tene

On its own it's not necessarily an issue, but I'd consider it a warning sign. The times in my life that I've obsessively played games like this have been times when my emotional health was suffering. I felt overwhelmed by life and the world, and games like this gave me a synthetic feeling of progress and accomplishment, gave me something extremely simple to do that I couldn't fail at. Games like this were a symptom of my problems at the time, not the cause, and when my life got more stable, I lost interest in playing them.

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: [email protected]

Hi. I've got 20 years experience as an SRE and SWE. I've worked at startups and at megacorps. I can troubleshoot and solve problems at any layer of any stack. I bring deep technical experience and a production reliability mindset.

You've got it exactly right, many people in the US care far more about compliance with and respect for authority than they do about rule of law.

The way it sounds from reading the article is X11's design fundamentally is that bad for modern hardware, which is why almost all of the active graphics development is focused on reimplementing a designed-for-modern-hardware replacement. The claim from the article is that X11 is basically unsupported abandonware, and is calling for developers to please help with the rest of the work in finishing the migration of use-cases to Wayland in order to help the whole ecosystem be able to abandon the sinking ship and move to a more-modern better-maintained future.

Lifetime analysis matters a lot for way more than just garbage collection.

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

What are some examples of sound programs you want to write in Rust but are unable to write?

> Daily life feels like that swim scene from Gattaca.

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

Hmm...

Policy Prediction Markets.

I understand that you're not personally advocating for this position, but I'm glad you brought it up, because I really resent this kind of "Here's an imaginable scenario where this would have some negative consequence" argument.

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.

I disagree.

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.