I think “about Apple” was the operative part. For example, if you know that Nokia had a bad quarter, then perhaps you might infer that Apple had a good one. I believe this is also illegal but obviously harder to prove.
Jokes aside, I think you’re valid but if you take the macro view, it’s clear that there are now more people doing some form of engineering, the same way the digital camera led to more people doing photography, and so on.
I think we can make separate distinctions around the act of consuming vs creating—a lot of vibe coding is beginning to look more like “consuming software” but that’s not what I was intending to describe here.
Precise terminology is important. Just like there's a difference between "taking a photograph" and "photography", there's a difference between "making software" and "software engineering". Digital cameras let more people take more photographs, and some decided to practice the art of photography. Every technological advancement, from personal computers to widespread Internet access to AI tools has made creating software more accessible, but it hasn't inherently made more software engineers.
I can’t speak about other languages but in my head the simplest reason is that English “a/an” specifies “one”, eg “I have a cat and two dogs.” I googled and confirmed a/an is Old English for “one” but otherwise they didn’t use articles. I assume it’s a similar origin story for other languages like “un/una/une”. In that case, it’s equally strange that other languages would make “one” plural imo.
> In that case, it’s equally strange that other languages would make “one” plural imo.
Why? It's very common in English:
I don't want those ones.
In this case the number has been repurposed as a placeholder noun, and the noun is what's pluralized, but that's also what happens when the number is repurposed as a determiner and the determiner gets pluralized.
I think it probably just boils down to whether the word is functionally necessary to understand the meaning of the sentence and how the language evolved...
For example, in French you don't usually pronounce the "s" at the end of a plural noun and lots of singular nouns end in "s", so the articles become necessary for determining if you mean plural or singular. In English you pronounce the "s" clearly and very few singular words end in "s", so you just don't need the article to distinguish anything, it becomes functionally redundant.
This is not a good explanation, because you could just as well say "I have cat and two dogs". The fact remains that "a cat", "cat", and "the cat" (and "one cat") all have separate meanings; while for plural, you only have "cats" and "the cats".
There are some nouns that are always plurals e.g. "scissors" or "pants", and those things still arguably need indefinite/definite distinction, right? Actually no, the very use of plain "scissors" instead of "*a scissors" demonstrates very well the redundancy of the indefinite article, but let's pretend.
Again, e.g. Bulgarian uses едни ("ones") as essentially plural indefinite article, and for genuinely plural things too. It's not nearly as pervasive as the English usage (the null article is used in most cases), but it exists. While in English you could reply to "Where are you going?" with "To hang out with some friends" ('it doesn't really matter to you which ones exactly'), in Bulgarian that "some" would be translated as "едни", not "няколко" or "някои" (technically, you could use that last one, but the meaning would be that you're yourself not sure with whom exactly you're going to hang out there).
Yet other people claim to not have an internal monologue (including my wife and brother) and say they don’t hear anything when they think to themselves, and don’t really even “think” in words for that matter. So this comparison is also tricky because not everyone agrees on either of them. I have a weak visualization ability and strong internal monologue, I’m not sure if they’re correlated in some way or not.
No visualization, no monologue or other auditory thinking ability. My thinking process is more like reading and writing than speaking and hearing. The concepts flow at the speed at of thought when active, much faster than I could comprehend spoken language or images, but completely still otherwise. When I have to think in words, I'm quite slow (it took around 20 minutes to write this post).
The number is wrong / the citation is misleading. It’s closer to 20-30% according to that study, the 79% is referring specifically to cases involving social media, of which Meta platforms are obviously going to make up a large percentage.
There’s also a reporting bias here I’m sure - if Meta is better at reporting these cases then they will become a larger percentage, etc.
Not trying to defend Meta at all here, but this report is also lying.
For example, it says "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms." But the source it cites actually says 79% of online social media cases occurred on Facebook and Instagram. So this stat is probably just a reflection of Meta's market share of social media.
> I'm curious about what other conclusion you may have reached when reading "on Meta's platforms".
The claim was "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms", so they probably took it to mean that 79% of all sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta's platforms.
I don't mean to be a smartarse (well maybe a little). But why wouldn't they interpret it that way, when that's exactly what it says? "X% of all Y happened on Z" doesn't implicitly mean "X% of online Y happened on Z" just because Z is an online platform.
> But why wouldn't they interpret it that way, when that's exactly what it says
I assumed online by default because honestly 79% of all trafficking happening on Meta's platform sounded so implausible I didn't even consider it.
I mean if that number were really true then FB/Insta would rival the dark web or whatever it is called these days. Didn't think they were gone that far.
It’s just an incredibly different statement. It’s like saying 79% of Americans voted for Trump vs 79% of registered Republicans voted for Trump, they lead to very different conclusions.
> Facebook causes harm, disproportionately so for younger people
I think I disagree with this step. Facebook causes a kind of indirect harm here, and is used willingly by teens and parents, who could simply choose not to use it. That's different from, say, a factory polluting a river with toxic chemicals, which needs government regulation. Basically "negative externalities".
There is an inherently addicting aspect to it though - carefully evolved over the years by optimising for "engagement".
One (imperfect) analogy is gambling - anyone can in theory choose not to gamble, but for some people addiction gets in the way and they don't make the choice that can be good for them. So (in the UK) the gambling industry is regulated in terms of how it advertises and what it needs to provide in terms of helping people stop. I don't know if this particular regulation is in anyway effective, but I do think that some regulation is appropriate.
Yeah that’s a good counterpoint. I guess it hinges on whether you can define a clear boundary around what is harmful or unharmful social media.
Like to me “online shopping addiction” is probably a more realistic and analogous problem to gambling, so maybe online advertising to teens could be regulated, but the jump to child abuse is so far outside Meta’s actual business model that it feels over-reaching to go there.
I like how everyone on this thread is up in arms about Zuckerberg - until the moment where regulation is mentioned. Then it's suddenly "oh well, they could just, like, not use it, couldn't they?"
There is also peer pressure/FOMO. "Choosing not to use it" is not exactly easy if everyone else in your social group uses it - especially for teens.
I’m not saying it’s easy for teens to stop using social media, I’m just saying it doesn’t seem like it should require intervention by the US government to do so. There are many other ways to go about social change.
The harmful effects of social media are a topic of public discussion for at least a decade now, if not more. I think if there were an effective grassroots/civil society way to address this, it would have been found by now.
From the article, which quotes an internal study of Facebook itself on this:
> An internal 2019 study titled “Teen Mental Health: Creatures of Habit” found the following:
- “Teens can’t switch off Instagram even if they want to.”
- “Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in compulsive behavior that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.”
- “The pressure ‘to be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.”
Curious, let me know if you find anything about it! That does sort of explain why the brain areas would be locally flipped, but maybe doesn’t explain the global flip (right body -> left brain) that the original article is talking about.
Maybe a silly idea, but here’s a solution to prevent financial censorship: make the game free. Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits. There’s actually a lot of options for Steam if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content.
> if they aren’t being pressured directly to remove the content.
The problem is that they aren't being told "we won't let people buy this through us", they're told "this needs to go entirely or no more credit cards for you".
Fair enough - so in reality they _are_ being pressured directly to remove the content and it has nothing to do with selling the products. A slippery slope indeed!
Most of the games that have been deindexed on itch.io and some of the ones that were banned/removed were free or Pay-What-You-Want/Donation-Ware (some even via Patreon or SubscribeStar rather than itch.io's own payment processing).
The problem isn't just "the Payment Processor doesn't want to support this game" but also "this game shows Guilt-By-Association that your platform's money might go to 'criminals' or 'sinners'."
Guilt-By-Association is real gross, but a large part of the current fight, too, especially looking at itch.io's payment processor-required actions, not just Steam's.
>Or monetize via another way—ads, subscriptions, credits.
All of those are still prone to censorship if the attacking group is motivated enough.
Even crypto, which should be the ideal solution to this problem, is not ideal because most transactions are performed through centralized exchanges which can easily blacklist whatever transactions they want.
