Most people don't know how to use them and of those who do many choose not to use them, at least not casually. The em dash is a lost battle, it's one of the first red flags for AI writing online.

I'm hopeful it will. Just the other day I got an old webcam I own working on Windows 11 despite there being zero compatible drivers for it on any modern version of Windows.

I might be a developer, but I'm not one who knows how to develop drivers, so I gave Claude the spec sheets for several of the chips inside the camera, stated what my goal was, and after doing some debugging guided by the AI it just worked. So tada, an obsolete piece of hardware is now usable again.

Things like that are what have changed my mind on AI assisted development.

Never developped a driver, but doesn't that require running the OS in some special mode, or in a VM, requiring a ton of time waiting for the thing to reboot over and over again ?

The multi billion dollar company selling ads is of far less concern to me than the gossiping of people in my community

Gossip is a hugely important part of how a community constitutes itself. Without gossip, you don't even have a community. Of course, it can go in malicious and destructive directions as well

I think you're confusing "gossip" for "communication". You don't have to have gossip to have a community, but what you say is perfectly true if you replace it with "communication".

I think you have it the wrong way around. The gross product of humans talking about themselves and those around them and gossiping is huge. What else is Twitter really?

Respectfully, I am not. Communication is so broad as to be meaningless in this context. Can you have a community that communicates via smoke signals alone?

If people don't talk about one other then there is no community. It's a fundamental part of human culture, which has existed in every human society ever recorded, and almost certainly every human society every to exist.

The multi billion dollar company has a lot of influence over the people in your community and the things that they gossip about. It also has influence over an increasing number of areas in your life as well. "Targeted ads" are just what they tell us they're doing with our data, because nobody actually cares which ads they see. Ads aren't the only things they do with it though.

Over time it's become harder and harder to deny how bad some aspects of the internet are for people, especially for young people. Whether it's right or wrong it's not shocking that people are more willing than ever to entertain the idea of internet restrictions.

I'd dig deeper on the problem though. More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.

Yet we have laws around child endangerment. I'm a big supporter of parental sovereignty, but I also acknowledge that if society operates the way it does, I can't immediately think of a good reason why "mental health endangerment" (which social media for kids very much is) wouldn't be included in the broader scope of endangerment.

I don't have children so huge caveat there, but from what I have heard from those parents I'm close to our child endangerment laws are out of hand.

I had a family member find police knocking on their door because their child was playing unattended in the front lawn in the middle of the day in a nice neighborhood with very low crime. While I completely get that some people find that unsafe and wouldn't let their kids play outside unsupervised, it wasn't long ago that I was a kid riding my bike a mile or two down the road to go to a friend's house on the other end of our neighborhood.

Either we all now live in a crime riddled third world country (aging myself there, I guess its the global south now), or we may have overstepped in the name of keeping other people's children safe despite what their parents think is best.

With regards to social media, that should be something we are making loud and clear to parents so they can make the decision best for them. A close friend didn't let their kids have a cell phone or be on social media at all until 16 years old, parent can absolutely make similar choices if they think it matters.

I don't say it as a gotcha. I say it to make clear that its an assumption baked into these laws that (a) I'm not sure a strong majority of people agree with and (b) creates further precedent for more government control over our lives and our children.

Edit: why is it you know these decisions should be made but you can't do it yourself? Do you not trust yourself, like an alcoholic avoiding one drink because it turns into 12, or do you not think you're capable of making the right choice at all?

As required by law.

I generally try not to be outright dismissive of articles/blogposts, but I don't see a ton of value in reading about someone being against opening Pandora's Box after the box has been opened. It can never be shut and we are going to have to figure out how to live with the consequences of it.

I gave the article a chance regardless and it's nothing I've not read before.

Indoor smoking in restaurants used to be legal, we made it illegal. Slavery used to be legal, we made it illegal. Don’t say that it’s not possible to stop bad things that are already happening.

I built one of these recent after Princess Auto had an amazing deal on surplus meters like these. They were under just over 1$ each and I bought a lot of them.

The one I built isn't as nice, but it's a really nice way to display the time and people are mildly fascinated by it when they see it.

>This level of conversion isn't exactly trivial but it also isn't rocket surgery for the kind of person who pulls an engine out for rebuild on a classic car project.

If you saw the "quality" of electrical work otherwise very smart car enthusiasts do you might think otherwise.

And most of the "bad going on" is completely out of your control. People could do with consuming a lot less national/international news.

Telus is completely out of touch. The issue hasn't been the accents of most agents, at least not for years at this point, it's the horrendous quality microphones the agents are given and the noisy conditions they're forced to work in.

It's hard to decipher anyone when you can hear 30 other people in the background and the audio is choppy.

Not Telus, but I was getting an insurance quote last week and actually gave up after five minutes and told the agent they were just too difficult to understand with their poor microphone and background noise.