> With their "don't put the cat inside the microwave" stickers
not sure what this means, my microwave does not have such a sticker
> "coffee is too hot" lawsuits
I'd encourage you to look into the case you refer to[1] and decide for yourself whether the lawsuit feels frivolous given the facts. My read is that the lawsuit was justified.
If caring that people might burn themselves with hot water is nanny state, then caring that people might burn themselves with macdonalds coffee is also nanny state.
Caring that some restaurant employee is negligent enough to pour coffee hot enough to require an 8 day hospital stay isn't a nanny state, that is basic public safety. If I got in a hot tub expecting it to be hot tub temperature and it burnt my skin off I'd expect them to get in trouble for endangering me by misleading me into believing it was normal hot tub temperature.
That argument is specious to begin with, because typically a hot water heater should be set such that its maximum temperature would not cause a burn (just like how coffee should typically be served at a temperature that is not capable of melting skin), but leaving that aside - the coffee case was a private tort case - a civil suit - and therefore does not and could not by definition support calling the country in which it occured a "nanny state".
Ok, so an airport is a private business and it chose to put "hot water" labels on the taps, and therefore does not and could not by definition support calling the country in which it occured a "nanny state".
This definitely seems true to me, from my limited short content usage. I try to avoid getting sucked into the feed (Youtube Shorts is the one I have used), but if I do find myself scrolling through the morass of clips from Shark Tank or Family Guy [1], the one guy I'll almost always stop for is FunkFPV, who just does a duet on clips of stupid "hacks" and incidences of dumb stuff happening in factory / warehouse / construction settings.
He's just a blue-collar type guy who is mildly funny when critiquing the stupidity of, say, a guy walking up a badly placed ladder with a mini split condenser on his shoulder - but it's a niche that for whatever reason I enjoy, and I don't think I'd remember his handle if it wasn't for his very specific niche.
Interestingly enough [2] I've noticed a number of other creators seem to have sprung up in this niche and will occasionally find a video of some other blue-collar-lookin-dude doing the same schtick. I doubt FunkFPV is the first (in fact he sort of reminds me of an "AvE-lite") to tap this weird market, but he's my touchpoint, at least.
[1]: Yes, it is embarrassing that the algorithm has determined that these are likely to garner my attention
[2]: it's actually not really interesting because almost nothing on the topic of short-form video is actually interesting by any reasonable definition of that word, so this is just a turn of phrase
It definitely bears all the LLM hallmarks we've come to know. emdash, the "this isn't X. it's Y" structure - and then, to cap it off, a single pithy sentence to end it.
Also bears all the hallmarks of an ordinary post (by someone fairly educated) on the Internet. This would make sense, because LLMs were trained on lots of ordinary posts on the Internet, plus a fair number of textbooks and scientific papers.
The — character is the biggest cause of suspicion. It's difficult to type manually so most people - myself included - substitute the easily typed hyphen.
I know real people do sometimes use it, but it's a smell.
I think some software will automatically substitute "smart quotes" for regular quotes and an em-dash for a double hyphen -- I know MS Word used to do this. Curious if any browsers do. This comment was typed in Brave, which doesn't appear to, but I didn't check if Chrome or IE or Opera does.
The comment was not wrong though so I am not sure I understand if flagging it for the sole "it was most likely written by the use of AI" reason is completely valid.
thanks for sharing, that's an interesting perspective actually. It's easy for us "pro devs" to kind of ignore platforms like Replit as "training wheels." I look at it and think "why would I use that, I have all my own stuff set up the way I like it locally".
But us older guys (i'm not that old, 34, but still) can easily forget how valuable and exciting it is to have tools that make the publication / deploy easy. It's cool to hear what the younger, less experienced crowd gravitates towards in the modern dev tool landscape. Thanks for sharing!
Excellent point. With that being said, I think there is market potential for replit, specifically in the middle ground between 'not knowing any code' and 'full on developer using an IDE/Cursor'.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. These are valid criticisms of platforms like Lovable, Bolt, Replit, etc. that cater to "fast MVP" type customers. I'm not sure how you sustain the valuations if the churn inherent to those type of "hobbyist" or "solopreneur" type customers isn't solved.
This is such a common annoyance on the modern internet. I've recently been playing Minecraft with my kids, with a few mods, and I've been irritated to discover that - unlike when I'd mess around with mods a decade ago - lots of the "documentation" for mods now exists only in video form.
Anyway, I built / slopped out this little wrapper for yt-dlp that I call tuber[1], and it has a feature for grabbing a video's subtitles and summarizing them with Claude, if you've got the CLI. I've found it really handy for those annoying cases where some video seems to promise info I want but I don't want to sit through ten minutes of bullshit.
Do you have kids? I'm guessing you don't, because the answer is pretty obvious to those of us who do - the vast majority of parents seem to give not one single fuck about what their kids do with technology. I've known families who have a cell phone - a dedicated device - for their four year old.
My armchair diagnosis is that parents who are just a little bit older than me (I'm 34) and especially parents who didn't grow up as nerds just don't see the problem. Among the class of people who spend their time on Substack or Hacker News the horror of the modern net and its affect on childhood are well understood at this point. Among "normal people" you will definitely get weird looks if you suggest that this stuff is terrible for your kids.
My kids (4 and 6) have a "dedictated" iPhone, a iPad with the pencil, and a MacBook Air. But they were just hand me downs. They don't get to use them unless we let them, but we mostly use them to learn how to type, write, draw, play learning games, Khan Academy, and to mess around in general.
They also call or text aunts/uncles/cousins/grandparents. I feel like it has helped them with reading and just the exercise of trial and error to figure out how it works is beneficial.
Haven’t needed to delve into parental controls yet though.
> They don't get to use them unless we let them, but we mostly use them to learn how to type, write, draw, play learning games, Khan Academy, and to mess around in general.
That seems fine to me. What I'm referring to above is that the kid literally just has an iPhone with, as far as I can see, virtually no restriction. I imagine you would not let your kids use their device to scroll through Youtube Shorts for an unsupervised 2 hours, for example.
Just like it's hard for me to find the right balance of benefit to downside in technology for my kids, it's also hard to strike a balanced tone when discussing my feelings on this stuff. Every time I write something about this problem online I feel like I'm coming off as some authoritarian luddite - which I'm definitely not. I want my kids to get the benefits of technology. Any bright future for them is almost sure to include the need to engage with the net.
Instilling the values that allow for that is the hard part.
> That seems fine to me. What I'm referring to above is that the kid literally just has an iPhone with, as far as I can see, virtually no restriction. I imagine you would not let your kids use their device to scroll through Youtube Shorts for an unsupervised 2 hours, for example.
Yes, they aren’t allowed to watch youtube shorts at all (nor do either of the parents), but we’ll look up nature or physics videos, and if they want to watch a video on repeat, we use yt-dlp to download and they watch via infuse. But again, not of their own accord. When it’s time to play outside or elsewhere, it’s time to do that. And no devices at meal time, even if they see other kids at the same table with them.
I guess my point was that the devices are immensely powerful tools for learning and communication, so I try to teach them how. But they also play games with non gambling mechanics (thank god for Apple Arcade).
This is key, in my experience. I've told my kids that if they catch me scrolling shorts or reddit, they have the right to confiscate my phone. A big part of instilling the values I referenced above is embodying them myself. (obviously, but it bears repeating).
> But they also play games with non gambling mechanics
This is important too. There's so much genuinely great media out there - TV shows, video games, movies, books. It's not that I don't want my kids to experience that stuff - I just want them to learn how to focus on the stuff that's quality rather than the stuff that is slop.
There is enough general public concern about minors having access to online pornography that jurisdictions all over the world are passing age restrictions but I think the HN discussion is one sided.
That is, HN users see the costs, the difficulty, the privacy concerns, etc. But they're also dismissive of the harm, which in terms of the young Gen Z men that I know personally is real. I can't attribute online pornography 100% but the damage includes criminal convictions, falling victim to "blackpill" ideology and other false answers to gendered problems and frequently people giving up on work and love.
I collect ero images and restrictions would personally be a hassle for me, I can't say I am against pornography in general, but I've got some concerns about pornography today. I think advocates are stuck in the 1970s when it was tamer and much less prevalent than it is today -- it's entirely different for a teen to have a few issues of Penthouse or Hustler than it is today.
I think the story of how it relates to relationship satisfaction is nuanced. Personally I think OnlyFans is a cancer. I want to feel special in a fantasy, and not as the biggest simp in a room full of hundreds of simps. (And this is healthy narcissism [1], not pathological narcissism. In good sex or sex with love, somebody thinks you are special)
I'm not sure what the answer is but I can see it both ways and that seems rare on HN.
Yeah, I think this is a sort of similar issue to the kind of thing I describe above, where parents of a certain generation / certain technical background might not be fully aware of the sorts of harm that can come in through technological channels.
I would never actually do this, but there's a part of me that would like to just give my kids a magazine to hide under their bed, or even some sort of curated private video site on the LAN, just to allow for some expression of natural puberty urges in a way that is ... if not "healthy," per se, then at least "harm reduced?" Obviously that idea in practice would be way too weird to consider, lol.
But this comes back to the balance thing I was talking about on my other post in this topic. Full abstinence is probably practically impossible and I'm not sure it's even the right approach. The other end of the spectrum - throwing the kids into the waters of Pornhub, OnlyFans, and whatever the TikTok equivalent of porn is (surely that exists, right?) - that seems pretty fraught too. The taboo nature of this discussion makes things harder - but I have tried to overcome the weird feeling and have fairly frank discussions about these sorts of things with my oldest.
... it's a calf, dad, just like yesterday
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