acceptable. It's not making indie developers poorer.

Of course it makes them poorer if a big chunk of what you pay for their games goes to Valve.

> It helping to ensure Valve can focus on the things that matter to them and do things like invest

But they basically aren't doing that. If a company has an extreme revenue-to-expense ratio, it means they are hardly investing any of their revenue. They only have a few hundred employees while making around 6.5 billion per year.

> Every other digital storefront does far less and still takes 15-30%. Why is Valve the big boogey man

Well, Microsoft seems to do 12-15% in the Microsoft Store. And I fully agree Apple is significantly worse than Valve with iOS, because there is no way to circumvent the 30% fee in iOS; indeed, it wouldn't even be possible to offer a software like Steam on iOS. (But it should also be noted that Apple has a much lower revenue-per-employee ratio than Valve, indicating that they reinvest a lot more of their revenue.)

crowbahr · a month ago
There's a reason everyone else who comes to take on this "market inefficiency" fails. Amazon threw billions at it. So did Google. So has Epic. And Microsoft.

None of them dethroned steam, so 30% is still the cost to access the steam user base.

If tens of billions can't overcome this "inefficiency" then it sure seems like there might be more to the story than economics 101.

The fact is that Steam has an incredibly loyal _userbase_ and you won't convince them to leave unless steam betrays their trust, which they haven't.

The trust in any competitor is nearly 0 compared with Steam which has been a platform people have loved and used for over a decade now with basically 0 issues. No corporate missteps.

Arguably the biggest controversy is the latest way they made CS2 loot boxes less valuable, popping the insane bubble in the skins market. That's still ultimately good for the average gamer and I expect they'll come out smelling like roses.

crowbahr commented on Mullvad VPN present And Then? (Chat Control is back on the menu)   mullvad.net/en/blog/mullv... · Posted by u/dotcoma
blendo · a month ago
For months, Mullvad has been papering San Francisco with smart and cheeky ads, like "Mass surveillance is made by machine men with machine hearts".

I admire that they're saying this, and wish other VPN companies would do similar public relations to highlight the risks of ad targeting.

Tbh, I'm a customer. Before Mullvad, I used PIA.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/advertising-that-targets-everyon...

crowbahr · a month ago
Same. Switched off PIA when they were bought by Malware vendors Kape

u/crowbahr

KarmaCake day1560February 13, 2017View Original