I know the US has a main character syndrome but this has been going on for decades now, Donald Trump is not responsible for what happens in the rest of the world regardless of what US news says.

China has been adding a United Kingdom's worth of solar for several years now, Pakistan replaced 40% of its energy supply with solar after floods in recent years, Germany over the last 30 days produced 70% of its energy from renewables etc.

"Drill Baby Drill" in 2026 was already the mentality of a Japanese holdout soldier years after the war is over. It's a purely ideological thing.

You can't assume that because if that was the case he'd already know what sentence to write, because that's what that means.

The notion of a best sentence requires a final cause, an end to write to. By their very nature that's not how LLMs work, so you can't 'degrade' them on that front. They can't lose a property they didn't have.

The socioeconomic factors have become more favorable. Excluding surveillance there's been a secular crime drop due to aging demographics, family planning / abortions, potentially even decline in lead etc. The US is not as safe as China, but it's safer than the US 40 years ago all other things held equal. Of course an authoritarian state is safer but that's meaningless to compare yourself to if you value freedom.

What's actually changed is an absolute spread of paranoia and fear of imagined threats even in neighborhoods that look like as idyllic as a Scandinavian village.

The worst scenario isn't actually that machines are intelligent and you lose your job, it's that they're stupid and you lose your job because in our quantitative glutton culture qualitative judgement is entirely gone to begin with

Is that why prisons so safe and free of crime? How is that life? Electronic mass surveillance is how old, the late 90s?

Yes, let's ban all mass surveillance. I know where that gets you, the 70s or 80s when the height of technology was localized tape CCTV in a handful of places. Did everyone die and everything burn down? How can anyone with a straight face be this hysterical when most people currently alive grew up without any surveillance

As a bottom up communal activity yes, American sports is Roman bread & circuses now with their own Temu version of an emperor and his clan at the top. This is sports in the way Barron Harkonnen is throwing sports events for his nephew

People who drown out boredom or silence tend to eliminate wandering thoughts, introspection, autobiographical thinking, pondering of relations, effectively the kind of internal reflection that's necessary from time to time. It's pretty common now to hear people say that they're uncomfortable with silence exactly for that reason.

I used to work at ByteDance and they alone employed I think more than 800 Flutter Devs. Douyin uses Flutter (the Chinese version of TikTok), Grab and Ebay use it, Alibaba and Baidu did too. Toyota and Volkswagen I think both use Flutter. Nubank I think is also a flutter app and they alone have like one hundred million some users.

With the popularity in the Chinese ecosystem alone there's gotta be a billion plus people using flutter.

Of course professionals themselves need to be licensed, how else is any company supposed to have any confidence in who they employ or any legal security?

Because it isn't creative work. Software underpins payment processors, medical services, emergency alerts, infrastructure. In the UK not long ago a ransomware attack took the healthcare system offline and surgeries had to be postponed. in 2021 the Colonial Pipeline attack took 50% of the US East Coast's oil supply offline. The entire German train system died a few weeks ago for half a day because of a software bug.

People's entire communication is in digital services, all of their private data, the economy grinds to a halt or national security is impacted monthly now by either deliberate attacks or just bugs.

if nobody clicks on the ads nobody's going to buy ad space because people who place ads care about whether their ads translate into sales. So of course Facebook cares, and ultimately only cares about how many people respond to them because how much money they'll make depend on how much money the ads make.

That's why FB has invested ungodly sums into trying to figure out the preferences of their users.

And to point out the obvious on the actual quality of the piece, The US has itself passed age verification laws in 20 states, such as Texas where it was driven not by the British but by domestic interest groups and decidedly state senators like Angela Paxton.

Also given the slant of the site it's pretty obvious was the political motivation here is, I guess yelling at the British always works

yes, that's called a differentiated product in economics and it confers market power the same way any other monopoly does, Sony controls the Playstation ecosystem, Apple its ecosystem and it gives them leverage over the consumer, those products are not commodities.

That's why pharmaceuticals, patented medical devices or cable and broadband providers are regulated, see net neutrality legislation. Which exists exactly to commoditize information access in a market that's dominated by differentiated providers so they can't exercise their gatekeeping power to drive prices between you and online services up.

My argument's pretty straight forward. Manipulation on the platform isn't profitable for Mark Zuckerberg. What's profitable is selling ads. Making teenagers anorexic doesn't increase his revenue, it just creates problems for him.

Sure he doesn't care either as long as it doesn't, I agree but also he shouldn't because he's not the nation's parent. I think Zuckerberg's due diligence is done when he doesn't interfere or steer politics, he has not, and should not have responsibility for how people use his apps.

It's not Zuckerberg or "the algorithm" that's manipulating people on Instagram, it's people manipulating other people. What's making you human isn't feeling or wanting to be heard, you have that in common with your cat or dog, what's uniquely human is being able to manage and control those impulses. In a democracy it is not Zuckerberg's fault that a largely infantile population cannot manage their media consumption. That's like blaming the guy at the liquor store for the fact that you're drunk at ten in the morning.

I'm not shifting blame, in a democracy people get the institutions, companies and leaders they deserve, by definition.

The reason the US has fairly robust interstate commerce laws is because if you don't you'll have trade barriers between states. Even the most well intentioned internet company can't operate in that ecosystem

That may have been the result of those platforms and he profited from it but I doubt he purpose built them to that end, because his businesses do profit from an open society, not a closed one. I think if he could snap his fingers and not have teenagers lose their sanity on the site he'd do it if only for PR reasons and to avoid congressional hearings.

I don't like him as a person but most of what happened on those sites we did to ourselves. I don't see him anywhere close to his techno-feudal peers who explicitly seem to seek out to destroy most institutions.

In a democracy, you, I and we are the pronouns when it comes to who is responsible. One greedy nerd can't end a democracy of people who have some degree of virtue, education, temperance and civil sense in them. If that happens you already had much bigger problems.

You shouldn't but you can't and will never be able to know what the future looks like. You could be in libertine Berlin of the 1920s and be hunted down by fascists a decade later because of your ancestry or sexuality.

And don't think that can't happen quickly again, it's not much of a hyperbole given the way the world is going. And nowadays, once you put something on the internet, good luck getting rid of it. So I'd be very careful with what I disclose, it's not paranoia any more. I'm European and flew to the US earlier this year and got asked to disclose my social media profiles. I have none, deleted them a decade ago. Is that sane or moral? No but if that's how the US rolls these days imagine where else your data can end up.