No, uBOL blocks more ads and isn’t affected by Firefox’s insistence to not block Google Ads or their own.
> Sponsored shortcuts and other sponsored content shown by Firefox when you open a new tab are separate from ads on the web pages you visit, so Ad Blocker doesn’t affect them.
Just mentioned in another comment, but I'm not sure Firefox on iOS can actually use webkit content blockers? (I thought it could but have been using Orion exclusively for a while now)
Do you really think a fresh steam account will have equal footing? I'd be surprised if that was the case.
Even Nintendo has been setting fairly strict requirements to pre-order some of their products, like requiring 50 hours of playtime on the original switch to pre-order the Switch 2
At what point should the responsibility fall on the parent to protect their children from harm?
Don’t get me wrong, if I had my way TikTok wouldn’t exist for anyone, adults included. It’s just so strange to me that so many parents hand their 7 year olds unrestricted access to TikTok and expect someone else to keep their kid safe.
I am from Eastern Europe and I’ve been living for many years in Western Europe. Where I come from, kids get their first phones when they start school at 6 (there’s a pre-school year) simply because every other kid has one. I keep coming back in my mind to two examples from my birth country: a friend’s kid carrying an 8 inch smartphone in his hand everywhere because the phone was as big as half his thigh and would have to carry a bag for it. The second one was on a visit at the zoo, I was on a bench and a family with two young children with them, in a cart. And both children, couldn’t have been older than 4 or 5, were scrolling TikTok, that was showing them children content!
In contrast, in Western Europe, my son is now in the sixth grade, more than half his class doesn’t have phones, phones are absolutely forbidden on school grounds and at school activities, and they are now doing a class trip where they were told that there’s a pay phone at the hotel, in case they want to call the parents - our son promptly informed us that he’ll rather buy a pack of Pokémon cards than call us and 3 days is not so much anyway.
And it is not only at school, he travels for tournaments with his team every other week and mobile phones are absolutely forbidden on the team bus. Children read, play games (including chess on a magnetic board), sing and change stories for hours at a time
It's not so easy, they need phones and social media to communicate with their friends. They also need to fit in and find an identity. The algorithms basically all engagement engines have is harmful for humanity as a whole. They are marketed as recommendation engines but it's 100% about engagement and that is why the content you see is mostly creating dopamine from it being fun or rage for it being provocative. It's built to serve one purpose, to keep people using the platform as much as possible. Not because the platform is good, but because it serves content that maximizes engagement.
I read a post about someone saying his wife worked for a snack company. They used MRI scans to see how much salt (or sugar) they should have in the snacks to maximize the response in the brain. Sounds disturbing right.
Well engagement engines are the same thing. It's artificial intelligence optimized to get people to react and stay addicted. Basically AI doing harm. It's not what is best for the individual in terms of health. It's what generates most money to the owner of the platform.
It should not be allowed to build a business around something that exploits humans brains. Basically biohacking our brains for profit.
Apparently parents are spending more time with their children than ever. Dads especially. Paradoxically, there is what you're addressing.
Personally, I think some parents are afraid of their children growing to resent them for infringing upon their "freedom" in ways that keeping them away from the dangers that social media and other technologies present.
Replace TikTok with cigarettes, and it'll hopefully make sense to you. There was a time when people had no idea that smoking was bad for you, which is where we are now with these apps.
And since they're addictive, kids will find a way to get them even if their parents don't allow it. That's why it's most effective to require ID when you're buying cigarettes than it is to shame people for not being perfectly vigilant parents.
BTW, I'm not saying age verification is the solution here. IMO, we should instead ban addictive social media completely. Eg, target specific design patterns/features, require companies to disclose how their algorithms work to regulators, etc.
IMO, the trajectory was set back when they removed the option for monthly payments. Minimum US$450 to play made it a non-starter for my projects (even with commercial ambitions). They changed this just as I started to integrate (~2024, I think) so I kept to the free capabilities. Have been waiting for the other show to drop and here we are.
Edit: looks like they’ve reintroduced monthly billing within the last few months. I guess that’s a sort of win, even if not for the OSS community. But I’d still be reluctant to get into bed with them at this stage.
While this is a neat feature, this means it is not in fact a drop in replacement for JSON.parse, as you will be breaking any code that relies on the that result being a mutable object.
True, the particular use case where this really shines is large datasets where typical usage is to read a tiny part of it. Also there is no reason you couldn't write an rx parser that creates normal mutable objects. It could even be a hybrid one that is lazy parsed till you want to turn it mutable and then does a normal parse to normal objects after that point.
They don’t need to hide behind a "think of the children" excuse to justify invading people’s privacy and rights. They already do that freely. But to be fair, they do actually think about the kids some times. Limiting screen time, banning certain games, and restricting social media are based policies for developing brains IMO.
In 20 years we'll look at a lot of things that are normalized today like we look at cigarettes now, in disbelief at how unhealthy it was.
Not intending to defend OpenAI here, but their MAU (800 million) does dwarf most other AI companies, anthropic included. I do not envy the engineers there working on scaling.
Not sure MAU is the best metric here. I was recently surprised to find out their revenues are actually kind of close 12B vs 7B, so maybe closer (than could be fairly described as being dwarfed) in terms of token count?
