It reminds me a little of when Hegseth wrote "we're clean on opsec" in a message thread with confidential military information that he accidentally sent to a journalist. It seems like role playing/fantasy fulfilment for certain personalities. I struggle not to hold some contempt for people like this, who are making life difficult for everyone for their own petty reasons. I can sympathize when it's simple ignorance, but the ego chasing really is inexcusable and needs to be called out more.

But when you conflate free software with open source, you get confused people cheerleading their own abuse. Android is probably the worst offender here. Google Chrome, VSCode are others that come to mind.

> posts a lame reduction of the argument

And since they're addictive, kids will find a way to get them even if their parents don't allow it. That's why it's most effective to require ID when you're buying cigarettes than it is to shame people for not being perfectly vigilant parents.

BTW, I'm not saying age verification is the solution here. IMO, we should instead ban addictive social media completely. Eg, target specific design patterns/features, require companies to disclose how their algorithms work to regulators, etc.

What makes you say that? It's well known that the addictive patterns in these apps trigger dopamine the same way drugs do. In a sense, dopamine is the "chemical substance" central to the addiction. Heroine and algorithms are just different ways to get it.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-pot...

This site used to have interesting technical discussions, but now its all either AI cheerleading, or vibe coder blog posts.

That's not how it reads because there is a semicolon in there. It means "This is AI, so I didn't read it".

Also, I'm getting nitpicky here, but LLMs don't ”read".

If you mean ban all crypto currencies, then you're correct.

But it's clearly bullshit.

I think this is a potentially giant market: incurious people who don't know what they're doing, lack experience and wisdom, and are highly susceptible to empty marketing fluff. Selling junk to these people can't be very difficult, especially if they rely on an LLM (funded by many of the same investors) to explain it to them.

But it has been a while since I've tried it, maybe I should look into it again

But for gaming, it really is hard to go back to 60.

Missing an /s?

Maybe you missed my edit? I specifically said not a clone of the monopolies, but a competitor big enough to be a sustainable business. The economics of a monopolist's empire are irrelevant.

> Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them

There's so much wrong with this statement. First of all, I will never meet anywhere near a million people in my lifetime. A regular human being's real social connections won't be anywhere near that big.

But even if it is (or users want to discover/follow random people), it doesn't take a computer science genius to discover how to interoperate between social networking apps. Meta and Google would never do this, but that's because they're anti-competitive monopolists; if you're a startup trying to gain marketshare and win on your product's quality, interop with other networks is a no brainer. We probably don't even need regulation to require interop, as the market will see it as a useful thing to develop on its own.

(EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly, I mean to build alternatives that are big enough to survive as a business, and big enough to be useful; A few million users as opposed to the few billions Facebook and Youtube (allegedly) have)

The reason it's hard to imagine such a thing today is because the tech giants have illegally suppressed competition for so long. If Google or Meta were ordered to break up, and Facebook/Youtube forced to try and survive as standalone businesses, all the weaknesses in their products would manifest as actual market consequences, creating opportunity for competitors to win market share. Anybody with basic coding skills or money to invest would be tripping over themselves to build competing products which actually focus on the things people want or need, because consumers will be able to choose the ones they like.

This is peak finance brainrot. In no scenario is abandoning ship a positive signal, even if you managed to pocket some valuables on the way out.

Let's stop celebrating dysfunctional business models and consolidation of the industry around finance bros who give zero fucks about said industry.