dividefuel (u/dividefuel)

dividefuel commented on Facebook is cooked pilk.website/3/facebook-i... · Posted by u/npilk

bentcorner · 20 days ago

Personally I stopped using Facebook because even in the before-AI days it started becoming a glamour photo book of everyone you ever knew (and probably lots of people you only kind of sorta know), and while people certainly deserve to do and see great things, seeing it all shoved in your face every day becomes exhausting in a keeping-up-with-the-joneses kind of way.

I totally get that not everybody is like that, but I am, and so I stopped going to Facebook.

These days I'm in private Whatsapp groups for my direct family and so I learn about what they do, and not the random stuff that my neighbors and 20-years-past classmates did.

My wife is still active on Facebook and I actually do still visit occasionally to boost her posts but that's about it.

dividefuel · 19 days ago

I agree with this a lot. In the late 2000s, which for me was when I was about 20, posts were very throwaway and low effort -- in a good way! You never really knew what you'd see when you logged in. Photos of stupid things or silly status updates, etc.

Over the next five years though, content gradually shifted to mainly image crafting. Over-processed photos, highlight reel curated trip photos, major life updates, etc. It felt like the bar was higher on what people would share, but unfortunately that removed a lot of the things that made FB fun in the first place.

I don't know whether it was a more universal shift or whether it had more to do with the age of my peers.

dividefuel commented on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic? · Posted by u/publicdebates

dividefuel · 2 months ago

When I think of times in which I've made friends, it usually has to do with being in a group of similar-ish peers for an extended period of time, ideally with a shared goal. School is the obvious example, but work can be too if your coworkers are similar enough.

I've often wanted something of a service that produces something similar: creating groups of people that commit to spending time together on some task or activity. E.g. people who are into sports commit to meet up N times to go watch their local team, or people who love animals can volunteer at an animal shelter weekly for a couple of months.

The 'tech' part of this probably comes from: 1) matching people well to groups, like considering age, personality, politics, location, interests, etc to try to create a good fit. and 2) making it much easier for them to participate in activities, like by automatically booking tickets for events, etc.

Obviously there would be challenges. How do you prevent people from flaking or bailing? How do you handle groups where one person is clearly a bad apple?

dividefuel commented on Peanut allergies have plummeted in children nytimes.com/2025/10/20/we... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

evereverever · 5 months ago

The kids I see that have peanut allergies lived in bubbles. It seems like it is self-inflicted but I have no scientific evidence.

dividefuel · 5 months ago

My kid showed an allergic reaction the third time he had peanuts, at 6-7 months old. We hadn't lived in much of a bubble up to that point.

You say they live in bubbles, but is that before or after discovering the allergy? After the allergy is discovered, some amount of bubble-ing is necessary due to how difficult it is to be certain than something is peanut-free.

dividefuel commented on Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters bbc.com/news/articles/ckg... · Posted by u/speckx

mrandish · 6 months ago

Here in California the cost of fast food skyrocketing and the service experience plummeting started after the introduction of a $20/hr minimum wage for fast food jobs made replacing workers with kiosks, automation and AI more economical. I've also noticed many stores have shortened their hours to center on peak traffic periods - which sucks for those of us with unusual schedules.

I've also recently had more than one sandwich shop visit where there was a huge line and wait simply because there was only one employee on duty making sandwiches, running the register and taking to go orders on the phone. It's gotten so bad I just don't eat out nearly as much, which is probably just accelerating the downward spiral. Fast food used to be the "starter job" for local teens living at home who weren't going off to college where they could score internships. Now there are far fewer of those jobs and the remaining ones have reduced hours. Plus with fewer positions and less hours to fill employers are less likely to hire teens with zero work experience at all.

dividefuel · 6 months ago

I do think some automation is useful. For example, being able to order a sandwich online is very convenient because the visual UX makes it easy to be specific and clear about what should and shouldn't go on the sandwich. Communicating that verbally is more prone to mistakes.

dividefuel commented on Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters bbc.com/news/articles/ckg... · Posted by u/speckx

dividefuel · 6 months ago

It's interesting to compare Taco Bell (and many other chain fast food restaurants) with In-N-Out.

At Taco Bell, a meal costs something like $15/person unless you're aggressive about saving money. They also only seem to have 2-3 workers at a time. There usually isn't a long line in the store or at the drivethru. They still frequently mess up my order, leaving out items or giving me the wrong thing.

Compare that with In-N-Out. A meal costs more like $10/person, and they have more like 15 workers at a time. I rarely have mistakes in my meal. You pay less and have a better staffed restaurant. I'm guessing they get away with it because they always have a long line of people waiting for food. They make up for it all through volume.

dividefuel commented on What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another? derekthompson.org/p/what-... · Posted by u/mmcclure

PakistaniDenzel · 8 months ago

No - being a mom and having to work full time sucks. Being a full time mom probably isn't that bad.

dividefuel · 8 months ago

If you read forums of new parents (e.g. parenting subreddits), the common consensus is that being a stay at home parent is far harder than a job.

dividefuel commented on What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another? derekthompson.org/p/what-... · Posted by u/mmcclure

dividefuel · 8 months ago

I see three big reasons why people aren't having kids:

#1: Raising kids is really hard. They're expensive. They eed constant attention when they're young, and in modern American society they need to be in a bunch of activities once they're older. And all the various tasks of day-to-day life that don't disappear: work, food prep, cleaning. I spend virtually all my waking hours on work, chores, and childcare. Being able to offload some of these (or being able to afford to offload some of these) would reduce the burden to carry.

#2: People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like.

#3: The network effect. When you're the only one in your friend group having kids, you're going to feel extremely disconnected from that group. You'll be the one sitting out while everyone goes out to have fun. But if most or all of your friends are having kids around the same time, it's more of a shared experience where you can bond over it. It's the opposite: a nudge to your childless friends to join in and have one of their own.

The thing is, none of these are really easy to solve with policy. #3 basically requires #1 and #2 to improve enough to kickstart a feedback loop. #2 is made of the big issues of our era, and won't be solved anytime soon, and certainly not for the sake of fertility. That leaves #1, where the most you can do is to give money and long maternity/paternity leaves. But it would take a lot of money/leave to really push the needle. This likely isn't politically feasible.

dividefuel commented on Overtourism in Japan, and how it hurts small businesses craigmod.com/ridgeline/21... · Posted by u/speckx

dudeinjapan · 8 months ago

I'm the CTO & Founder of TableCheck, the booking system used by 10,000+ restaurants in Japan. My two cents: the issue isn't simply "too many tourists" but rather over-concentration at a few hotspots, a domestic-first market, low English proficiency (ranked #87 globally, a notch above Afghanistan), and a culture deeply focused on orderliness and not causing inconvenience for others.

That said, nearly all hospitality owners in Japan I work with now recognize the importance of inbound tourism--critical for a country facing a 30% population decline by 2070. When I started TableCheck ~12 years ago, many places avoided non-Japanese guests--not always from "racism", but often a fear of miscommunication and dissatisfying guests. That mindset is rapidly fading: venues that don't capture inbound guests' revenue simply won't survive.

Happy to answer questions!

dividefuel · 8 months ago

Do you sense there's still a reluctance to serve foreign guests, and that it's largely done out of necessity but not out of innate desire?

dividefuel commented on Overtourism in Japan, and how it hurts small businesses craigmod.com/ridgeline/21... · Posted by u/speckx

parpfish · 8 months ago

but that's kind of the problem.

people insist that they need "the BEST", so they hop on a plane to get the picture-perfect locale that they see online at the expense of hollowing out anything that is merely "pretty good".

dividefuel · 8 months ago

Isn't this what pricing is for? The "best" places can raise prices because of the high demand. Then the "pretty good" places in comparison wind up being a good value option.