Quite a contrast from the quote about civilization advancing in proportion to the size and scope of things it can achieve automatically.
Dug it up. Alfred Whitehead:
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
A rooted phone is more capable of modifying the banking app itself and has 'freer reign' over the APIs that the app uses to interact with the bank.
Whereas previously the app displays a 'whitelisted' set of UI options to the user, the rooted user could use employee only methods. Somewhere or other every bank has methods that set balances on accounts.
To be honest a law like this makes security by the extremely modest obscurity of not having an "increase your balance" button on the app UI much more tempting.
I do not know whether I'm misinterpreting this comment but:
Yes, the context from working sessions moves over the wire - claude "the model" doesn't work inside the CLI on your machine - it's an API service that the cli wraps.
Nit: Children haven't been taught the food pyramid in something like a couple of decades I think. Current model is something like the DailyPlate visual - a plate filled proportionally with various things.
FYI Opus is available and pretty usable in claude-code on the $20/Mo plan if you are at all judicious.
I exclusively use opus for architecture / speccing, and then mostly Sonnet and occasionally Haiku to write the code. If my usage has been light and the code isn't too straightforward, I'll have Opus write code as well.
The problem with current approaches is the lack of feedback loops with independent validators that never lose track of the acceptance criteria. That's the next level that will truly allow no-babysitting implementatons that are feature complete and production grade. Check out this repo that offers that: https://github.com/covibes/zeroshot/
That's helpful to know, thanks! I gave Max 5x a go and didn't look back. My suspicion is that Opus 4.5 is subsidised, so good to know there's flexibility if prices go up.
The $20 plan for CC is good enough for 10-20 minutes of opus every 5h and you’ll be out of your weekly limit after 4-5 days if you sleep during the night. I wouldn’t be surprised if Anthropic actually makes a profit here. (Yeah probably not, but they aren’t burning cash.)
You may know that intermittent rashes are always invisible in the presence of medical credentials.
Years ago I became suspicious of my Samsung Android device when I couldn't produce a reliable likeness of an allergy induced rash. No matter how I lit things, the photos were always "nicer" than what my eyes recorded live.
The incentives here are clear enough - people will prefer a phone whose camera gives them an impression of better skin, especially when the applied differences are extremely subtle and don't scream airbrush. If brand-x were the only one to allow "real skin" into the gallery viewer, people and photos would soon be decried as showing 'x-skin', which would be considered gross. Heaven help you if you ever managed to get close to a mirror or another human.
To this day I do not know whether it was my imagination or whether some inline processing effectively does or did perform micro airbrushing on things like this.
Whatever did or does happen, the incentive is evergreen - media capture must flatter the expectations of its authors, without getting caught in its sycophancy. All the while, capacity improves steadily.
I always have to get a very bright flashlight to make rashes show in a photo and then the rest of the body looks discolored as well but at least I have something to share remotely :/
It's not really something to be suspicious of. Cameras just don't know what colors things "actually" are, mostly because they don't know what color the lighting is. Auto exposure/auto white balance erases color casts or unusual skin colors.
You can put a color calibration card in the picture to achieve a similar effect, but it's not as predictable.
Being born in 83, I experienced the shift from "serious local nightly news program" into the 24 hr cable news platforms as a loss of focused, serious journalism.
Only much later did I read Understanding Media, Amusing Ourselves to Death, etc, and understand that the prior shift from print to the "serious local nightly new program" was itself a loss of focused, serious journalism.
For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.
I'll always upvote a recommendation for Amusing Ourselves to Death. I haven't yet gone back to Understanding Media directly yet.
I haven't watched the news in 5 years. I started watching it again since Bondi (I live nearby), and while I'm surprised at the variation in reporting styles (political bias?) between Australian channels, my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
I've found it very helpful to watch the live briefings, Q&As, etc with politicians, but the news cycle here is so short (hourly) that a few minutes later you get to hear a "recap" by the news reporter that glosses over most of the important and interesting points (at best) or actively removes key nuance and outright changes the message delivered by the original person (at worst).
I feel there has to be something between "I heard about a thing 7th-hand" and "I actively watch political discourse / read scientific papers", but I'm no longer sure The News, as we currently know it, is it.
Presumably this was what "journalism" was originally supposed to be.
>my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveye
Much of it is merely factual statements conveyed by over-the-top body language and vocal intonation which paint a clear "this is bad" or "this is good" language. Often the language is biased as well, but the modern newscasters are "telling you how to feel" via the tone of voice in the same way that a friend is "telling you how to feel" when he recounts his horrible day that the office. Via body language and tone of voice he prompts you to respond sympathetically to him, and the newscaster does much the same.
I think the greatest crime social media has committed is convincing everyone their opinion matters, the idea that research/journalism is hot-swappable with fact-checking.
Sometimes in conversation Israel or tariffs or whatever comes and I'm always like... idk? What do I, have a PHD? I know enough to know they're complex issues and the worst thing i could do is have a strong opinion
And then they scoff, and say, "so you just 'trust the experts,' then?"
I don't have the time to become expert in global affairs, history, climate science... all the fields implicated by the big hot-button issues. The next best thing is defer to someone knowledgeable and objective (given you can find such a person), IMO.
> I think the greatest crime social media has committed is convincing everyone their opinion matters
So much this! Social media has also allowed people to reinforce their own opinions and spread them by connecting with others who think the same way. Back when we mainly interacted in real social communities, fringe ideas couldn't get traction because there wasn't enough reinforcement.
Neither of those are topics that are particularly complex, though.
And I realize that I'm taking the bait, but it's worth noting that the flip-side of the oversimplification of complex topics in modern news media is the affordance of notions of complexity to issues that are fairly cut-and-dry, when applying known and well-accepted standards to them. Solving housing issues in the US? Complex, though news media would have you believe that the answer is simply, "Build more." Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? Simple, though biased experts spend enormous amounts of energy spinning extant circumstances that are readily accounted for in most definitions of genocide. Tariffs? Very well understood. Ending Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Apparently a bit more difficult than flooding the country with weapons and finger-wagging at Vladimir Putin until he stops being bad.
Note also that this isn't predicated on the existence or non-existence of social media as an influential force. It's simply a matter of whether or not the corporate and political interests that steer public discourse find it useful to complicate or simplify a news story.
I have found that, often, there is only so much information to convey. They keep talking because that is their job, but you've already been told all there is to know. The rest is speculation, rumor, and prattle.
That's especially true for evolving emergencies like Bondi. In my opinion, you might as well wait until tomorrow, or next week, and get all of the information at once. Unless, of course, you're involved, but that's extremely rare.
I watch news (and everything else) on YouTube at 2x speed to keep the information density high enough to be worthwhile. Once you get used to it, regular media becomes less tolerable because everyone is talking too slow.
Where possible you want everyone to be well informed on the way in, at least about the current situation and the obvious proposals. This gives people time to digest the information and maybe even suggest their own proposals.
Then there's two types of meetings.
* Leadership communication meetings (quick review to make sure everyone understands how important the data they already knew about is / cement context).
* Brainstorming meetings (figure out a plan / pathfinding)
The 2x speed will only keep your brain preoccupied enough not to notice the relevant information is missing or made very shallow... getting the same slop in half the time won't solve the problem.
>my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
This is the key. I think they (entertainers cosplaying as journalists) do it on purpose. For example, from time to time I do attempt to watch some "news" on TV with my partner.
A typical interaction may be:
- TV - "..the president vetoed a bill to lower taxes...here is what this politician thinks: 'I think he only cares to gain support of the extremists he secretly supports', and here is what another politician thinks 'it was a bad bill'"
- me to my partner - "did I miss it? have they said what the bill was about? What were the exact things that were questionable?"
- her - "nope"
- TV - "... The president says he will be submitting a similar bill minus the parts he disagreed with, and now a house burned down in..."
- me - "WTF was that?"
I sometimes wonder if they are playing a sort of game, how many minutes of "content" can be made while conveying the least amount of information possible.
> I sometimes wonder if they are playing a sort of game, how many minutes of "content" can be made while conveying the least amount of information possible.
Exactly my impression. I tell people there is no real news in the United States, only gossip style reporting of information one can do nothing about and has nothing to do with them. If the reporting it political, it's in 4th grade language and a second grade mentality. News in the United States is talking to children.
It’s not even a game. There just isn’t that much news to report on 24/7. And even when an event does happen, the early reports are often wrong. People crave an update when there is no update to give.
We are not given any factual and material information on business activities in the nation, which is what the nation is actually doing. Who (as in companies) are gaining, are losing, and how is this economic conflict manifesting for their consumers and employees? None of that reporting is performed, the population is too shallow minded to even understand the discussion. Where are the local economics news that graduates to county, state and region with actionable numbers and not pointless no-ground reporting like "the stock market has trading volume of x trillions" <- useless information.
We get sports and entertainment news, which is not news, not really, not at all.
Part of the challenge is unless you know what the "news reporter's" role is (are they just reporting what they see/have heard vs. analysis/opinion and what their relevant expertise is; I'd suggest good news providers have clear divides and provide this information (though with biases), those that don't likely have some agenda), you get a mix of voices/views without a clear understanding of the facts. A different challenge is constraints of the various content formats/audiences (which are really only obvious when the same journalist does the same story in different formats).
I'll also add that paradoxically, bias is not really the problem here, but rather the problem is bias-disguised as objectivity. There's truly nothing wrong with a commentator who states "I have a particular view on this issue. Here are some of the things which inform my view. Here are the strengths of my view, here are the weaknesses, and here are what some of my opponents argue."
What we didn't know back in the 1990s was how little this sort of presentation (that you describe) was engaging. Everyone could sort of tell, which is why producers shied away from it, but with the rise of algorithms and internet slop it can be measured very precisely. And the measurements show that it's damn near close to zero, on whatever scale it is that they use.
Intelligent people are boring. They're worried about problem-solving. Problems like on the tests back in school that used to make my head hurt, problems I'd get the red X on and have to repeat 3rd grade over because of. Unintelligent people are exciting. They're in conflict. They're fighting, or going to find a fight somewhere, and if you watch long enough they might even get into that fight right then and there (Bill O'Reilly used to do that on air, after all).
IMO "just reporting what they see" is a solution at all. I tried looking at messages through that angle, and too often there is very important context that you need, or the message's content does not make sense, or becomes something different.
For example, we have plenty of "journalism" that reports exactly what some entity says. That just makes them a PR channel. If they added context that politician's or company's message's content's meaning would turn on its head and would be exposed as a lie.
Similarly, a lot of news would greatly benefit from larger context that just is not there, and that the vast majority of "consumers" of the news are simply not aware of, through no fault of their own.
"Just report what you see" IMHO is part of the problem, not the solution. It's trying to "solve" the reporting problem by removing most of the role of journalists because they are seen as unreliable, for good reasons, but I don't think that works at all. It is similar to trying to solve all problems by adding ever more rules for everything, to remove the uncertainty and unreliability of individual decisions.
This is just like at work, where the capital owners and bosses would love to replace all those pesky annoying opinionated humans with something more controllable and predictable. If the intelligence can be moved from the people into the process, the latter become replaceable and much cheaper, and the company gets much more control. But it is not just the owner class that does not like having to rely on and to deal with other humans.
I think the direction of development of the role of journalists has actually gone way too far in exactly the direction of them using less and less of their own brains, and having less influence and ability, for most messages, the very few deeper pieces notwithstanding.
Although, none of that will do anything as long as the news source owner structure is the way it is, with a few billionaires controlling most of the big news sources.
Only doing "just reporting what they see" is a problem as well (and even AP (https://apnews.com/) does analysis, and their more on the "just reporting what they see" side than most news providers), but opinions being presented as facts is far more common (at least from the mainstream AU media, I don't know what the situation is elsewhere), hence trying to clearly demarcate the two is better than being unclear about what you are presenting. You need facts and analysis, and them labelled as such.
Personally, I find a good example of this is the different election broadcasts: the commercial TV broadcasters tend to have their staff take both the role of election analyst (i.e. result prediction) and commentator, whereas the ABC (one of the public broadcasters) has tended to have clear separation of roles (enough such that the election analyst who just retired has a cult following), with an election analyst who is giving detailed predictions and calls the election, political journalists providing context/analysis, polling experts covering what the polls missed/got right, and politicians from the major parties giving their opinions as well.
> I haven't watched the news in 5 years. ...my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
They're more concerned in being the first than being accurate.
Unless the event is something definitive like "celebrity died", it's much better to just check what happened a few days later when there are some actual facts and not just rushed speculation masquerading as facts.
I'd pay a modest subscription for a service that would give me the news, but just delayed by 24-72 hours, after all the "BREAKING NEWS" crap is just "news".
I used that book as a background example in a presentation I did you faculty on how to integrate new open resources into their classes. One guy in the back laughed really hard at that screen and everyone looked at him like he was a lunatic.
And that's the story of how I made a work best friend.
Seriously though, if you haven't read amusing ourselves to death you need to.
This is why I love listening to Joe Rogan, it’s hard for someone to keep to their coached media narrative for three and a half hours. I’m generally suspicious of people who tell me I shouldn’t listen directly to the words of people they dislike.
Though you are now buying into the Rogan worldview with his show, which is its own set of issues, namely he’s routinely proven that he’s unwilling to press people on real concrete issues or criticisms if it means he might be in even a small amount of hot water with whatever in group he’s catering to
Climate Town had a video a little while ago, "Joe Rogan Doesn't Understand Graphs", where Rogan talks about a Washington Post article and says things about it that are the exact opposite of what is written in the article:
Joe Rogan regularly has people on his show that he just lets lie to his face. The promotion of fake archaeology being the clearest/strangest example of this in recent times (many more examples from political guests).
> I feel there has to be something between "I heard about a thing 7th-hand" and "I actively watch political discourse / read scientific papers", but I'm no longer sure The News, as we currently know it, is it.
I have found that some Youtube channels and videos (non-comprehensive examples below (I have hundreds of subscribed channels), mostly not politics, but these things inform politics since politics is making decisions about other things) can fill this gap nicely. This is not a perfect choice, since journalism integrity and standards do not apply, but I find that this can be mitigated by watching a wide variety (for example, in the field of economics, I regularly watch creators who espouse everything from very free-market capitalism all the way to full on communism). There are likely other forms of new media that operate at this level of depth, but I haven't found htem.
I started watching the full press releases and politicians interviews which are normally available on YouTube. It just changed how I view geopolitics. The media is extremely biased and absolutely does not report what people are actually saying. You really should never accept at face value what the news are reporting.
> I started watching the full press releases and politicians interviews which are normally available on YouTube.
Is this true for Australian politics? This is exactly what I'm looking for. Currently all my searching for recent events just results in summarised/paraphrased news reports with some footage, or shorts and clickbait.
>I'll always upvote a recommendation for Amusing Ourselves to Death. I haven't yet gone back to Understanding Media directly yet.
I love both books, but when you read Understanding Media you will see how blatantly Postman just restated McLuhan's basic thesis and pretended to tweak it to make it his own ("the medium is the metaphor" has the same meaning as "the medium is the message"). However, I found where Postman's book really excelled was in its presentation of the historical changes in literacy in the US. I knew we were a literate country once, but I didn't realize just how much we were.
Honestly, it boils down to capitalism / market pressure. Quality journalism is expensive, compared to the return in the form of the price people are willing to pay for that quality journalism. Clickbait is so profitable, it's like a powerful magnet pulling all news institutions, be they TV channels, newspapers, or whatever, towards that model.
LLMs can produce a literal terabyte of slop for cheaper than a month's wage for a journalist. I'm not hopeful.
Even when I was younger, I was baffled by how people could get their news just from TV, because the amount of information in a TV news report was so tiny compared to what you'd get in a newspaper. When I hear that people view TikTok as their main news source, it's like telling me people wear watermelons as socks. It's so nuts its hard for me to even bring the concept into my brain.
The TV will have maybe 5 stories, each told in one way only.
The Internet (including TikTok) will have nearly unlimited stories, told in unlimited ways.
I remember very well when just a few powerful people were allowed to decide what the public would be allowed to know and not know. They could suppress huge stories and leave the public in the dark. For example Chernobyl. They still try that today in print media and television, but have become a pathetic laughing stock now that information is free.
Somebody getting news from TikTok will probably be better informed than somebody relying only on print or TV.
An infinite stream of all possible information, true and false is exactly as useful as no information at all - and social media are getting pretty close to this ideal
That's a classic trick of opinion manipulation. You start an account that posts factual content that caters to target audience. Then once the rapport is built, you throw your narratives in. The barrier to do this, on scale, all the time has never been lower
All media is opinion manipulation. You could even stretch that to say that all communication is opinion manipulation.
Highly respected and highly ranked mass media sometimes publish outright lies and made up stories, completely knowingly. Because they are in the business of manipulation. So you have to trust your gut, and verify if something smells strange. Many times it isn't even possible to verify, as for much of war reporting.
There will never be a time when there will be an absolute guarantee of anything. Not as long as there are people.
I think there's a difference between trying to stay informed and seeking information. I swipe to my newsfeed and see seven stories ranging from local to national, from local news station to fox to New York times. Fact checking each of these stories will take time that I do not care to spend, and I imagine most folks will not.
“If you don’t care about false alarms, why do you listen to the fire alarm sounding and then evacuate the building? The only rational answer is that the fire alarm is just entertainment to you”
The rational answer is that they look at the news to see if there are any stories important and relevant enough that they would care to verify them.
Yes, agreed. News has become entertainment, because the standard for news has fallen so much. Which makes actual news harder for most people to attain.
> The Internet (including TikTok) will have nearly unlimited stories, told in unlimited ways.
Mainstream TV channels have their biases but "unlimited" doesn't actually mean anything if the content you're getting served is whatever the algorithm thinks will engage you, which is usually something that already aligns with your world view, or something that doesn't but is designed to outrage. Most average folks who browse the internet aren't looking past the sensational headlines they see in their Apple or Google curated news feeds.
>Somebody getting news from TikTok will probably be better informed than somebody relying only on print or TV.
Imagine talking about how the "internet has unlimited stories" and then following up with "people who use TikTok are better informed".
If you're getting the information by listening to one of those jackasses in their sing-song presenter voices... you're not getting information at all. You're functionally illiterate and hyponotized by someone who learned to exploit Youtube-style algorithms.
> Somebody getting news from TikTok will probably be better informed than somebody relying only on print or TV.
Possible, but also quite unlikely. From the people who post "news" on TikTok, I wonder how many spent at least 30-60 minutes on verifying what they're about to post? There is an endless sea of "influencers" who want to be first with posting something, that "validate what you're about to report" doesn't even enter the arena before they've posted their snippet. And if it's retracted, count on the video just silently disappearing.
Contrast that with TV and print that at least have some sort of validation, although imperfect, with editors and what not, that review things before they're published. Now of course, US media is a really shit example of proper journalism, as they've all fallen into basically doing "content creation", but if you look at other newspapers and news channels around the world, you'll see that proper journalism is still done, and the people pushing videos on TikTok usually do "content creation" very differently from TV and paper, with very different understanding of what they're actually contributing to.
There is a flip side to this. Yes it was stabilizing to have “boring” news where every provider largely had the same stories. But there was a narrower Overton window of issues to be discussed. A single thread of attention at any one time.
There are advantages to the disjointed, small, grassroots, often histrionic, news of today. We get a lot more perspectives in our news. We get so many it’s overwhelming (and we sadly need to jump into our corners to feel safe).
Anyone can start a Substack now and the market can decide if they’re a journalist. In my town there are several more trusted and prominent than the local broadcast news. Some specialize in a topic like housing. Some focus on govt going’s on. And of course there are local nutjobs (or I think they are, others disagree?
It’s messy and not nearly summarized, but in some ways it’s better and more detailed than bland evening news.
Current news media is even more narrowly focused on the three hot news stories of the day with 24-hour repetitive commentary all funneled into the narrative of the day.
Every generation experiences the current downgrade as catastrophic, only to later discover it was already a compromise layered on top of an earlier one
I think, at a minimum, a return to print or radio news is called for. They necessitate attentive consumption of information in a way that video just doesn't. I feel like they leave mental space open for critical thought. TikTok is the total opposite.
I don't know how bad TikTok is because shorts just don't grab hold of me hard enough to even look at the app, at most I see someone else sharing a short of something silly on a meme channel.
But… and I appreciate you did say "at a minimum"…
Radio is absolutely something you can have on in the background, vibrating your eardrums without engaging your attention.
Intentionality may be impossible in TikTok for all I know, but it isn't enough to just do radio, and I think also not print.
So if we try to walk up all the ladders of abstractions and get to the core where we cannot go yet another layer above, what we end up? Word of mouth basically?
My general view on TikTok is: why would I even remotely want to use something that's specifically designed to exploit me and manipulate me? The tiny shred of value I might experience (in the form of an occasional interesting video) is a side-effect of the service, and if they could get their value out of me and give me literally nothing at all, they would. This same perspective applies to all the centralized "social media" services out there today. None of them exist to make society better or improve the lives of anyone in any meaningful way (outside of enriching the executives and investors running them).
To be frank, the TikTok algorithm is the best of all the algorithmic doomscroll machines you can use.
Instagram is trash, Youtube Shorts is complete AI puke trash.
TikTok actually seems to "know" what I like seeing and clearly learns faster than the others.
A quick test just now:
- Video about Amiga 500 in the 90s in Finland
- A running gag about people having a Favourite Spoon
- A recipe for Bao Buns
- A skit about Japanese Shisa Kanko pointing and calling method
- Book reviews of someone's favourite books of 2025
- Someone tried to do floor work and found a massive shaft leading down under their house
Zero ads. All were from "real" people, not content farm accounts.
Instagram reels:
- A "family account" skit, yech
- Ad
- A verified account reposting other's videos
- Another one of those
- Ad
- A meme account
- A meme account
- Ad
Not even touching Youtube Shorts, they're even worse.
That's cool, but yeah I won't use it regardless (just like I won't use any of the services you mentioned). It's all for-profit centralized extractive/exploitative stuff.
To be honest, it's pretty easy to surface useful content on TT. Its algorithm is far more responsive to, say, immediate skips and likes/follows than Ig or FB.
I have found it a lot easier to find a diversity of opinions from a more diverse group of folks there. Specifically, I have been really interested in what leftist/liberal bipoc folks think about current events, and it's very easy to get that content. And it's easy enough to flip quickly past hoteps and maga black men, who I don't usually care about hearing from. The disussions between say, black anarchists, pro-Harris DNC folks, and afropessimists have been very enlightening, personally.
Those aren't conversations I have been able to find on, say, Ig.
The main thing is that it pays a lot of attention to what you actually stop and watch, so if you let your attention wander you might end up watching folks rebuild industrial electric motors or paint warhammer minis.
Honestly, I think it's a lot less mind numbing than the last bits of broadcast TV or feature films folks have inflicted on me, regardless of folks enjoying their ability to hate on it.
I've tried multiple times with a TikTok account to get me useful videos and its always kids playing some weird games. FB/YT are much better and instantly switching content when I skip past a video.
I get a lot of stuff I care about (some scientific papers overviews, blender/davinci editing tips and tricks, bits of high-quality podcasts) on tiktok, even if I just go for 5 minutes to entertain myself with some audio-visual crap. Mention of its algorithm being responsive matches my observations here.
I think one good reason is connecting with the youth. My kids are too young for Tik Tok but old enough to come home with 6-7 (btw, best antidote to that is the 7-8-9 joke ;) ) and "chicken banana", and I'm told this comes from Tik Tok. I grew up in a house where every BSOD was caused by the fact that we installed video games, and I'd rather not be that kind of parent to my own kids. I'm also like GP though, I'd rather not go full scrollhead, so it's a bit of a dilemma.
As a former child, I'm not sure I would have wanted the adults mimicking my behavior. Back then I loved the occasions where the adults and us kids got together, such as festivities, and I got to hear their stories. They were all interesting and serious people though, with interesting lives and jobs (I was born in the 1970s and many of the adults had experienced WWII, or, the parents, the hard years following it - I am [East] German). No strange opinions about science or politics.
I think that's similar to when politicians try to "be like the people". I think "normal people", and children, prefer that their "betters" are actually examples of something better.
Agree. Your role as a parent is probably to serve as an example to them—even of old-fashioned, crufty ways. (Surprised/not-surprised to find my kids are curious about film cameras, vinyl, audio cassettes, MUDs, BBS'es…)
It's not a question of mimicking, it is interesting what is current within the teenage/student community. Adult population runs out of steam at some point.
I hear a lot of people be incredibly critical of TikTok, while being active consumers of Facebook/Instagram/X/etc. I've found the content on TikTok to be much better curated to what I actually like, with just enough (i.e., very little!) other content sprinkled in occasionally.
I asked someone a similar question to you a year ago and they told me something like "just spend 15 minutes with it. Aggressively swipe past things you aren't enjoying, like the the things you like. Search for something you are interested in too and like anything you like there". My feed is currently entirely basketball coaching tips for kids, cooking & recipes, stand up comedy, basic DIY, fitness/running tips, local restaurant recommendations, and sports highlights.
We don't have TikTok here (India), but I find YouTube shorts pretty useful. My feed is a mix of Action Labs shorts, Omar Agamy news, ZTT PC stuff, psychology, videos about animals (pet, domestic, wild), etc. I don't know what your standard for meaningful is, but the shorts are at least as useful as long form videos to me, if not more.
An important bit of context is that I prefer to get detailed information through text, research, sometimes podcasts, but rarely ever videos. The shorts serve as one low effort way (among others) for me to surface new potentially interesting things, to follow up on to the degree I find useful or interesting.
Closed-source, very-limited-API platforms like Tik Tok do not actually let you "play with the thing". What I imagine you would be interested in is a client which, say, gets the text version of a large number of short videos, filters those texts based on criteria you have defined and meta-data from TikTok (time, number of views, some proxies for a 'quality' measure) and serves you up with the results in a textual form, or perhaps a page with titles/summaries and links to the text and the video.
I'm not sure that's worth it but I'm willing to be this is not possible to achieve.
Why do people rag on TikTok? What the hell did you grow up on and did your parents and older folks from the previous generation not look down on that with a sigh or disgust??
Rock music? Rap? Video games??
In East Asia I see TikTok as pretty healthy, encouraging kids and even older people to be more active in public spaces, doing harmless dances or imitating other trends. It's actually pretty refreshing. Why you hatin?
Or is the West just salty that Facebook/YouTube/Instagram etc fell off as sterile in comparison?
I can actually remember when the consensus on HN was that TikTok was a novel, fresh experience that reminded them of the "old web" and its spark of creativity.
Now the consensus seems to be that it's a Chinese mind-control tool and it represents everything the misanthropes here hate about modern culture, the web and the generations that participate in it.
It seems to be exactly the same generational impulse as our parents railing against the "boob tube" and "devil music" or (to quote RMS) "(c)rap music." Although they weren't entirely wrong they weren't nearly as correct as they insisted they were. I suspect the same is true about the current moral panic around social media, and TikTok in general. Yes there are legitimate concerns, but it isn't the ontological evil people make it out to be either. It isn't actually controlling people's minds. It isn't actually more addictive than heroin.
And to answer NiloCK without another comment, what's worse will be "TikTok but everything is AI generated by the platform itself." Say what you will about TikTok, at least a lot of it is still human expression.
> Now the consensus seems to be that it's a Chinese mind-control tool and it represents everything the misanthropes here hate about modern culture, the web and the generations that participate in it.
If you drop the word "Chinese" and "misanthrope" I'm in board with your description.
For me the difference is exactly what the article is about. TikTok was the first to abandon even a pretense of being about communication and became all about content. Facebook and IG have went the same way and are barely better these days, but TikTok exemplifies the trend
> For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.
So your argument is centrally controlled and edited distribution of news information is superior?
I was born in 82, and news has been largely rubbish in almost all forms. Heavily biased by the editors/owners, things missing, weird focuses. The 1940s was filled with propaganda and newspapers were owned by a few moguls or by fascist governments.
At least with the uncensored internet it's possible to educate yourself. There is plenty of amazing journalism if you look around. Including on Tik Tok!
Yep. I remember my dad quoting some major news anchor as saying, “My job isn’t to report the news; it’s to shape perception.” Or something like that. I started watching the news with that as my lens, and it seems to be an axiom of the entire industry. I never have managed to find a reliable way to filter the signal from the noise, other than watching / reading the direct sources (CSPAN or whatnot). No one has time for that.
Another overlooked characteristic of a toy, especially a toy that takes up space, is "doneness".
Lots of free-play toys that my own kids use (4 and 7) can unconditionally be defended as still in use. They haven't been touched in an hour, but an ask to put it away is met with "I'm still playing with that". So: nothing gets put away until a parent pulls authority and overrules the kid's declaration that the game is still going. Understandably, the kids find this unfair and sort of demeaning.
A board game is different in so far as it has an ending. The kids never try to weasel out of putting Hungy Hungry Hippo or chess pieces or whatever back into a box.
I think what you're describing here is mostly a mindset / user education problem. SRS is for "serious learning", which by necessity will unconditionally feel difficult - if your training sessions aren't strenuous, then they don't drive adaptation.
It's hard to get around without marrying the SRS with something like a hierarchical skill tree whose traversal you can be made aware of, or some other visible progress metric (eg, climbing the ELO of encountered puzzles in a chess training engine).
Still: users have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable if they want to profit from these sorts of systems.
A different issue with SRS's lazer accuracy is the Pareto tradeoff between efficiency and robustness.
I appreciate horizon expansion as a fundamental metric, but duration seems like too crude a measure. We used to like it when computers were fast.
An infinitely unscrupulous model provider could double this five hour result by cutting your output tokens/second in half!
This isn't only a question of gaming the metric: the very strong current small-fast models (4.5 Haiku, Gemini 3 Flash) have no hope of being measured fairly against this - they will succeed or fail much faster just because they are much faster.
How about something like total output token count as the "long term horizon" metric instead?
My introduction to this type of model measuring came from an interview where the repeatedly hammered-home point was that Sonnet 4.0 nailed a gigantic refactor (conversion of a large legacy asp.net or similar into react server-side components or similar) in a loop whose runtime was some large number of hours. I mistakenly attributed the same framing here.
Task duration is the time it would take for humans to complete the task. The speed of the models and how how long they might take to complete the task is not part of this metric.
Dug it up. Alfred Whitehead:
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
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