*parent post edited and elaborated while I was writing my reply
Can you elaborate? I do have children, and I don't view it as any platforms job to police their Internet usage. I appreciate parental controls, but if they have Internet access it's my job to teach them to use services safely and keep an eye on their activities
As I start to work with more genz folks, it is extremely pervasive that gym culture and health consciousness are much more core to their common zeitgeist than millennials. I imagine the same conditions core to their childhood and adolescence is also driving change in their parents and the rest of society.
Growing up natively with social media seems like a very reasonable correlation for me. Your life and habits are always under a lens, self consciousness or conscientiousness make sense.
Even if this is true, surely this wouldn't show up in the statistics until decades later? Going to the gym has little effect of whether you make it to 40 or 50, but it might make a difference between 80 and 90, but if all the gym going population are in their 20s today, that's not going to cause the statistics to shift.
This is absolutely true on both counts. For as much as social media is decried for negative effects on mental health and IRL socialization, healthy lifestyle & fitness inspos are absolutely having an impact. The nice thing about this is that it translates in obvious ways to IRL lifestyle mods, which when they show positive effects (better sleep, better skin, improved fitness, etc) become self-reinforcing habits. Among other things, alcohol consumption is way lower in young people than older generations, and although other recreational drug use is still "a thing", overall knowledge about the effects & impacts of recreational drugs is far more pervasive than in the past (as a young Gen-Xer myself, the prevailing mentality in the late80s-early90s was "drugs make fun times more fun" and that was about it).
I expect lots of formal study of these phenomena in coming years. As a parent of kids 7, 13, and 16 who spends a fair bit of time around school campuses & youth sports teams, for all the whining and complaining adults do about young people, my experience is that today's youth are by far the most empathetic, compassionate and best adjusted yet. They're going to be ok (provided we can afford to educate them and then hire them into the working world).
Genuine question: in your experience, does this increased focus on image create proportionate negativity in the form of e.g. increased peer comparison, superlatives (i.e. "I am/am not better/smarter/better looking than my peers") than your generation?
Gen Z also views alcohol very differently, apparently. Without looking at collected data it's hard to say which generation is leading this charge (I suspect Gen Z and Gen Alpha), but I feel like an *alcohol* sober lifestyle is much more common these days.
I'm not on TikTok and generally try to avoid a lot of social media, so the uptick in gym rat lifestyle is not something I've been aware of. Certainly a good thing though and it's nice to see a whole generation not submitting themselves to permanently being on weightloss hormones or chronically obese. I'm in my mid-30s and folks in my social circle are either fit with quality fitness interlaced into their weeks or above average in weight. There's rarely an outlier from those two groups.
The fitness phenomenon is interesting to watch. My neighbor's older high school age children will be looking for something to do and they go to the gym.
When I was in high school ... nobody went to the gym. There weren't many gyms around, now there are a lot.
I do worry though that it might be cost prohibitive or even just limited to some social groups.
> I do worry though that it might be cost prohibitive
Modern gyms can be surprisingly cheap.
Gone are the days of the 1980s when the only option was $$$ for a 'health club' with squash courts and swimming pools, stuck in a year-long contract whether you went or not.
There has been a rise in 'low cost gyms' which are less of a glamorous club, and more of a warehouse with a load of free weights, treadmills and stationary bikes. Often there's barely an employee in sight. In a lot of places $25/month can get you 24-hour access - with no joining fees, and you can cancel whenever you like.
Of course it's still not as cheap as sports like running. But just because someone goes to the gym, doesn't mean they're paying $250/month.
This is so true. I noticed only last year how many young kids go to my gym. They aren't skimping on it either. They do all the core exercises, they don't skip leg day, they help each other push more on the bench, etc. I think it'll build a certain form of discipline and character: there are certain things in life which don't have shortcuts. A gym is a great equalizer in many aspects, because you need little to no money for a good gym with good equipment. The most important equipment is a bunch of free weights, and rich or poor, results will need more or less the same amount of work. It's a place which welcomes everyone, and where hard and consistent work is rewarded.
Lifting has definitely played a changing role in my life. As a kid it definitely did instill the idea of working for results. It was extremely rewarding to see that when I worked out consistently and with a plan, I was stronger than my friends who went inconsistently or with poorly planned workouts. As an adult now it's more therapeutic - so much of my day is ambiguous, out of my control, or searching for how to apply my leverage instead of actually just applying my leverage. So it's very nice to have an hour of my day where I decide what I am working towards, and be able to hit clear goals largely by putting in blind effort.
On the other hand, a lot of people played pickup basketball, went running, got exercise in countless other ways, etc. Even if gyms are more popular, I would need to be convinced that those (and fitness trackers, etc.) actually correlate to better fitness and health levels overall.
High schools have gyms. Hell even my high school had a pretty decent weight room. Also don't forget that parents bought a ton of at-home exercise equipment during Covid, so the teenagers probably tried it out too.
I tried to reply to another comment that was since deleted. It said something along the lines of:
>I don't get why Tesla would kill their battery-swapping while they are tackling other Hard Problems.
The practicality of battery swapping decreases exponentially as size and weight scale. The cost of building a battery swapping network for western-car-sized battery systems, even once solving the engineering elements (which are manageable), are likely a non-starter. Especially if the other principle technology rival is fast-charging stations.
How much added convenience is required to justify huge mechanical systems with many wear components and large maintenance costs over replacing a few charging cables every X months? Lots.
I suspect that battery hot-swapping will be practical for electric trucks. Charging them is really slow unless you use a dozen of cables. Parked time costs real money for them. Normal trucks unload, reload, and go back to the highway pretty soon, often with a different driver at the wheel.
Truck yards usually already have equipment for heavy lifting, and the batteries need not be tailored to the car aesthetics and space constraints. Also, a narrower industry has a better chance to come up with a common standard.
Tom Scott did a video[1] on this that tackles the problem of electric trucks in a different way. Instead of charging somewhere or swapping out a battery, what if we charged them while they were in a specific lane of a highway.
I'm wondering how well that will scale if all/most of the trucks become electric. I would think the friction would create issues from both heat and mechanical wear.
I think the trick is not to swap the whole battery
Instead design in a space for a secondary battery, maybe 40% the capacity of the main battery. Make those standard and swap-able.
Now, you can use the car as ordinary in either the one-battery or two-battery mode, with the 1B config being more nimble handling with less range, and the 2B config more range. In any case, you can then enjoy rapid-swap of the standard 2nd battery, or maybe just rent one for a long trip.
This also helps the automakers keep their proprietary designs on the main battery for differentiation. The 2nd battery could go in the extra trunk space or something...
But if you are talking about faster partial-capacity refills during road trip stops, we already have that.
Current batteries charge way faster from 0-50% than 50-100%. The curve really starts to fall off above 80%.
I usually try to plan my stops so that I’m arriving with 5-10% and charging to 60-65%. With 250kW chargers that results in a ~15min charging stop.
I don’t think the costs of development, impact to vehicle design, and infrastructure would make sense for swaps just to replace what is already a 15min charge.
True, the differential will reduce as we get even higher-amperage chargers and batteries w/higher C ratings.
Yet still, being able to get 40% in 3 minutes is still better. I'd also see little reason that a properly configured trunk couldn't hold a pair of 40% battery units. Kind of like carrying jerry-cans on the back of a rover, except you can just plug them in...
I suspect that Tesla battery swaps were never a serious endeavor meant to be rolled out, and were instead by design limited to one location merely to be used as a massively profitable tax credit scheme: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/12/30/te...
Doing battery swaps on such vehicles would be incredibly difficult (least of all from an engineering perspective), and my suspicion that it was more subsidy scam than genuine attempt is based on other factors.
That doesn't mean its worth it. There is always a tradeoff and I would rather live in a world where I know I am free from surveillance than a world where I am .000001% safer or criminals are caught 10% faster.
It's not just safety vs. privacy, it's safety vs. safety: pervasive surveillance can and does make us less safe due to the potential for a future, less benevolent, government to abuse it to oppress politically unpopular groups.
Do you have any proof to backup your empty claim? It may discourage pocket picker at your local market.. when it comes to blowing up King Cross I bet you more survelieance the more incouraging to terror. These folls live for five minute survelliance video of one of their own walking down with backpack across few CCTV cameras on all national News Stations, so yeah I bet you its a one big fat encouragement to them to harm more.
> pervasive surveillance can and does make us less safe due to the potential for a future, less benevolent, government to abuse it to oppress politically unpopular groups.
Do you disagree that pervasive surveillance would make it easier for an oppressive government to collect data on their opponents and imprison or harass them? The East German Stasi didn’t have the advantage of universal surveillance and they did a great job of suppressing political opposition. Do you think their job would have been easier or harder with pervasive logging of all conversations conducted electronically or in public or private spaces?
In the grandparent comment’s specific example police stalked and killed a completely innocent man because they thought he looked like one of the bombers from their CCTV tapes
Just the presence of surveillance alone discourages criminals from acting in the first place. Without any surveillance, I don't think criminal activity will increase by just .000001%.
In the case of (PUBLIC) meatspace, physical surveillance (e.g., cameras), I'm onboard with the Big Brother panopticon state. Bad, meaningful stuff happens in meatspace, like explosions.
When it comes to cyberspace, digital surveillance, I fled Windows for Linux and read /r/StallmanWasRight. Bad stuff happens in cyberspace, but none of it is meaningful enough to me to warrant the limitations to privacy that we endure IRL.
Does anyone else have this arbitrary configuration of opinions?
Well. Strangely I happen to be one of the folks in that .000001%, so I apologize if my opinions have been shaped differently.
I lost one of my ex-school mates in an market-place explosion (2005 Delhi bombing). While the London Bombing suspects were identified, all suspects in the Delhi bombing that same year were released due to "lack of evidence".
I am completely in favor of surveillance of public property.
> While the London Bombing suspects were identified
They were identified. After they’d blown themselves up on trains and a bus. The one person ‘identified’ as it was happening was in fact mistakenly identified and killed by the police.
Surveillance only helps in situations like this where the authorities have intelligence upfront. Even then you can argue that regular on-foot surveillance is a more proportionate approach over serveilling the entire nation ‘just in case’.
I was in London when the bombs went off (I worked on Russel Square along from the bus bomb - I would walk past the site, every day, to and from work; and have a friend who was on the train going from Liverpool St that was blown up). And, I remember being nearby (and hearing) the IRA bomb in Bishopsgate. I still believe very strongly that governments should not have carte blanche rights to spy on all citizens. Privacy is more valuable
But if we make a world safe from these .000001% events, what do you think that will look like? I can only imagine a dystopian/ Orwellian society where we are all encouraged to report any suspicious behavior and everything becomes a race to the bottom, a Prisoner's Dilemma where I feel pressured to rat out my neighbor for _something_ before he does it to me.
Who's asking everyone to report suspicious behaviour ? You have raised a _strawman_ argument. Automatic surveillance of public property and public spaces is in my opinion necessary for analysis, investigation and prosecution of terrorists. This must be done by career intelligence folks not by amateurs.
Pervasive surveillance will inevitably lead to machine learning techniques being used to analyse the data which will massively increase the rates of false positives, people who aren’t a threat but who the system flags as potential threats. Freedom and security trade off against one another.
Citation needed. You are making a strong statement about the inevitable future based on what? Sounds like evidence as strong as your claim would be worth some very interesting papers.
Have you been paying attention to anything regarding government surveillance in the past decade? NSA? Five Eyes? Governments are thirsty for any new tech that allows them to amass data fast about public behavior. There's startups that exist right now that use ML techniques to analyze security footage for bad actors. There was a Japanese one on the HN front page a couple days ago. This isn't a slippery slope argument, this shit is happening right now.
The question is where do you draw the line for removing privacy to enable law enforcement? Would you consider a system that monitors every individual at all times because it would almost guarantee that any criminal is identified?
This is a terrifying step for the internet. These kinds of step lay the groundwork for censorship but fail to consider the impact of these changes in the event that the bad guys come into power or gain influence of these management systems.
It's less "terrifying" than the current alternative, where people can openly support various forms of extreme violence, get away with it, and monetize on the way.
Mind you this "internet" is private biz. This is a pretty obvious "don't vomit on my rug" case. Don't like it? Find another party.
I really don't care if people "support" various forms of extreme violence by watching youtube movies. That is WAY better than supporting it by committing various forms of extreme violence.
Is there any actual evidence that these youtube videos are in fact driving people to commit acts of terrorism?
In hope they'll make people become terrorists. That is not the same as observing those videos actually do it.
Also, some of them are probably posted just so that the Western media can find them and scare the population shitless with them, pumping the huge autoimmune response we have wrt. terrorism here.
People are quick to condemn certain states for their censorship, but give a pass for Google easily. Don't get me wrong, in this particular case there are very few who would argue with Google, but not long ago there were discussions about search results bias during the election campaigns for example.
Indeed, if Google thinks they are capable of shaping the narrative, what is stopping them from redirecting people e.g. to Coalition for Better Ads when searching for a content blocker? It is not hard to imaging scenarios when Google and the individuals' incentives are not aligned and that slope is slippery.
We already have the groundwork. Obscene images are illegal, and morally I've yet to see a justification for why (justification for some cases, but most cases I've yet to see a good justification that is consistently applied in other area). Government should just declare any extremist material as obscene and ban it under the existing framework.
It probably costs like $20 and a WordPress plugin to set up a video hosting/social network site.
If that's impossible to achieve maybe there is some analogue of Darwin's law about whether your content deserves audience.
But the real thing isn't the platform. These groups are after the audience. And that I see Google as having having no moral responsibility to provide.
They aren't locked out of the internet at all or prohibited from creating/distributing content (with which I would take objection). They just can't use a private companies distribution channel at the same level as other users to get eyeballs. Cry me a river. It's not the end of the internet.
While your statement is quite vague it is no less completely inaccurate. "Supporting violence" is subjective and ambiguous. Are action movies and video games supportive of violence? How about war documentaries?
Furthermore, while "hate" speech is not the best use of our ability to communicate it does fall under the protection of free speech - at least in the United States. In some groups hate speech (however it is you describe it) is acceptable.
Just as you are free to not associate with those groups the internet should be free to express the ideas you disagree with.
You don't have the freedom to interfere or disrupt the freedoms of others.
It absolutely is acceptable. There's a lot of hate being stirred towards ISIS, and violence is supported quite openly in the media, and also used in the real world.
The west has enemies and stirs up hate and uses violence to target them, adding to the mayhem in the middle east, killing 10s of thousands of people every year.
Violence is very acceptable for the western democracies. You have to be willfully ignorant not to see this, after the last two years and 70000 people killed by the coalition during that time.
You're confusing is with ought. Violence is only acceptable in very reasoned, measured manners, and only to achieve clear and decisive goals. Hate is not acceptable anywhere. Outrage, maybe.
edit: Anyway. There's a lot of hate towards real or believed enemies of the west. It's easily visible online in news websites' comment sections, on social media, etc. It is somewhat rare to see people standing up against it. Even on platforms, where you need to provide gov. ID to be able to discuss, and your name is visible to others, people feel perfectly fine to spew hate against muslims, ISIS, or whatever in very non-measured ways.
My point with the previous comment is, that it is important to realize the western hate and violence too and not to brush it away, because it's very significant in its effect on peoples lives.
I'm not from the US, so it might be different in different countries.
Snail mail letters are the oldest somewhat comparable format. Privacy of your envelope of hate speech is secured by law in most western nations.
However we have recently seen that principle degrade with all kinds of exceptions. It's weird given how little potential islamist terrorism has in the west compared to what communism, republicanism or protestantism had in the past.
The basic state of human nature seems to be struggle. I suspect the engineers at Google understand quite deeply how serious this is. But I am afraid we are approaching a state of war.
As with all weapons, there is no doubt a risk that enemies will get the weapons. Open source will in fact make it easier. Network control will be more important.
And there are many, many fronts. Trump. ISIL. Any number of dictators (the Chinese Communist Party, Putin's oligarchy). And only a few bright lights of democracy.
A bit confused why you are trying to roll your own storage solution. Ceph is great for a lot of applications, but I am not sure it really fits the bill for what you describe. Especially when you indicate you are going to use spinning disk behind it. Have you looked at any of the storage arrays on the market? Your TCO is likely to be much lower and your performance/resiliency much higher if you buy something with $100's of millions of R&D behind it rather than all the hours and costs of rolling your own. Not saying its impossible to make it work, but it just sounds like something that will be a PITA going forward.
I think a storage appliance (NetApp, etc.) makes a lot of sense in the short term. The TCO is lower since we'll spend a lot of time making Ceph work.
In the longer term the storage appliance will lock us in and will get very expensive. I've heard pretty bad stories of companies betting on it. Especially with many small files like us (IOPS heavy).
And one goal of GitLab.com is to gain experience that we can reuse at our customers. Most of our customers use a storage appliance now but are interested in switching to something open source.
This is interesting to me. The lack of diversity in the tech industry is definitely something that will be harmful in the long run. Diversity is necessary to improve the relevance of new ideas in tech and to promote them to broader audiences from different cultures.
The trend towards making a pariah out of anyone with opposing points of view can be equally harmful to promoting diversity of thought. Making people afraid of speaking their minds can hardly help the flow of new ideas or positively impact the industry. While I likely don't agree with the political ideology of a speaker at the RNC, I definitely agree with the right of anyone to do so without being held captive by the threat of activism at home. Boycotting and protesting people with different political views may feel good in the short run, but it is unhelpful to promoting freedom and equality in the long run.
If they can't say what I find reprehensible today, how do I know that views I hold dear will be "allowed" in the future?
The lack of diversity in the tech industry is definitely something that will be harmful in the long run.
My intuition is that the harm has already been done, but we will only fully understand it 10 years hence.
Making people afraid of speaking their minds can hardly help the flow of new ideas or positively impact the industry.
There seem to be a lot of people online who have been indoctrinated to believe that pressuring/intimidating/shaming people into compliance is a useful means of changing people's minds. History tells us that it never works that way. You change people's minds through friendly interaction, by living and working with them.
Wait. What does the relevance of a new idea have to do with the ethnic composition of the people with the idea? Isn't that a racist statement? Fascinating.
My favorite part about the liberal mind are its obvious contradictions and, thus, the unintended consequences of its thought process.
But don't you think people need to be held accountable? You can't just let Trump supporters off-the-hook because it's just their opinion! Many of us would never belittle someone voting for Mccain or Romney who are accomplished and respectable, even if they may hold differing political views. Trump is a totally vacuous, exceedingly risky candidate. People should feel embarrassed voting and supporting him.
How is this "Speaking for others"? OP provided their perspective in comments. You having a different perspective is valid and is not threatened by the point of view of OP.
That's speaking for the child. Speaking for someone else's feelings besides your own is speaking for others. And, it's not a perspective either, it's an opinion how someone else would feel in the situation, which is NOT a different perspective you can hold, given you aren't the other person.
Can you elaborate? I do have children, and I don't view it as any platforms job to police their Internet usage. I appreciate parental controls, but if they have Internet access it's my job to teach them to use services safely and keep an eye on their activities