So even if you don't believe I have the capacity to understand that a teenager I know (who was also a child) who was doing drugs, smoking, etc., would absolutely have gotten me what I wanted; it doesn't follow that I didn't have the access I actually had. "We'll never know" is false. I know, because I was there.

As far as minimum age laws not having their intended effect, again, it's easy when you're the one saying what all the arguments are...

Many (most?) streaming services advertise their own shows and other content ahead of other content you elect to watch even on ad free subs.

Hulu’s ad free subs have some shows that show unambiguous ads.

Prime and others muddy their interfaces with others’ “channels” and content that you can subscribe to through their service. They also show other content you can purchase or rent through them that aren’t part of your package. These things are included in search, viewing UI lists, and banner ads.

Em-dashes keep everything on the same level of importance in my brain.

Commas don’t feel as powerful. To be fair to the comma I’d probably do this:

Em-dash matches how I speak and think: A halt, then push onto the digression stack, then pop. So I use them like that.

Edit: I accidentally used an em-dash in the word em-dash. Interestingly HN didn’t consider changing the dash to be a change in my text so didn’t update it. I had to make a separate change and take that change out for my dash change to stick.

Disinterest was what really “saved” me from these vices but lacking that, it was my parents. I also had access to perfectly legal things that were bad for me that I actually wanted and it was my parents who helped me there too; no mandatory ID required.

All this talk of “glimpses” is you trying to read too deep into a single example.

I’m not using my adult mind to figure out how I could have gotten this stuff as a kid. I’m using my adult mind to recognize that if I had been motivated as a kid, there are additional ways I. as a kid, would have been able to figure out how to get it.

I’m not throwing my hands up in the air and saying this is impossible or that we should just open up access. I’m saying requiring ID for access wasn’t effective before and it won’t be effective in a world with easier access. Yet the cost of that is quite high. Scan these threads for actual ideas, I’m not arguing for any particular one but there are plenty of them and some I think are good.

At 16 it was easier, but at 8 it wasn’t hard.

Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography were all illegal for me to access as a kid but I wouldn’t have had any trouble getting any of it.

One of the first uses I discovered was to have it identify my own blandness. I'll give it a general scenario from my writing and ask it for ten resolutions to that scenario. If my own resolution appears, I realize at best my resolution is bland and at worst cliche.

In most cases there can’t be movement in this direction and to the degree there can be, it isn’t enough.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to read (for example) AI fiction because I know there’s no actual mind behind it (to the extent that I can ever know this).

But AI is going to get better and the only thing that’s going to even work going forward is to trust publishers and authors who give high value regardless of how integral LLMs are to the process.

However, if I had an idea and just fobbed the idea off to an LLM who fleshed it out and posted it to my blog, would you want to read the result? Do you want to argue against that idea if I never even put any thought into it and maybe don’t even care?

I’m like you in this regard. If I used an LLM to write something I still “own” the publishing of that thing. However, not everyone is like this.