baconmania

There is zero evidence that any aspect of current regulatory effort is aimed at protecting “mentally fragile users”. We’re in a golden age of regulatory capture in favor of capital owners, especially AI companies. Why not just take the win?

Folks who keep mentioning that this is no different than any previous upward leap of abstraction in human history are missing a key point that the frontier labs are certainly not missing: this is the first time in computing that you are becoming completely dependent on a _subscription service_. I don't need to know how my CPU works because it continues to work once built. Once I outsource all cognition to a billable service, I am forever and continuously in thrall to someone else's revenue strategy.

Sorry to disappoint bud, I'm a manager of managers. Being able to look critically at your own tribe is one of the first skills you learn if you want to survive as someone telling other people how to do their jobs.

>choose what tools I use to learn about my condition regardless of how well it works or even if it’s likely to mislead me.

Even if it "works" so poorly that you're not actually learning about your condition?

The implication that tokenmaxxing was an intentional and thoughtfully considered approach rather than blind hype-following by an overpaid manager class who are too far removed from value to understand the downsides of LLMs is hysterical beyond belief.

Outsourcing a specific task to a deterministic tool you own is clearly not the same thing as outsourcing all of your cognition to a probabilistic tool owned by people with ongoing political and revenue motives that don’t align with your own.

You’ve offered no evidence of “DEI in maths” or any of your other confidently unsubstantiated arguments. You’re just parroting talking points. Unserious takes deserve unserious responses.

This is an enormously disingenuous take. When Usenet was the only game in town, children were not stumbling into hyperoptimized addictive experiences tailored to every flick of their eyes. You don’t think that thousands of engineers building TikTok or Instagram to hijack your child’s literal capacity for attention and healthy social development “externalizes your locus of control”?

Reducing the algorithmic targeting of children (by taking away phones or otherwise) is no more censorship than telling someone to stop standing in front of you and shouting in your face.

It’s not super clear what you’re getting at here. The choice isn’t teflon or oil. Everyone uses fat to sear food in a pan, whether or not it’s a nonstick pan. Cooking with a high-smoke-point oil which is low in saturated fat, such as avocado oil, with stainless steel, is strictly better than cooking with teflon pans by every measurable health metric.

Most consumer PTFE coatings are declared to be safe up to 450°F. It is trivially easy to heat a pan beyond that temperature on modern gas, electric, and induction ranges in less than ten minutes. The margin of safety is demonstrably nonexistent and it’s wild to me that we just accept this risk constantly, everywhere, anytime we eat food (whether at home or from a restaurant).

Assuming you're serious, I'm curious why you think Reddit's CEO shouldn't be chastised under that same category. Selling ads next to user-generated content, rent seeking with demands of extortionate API fees to serve that content, relying on unpaid volunteers to operate the site, proudly shipping terrible first-party UX, all while providing zero additional value sure doesn’t sound like a sustainable business. But maybe it’s the `hard hitting memo` obstinacy of a CEO that seems the biggest feature here?

Is this actually a reinvention of the browser, or just another self-interested organization trying to grab a slice of the pie?

I download Arc and am immediately greeted with a mandatory account creation page (which asks for my name, even) with a footnote that says `tl;dr we don't spy on you`.

A web browser should be a purely clientside application; no logins required. Building a chromium riff that maintains serverside state about you as a user while saying "trust us :)" is in no way revolutionary, it's just another player in the nightmarish arena that is the modern web.

Given your comment history, it’s clear that you’re driven by motivations that aren’t at all universal.

More bluntly, you’ve decided that consumer-surveillance-as-a-service is harmless. I’m thankful that the European regulatory apparatus disagrees. Now if only we could remind the American federal government why regulation is a worthwhile effort.

Charitably, this is a goofy take. Less charitably, your reference to a "vocal urbanist activist crowd" suggests that you're leaning more on partisan talking points than evidence.

More to the point, here's where this argument breaks down:

> If a city is not overbuilt and overpopulated to the point where the road infrastructure is overwhelmed

Given current demographic trends within the United States, major cities are guaranteed to see population growth beyond what current American public infrastructure can sustain.

Compounding this problem is the fact that there's significant overlap between the segment of the population which thinks that driving is a sacred right and folks who think that spending public money on efficient public transit is unacceptable.

I enjoy driving. It doesn't work for major cities. And those same cities are inevitably going to get denser if trends continue. Everyone driving his or her own car to their job (or to "the things they want to do") in the name of personal convenience is not the answer.