If they're playing in moderation, just to pass the time during otherwise-boring events, probably not an issue. If they're pretty much always playing, or if it's intruding on their life, or if they're not otherwise engaging with the world, consider worrying about their emotional health.

  Location: Sunnyvale, CA (San Francisco, Bay Area)
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Rust, Python, Go, Kubernetes, Docker, Puppet, Linux, Networking, SRE
  Résumé/CV: https://github.com/tene/tene-resume/blob/master/sweeks-resume-2024.pdf / https://www.linkedin.com/in/srweeks/
  Email: tene@allalone.org

File handles, iterators, mutex guards, database transaction handles, session types, scoped threads, anything where ordering or mutual exclusivity matters.

> I've not got enough of a problem to go get diagnosed or medicated.

Hmm...

Yes, if the regulators stop doing their job well, and there's a sudden extreme emergency requiring some kind of action that regulators have not already approved for use in emergencies, then there will be some costs, and sometimes those costs can be measured in lives.

This is true, but all it says is "there is some nonzero chance of society paying some nonzero cost". These costs are what we are paying in order to have a well-regulated intelligence service. The bet is that the expected risk from an effectively-unregulated intelligence service has worse costs for society than one with effective regulation.

In order for "think about the children" to be a meaningful argument, you need to actually establish that the nightmare scenario is meaningfully more likely than overreach and abuse of power that causes similar or worse costs for society.

Has this kind of "We could save the children if only we could get regulator approval to tap this phone line! Unfortunately, the regulator is taking a nap, so we're forced to let the children die." scenario actually been happening? If so, is there any kind of much-more-specific permissions that could be granted by the regulators to address the actual emergencies that have been coming up?

I kind of get "You can't trade off a life!" for some kinds of arguments, but we're talking about national security issues, and failures of corruption and overreach also involve risking lives.

"We need to just drop all safeguards and trust our valiant heroes" only works if the people who are subject to regulations actually are pretty reliably valiant heroes, or there are other significant incentive and oversight mechanisms to rely on. I don't have personal experience with people who work in national intelligence and security, but I haven't ever heard anyone willing to say that people in this line of work are consistently virtuous and corruption-resistant. There are good individuals, certainly, but there really are also both selfish individuals, and well-intentioned-but-misinformed individuals who can do a lot of damage.

While I agree that I haven't seen specific criticisms of Khan Academy being dangerous, I absolutely have seen both pervasive media messaging as well as real people in my personal life express and stand behind unconditional unqualified statements like "Screens are bad for kids; one way I keep my kids safe is absolutely minimizing all exposure to screens. Screens are bad and harmful for children."

This really is a meaningfully different message from "I'm concerned about social media use specifically. I try to limit the amount of passive content consumption my child is exposed to, and I try to shift the passive content to forms that are less of a superstimulus and more intentional, like novels."

I agree with you that the addictive nature of social media and other infinity pools of content and engagement represent a lot of the real danger of screen time, but I disagree that this article is arguing against a straw man.

If you're lucky enough to never encounter these ideas, congratulations on cultivating an excellent social environment! The rest of the world hasn't all made it there yet.

Check out this archived post from when they took down their photo sharing site: https://web.archive.org/web/20180327235711/https://lytro.wuf...

If they actually wanted to build a popular product with significant longevity, they could have done FAR more to enable people to build on their file format etc.

This "they didn't want to pursue full vendor lock-in at every step of their company; they had no choice" apologism just doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.

More likely, they made a bid to capture a greater share of the value, at the cost of limiting the size of their market, and it predictably failed. Or maybe they were prioritizing some kind of acquisition, over building a company with real longevity.

I don't really know anything about the company besides a short skim through Google, but it just doesn't seem remotely plausible to me that they really truly wanted to make this accessible to more people and cultivate a larger market and ecosystem, but somehow had literally no choice in pursuing their vendor lock-in strategy.

They chose to bet on control over mindshare, and this had predictable consequences.

Given that huge populations are consuming sugar water daily, and given the health consequences of this, information on which type of sugar water has the least-bad long-term effects is extremely valuable for harm-reduction efforts.

If "everyone should just stop drinking soda" was actually a strategy that worked, then the problem would have already been solved. It didn't work, or hasn't worked yet, so it's worth trying to check whether the variations advertised as less-harmful are actually less-harmful or not.

What are some examples of important work with decent pay in an inexpensive area that a SV tech worker could be good at?

I agree that Rust is a professional tool, designed for professional use. It's designed for professional use, instead of being optimized for inexperienced beginners like Python is.

I just don't really see "inexperienced beginners can easily contribute productively to this code base" as something that would have been valuable for any of the professional work I've done over the past couple of decades of my career.

If you're an amateur, or if you're programming recreationally, or if you're writing some low-reliability low-impact throwaway code, sure, it's great to use happy-path-oriented languages. When you want to write something that people actually rely on to run a business, you should use professional-grade tools instead.