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fortydegrees commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban   reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau
ropable · 18 days ago
I fully support this legislation, and government regulation around this topic. Given the current (2025) state of the social media landscape, I believe that the positives of restricting access to them for teenagers well outweighs any potential harms.

As the parent of a teenager affected by this ban (plus one who has aged past it): I wish that it had been in place 8-10 years ago, before either of my kids got smartphones. We tried to be reasonably conservative in their introduction to devices and social media, on the rationale that it would do them no harm to delay using those for a couple of years through their early brain development. The real difficulty turned out to be the network effect of their peers having access to social media, which increased the social pressure (and corresponding social exclusion) to be online. Not having access to Snapchat/Discord/etc. at that point meant that they were effectively out-group, which is a Big Deal for a teenager.

We ended up allowing them onto social media platforms earlier than we'd have liked but imposed other controls (time and space restrictions, an expectation of parental audits, etc.) These controls were imperfect, and the usual issues occurred. My assessment is that it was a net negative for the mental health of one child and neutral for the other.

I realise that HN is primarily a US forum and skews small-government and free-speech-absolutist. I'm not interested in getting in a debate with anyone about this - my view is that most social media is a net negative with a disproportionate harm to the mental health of non-fully-developed teenage brains. This represents a powerful collective-action failure that is unrealistic to expect individuals to manage, so it's up to government to step in. All boundaries are arbitrary, so the age of 16 (plus this set of apps) seems like a reasonable set of restrictions to me. I am unmoved by the various "slippery slope" arguments I've read here: all rules are mutable, and if we see a problem/overreach later - we'll deal with it in the same way, by consensus and change.

fortydegrees · 18 days ago
Thanks for sharing your opinion.

I strongly disagree with this legislation and have found it hard to 'steelman' the other side, which your comment/opinion does well. I found it very informative so just wanted to share my appreciation for you posting it here.

fortydegrees commented on Show HN: I built a wizard to turn ideas into AI coding agent-ready specs   vibescaffold.dev/... · Posted by u/straydusk
fortydegrees · a month ago
This is really good work! Love the UX and the design. Even though I work with AI agents and building them a lot, I found the way you structure the steps very helpful for thinking about the project itself. The agent asks the right questions which makes me feel confident it's understanding my goals.

If you're looking for feedback, you could include a tiny section on the homepage about how to run the output docs. e.g. put them in a folder, point Claude Code/Codex to it and give it the prompt.

Thanks for building this!

fortydegrees commented on When stick figures fought   animationobsessive.substa... · Posted by u/ani_obsessive
robmerki · 2 months ago
SFDT was the first online community I was a part of. It was a special time on the early internet. I feel so lucky to have been a very small part of it.
fortydegrees · 2 months ago
Can't believe this is the only mention of sfdt so far on this thread. I have similar nostalgia about it being the first online community I joined. Collaborating with others, getting a glimpse into their personal lives, chatting off-platform on MSN/AIM. I wonder if that experience exists for kids in the modern day internet...
fortydegrees commented on Online Collection of Keygen Music   keygenmusic.tk... · Posted by u/mifydev
fortydegrees · 5 months ago
I've been looking for that Paradox Photoshop CS2 one for years. Great nostalgic memories.

I've always been in slight awe of these kind of teams/releases. Cracking (mostly) for the raw intellectual challenge and bundling it with demoscene-ish artistic expression - usually a unique UI and obviously a great chiptune. I've always wondered why that behaviour emerged..

fortydegrees commented on Coding Font Selection 'Tournament'   daringfireball.net/linked... · Posted by u/tosh
baalimago · a year ago
I use comic shanns mono [0] for both printscreen annotations and in neovim with the hopes of subtly trolling whoever I'm sharing screen with.

For three years have I now suffered, with 0 reaction. Three years. I haven't lost faith though... one day, someone will say "what the hell kind of font is that? why would you do that?", and I will chuckle.

[0]: https://github.com/jesusmgg/comic-shanns-mono

fortydegrees · a year ago
I appreciate your pursuit of this artistic endeavour. Truly great art is always the product of great personal sacrifice.

That said, it does make me wonder about two alternative approaches:

A) When a screenshot is detected, change the font, produce the screenshot and then change it back. You could probably do this on a per-application basis with something like AutoHotKey, or there's probably a deeper way of doing it on the OS-level.

B) Use the magic of AI. Given it's monospaced, you could probably modify an image model to replace the relevant font of the screenshot.

Of course, these approaches may compromise your artistic integrity.

fortydegrees commented on The expected value of the game is positive regardless of Ballmer’s strategy   gukov.dev/puzzles/math/20... · Posted by u/gukoff
rustybolt · a year ago
I don't think this is true. Most people will not be bankrupt after losing a dollar. If this is true then Steve failed badly at communicating this context.

To be honest, I think Steve just didn't grasp the mathematical deepness of the problem.

fortydegrees · a year ago
While it does seem that Ballmer doesn't have an understanding of the deepness of the problem, in his defence, he outscored BillG on the math SAT with a perfect score of 800, and graduated Harvard with a degree in applied mathematics.

Which makes me wonder if it's related to another 'simple' game theory problem that came up in Matt Levine's money stuff:

"They made me do the math on 1000 coin flips. EV(heads) (easy), standard deviation (slightly harder), then they offered me a +EV bet on the outcome. I said “let’s go.”

They said “Wrong. If we’re offering it to you, you shouldn’t take it.”

I said “We just did the math.”

They said “We have a guy on the floor of the Amex who can flip 55% heads.”"

I like that anecdote and the takeaway, especially with regards to trading: if someone's offering you what seems obviously a +EV trade, why are they offering it to you and what are you missing? Whether that was Ballmer's intended lesson is another matter..

[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-14/amc-is...

fortydegrees commented on Show HN: Affordable text-to-speech for long-form content   audiowaveai.com/... · Posted by u/yagudaev
fortydegrees · 2 years ago
This is great. Simple and slick makes it easy to use. I'm impressed by the URL importing feature. Is that a GPT wrapper behind the scenes or do you use another library?
fortydegrees commented on Show HN: Affordable text-to-speech for long-form content   audiowaveai.com/... · Posted by u/yagudaev
fortydegrees · 2 years ago
Is this a custom trained TTS model or is it an implementation of something like StyleTTSv2?
fortydegrees commented on Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?    · Posted by u/fuzztester
midgetjones · 2 years ago
A few years ago, my wife and I decided to adopt a rescue cat from battersea.org.uk. However, it was a frustrating experience as the staff didn't always update the website regularly, and we'd find that any suitable cats would be snapped up before we'd even seen them.

I spotted that the website served its data to the frontend via an unsecured internal JSON API, so I built an Elixir app that would poll the API endpoint and upsert the cat data into the database. Any new records would get posted to a twitter account (a free way to get notifications on my phone).

It worked beautifully, and when a black cat called "Fluff" popped up, we both knew he was the right one, and we were able to phone them and arrange a meeting before anyone else. Fast forward five years, and he's sitting next to me on the sofa right now, purring away.

fortydegrees · 2 years ago
I have a similar story of accessing an internal JSON API for my own benefit.

I left my airpods in a car I rented using zipcar. I spoke to support etc but nothing had been handed in. I checked to see if the car was still where I left it so that I could re-hire and claim them, but it had been moved.

The app tells you the 'name' of the car you rented which is used as an identifier. It also shows a map of where all available cars are. I sniffed the requests the app made to display this map, and was able to filter it by the car name. From this I was able to locate where the car I left my airpods in was. Was able to head there, unlock the car, and to my amazement the airpods were still there!

u/fortydegrees

KarmaCake day383March 27, 2018View Original