I teach children. You have no idea how much social media has affected their attention, memory, critical reasoning and social skills: the social repercussions will be felt for decades.
And this isn't mentioning exposing easily malleable minds to propaganda paid for by states that see the UK as an enemy, all before their critical reasoning skills, and awareness of their emotions, and how their emotions can be used against them, have had the chance to develop.
I expect this to massively electorally backfire on the government. But in the long run, it will be more than worth it. The only alternative would be to blanket ban phones in schools, although they'll still be plugged into social media the minute they leave.
Tbh I've never understood why a strict non-negotiable ban on phones in schools hasn't been in place. This is an easy win with no negative consequences for adults.
It already exists in the schools near where I live in the UK, but only came into place in some of them in the last year. I was surprised that they had been so slow about it.
I was also surprised it hadn’t been the case. Apparently there were some policies against phone use during class but the enforcement was so toothless and sporadic that teachers and kids alike were ignoring the rule.
Now the rules are firm, universally applied, and have actual consequences. That last part seems to be the key. You can try to say phones are banned but until there are actual consequences it’s not really going to make a difference.
Round here they have a locked pouch they have to put their phone in during school which seems to work reasonably well (although I'm sure not perfectly). It makes it more clearcut if they do find somebody with a phone not in their pouch anyway that they've definitely broken the rules. They get locked at registration at the start of the day and then unlocked when they leave school at special points.
The goal is to prevent phones and social media from being a distraction during school time.
The schools in my district did it. Several kids ran huge campaigns with flyers and news media involvement trying to protest it, but after that died down the response has been very positive.
It’s not going to satisfy the people who think that all children everywhere must be banned from social media at all times whether their parents agree or disagree. It does have a very positive impact at schools.
Oh ok. I agree with you from that perspective - phone are indeed a distraction and should be banned in school. I do find that whole debate strange though because in India, schools (not government) have never allowed phones in the first place and our society has been largely fine with that practice. Nobody has accused any school of "overreaching" or made such mandates a political issue. In fact, my mischievous nephew's phone was confiscated by his school Principal who told his parents that she wouldn't return it till the term ended because they shouldn't be giving a phone to him at his age!
What I find utterly wrong is the method, because this way you end up tracking also every adult.
A better way would be to legislate that minors need to use devices specifically designed for them, so that they can be kept under control, and forbid them to use regular devices.
My daughter cannot drive my car, and I don't need to insert my id card to use it, nor there is a facial recognition system to ensure that I am an adult.
Banning the kids from access social media sounds like just an excuse to be able to track adults.
You seem to have contradicted yourself saying it's OK to ban them and then saying it's just an excuse to track adults. But you're no exception it seems everyone involved in this discussion is conflicting these two issues. How about we just say we're going to ban minors - make that the law, and then figure out the proper technical approach? We're smart technologies here and I'm sure in about an hour we could find a solution.
I'm really torn on this. On the one hand I agree with you 100%, whilst on the other I have little faith that our government will implement in a non-damaging way. However, I'd almost be willing to trade some amount of civil-liberty in order to protect us from the rot of social media. If I could ban everyone from "harmful social media" I would, I just understand that's impossible to define and implement without massive unintended externalities.
I'm not naive to how much of a slippery slope that is, and I don't think the government is pursuing this in good faith. Nonetheless, here we are.
My kid's school bans phones for that very reason. I find the age limit annoying and very easy to circumvent, which renders it pointless. This is a problem, because I agree with the benefits of kids attention not being eroded at scale.
The other potential good outcomes are that (1) make a dent (however minuscule) into current and future revenue of parasitic american companies (2) a next generation of young people growing up not addicted to social media.
The latter has the same effect of trying to proselytise to a grown, intelligent adult. The response is, quite rightly, yuck.
> You have no idea how much social media has affected their attention, memory, critical reasoning and social skills: the social repercussions will be felt for decades.
I don't see different results among my peers (I'm 39) let alone older people.
Seeing my family, it's mostly the 50+ that are consistently distracted by phones, not the Gen Zs.
Do you agree that parents should be the one protecting their children from this 'propaganda' and internet slop?
Whilst I agree that social media can be overwhelmingly negative especially for young people, dont you recon that the risk to privacy and free-nature / increased surveillance of the internet is a greater problem?
I think they should be "one of" not "the one." You know, it takes a village. And in any event, as others have said, parents have completely refused to participate in the question anyways, so in the real world your statement is not worth the paper it's written on.
Not OP but parental controls have existed for over a decade in these platforms with little to no uptake.
Now that the UK has had 3 major riots in the past 24 months exacerbated by foreign social media bots, it is all the more critical to prevent children from falling into the trap.
The time for the carrot is over. It's time for the stick.
On a separate note, I find it funny that plenty of so called internet freedom supporters are using HN given that it's terms and conditions give YC full ownership of comments in perpetuity.
Apply the stick to the companies and people doing this, you don't think social media was critical in the UK riots? See how even adults are affected by the thing you're proposing controlling with age limits.
Do you really believe parents can realistically protect their wards from getting hooked to any harmful, addictive drugs? How will they ever know if their kids are experimenting with these drugs? The problem is that the drugs are addictive - all it it needs is for someone to try it a few times to get completely hooked to it. And you don't realise it until it is too late.
I was explaining why stopping the circulation of harmful substances, like Heroin, do require government intervention and that parents alone cannot fight it. Your conflation that such drugs are equivalent to addictive social media is something I don't agree with - they are addictive but it's a different type of addiction and the harm is different too (more psychological than physical). That said, I will concede that I mostly agree that "age verification" isn't perhaps the best approach to fight it.
I believe that I would be happy to recompense someone for their efforts since, providing I enjoy the music, I happily give money to buskers.
Yet getting my credit card out for a stranger everytime I half-enjoy an article is not something I'm going to do.
Unless the answer is payment friction, assumed wealth or assumed effort, I can't seem to reconcile why I'm happy to recompense buskers but unwilling to recompense bloggers whose article I'll enjoy once and whose website I'll likely never visit again.
In an internet of initially-convincing yet insubstantial AI-slop, people hawking every fad going, and knowing your hard-work will be fed into a AI model that you'll later be charged for, I can't help but feel there must be a solution.
I theorise that many social ills come from workers having less pride in their skills and achievements, and a greater sense of social alienation, due to automation.
If you spend countless hours at work, and you partially define yourself by your work, and you realise you are easily replaceable then I cannot imagine this comes without mass social malaise that manifests itself elsewhere.
When you know you're essentially babysitting the workhorse to ensure it doesn't go off the rails, I can't see job satisfaction, and the social consequences of such, increasing.
> When you know you're essentially babysitting the workhorse to ensure it doesn't go off the rails
I don't have data to support this (other than, I guess, my LinkedIn feed), but my impression is that the management class is pushing AI _way_ harder than the worker / craftsperson class.
And if that's true, I think it's perhaps because it's something they understand: you tell AI to do something, and (with varying degrees of success and less complaining)... it does that thing.
To the extent that I've seen craftspeople adopt AI, it's been because they recognize its usefulness as a tool to further their craft. I don't meet many craftspeople that enjoy watching any[one|thing] do their work for them.
Does that mean the Human element can be condensed to a single Manager with the right skills? A Director above them? Is the VP above them directing the agents?
Is this another variation of Conway's law, where orgs design systems that copy their own communication structure? Seems like that is how my Manager/Director approach it. Then again, they are making slide shows and obviously AI assisted reports, not something that needs to be stable and responsive for the entire product lifetime.
But to your point, the manager sees it as a structure to manage to increase productivity. The craftsman sees it as a tool to further their craft. Each is driven by a different methodology and use case. Can that mesh unless specifically directed to throw AI at no joy work?
> I theorise that many social ills come from workers having less pride in their skills and achievements, and a greater sense of social alienation, due to automation.
I agree entirely. Even in an idealistic fully egalitarian post-scarcity society, to truly be happy I think most people would need to do work that they can feel a sense of accomplishment about. The problem is that work at most jobs is increasingly just toil. Any possibility to scrape some tiny flakes of satisfaction out of the toil gets removed, often for no good reason.
There's been a fair amount of research done on this, and while Marx's alienation theory isn't totally out there, what makes the most difference for workers is autonomy and purpose. We need to feel like we have some control over what we do, and like what we do is meaningful.
That's easier with things like farming, but it's totally possible with highly-automated jobs; you just can't have managers treating us like we're machines.
Get people hooked, tell them spending time coding is no longer needed, let their skills deteriorate, tell them they need cough up for a licence to do their job
Forcing developers to pay for models that were build on code they scraped scott-free
A tax to do their job that developers are jumping at the chance to pay
Everybody's finally realising that node dependencies are a threat, but letting these AI companies gatekeep the industry is a bandwagon people are scrambling towards
> Forcing developers to pay for models that were build on code they scraped scott-free.
Yes this makes me sad behound explanation. Specially when I see open source developers happily using these tools. These companies stole your, free, hard work and charge you a subscription!! Not to speak about them torrenting books and (most likely) training on private repos.
This and devs paying a subscription to use a tool that is marketed as trying to replace them.
I had 150$ monthly budget thatbI used for various open source projects and I've cut that entirelly.
I don't get what you're saying. You're frustrated that Open Source projects were used to build these AIs and that OS devs (or devs in general) are paying to use AI.
Then you say you had money that you used to donate(?) to OS and have cut that because of the frustration?
Open source just means sharing the source code for people to learn off or have the ability to customize on their own. I don't think there is any need to be frustrated about that (now if it was copyright/private of course).
> To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the
books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was
exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107
of the Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books
purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not
for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it
was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print
copies it had purchased for its central library with more
convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its
central library — without adding new copies, creating new
works, or redistributing existing copies.
> Forcing developers to pay for models that were build on code they scraped scott-free
That's also caused by some very smart (even brilliant) developers (you can see many of them in this very thread) choosing to be oblivious about all this and bury us all under, hoping that they'll be among the last ones to go. Writing this down I realise that they maybe aren't all that smart.
I'm perhaps missing something but if there were a significant connection, wouldn't this mean those in sunnier climates would have better verbal and visual memory?
If there were a connection then I would wager that there are more significant factors, since I have seen or heard of no evidence to assume those in sunnier climates have better verbal and visual memory.
The results of this study seem to show no significant correlation, anyhow.
Not necessarily, if the effect was due to exposure to levels beyond what you’d even get in sunnier climates. It also could be possible those in sunnier climates do experience this effect and it was unnoticed, due to political and socioeconomic issues associated with typical equatorial countries
The rust conversion was a byte-for-byte replica of the original's bytecode, was it not? Thereby it was easily possible to validate the quality of the AI-based work. The same would obviously not be possible for patches. I don't believe you can use the rust conversion as a valid, if implied, argument that you can take AI-patches in good faith.
My implied argument is not so much that "because llm was used, then llm must be used."
The original argument proposed by the author is essentially distilled into, "because llm could be used, we must no longer accept public contributions."
Which is, in my opinion, a disproportional and misguided overreaction. The llm was apparently good enough to do the byte for byte replica, so we know that it can be used (within the context of ladybird) in a way that's apparently acceptable to the maintainers.
To attempt to get more precise, argument is that "closing the gates" is moving in the wrong direction against progress, and a signals a potentially net negative impact to the ladybird project.
I don't have a fully formed thesis, it's a lot of vibes. It just feels wrong. I'm willing to acknowledge that, much like the overreaction that I'm calling out, I could be experiencing a similar kind of conservative gut reaction to the changing of the open source community that unsettles me.
Well see how it all shakes out. Right now the topic is so charged and we don't have a good suite of tools and heuristics for the new world, that were bound to see the gamut of reactions.
From my fairly quick reading, their premise seems to be "we can no longer trust /unknown/ developers who use AI to understand and maintain the code they submit", rather than a simple attack on those who use AI.
This seems fair to me: numerous developers would love to put "contributed to the Ladybird project" on their curriculum vitaes, and AI tools can now make this within the reach of a huge number of people.
But the Ladybird project needs more than just working-code, something that AI can easily produce: they need code that is understood and maintainable by the person who submitted it.
Not only does AI-generated code fail to guarantee this understanding and maintenance (to a greater degree than before), but the developers increasingly need to get through an avalanche of AI-generated pull requests rather than, say, code new features.
I would prefer projects to be developed in the open: but when developing in the open makes the code checking exponentially harder, and the chance of the submitters sticking around becomes significantly lower, then I can at least understand.
When the dam starts to overflow, then something needs to be done.
I see where you're coming from, but I think it's less the fact that they _can_ use an LLM to do this and more that they can't guarantee anybody else has exercised equal diligence with their code or equal experience with browser engines.
It's not unreasonable to feel conflicted about this, but at the same time, I wonder if they're starting to burn out on code review.
How the Russian interests have taken over significantly invalidates the purpose and existence of the FBI, CIA, and NSA.
But then again, President Biden's administration had multiple grounds to prosecute Trump for crimes committed, whether the attempted coup or espionage with top secret documents or Epstein, and they just did not make it happen in a way that had any effect.
OpenAI etc, are, however advertising them like they are magical oracles, on the verge of lifting humanity to next phrase of civilisation. The idea the majority of users know what nondeterministic even means it's a massive, massive ask
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