I'm sure that Jasleen Kaur, Kendrick Lamar, and Bethany Baptiste all have mobile phones, and yet, they were all recognized as top creators in 2024. Plenty of people with jobs they hate were dead inside long before mobile phones were invented -- they were addicted to alcohol instead. People levied the same complaints you're making about newspapers and books.
Instead of painting any technology or distraction with a broad brush, it's best to focus on the potential harms and find out who's most impacted. We can help those folks better if we don't just demonize their vice across the board.
There's a recent article that basically sums it up as the parents being the ones pushing back against the bans, not teachers or students.
> "Mommy and Daddy were checking in all day long saying, 'I miss you and can’t wait to see you,'" Hochul told the NYT. "That’s a parental need, not a student need."
Newborn Stroller babies are not asking to be looking at a tablet. It’s the parents.
Newborn Babies do not ask to watch YouTubes while being fed ultra-processed food.
It’s the parents who purchase all those electronic devices to their children. I gather that they do it because shutting them off is illegal and irreversible
I’m raising two kids right now (4 & 6) and I agree with them. Strollers with built-in tablets are abhorrent and shitty parenting.
Learning how to be ‘bored’ is an important part of growing up, and any parent that is not teaching their children that lesson is failing their children.
When I was a kid and got bored I roamed the creek or biked miles around. Sometimes even with a real or bb gun.
All these things now end in arrest or investigation or at the least a Karen stirring up shit, unless you are real rural. I weep for today's kids. You can do almost nothing nowadays what I did as a kid unless your parents are rich enough to not work and accompany you. The parents want to let their boredom drive them to discover the world, but they usually can't. Instead they're locked in with a tablet where a Karen can't snitch on them for being a kid.
This is such a lost experience. I was a “free range kid” well before that term was coined. It was wonderful. I occasionally got in trouble, but mostly I explored the world and learned a lot.
A student recently asked me if I was ever bored. I said no. They had a hard time believing me. I pointed out that the world is endlessly interesting if you just look at it. This table— who made it? Why was it made this way? What is it made from? How was THAT made? And so on. Even dirt is fascinating. I remember biology teacher demonstrating with a microscope that a small sample of soil contains countless microbes…
I hope that people will eventually grow out of the fascination with online/social media, but I am not optimistic. But if they do, come join the rest of the folks who are having fun in the real world.
I don’t think we should raise ‘fun in the real world’ on a pedestal higher than ‘fun in the digital world’. The problem isn’t whether the fun is digital or real, the problem is that the digital fun isn’t really fun, but drugs. Real drugs aren’t legal, and the same should be true for their digital equivalent.
There's been pushback against this, 8 states have passed “Reasonable Childhood Independence” laws since 2018, Georgia in the last few days, and more will.
There are still places where you can experience these things without "Karen" ruining your life. Smaller towns basically anywhere provide the statistical cover you are looking for. When you dial the density up to a certain threshold, these people become unavoidable.
I have a 5 year old, it takes effort to not expose them to phones and tablets, it's a conscious choice. We even avoid them when driving for a couple of hours, instead she can draw in a coloring book or we can play disney songs on the radio. It's all habits, how come our kid can sit alone in the back seat for an hour and not make a fuss, but her cousin needs mom to sit with her in the back seat for even a short drive. Mostly what I observe is parents using phones as a pacifier when they need the kid to sit still for awhile.
Yeah gotta love those 'cool' parents who even brag how they easily travel with small kids in their cars for a long time. Then you look at the car and of course there is a tablet in front of each kid.
'Bbbut kids then cry and scream!' Well yeah, thats how you raised them overall, don't expect miracles suddenly, world doesn't revolve around you and certainly kids don't.
Fyi our small kids (3 and 5) can handle that 'boredom' of day-long travel without any device just fine. But its due to them being raised without screens, and their parents not being constantly glued to same thing. So they just watch the country go by, go through a book or two, draw with pencil on paper (yes, its still a thing), we talk to them and entertain them and so on.
Your kids are soon going to notice the glowing entrancing screen that other kids (their friends) have access to, and they will absolutely hate you for denying them the same fun. Tale as old as time.
Admittedly not my kids, but my experience of how "tablet/phone banned" kids actually act in that case is "why are these other kids being so boring"
But these kids are pretty well looked after, 24/7 parent available, high engagement parenting. The kids just find stuff in the real world to do. They get 30 minutes of "group" screen time a day, as in the family sits down together and watches something.
I have the same feeling when I see adults on their phones to be honest, and I'm quite introverted. Just feels like a sterile community to be in.
People have this frustrating tendency to see any spike in bad behavior as the worse that it has ever been. I recently saw someone say that anti-Semitism has never been worse and they were getting tons of folks agreeing. I'm sure there's a name for this sort of myopia in psychology.
> As of March 2025, the largest companies by market capitalization are Apple ($3.63 trillion), Nvidia ($3.05 trillion), and Microsoft ($2.95 trillion).
I wonder what makes DHH think that the CEO of the world's largest company wants management advice from a guy who lost at least 1/3rd of his employees because he wanted to maintain a work place that mocks customers' ethnic names.
At this point, why would you travel to the US? People with valid visas and green cards are being denied entry, strip searched, detained indefinitely, and denied prescription medicine. The government is ignoring judicial orders regarding immigration and deportation.
What percentage of travelers are running into problems? How does that compare to other countries? How does it compare to your probability of being detained where you are anyways?
Not to belittle the anecdotal issues but without any baseline or comparison this is meaningless scare mongering. People are denied entry, detained and strip searches in every border all over the world, every day, all the time. If you think staying home is fine you'll find people are arrested at their home, even killed, by law enforcement at their home in many countries all the time.
Your first article immediately says that the government is investigating and other articles point out the man was found carrying cocaine.
Your second article points out that someone was arrested on suspicion of a crime and will go on to face a judicial process to establish innocence or guilt.
If you think those two cases are comparable to the two I provided, I'm not sure we can have a productive discussion on this matter, especially considered you entirely ignored the second point of my post.
You're ignoring my point which is that similar things happen all over the world all the time and without any comparative data they are just anecdotes.
Is the Trump administration applying a different policy? Absolutely. Does that make the US materially less safe for most of us? Open question. Almost certainly not.
So yes, we're not going to have a productive discussion when I am coming at things from a fact based view point and you are presenting anecdotes as being relevant.
Maybe yes maybe no. We had some of this in the previous Trump presidency and despite the fear mongering we got over it. The US has plenty of checks and balances it seems (I'm not American so easy for me to say ;) ). We also had democratic governments that didn't make any material changes to what are questionable immigration practices or in some cases made things worse.
these incidents - among an escalating number of other, similar incidents - are a grave betrayal of the US’ purported values, especially when it claims to be morally better than "other countries" who routinely violate the rights of people who aren't breaking any laws (in one case, literal torture techniques were used on a permanent resident of the US).
furthermore, the point is to call these things out as soon as they happen in order to prevent a situation where these occurrences become statistically significant enough for you to pay attention. the idea is to prevent wide-scale violations, not to sit back and allow them to continue until it reaches a point of normalization.
I disagree. What we have here is that random incidents that happen all the time are seized on to make a political point.
From that linked article: " The US CBP denied the allegations, with assistant commissioner of public affairs Hilton Beckham telling Newsweek: “These claims are blatantly false with respect to CBP.” "
There is no "escalating number" of similar incidents. If there are then show me the numbers. It's not news that border guards occasionally get power trips and take it out on whoever happens to be there. I can find you dozens of examples over the year[s] (and if I've heard of dozens there's many more). This is out of 10's of millions or more entries. When you're arrested you also might be strip searched, forced to shower, and other inconveniences. Is it great? No. Is it new? Not really.
What we need to call out isn't the US not living up perfectly to its purported values. That's not exactly news. Civil forfeiture anyone? What we need to call out is the crazy political climate and people becoming hysterical over anecdotes. If we do see a clear pattern that things are shifting in a major way- then we'll talk. Having a fact based, not an emotion based, political discourse is the important thing.
and i disagree with you. once again, these are facts and numbers - it's not enough to wait until the situation becomes so dire that we no longer have the ability to legally, meaningfully respond and reverse our circumstances. it's also disingenuous (at best) to downplay these violations of rights ("this happens all the time", "they gave him a shower", etc) - this is the normalization of abuse of power. whenever these violations/abuses have happened they've been wrong, and we should always call them out as wrong and act to prevent them from happening again.
furthermore, if you only care about statistics then abuses of vulnerable populations must be acceptable unless they hit some threshold of statistical significance. you can excuse horrific acts based on the idea that a minority is only a small percentage of the total population or that their abuse is only a small percentage of total abuse, as you're doing here. that's the point of creating a social system which protects everyone - that people who comprise a minority are not singled out and abused. murderers and serial killers also target relatively small percentages of the population, but we don't allow them to roam freely.
when the government no longer cares about its own values, laws, and separation of powers, we no longer have a government of the people. this is a an existential issue, not a "wait and see" situation.
I agree with you that we should not normalize abuse. It's fine and required that we call these things out. I'm with you on that one.
Where I'm not with you is on the mass hysteria that the world is ending and the grasping on what are anecdotes to fuel a political struggle. The American left has collectively lost their minds it seems and they want to turn their prediction that this is the end of democracy in the US into a prophecy that fulfills itself.
The latest on the Brown professor is that the judge accepted that the deportation happened before his order could reach the border agents. The CBP also responded they would not violate a judge's order. So all seems at it should be. If judge's orders are violated there are mechanisms to deal with that such as holding those people in contempt and sending them to jail. It's true that there could be a constitutional crisis if e.g. the president pardons those people but it seems we're not there yet.
There is a fine line here between order and anarchy. Let's stay on the order side. A few cases don't prove anything. We are seeing a policy shift which is what this administration said it would shift if it got into office. For the most part this policy is under their control and people knowingly voted for that. Democracy means accepting that even if it differs from what you think. We are seeing ever increasing polarization which on its own is going to lead to the destruction of democracy. This should be more worrying.
It is mentioned later in the article but I think it's important to clearly draw a distinction between cases where a) The "offender" is using the licensed work within the letter of the license but not the spirit b) The "offender" has broken both the letter and spirit of the license.
I've licensed multiple repositories under MIT, written under CC-BY, and published games under ORC. All of those licenses require attribution, something that AI, for example, explicitly ignores. In those situations "Wait, no, not like that" isn't "I didn't expect you'd use it this way" it's "you weren't authorized to use it this way."
Listing all of the creators from whose attribution-licensed works an LLM (potentially) derived an output would seem to satisfy the letter of such licenses, but it is not clear that such would satisfy the spirit (which seems to assume a stronger causal link and a more limited number of attributions). If creators can be grouped outside of the creator naming explicitly associated with the works, this could degrade into "this work is derived from the works of humanity"; however, listing all human beings individually does not seem _meaningfully_ different and seems to satisfy the attribution requirement of such licenses.
From what little I understand of LLMs, the weight network developed by training on a large collection of inputs is similar to human knowledge in that some things will be clearly derived (at least in part) from a limited number of inputs but others might have no clear contributor density. If I wrote a human "superiority" science fiction story, I could be fairly confident that Timothy Zahn and Gordon R. Dickson "contributed"; however, this contribution would not be considered enough to violate copyright and require licensing. Some LLM outputs clearly violate copyright (e.g., near verbatim quotation of significant length), but other outputs seem to be more broadly derived.
If the law treats LLMs like humans ("fairly"), then broad derivation would not seem to violate copyright. This seems to lead toward "AI rights". I cannot imagine how concepts of just compensation and healthy/safe working conditions would apply to an AI. Can a corporation own a computer system than embodies an AI or is that slavery?
If the law makes special exceptions for LLMs, e.g., adjusting copyright such that fair use and natural learning only apply to human persons, then licensing would be required for training. However, attribution licenses seem to have the above-mentioned loophole. (That this loophole is not exploited may be laziness or concern about admitting that following the license is required — which makes less openly licensed/unlicensed works poisonous.)
If the purpose of copyright is to "promote the useful arts", then the law should reflect that purpose. Demotivating human creators and the sharing of their works seems destructive to that purpose, but LLMs are also enabling some creativity. Law should also incorporate general concepts such as equality under the law. LLMs also seem to have the potential for power concentration, which is also a concern for just laws.
Perhaps I am insufficiently educated on the tradeoffs to see an obvious solution, but this seems to me like a difficult problem.
From Holub on Patterns (2004), patterns are discovered, not invented. The implementation of patterns is the idiom, which may or may not be idiomatic based on a given community of practice.
If it can be shown multiple people independently created something, the artifact is not the pattern itself--but the pattern is recognized because of so many similar implementations.
LLMs create (or re-create) and derive idioms of things, based on weights which are idioms themselves (probabilistic patterns). Then we can only say AI may understand patterns of color theory, or idiomatic execution (art style)--but that is all.
---
1. They are willful, purposeful creatures who possess selves.
2. They interpret their behavior and act on the basis of their interpretations.
3. They interpret their own self-images.
4. They interpret the behavior of others to obtain a view of themselves, others, and objects.
5. They are capable of initiating behavior so as to affect the view of others have of them and that they have of themselves.
6. They are capable of initiating behavior to affect the behavior of others toward them.
7. Any meaning that children attach to themselves, others, and objects varies with respect to the physical, social, and temporal settings in which they find themselves.
8. Children can move from one social world to another and act appropriately in each world.
Big tech has no respect for licenses, or the law itself with Uber and the like.
People talking about licenses like they have some courtroom legitimacy is hilarious. Licenses are like patents, they are weapons of the large corporation to be used against other large corporations or the people.
Of course you can try to litigate for ten years against a big corporation with lawyers on retainer, good luck. Might even get an "Erin Brockovich" movie script out of it, but we're seeing the rule of law and legitimacy of the courts degrade rapidly and become increasingly corrupt, once over the years, but now by the day
Will these continue to work without support from your company, in the event you decide to release v2 or go out of business? Or are they dead at that point?
Yes, great question! As the software person, this is very close to my heart.
All of our software and hardware is local-first, and will work without our servers/cloud, without any connection to the outside world. We are a backup company after all :)
How this works is that we broadcast and listen to (pubsub) MQTT topics. You can pare it with Home Assistant in 10 years, we also support Alexa, Home Assistant, Google Assistant, whatever.
My goal is to make our apps and software so good you'll want to use them. But we don't have an ecosystem to lock you into, so we won't. Your hardware belongs to you!
> Carney tripped up, most notably when he said, “we agree with Hamas,” instead of “we agree about Hamas,” to the delight of Conservatives all over social media.
There are plenty of crappy but important websites that don't work with Firefox and there's hardly ever a way of knowing that's the issue without opening Chrome and seeing that it works there. I'm not putting Firefox on my dad's PC just so he complains about not being able to access his bank, etc. Maybe Mozilla should focus on that issue instead of an AI website builder, ad server, etc.
Opinions on a crypto reserve aside, we seize tons of cryptocurrency every year in police actions and then auction it off. Just stop auctioning it off and you don't need to buy anything.
The slippery slope fallacy is a logical error where it is claimed that a relatively small first step will lead to a chain of events resulting in a significant and undesirable outcome, without sufficient evidence to support that claim. This type of argument often exaggerates potential consequences to instill fear or discourage a particular action.
normalization may refer to more sophisticated adjustments where the intention is to bring the entire probability distributions of adjusted values into alignment.
I don't hate it. I am a former Bitcoin maxi that watched the entire community commit suicide the moment KYC was imposed. When you remove the opportunities for fraud, money laundering, rug-pulls and illegal commerce, cryptocurrency atrophies.
You can skip the sealiioning and just say you like crypto and don't care if illegal stuff happens with it. It's not some gotcha that we 8se proportions for comparison instead of raw size with most societal things.
I don't particularly like crypto (mainly due to inefficiencies being common and it being a breeding ground for all sorts of grifters), but this argument doesn't convince me. Like... what ratio of legal-to-illegal transactions is permissible until you say "no, this is wrong, you can't use it even legally" or argue against it in a "only criminals use this, and you're not a criminal, are you?" way?
If we followed the same chain of reasoning, we can still easily apply it to real money. Cash, especially nowadays, is probably far more likely to be used for illegal transactions than electronic transactions. It's hard or impossible to trace, it can be laundered far more easily, it's easier to cook the books or hide illegal transactions with cash. Does this mean we should move towards banning it, as our society becomes more anchored to digital banking and the ratio of illegality keeps growing?
I still hold to a theory that Satoshi Nakamoto is a brilliant North Korean engineer. The ability to steal Bitcoin with no consequence is an extremely powerful vehicle for a sanctioned country. Yes I get it's not likely but it would be so much more fun if it was true.
There's a lot of talk about drugs and such, but just being able a tool for avoiding sanctions seems to be a bigger one that could be a reason to delegitamize it to drive the value to zero.
Yeah but that wouldn't do what this is actually designed to do: enrich the people who financially backed the Republican ticket.
The fuck are we going to even do with reserve crypto? I'm not even on the crypto bit here, the point of strategic reserves is to have stock for emergencies. What fucking emergency can someone possibly imagine that would be resolved with a pile of ETH?
Sell it to prop up the dollar and/or pay down debt, same as gold reserves.
Whether crypto is a good idea for that purpose is a matter of opinion. I lean toward no. Strongly. Make the case either way and it can be a sensible discussion.
So, I was in a conversation with someone who made an interesting comment.
He said we have a gold reserve and that makes sense, but if we become interplanetary, then you don’t want to pay to ship gold to Mars. Crypto solves that issue. The reserve will last well into the future so preparing now makes sense.
Unique take to be sure, but sharing because it was interesting.
The United States needs to establish a crypto reserve to prepare for a permanent Martian settlement with an independent economy 100 years from now? It's difficult to think of something less relevant to the well-being of the American public.
You can really tell it's just another pump-n-dump scheme because no reputable science enjoyer would read/write a novel about this in sci-fi except to describe a dystopia or satire.
Having gold-equivalent reserves seems like the very last thing that Martian colonists need to worry about. I would suspect "how do we survive in an extraordinarily hostile environment with no hope of rescue when something goes wrong" is a higher priority one to solve.
This level of thinking is exactly why we're so far away manned exploration of the solar system. Early colonists absolutely cannot treat these missions as business expenses.
> Every colony is expected to earn, this is the history of colonialization.
The problem with a Martian (or even lunar) colony is that... there's not actually anything valuable there. So a traditional "earning" colony is basically off the table, and aside from the technological hurdles, is probably why the drive to do it just hasn't been there. Of our closes celestial neighbors, well, Venus is just useless entirely what with how hostile the atmosphere is to our... everything, Mars is quite far away, several months via current technology, and it's incredibly, devastatingly thin atmosphere and lower gravity means any given colony will require a lot and I do mean a LOT of support from us here on Earth to function. Colony isn't even really an appropriate word here, as colonization implies some level of living at the destination and between the lack of breathable atmosphere, lack of any and all flora, and lack of water, you're basically requiring regular supply drops or everyone is just dead.
Really the moon is far better in the transit aspect, which since you're supplying your colony from here, is a huge data point. And even then, what does that colony then do? The moon doesn't have much of anything we're really hurting for, certainly nothing to make up for the exorbitant cost of mining there. I could see it as a valuable location for low-G construction of larger, further-going spacecraft I suppose? But in terms of "expected to earn," I think either the red planet or our friend in the sky is going to be pretty dire.
When your colpny's line of support is a bubble om your head and a single sensitive means of transport, you don't want people thinking in terms of monetization. We can save taxation for the 24th century if and when we manage to terraform mars and make planatery transport not cost trillions of dollars.
But yes, I agree with you on the backers. That's precisely why I don't think they will be the ones landing Mars.
See, I want to agree with you, but at the same time we are actively burning our only habitable planet because the rich refuse to give up any money. So I guess, if we only send poor people to live on Mars, this will probably hold? But if there's one rich guy up there he'll probably kill every last person with him if you don't make sure he gets paid.
It solves the problem? The problem of shipping gold to mars? This is as made-up a problem as you get. Might as well say "What if advanced aliens come to Earth who already use crypto based currencies and the only way to stop them from destroying the earth is to pay them in ripple. So basically we need the reserve to save all life on earth."
Mars lies just at the edge of the asteroid belt. There is plenty of gold in the belt.
But to state the obvious: the Martians can keep their gold in Earth banks, just like Russia used to keep its gold in UK and Swiss banks. Many European countries still do. Even on Earth, nobody prefers to move gold around.
yeah it would cost more to ship it to Mars then it would cost to get a team of the most expensive contractors you can find to dig it out of the surface of Mars with their bare hands.
Not to mention the absurdity of thinking crypto would be more usable over interplanetary internet than VISA/ACH, or that such a society on Mars, when more than a research outpost, would benefit at all from being economically bound and gagged to a distant terrestrial currency.
> Crypto solves that issue.
Asteroid mining solves the issue. Gold will be functionally unlimited. Cryptocurrency will be long forgotten in history books after the first self sustaining space colony exists.
Maybe I am missing something, but what issue were they alluding to?
Yes, databases (anything digital for that matter) are easier to transfer over large physical distances. Why would there be a need to ship or transfer anything in that manner, considering we as earth bound humans have stopped moving around large quantities of gold for purely financial purposes quite some time ago?
Besides being a damning inditement of whatever interplanetary society they were envisioning, I’d be interested in what their view on modern day precious metal trading as a whole is.
I'm sure that Jasleen Kaur, Kendrick Lamar, and Bethany Baptiste all have mobile phones, and yet, they were all recognized as top creators in 2024. Plenty of people with jobs they hate were dead inside long before mobile phones were invented -- they were addicted to alcohol instead. People levied the same complaints you're making about newspapers and books.
Instead of painting any technology or distraction with a broad brush, it's best to focus on the potential harms and find out who's most impacted. We can help those folks better if we don't just demonize their vice across the board.