Yeah, I meant 'content' in terms of the intrinsic value, the 'nutritional value' underlying the writing... The message, the story, the information content.
Actually it's kind of dystopian to think of it; that the word 'content' has been appropriated to refer to an arbitrarily broad range of media products...
The word 'content' used to be associated with the word 'substance' but in a modern context, it's actually more closely associated with the concept of 'form' as the word emphasizes a variety of media... What happened to the term "multimedia"? IMO this is what I would refer to when some people say content... I mean, there's no content in content... It's empty, it's all smoke and mirrors.
Very correct! Why internal dashboards keep getting rebuild:
https://www.timestored.com/pulse/why-internal-dashboards-get...
It took me a few years to home in on the exact idea you've captured and I work in this exact area. There's a middle layer between UI team and notebook experiments that isn't worth companies building themselves.
The article is ignorant of reality. "The typical under-13 social media user is not a sneaky kid. It’s a family making a decision together. " No, every other kid had it and the parent had no choice else their child would be ostracised. Their example of kids learning about volcanoes in youtube. Ha! Go look at the view number for mindless nonsense... Minecraft blabbering then find me a volcano with more child views.
I wouldn’t mind YouTube if my kids asked to watch videos of volcanoes.
Instead they always end up trying to watch the most annoying people possible playing video games for a few minutes before we ask them to switch it off.
If YouTube really cared about kids they should allow users to pick a subset of channels and never ever mention again anything else.
Alas, we all know this will never happen because YouTube doesn’t care about what people watch as long as they come back watching some more
Yes, the ability to command a kingdom was relative to the number of people with force you could convince AND pay to be on your side vs the others. With automation, drones and AI, you no longer need any convincing just capital.
The term is Institutional knowledge. "An organization's collective memory, encompassing the unique expertise, experiences, processes, and cultural insights built over time by its members, acting as a vital asset that guides operations, decision-making, and continuity, often residing in seasoned employees' tacit understanding but also in documented procedures and data. It includes deep technical skills..."
Institutional knowledge is scoped to members of an organization and covers things related specifically to the institution's operations. What I'm talking about is the knowledge of the general population, often as it relates to an institution's products.
For instance, tons of people know how to use Adobe products like Photoshop, by way of deliberate inaction on the part of Adobe around product piracy outside of workplaces. With this large knowledge pool entering into the workforce, users were able to convince workplaces to adopt Adobe products that they were already familiar with.
That wouldn't be institutional knowledge, but a pool of knowledge that institutions could take actions (or inaction, as the case above) to influence.
My favorite quote from this video, that I wish more languages would embrace is:
"I went from application to application trying to use the same techniques. The most encouraging thing is that they would work. After 2-3 years during which time the language had grown by accretion, it grew and grew, eventually I found it was shrinking.
Essentially the idea was once you look at enough different applications you begin to see what is the general notion. So I came to generalisations that allowed me to take out whole chunks of special things I had put in.
Furthermore to my surprise it turns out the general ideas are usually much simpler to understand than any of the special cases."
QStudio is a tool for SQL analysis. Banks and hedge funds had been paying for it but this year we decided to open source it so that more people can use it. Like DBeaver/DataGrip it provides code highlighting, supports 30+ databases etc. but it also allows 15+ chart types with customization, excel export and table formatting.
I've tried to refrain from commenting but your comment pushed me over the edge. I either want to dismiss your comment as ignorant that amazon is just a shopping cart or ignorant that you even need cloud technologies until you have 1000s of customers. But I must concede there's a chance you fall in that middle area and I'm wrong. It's < 5 percent. But yeah sure.. we have a scale problem and you're right you've identified the nonsense cloud technologies that won't fix it. I'm glad you chimed in to convince us but to build our own for 5000 customers.
1. The most unexpected thing that I learned was the absolute nightmare it is to set up subscriptions.
I initially thought it would be a simple task. I started off with writing APIs and webhooks for Play store and App store.
But then as I got into the specifics things got complicated very quickly.
The combinations of subscriptions (monthly/yearly, AI and non-AI), cancellations, cross device subscription sync, how to handle trials, how to manage subscription states of users, and then when users upgrade, that's another few cases to handle.
There were just too many cases to handle.
I then just used a third-party provider (RevenueCat). They have handled all the complexities beautifully.
2. Supabase self-host is another nightmare in itself. Just the sheer amount of configs needs (through the .env file) is insane. They have intentionally made it so difficult to configure.
3. Setting up SMTP and sending emails is actually a very tiring and cumbersome process. AWS SES is just too much work. Mainly the domain reputation (emails always landing in spam) and also there are not many providers that give a generous trial.
This is a sympton of something worse. The bigger issue: Roblox isn’t the real problem, it’s filling the gap left by the disappearance of unstructured, unsupervised play in the physical world.
Kids used to build worlds, take risks, and form friendships outdoors. Now many have no safe places to roam, no peers outside scheduled activities, and no cultural permission to be on their own. So they do all that in Roblox instead.
You can tighten access control, but it won’t change the core dynamic: when real childhood spaces shrink, digital platforms become the default playground. Until kids have room to be independent offline, they’ll keep escaping online.
Can’t both be true? It can be true that Roblox keeps kids hooked through shady practices but if not them, kids would have sought other places. Club Penguin, RuneScape, WOW, Xbox Live, all served similar functions for myself growing up, I don’t find it hard to believe I would have ended up on Roblox
I would agree it's both. Ideally we would make many games restricted access and most games games less addictive. At this stage the only viable plan I can think of is for parents to join a cult or cult like group where the parents are dedicated to restricted screen time and enforcing outdoor play. One parent alone can't make it happen. Maybe the quakers were onto something. :)
this feels wrong to me. when i watch my 7yo cousin play, he is talking to his friends in a virtual space and playing volleyball or racing cars or playing golf or doing a fashion show.
the cosmetics are stupid, but thats not the main thrust.
the real world can't compete because its expensive and devoid of children.
YES! This is a big piece of it. Fewer kids + more of them wanting to be inside / parents wanting them to be inside = less kids to play with = even less likelihood of them wanting to play outside.
This is like social media in reverse: nobody wants to be inside, but some people are only inside, so everybody is inside.
My father might've been onto something in my childhood then. He'd specifically kick me out of the house if he knew it was day I'd be inside playing videogames. Rainy day, snow day, school holiday, missed the bus, whatever the reason. He did this the first time when I was ten and then again when I was fourteen, which were two periods where I struggled with making friends because we had moved.
I compare this to my neighbour's daughter who is now about the same age I was when my dad would kick me out of the house, and said neighbour's daughter never goes anywhere without her parents. She's somewhat socially maladjusted and doesn't know how to get along with other kids her age outside of sports, and I believe this is because she's not around other kids outside of school except for basketball practice or matches she's in. She wasn't like this a few years ago. It's alarming how such an athletic child can spend so much time inside the house doing... Whatever sedentary activities.
Last bit is not quite right: a lot of people want to be inside. That contributes strongly to the feedback loop you rightly identify.
(WHY they want to stay inside is another matter, but I suspect a large part is the stereotypical answer: unending seas of digital content highly optimised to hack the consumer's brain.)
If I mowed 2 acres of lawn dad would give me a stack of quarters. It didn’t take me long to realize that a fraction of that mowing time spent playing Defender would consume those quarters. I still
loved playing it, but valuable perspective.
Name checks out. There's some kind of weird non-sequitur going around almost verbatim: "Roblox keeps kids paying for cosmetics, therefore it's at fault if creeps creep on kids there" (as though it would be somehow better if Roblox were just accidentally popular with kids, and creeps crept on them there? Wat?)
This is an easy argument to make, but I don't think it actually applies in any way. Roblox is just as popular in countries where these things have not disappeared.
All the listed countries have low fertility rates, increasing screentime rates, etc.
I suspect if you cornered a parent of a 2yo in any of those countries, they would not say it is meaningfully more social and child-friendly TODAY that the USA is, or Australia (for which I can speak) is.
I'm a parent in Norway (though not of a two year old). Children really do have a great deal of freedom and the country is very child friendly and safe. But still online games are displacing physical outdoor play. However the majority of children attend barnehage (kindergarten) where there are no screens and outdoor play is strongly encouraged (and only lightly supervised) so at least for pre-school children there is still a lot of physical activity.
Sorry for being blunt, isn't this mostly an US phenomen?
Around most European countries kids are pretty much still playing outside as they feel like it, without having some neighbour call the police due to bad parenting or whatever it happens to be.
That sounds like a cheap attempt to deflect from tech's responsibility in that matter.
Decades ago, kids might have met in unsafe areas as well: maybe hang out in an abandoned building or whatever. But there wasn't yet a trillion dollar business deliberately creating abandoned buildings to hang out in.
Kids do not want to go outside. Even if parents want it and push for it, youtube, whatsapp, roblox, fortnite, whatever they have from steam is much more fun.
More accurately the kids you're aware of don't want to.
Where I am kids seem to love the outside, they're all over the plygrounds, they like driving quad bikes and tractors, they prefer to fly drones IRL under the sky than inside on a screen, they're still playing football and netball. Hitting a target at a thousand yards is still more fun IRL than not.
Our grandkids and their generation started welding, carpentry, glassblowing, metal casting etc. from five or so onwards, most are 13 to 16 now, still being forced to use paper maps to navigate, but allowed to collect track data on GPS recorders and overlay tat on GIS maps at night, etc.
Takes a bit of effort, the connection between real world interaction and reward has to be maintained, winding back network access to a quiet minimum helps.
Some will gravitate toward woodchopping for content rather than twitch streaming running about a virtual world.
Kids want to go outside if other kids are outside. We are social animals, and the most addictive games for youth are glorified social networks. It helps if other parents in the area are on the same page.
Yeah I was periodically booted out. My only gripe with it is there were few others around. My closest friend and I mostly played video games in the living room.
While those may or may not be issues, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Child abuse and pedophilia has been a scourge on children since at least Ancient Greek times when it was well documented and I’m sure even longer than that.
I believe the estimates are one in six children before the age of 16 will encounter sexual abuse of some form. Yet when cases like Epstein reach the news, people act shocked, even though it should be clear this occurs at every level of our society.
Ultimately it requires vigilance on the part of all of us and our institutions, and an awareness of how these predators operate. Even if you shut down one avenue they’ll find another.
So let’s not let those who turn blind eyes continue to be part of the problem but hold them accountable. Only then can we reduce all the avenues.
