safety1st (u/safety1st)

safety1st commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

yifanl · 4 days ago

Well arguably TV did destroy people's brains, just a lot slower and less efficiently.

And in fairness, dosage is the difference between a painkiller an a heroin addiction.

safety1st · 4 days ago

It's worth noting that this was a pretty active debate as TVs were going from one in the household to one in every room. "We don't want to put a TV in our kids' room, it'll rot their brains." And there was research to back up that it had a negative effect to some degree.

So why are we surprised that when we put a TV in the kids' hands things got even worse? Meta testified on the stand recently that they're not a social media company anymore, they're now all about video. Tiktok is the new TV. Every app wants to Tiktokify. The money from TV, just pushing an endless stream of video to someone, is very good.

safety1st commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

rcMgD2BwE72F · 4 days ago

Why ban social media when ad-supported media is the culprit? Remove the incentive (to get users to doom scroll, to polarize, to impulse buy…) and you change the behavior.

I remember when social media was sane 15+ years ago. The problem is the business model, not socializing. It's crazy to ban it when being a teen is the beginning of socializing!

safety1st · 4 days ago

I don't think it's just the ads, I mean we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted.

Then we got the one-two punch of social media apps on phones, and everywhere we saw these get adopted, we saw depression and anxiety increase en masse.

My own theory is that if you have to pick one thing it's the phone, because screen time/attention skyrockets when you get one of those, and they can have you freaking out about whatever clickbait they're feeding you pretty much 24/7. When I grew up there was just a computer in the den and when I wasn't in the den, whatever I'd viewed on it was out of sight, mostly out of mind.

safety1st commented on 'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay dri.es/source-available-i... · Posted by u/geerlingguy

benrutter · 5 days ago

I love open source, but I'd welcome less of it and more "source available" projects.

I think several large coorporations are pushing the boundaries of what "open source" can actually mean in good faith. Especially several recent big name cases where profit models weren't thought out during start up and then licenses for projects aee suddenly changes.

The term has erroded a lot recently, I'd be happy to see less, but more meaningful "open source" out there.

safety1st · 5 days ago

I certainly don't have all the answers here but the entire $300B+ SaaS industry (and a bunch of other stuff that behaves like SaaS) was built in great part on a loophole in the GPL. More precisely, many of the people who licensed their code under GPL were eventually dismayed when they realized you could sell access to whatever you like built on top of that code, over a network, and you wouldn't have to distribute the source. The AGPL was devised to close this loophole.

There are really two dynamics at play, one is that there are people who want to give a gift to the world and promote a culture of sharing, in fact they want to REQUIRE you to pay it forward if you use their stuff. That's the ethos behind GPL and AGPL. It has proven to be way more effective than the bean counters expected!

The other dynamic is the more conventional profit making and taking which has perceived a loophole and used it to make some extra bucks on the backs of the nice sharing guys.

I don't have anything against profits, I like money and I own a business where we choose to keep some code totally closed source because money. But you can't deny that this division exists. And I think this dynamic is what most of the dilemmas in the OSS world really arise from, there is a strain of altruism since the early days of the movement which has been betrayed, for many it feels awful if you've released GPL'ed code and then watched Big Tech promptly pile a bunch of proprietary code on top of it and use the resulting machine to strangle the freedoms of the human race over the Internet. You don't automatically get to squeeze profits from a thing just because it's out there and it's shiny and nice. That may not be why the author built it. It may be a betrayal of their intent if you do.

safety1st commented on Discovering the indieweb with calm tech alexsci.com/blog/calm-tec... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

qWoodpecker · 8 days ago

That is great. I didn't know I needed this.

After browsing for a few minutes I found that it really needs to have some kind of filter mechanism. For example, on old.reddit.com each post has its individual feed, while on blogspot you have both RSS and Atom feed.

safety1st · 7 days ago

It's incredible. I don't know the guy and I'm not being paid to say this, but I really think Blog Quest is a stroke of genius.

The article totally buries the lead, so for anyone who misses it: this is a browser extension which simply keeps track of a list of the RSS feeds of websites you've browsed, so that later you can subscribe to them if you want to. It was forked from an extension which does the same for Mastodon.

It solves a very simple problem, which is that when I'm browsing a website I'm usually not thinking about subscribing to it, but later on when I'm reading my feeds, I wish I could add some more.

Blog Quest does what Mozilla was supposed to do with their hundreds of millions of dollars. From the moment that they declared their mission was to promote the open Web and negotiated an annual nine figure check out of Google. This is where the money should have gone: easy UX for people to subscribe to websites through an open standard, laying the groundwork for a free social graph on top of it one day. If they had done it at the right time they might have changed the course of history (again?).

Sadly they didn't. For 15 years they gradually buried RSS and then one day some random dude just throws a browser extension out there better than anything they ever did in the space. Extension of the year. Massive kudos to this guy.

safety1st commented on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm theverge.com/report/82065... · Posted by u/evolve2k

palata · 11 days ago

Except when Capitalism has favoured monopolies for decades and is actually closer to Feodalism.

safety1st · 11 days ago

There is a bit of a debate about what to call the American economic system these days, but I think we should all agree it's not a capitalist one. It's not one that Adam Smith would look at, approve, and say oh yeah baby that's exactly what I was writing about in Wealth of Nations.

It looks a lot closer to the economic policies of the most successful fascist regimes - the best term for modern American economics might be "democratic fascist." There is a facade of a market economy, but there's heavy intervention to privilege not just domestic businesses, but a specific set of big ones that have close ties to the ruling party. This is not much different from how Hitler and Mussolini approached economic policy. Basically have your system revolve around private ownership, pretend to have a market economy but actually make very centralized decisions and execute them through a small number of private oligarchs you're buddies with. The uniquely American flavor is that there are two parties which do this instead of one (but three would be unimaginable), and you can choose which pack of bandits you signal loyalty to without being executed.

safety1st commented on Everyone in Seattle hates AI jonready.com/blog/posts/e... · Posted by u/mips_avatar

crystal_revenge · 11 days ago

I've generally found an inverse correlation between "understands AI" and "exuberance for AI".

I'm the only person at my current company who has had experience at multiple AI companies (the rest have never worked on it in a production environment, one of our projects is literally something I got paid to deliver customers at another startup), has written professionally about the topic, and worked directly with some big names in the space. Unsurprisingly, I have nothing to do with any of our AI efforts.

One of the members of our leadership team, who I don't believe understands matrix multiplication, genuinely believes he's about to transcend human identity by merging with AI. He's publicly discussed how hard it is to maintain friendship with normal humans who can't keep up.

Now I absolutely think AI is useful, but these people don't want AI to be useful they want it to be something that anyone who understands it knows it can't be.

It's getting to the point where I genuinely feel I'm witnessing some sort of mass hysteria event. I keep getting introduced to people who have almost no understanding of the fundamentals of how LLMs work who have the most radically fantastic ideas about what they are capable of on a level I have ever experienced in my fairly long technical career.

safety1st · 11 days ago

It's definitely interesting to look at people's mental models around AI.

I don't know shit about the math that makes it work, but my mental model is basically - "A LLM is an additional tool in my toolbox which performs summarization, classification and text transformation tasks for me imperfectly, but overall pretty well."

Probably lots of flaws in that model but I just try to think like an engineer who's attempting to get a job done and staying up to date on his tooling.

But as you say there are people who have been fooled by the "AI" angle of all this, and they think they're witnessing the birth of a machine god or something. The example that really makes me throw up my hands is r/MyBoyfriendIsAI where you have women agreeing to marry the LLM and other nonsense that is unfathomable to the mentally well.

There's always been a subset of humans who believe unimaginably stupid things, like that there's a guy in the sky who throws lightning bolts when he's angry, or whatever. The interesting (as in frightening) trend in modernity is that instead of these moron cults forming around natural phenomena we're increasingly forming them around things that are human made. Sometimes we form them around the state and human leaders, increasingly we're forming them around technologies, in line with Arthur C. Clarke's third law - that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

If I sound harsh it's because I am, we don't want these moron cults to win, the outcome would be terrible, some high tech version of the Dark Ages. Yet at this moment we have business and political leaders and countless run-of-the-mill tech world grifters who are leaning into the moron cult version of AI rather than encouraging people to just see it as another tool in the box.

safety1st commented on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm theverge.com/report/82065... · Posted by u/evolve2k

InvisibleUp · 11 days ago

I find it a touch strange, in the abstract, that a corporation being public is a bad thing. On paper it should be a good thing; being publicly owned should mean that your corporation has turned from a private business venture into effectively public infrastructure that's impossible to boycott and depended on to some extent by everybody. As a result, financial statements should be (and are) public and transparent, and the company should be able to be externally steered via regular elections in a manner that benefits the public and not just its founders.

The issue really lies in the fact that the (long-term, majority) shareholders aren't much, if at all, related to the customers or employees of the business, but first the founders, and then parties who are merely interested in rising stock prices and dividends. It feels like the solution here ought to somehow desegregate voting rights from how many shares are owned, instead of dismantling the concept of public ownership entirely. (Or, perhaps, allow the general public to proxy vote via their 401(k) index funds?)

(There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)

safety1st · 11 days ago

"The major reason is they are a private company with good business..."

This is unquestionably, undoubtedly incorrect. It is a really low information meme that's racing around the Internet right now. If you want a contemporary counterexample take a look at NASCAR. They're also not publicly traded, they're family owned, yet they are abusive toward drivers, teams and fans, and they're gradually ruining the sport that made them rich. We know all of this because it got so bad Michael Jordan decided to sue them and there's a ton of information coming out in discovery at the moment.

The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the moment (not really, but yes they're doing some amazing stuff for Linux) is because they feel threatened by Windows and Microsoft, they perceive a long term competitive threat to Steam. Competition makes businesses both private and public work for your dollar. The US economy has been characterized by a decrease in competition and an increase in monopolies for decades now which is the root of many price hikes and anti-consumer practices.

safety1st commented on OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race theverge.com/news/836212/... · Posted by u/goplayoutside

bloppe · 12 days ago

To be fair, I would get a ton of value out of someone selling dollars for 20 cents apiece.

But ya, OAI is clearly making a ton of revenue. That doesn't mean it's a good business, though. Giving them a 20 year horizon, shareholders will be very upset unless the firm can deliver about a trillion in profit, not revenue, to justify the 100B (so far) in investment, and that would barely beat the long term s&p 500 average return.

But Altman himself has said he'll need much more investment in the coming years. And even if OAI became profitable by jacking up prices and flooding gpt with ads, the underlying technology is so commodified, they'd never be able to achieve a high margin, assuming they can turn a profit at all.

safety1st · 11 days ago

The whole US economy is so deep into La-La Land at this point that they don't really need to be a good business. There are already murmurings that they may pull off a trillion dollar IPO, I don't see why they wouldn't, Amazon was making it cool to lose money hand over fist during your IPO as far back as 1997. They have the President willing to pump up their joint ventures with executive orders, we may just see tech become more like the financial industry, where a handful of companies are dubbed "too big to fail" based on political connections, and get bailed out at the taxpayer's expense when things get too rough. None of these guys function according to the real rules of the economy or even the legal system at this point, they just make stuff up as they go along and if they're big enough or know someone big enough they often get away with it.

safety1st commented on Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026 businessinsider.com/insta... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

messe · 13 days ago

And you think you're more likely to get those four hours in an open office environment with distractions aplenty, as opposed to my effectively noise-proofed home office where I can actually focus?

safety1st · 12 days ago

I'm on record many times saying that I think open office plans are a bad idea, so I'm not sure where you got that straw man

safety1st commented on Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026 businessinsider.com/insta... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

jakupovic · 13 days ago

First, nobody cares what you want. Second, do you pay for those 4 hours adequately, guess what if you don't? Even if you do, are you OK with 2 hours today and 6 hrs tomorrow? How about a year of 1 hour days and then a 24 hour period that fixes all the problems for last 2 years?

safety1st · 12 days ago

The Internet tough guy strikes again, as if employment is not a voluntary contract between two consenting adults. This militant attitude is always good for a laugh... hate management if you like, but if you think no employee ever worries about what their manager wants, sounds like you've never held a job.

Not really sure why I am even responding to this amazingly stupid line of discussion. I mean if you absolutely hate the idea of having a boss (I know I did) then there is a solution for that - start your own company! It's not as easy as being a badass on the Internet, sure, but you might have to look at both sides of the argument and you might even end up getting rid of that chip on your shoulder.