csnover

> they did not control for medication or supplements

The only way this would matter would be if phones were banned and then also those other interventions were withheld in order to perfectly counterbalance the expected effect of the phone ban. Do you have some evidence that Iceland suddenly decided to reduce these interventions between 2018 and 2023?

This point isn’t even mentioned in the limitations section of the study, so why are you making it? There are more significant potential limitations to this study that they did describe, including the fact that “we also lacked objective measures of in-school smartphone use and therefore could not determine whether bans reduced actual phone use”. (Though that doesn’t exactly matter either, since if the bans aren’t actually stopping phone use, then they are still ineffective, just in a different way.)

> Alternate interpretation: when it's dark for half the year your mental health isn't dominated by phone access.

This is a nonsensical interpretation that seems to me to betray a lack of understanding of statistics. The planet doesn’t experience any more or less sunlight in the winter between 2016 and 2023, so has no bearing on whether or not there would be a detectable effect from an intervention.

By “human” language, they mean “English” language. This is a study of English only, using these sources:

> The NRC VAD lexicon … English Fiction (1900 to 2019) from the Google Books project … Jane Austen’s six novels … The majority of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories … The New York Times (1987 to 2007) … Wikipedia (English language, March 2019 snapshot) … RadioTalk (transcriptions of talk radio broadcasts in the United States, October 2018 to March 2019); and Twitter (approximately 10% of all tweets identified as English in 2020).

(2003)

> The dev comes as self-serving

What, do you not include links to every single one of your social media accounts in every single post you make on GitHub? I think this is a very cool and normal thing, and not a concerning red flag about narcissistic tendencies at all.

Social programs to help towns experiencing economic depression would inject money, training, education, etc. which would create opportunity for new growth and development in areas with a low cost of living. When people are too busy just trying to survive, they are not going to be working on inventing the next big thing, and they certainly are not going to support tax dollars going toward investments for tomorrow.

> Is principle the only valid reason to want to do something? Why is it unacceptable that people be motivated to do things because they want the results?

No, not at all. I myself am not a “the means is the end” kind of person. If I just wanted to puzzle out solutions with nothing to show for it, I’d do the crossword. But, in my experience, caring only about results leads to myopic short-term solutions that create bigger long-term problems. For instance, if you’re in pain, I can “cure” that by shooting you in the head. A quick positive result for getting rid of the pain—but at what cost? For thinking work, AI seems to be shaping up to be a lot closer to a bullet than an analgesic.

All I was saying is that human motivation does not exist in a single dichotomy, and that ecosystems that develop around mutual effort create benefits beyond the mutual goal. You can’t get all those benefits without humans doing the work, but there’s no extrinsic motivation for humans to do the work, so very few will bother, and the ecosystem dies. (I hope it wasn’t ‘load-bearing’.)

Anyway, the benefit of reconstructed source code is not even about preservation, it is in enhancing the user experience beyond mere preservation. We’ve been preserving software using emulation alone just fine for quite some time. If you are actually worried about preservation, you might consider how much the Wayback Machine is getting blocked these days because of AI scrapers. Or how an AI agent might apologetically wipe out some irreplaceable archive. Or how nobody in the future will probably be able to care about preservation much as the one-two punch of climate change and AI descend on us. It’s always those damned long-term consequences from short-term thinking, you know?

Would you consider that you have perhaps both misstated the parent’s claim, misrepresented the study you are quoting, and failed to offer any counter-evidence in support of the parent’s actual claim?

The introduction from which you cherry-pick excludes a refutation of claims about media violence and aggression, not because they are valid[0] or causal, but because their analysis was focused on answering a different question. It is that different question which seems relevant to refuting the parent’s original claim.

If you can offer some actual evidence for the actual original claim, not this differently stated claim, I would certainly be interested in that.

[0] First, these claims apply only to non-interactive media, which a chatbot is not. Studies on video games more consistently show no or negative correlations. Second, they almost certainly are not real. The last study I cited explicitly mentions how these prior lab results do not seem to transfer to real life outcomes. And I cannot write a dissertation here about the flawed methodology of many of these aggression studies and the outright fraud of people who conducted some of them, like Fredric Wertham (whose fraud was not uncovered until 2012).

I know I am late to respond here, but I would say that I feel like this is the wrong framing. It’s like asking if someone plays football because they like to kick a ball or because they like trying to win the game. The answer is yes, and ….

When people work on projects like these, it is often a communal activity, for the love of a shared mutual interest. Friends are made, technical expertise is gained and shared, people learn from the code and from each other, and ultimately something fun is produced. We are a social species and it feels good to help other people, and to feel supported in our efforts by others. It gives us the feeling that we matter, what we’re spending our time on matters, that our interests are not merely selfish, that we are not alone in the dark.

In any ecosystem, different specialists fill different niches, and you can’t have a vibrant ecosystem without all of them. For projects like these, the place where the reverse engineers finish is where the mod tool developers take over; where the mod toolers finish is where the artists and game designers take over; where the artists finish, the fans and beta testers take over. Some fans might even try their hand at helping with one of the other parts, and learn how to become good at it, and now you’ve got a pretty good stew going.

LLMs poison the entire ocean, kill all the coral and destroy all the ecosystems. This is true in RE, but it is also true in OSS. If you try to do something human, the moment it becomes interesting to someone with tokens for the yes-sir machine, they will steal all that momentum for themselves. Contributing to and actually using the human version, then, becomes something one would only do out of principle. That’s a very shallow pool to try to survive in compared to an entire ocean.