It is 12000 days into September, 1993: Usenet is long since an artifact in the memory of greybeards; the internet belongs to the monkey cage. Yet on Slashdot, we still get physics puns. Here, the golden age lives on.

the father accustoms himself to become like his child and fears his sons, while the son likens himself to his father, and feels neither shame nor fear in front of his parents, so he may be free ; the metic [563a] becomes the equal of a citizen and the citizen of a metic, and similarly with the foreigner.
It indeed so happens, he said.
To these, said I, such trifles do add up: the teacher, in such a case, fears his pupils and fawns upon them, while pupils have in low esteem their teachers as well as their overseers; and, overall, the young copy the elders and contend hotly with them in words and in deeds, while the elders, lowering themselves to the level of the young, sate themselves with pleasantries [563b] and wit, mimicking the young in order not to look unpleasant and despotic.

- Plato's "The Republic" (ca 375 BCE)

I don't have any objection to people getting educated on how to be literate with the technology available for doing their jobs and interacting with their world. I also agree - just because I think it's stupid doesn't mean it doesn't have value.

What I have a problem with is not with the information itself, it's with the increasing trend towards abuse. With traditional marketing, it's more obvious that it's sponsored, and there are more obvious standards as far as how far you can go with stretching the truth for your marketing. With "influencer" culture, we blur all the regular communication lines, and end up with far more advertisements dressed up as if they're documentary news.

My problem isn't with "Product X is healthier than Product Y", it's with "Did you know that people who buy Product Y are putting literal poisons in their bodies!!?!". I'm in favor of the advertising from The Invention of Lying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stbwqSOJwL4).

There were a number of things I could say on the topic, but they all unfortunately end up reinforcing the unstated premise - I'm older and I think new things are stupid.

When discussing a robot made by the same company that makes RealDolls, you might want to be careful with your phrasing.

And for some reason, Discord went to Klipy...?

Probably a Linux nerd (on /.? The hell you say) that carried the xST vs xDT timezone markers before the brain caught up that "Standard" and "Saving" are both "S"

> next will be Jedi training school full of pointless teen angst.

Wasn't that "The Acolyte"?

> Heh, I've never heard that term before.

It's an acronym for "jack of all trades."

What, you mean you're not convinced to grab the no-name alpha-release "privacy browser" that cripples yourself if you don't let them MITM you?

It wasn't that hard - Netscape came on floppies, too.

I think my argument there is that we shouldn't be saying that what they did wrong was to "use infinite scrolling maliciously" as much as the broader concept of "creating addictive content".

Please forgive the poor comparison, but it's against the law for me to cause bodily harm to you. There might be additional laws that indicate that my reasons modify the nature of the crime, or the implements I use change sentencing, but the underlying law is about my actions and how they cause harm.

Similarly, I don't believe the issue should be about what UI elements the companies choose to use, but about the underlying actions / harm.

There's no need for a refresh button. If the page wasn't correct the first time around, that's on you.

Historical data lookup is the first one that comes to mind.

I want to pull back data, and keep pulling back more data as I go down further. This is a context where the data has value - it's not trying to keep me on the site. I'd *love* it if my bank would do this for me.

From a purely social media perspective, you're right, there aren't really any good places for it. But I'm just saying that the concept of a UI element that grabs more data when you get to the end isn't fundamentally bad.

My initial argument, before I just started attacking social media, was that if we start legislating certain UI elements as problematic, then we end up in a situation where legitimate use cases get outlawed, and companies actually trying to create good products end up hamstrung.

Can we quit trying to attack UIs?

I understand that an infinite scroll can be addictive. It's also an incredibly simple UI feature that has plenty of viable use-cases.

As long as we look at these companies in terms of what they *do*, rather than what they *are*, we're never going to actually solve any problems.

If you ban this or that feature, they'll use their teams of psychologists to find something else that isn't specifically regulated and use that feature. Or they'll have a litigation of lawyers come in and argue that the thing they're doing doesn't fit the particular legislation. But we need to come to the point where we all agree that artificially trying to force someone to engage beyond the point they normally would is not "making a better product", it's just sleazy.

I get the argument that people can make choices to do what they want. I support that. But we also shouldn't collectively turn a blind eye to companies going out of their way to milk psychology and exploit people. Just because I accept responsibility for the fact that I spend more time on YouTube than I should doesn't mean that YouTube gets a pass in the matter.

I 100% agree that parents need to be way more engaged, and that teens shouldn't get unfettered access to social media. But just because some parents are less engaged than they should be doesn't excuse bad behavior by Instagram / Tiktok.

Personal freedoms doesn't have to be diametrically opposed to companies being responsible. I'm all for a smaller government with less stupid crap, but if a multinational conglomerate isn't going to make right choices on its own, then oversight ends up as the only viable option.

I completely went off course with my argument, but as a curmudgeon, I stand by it.

That's the issue - it's all or nothing, just with weird caveats. Either:

1. The AI can do everything an engineer can do, in which case some business management person might come back and tell it that it was wrong with some assumptions on this or that (just like they would with a human), but it's otherwise fully autonomous, acting entirely on its own, or:

2. It can't.

The problem with #2 is that we'll spend so much time and money in thinking we're just a little ways away from #1 that no one is in the pipeline. There's also the risk of treating #2 like it's #1, where we let it make decisions, with no repercussions, and we just watch things burn.

I suppose there's a third option - it can do everything, *plus* mentoring a junior so that a human is still learning things just in case.