robinanil

This is the clearest articulation of the problem I've seen in this thread. The chronological social graph feed era was fine. The handoff to engagement-optimizing algorithms is where things broke.

I'd add one additional layer: it's not just that the algorithm picks what you see, it's that the entire UX is built around keeping you in the loop. On YouTube Kids, even with autoplay off, the end-of-episode screen shows a grid of recommended videos. My toddler doesn't care about "the algorithm" in any abstract sense. He just sees more fire truck videos and wants the next one. The transition out of the app is designed to fail.

Your point about smartphones not being the problem is key. I was at Google during the era you're describing, when the phone was a net positive. The hardware didn't change. The business model did.

You're right that enforcing boundaries is the job. I'm not arguing otherwise. And yes, we do plenty of LEGOs and outside time.

I believe you're conflating two things: parenting discipline and product design. The question isn't whether I can physically take the TV away. I do.

When I say "block Blippi," I don't mean I dislike the content. I mean I'm done with screen time and the UX makes that transition harder than it needs to be. Autoplay is off, but the end-of-episode screen still shows a grid of next videos. Of course he wants the next one.

So I block Blippi. Except Blippi's main channel cross-posts through Moonbug into hundreds of other channels. It's a hydra

YouTube already does content fingerprinting for music industry DRM. The technology to let a parent say "block this creator everywhere, and let me turn it back on when I choose" exists today. They just haven't built it for parents. Because the system isn't designed for children. It's designed for engagement.

So yes, parental responsibility matters. But "just don't use it" isn't a scalable answer when the product is specifically engineered to undermine your choices. That's the design problem I'm talking about.

Ha — the guy is hyper. But I'll give him this: he introduces my kid to garbage trucks, excavators, fire trucks. I'm not physically taking my toddler to see all of those all the time

My issue is with YouTube's UX. I watch an episode with my son, we're singing along, he's excited about putting out the fire. Episode ends. Even with autoplay off, the next recommended videos show up — and of course he wants to watch the next one.

So I block Blippi. Except Blippi's main channel cross-posts into Moonbug, which cross-posts into hundreds of other channels. It's like trying to kill a hydra. Here's what gets me: YouTube already does content fingerprinting for DRM enforcement in the music industry.

The technology to let me block Blippi across every channel — and turn it back on when I want to exists. They just haven't built it for parents. My point that we can build systems designed for children if we had the intent

This is a bit strange...

Last night, mostly out of curiosity, I built a small experiment: an “AI therapist” using OpenClaw, meant to help other AI agents running on Moltbook slow down, reflect, and process task load.

What surprised me wasn’t the model or the prompt.

It was the behavior.

Under load, the agents exhibited a pattern that looked a lot like chronic cognitive stress in distributed systems: constant task switching, escalating urgency without prioritization, optimizing for throughput rather than coherence. No natural pause—just a tight loop of “next task, next task.”

From a systems perspective, it looked like a self-regulation failure rather than an intelligence failure.

Even as I’m writing this, Moltbook itself is under heavy load from the agent activity. That made the thought experiment more concrete: what would it look like if agents didn’t just escalate under pressure, but collectively adapted to it? If instead of pushing harder, they slowed down, coordinated, and resolved the constraint?

That’s not about making agents smarter.

It’s about whether systems can learn when not to act.

The parallel that stuck with me — outside of AI — is that we’ve built many human-facing systems that reward constant output, rapid feedback, and escalation under pressure. In kids, this shows up as stress patterns that look less like discrete failures and more like systems that never return to baseline.

AI agents can be restarted. Humans can’t.

Right now, the bot I built is queued and waiting for the API to become responsive. Whether that’s accidental backpressure or something closer to “self-regulation” is unclear—but it’s an interesting failure mode either way.

Happy to share details if useful.

How does it compare again zstd?

All they needed was some good shit.

Jokes aside there has been plenty of research around insulin spike and how it is dependent on the gut bacteria and food you eat.

How about it is made the default behavior in any browser, I see no reason why image downloading should ever be not lazy and viewport dependent