What would help so much would be to force the platform to act in a way to not try to retain the user at every cost.

Like YouTube. I would love to have parental settings, "no shorts", "no recommendations on video page". Kids could search and click on the creator to see more. Combine that with blocklists and curated allow lists. Boom, YouTube is not a problem. And kids getting bored of clicking around would be a feature.

Conspicuous consumption? Like always?

I'm in the later part of the game and I feel really stupid. Some levels are so small I feel like I can understand all possible strategies but none work. Lovely game overall though, highly recommend!

Is it non-American all the way down?

I was born in Argentina, so technically American, yes ;)

Weird fun fact (as an Argentinian who went to school in England for a few years): in English-speaking countries, America is not a continent in the same way as in Spanish. In English they have two continents: South America and North America.

So the word "American" in English does not mean the same as "Americano" in Spanish.

There's really no natural word in English to refer to someone from "El continente Americano", because no such continent exists in English. That's why they use the word "American" to refer to someone from USA exclusively.

That sounded fascinating as a rather large difference in world view stemming only from using different languages.

It turns out that there are various models for the number of continents, and that is (phew) known in Spanish, too. See the Wikipedia page [1] (link to Spanish version) for instance. This is for European Spanish though, but I couldn't find a version of the page in es-AR.

[1]: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continente#Modelos_continental...

I think "the Americas" means the continent(s), and America (to some extent) can mean either but it would feel more like something used as a gotcha at a pub quiz.

You're definitely right about there not being a word for someone from that continent though.

That is weird isn't it "Asian, African, European"

"American" to refer to USA exclusively does make sense either way because USA shares the continent with at least two other countries no matter how you slice it.

You probably meant "doesn't make sense".

Correct

Frankly, the model with the single America continent doesn’t make any sense, because south and north Americas are so different in both geographical and cultural/historical sense.

Continents are about geology not culture

Well, North and South America are two different tectonic plates[1].

[1] https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/tectonic-plates-earth

They really aren't, there's no objective way to divide the world into exactly 7 continents (or 6) using geology.

America, Afro-Eurasia, Australia, Antarctica

I can count 4

Based on what?

Based on being large landmasses

Potentially any island is a continent if your cutoff is low enough

Europe says hi.

If it is successful then the next region would be in the US

I read the whole thing without seeing it. But I also fail to see how you marry "pretentious" with not wanting to be taken seriously. So maybe it's me.

I think you are reading to much into kids trying to break norms and trying to be "part of a clique". It's not pretentiosness, it's part of finding yourself. They are also actively trying to get you to not read them because you are old and think they "are not serious" so mission accomplished I guess. And time will tell if these kids will invent something you have to respect. (Spoiler alert, we did and they will to)

I turn off autocapitalization on my phone so I can be consistent with my computers where it IS more effort to use capitalization. I also believe quite dogmatically that computers should not try to be smarter than me, I can press the buttons I intend to press, including the shift key on a phone keyboard.

This is not because I’m super cool, it’s because I’m an old man and I’m still typing in 2025 like I was typing on IRC in 1998 when nocapsing was absolutely dominant.

But if I type in a space where proper capitalization is expected, like HN, I do it (this was typed on my phone with no autocorrect, suggestions or autocapitalization — I know, I’m dumb and my opinions and settings are wrong). If it was my personal blog however I would do whatever I felt like doing.

Of course you are free to do what you want on your blog, but some choices make it harder to read. IMO not capitalising is similar to using hard to read fonts or colours.

You're describing a 15 second effort that is performed at most once per phone purchase, and at its least once in the owner's entire history of iOS backup/restore processes. Less total effort than our comments took to write. You're then reading a whole lot into that.

> If you purposely go into your phone settings and turn off auto-capitalization (which is what the kids do, since they're all typing on their phones), isn't it the very definition of pretentiousness?

That's incredibly presumptuous of you. That they're on their phone, that they had auto capitalization defaulted to on, that it's them who turned it off, that they didn't turn it off for whatever other reason (bugginess).

you're right, blog articles should be entirely devoid of stylistic choices and signifiers.

This is HN, you need to use sarcasm tags.

ok, boomer

But the click bait was conceived and written super fast by a daring driver!

You should read the article. :)

No it's not?! The guardian does not have a pay wall. They ask for you to subscribe put you can simply refuse.

It's easy to mistake it for a paywall, an enormous wall of text telling you to pay some money.

Actually no - there's a "please help fund us" but you can read without paying

Degradation sounds passive, like something getting worse due to lack of care. Enshittification as a new word have the luxury of no baggage, so to me it perfectly captures the process of taking active, intentional steps to change stuff in a way that makes end user experience worse, but (maybe) product owner richer.

SSQ

I would actually like a phone that is lighter but fatter. Having empty space inside. Letting a good enough camera be flush with the back and the wider sides could add sturdiness. But as others have pointed out, consumer choice is an illusion. It's "you want this".