If parents don't want their kids on social media, get them a dumb phone, or use the parental control features. Maybe some parents don't care, and that's their prerogative. None of this is about protecting children, it's about "protecting" adults from "bad ideas".
The problem is many parents will not do that. Do those children then deserve to be taken advantage of by social media corporations?
Generally, things that are harmful and addictive such as alcohol, cigarettes and casinos require age verification. We dont just put the onus on parents because a child with bad or absent parents still deserves to be shielded from alcoholism at 12 years old.
So are gambling and cigarettes. As a society we've decided a reasonable compromise is that you can get the freedom to harm yourself at a certain age where you're assumed to understand that you're harming yourself.
The WWW was at least created with egalitarian ideals, even if it failed to meet those ideals (despite succeeding far more than people want to credit.) It was available to everyone, it ostensibly allowed anyone to publish and communicate freely. It wasn't intended for only a single culture or subculture.
Whatever comes after will either be entirely controlled by corporate and government interests or gatekept against "normies," and thus be a homogeneous cultural bubble doomed to wither into self-referential senescence and die, and will be far less free, less powerful and less capable than the web. We'll never get anything with the transformative potential of the web again.
A world where your only options are GovNet or EliteWhiteHackerDudeSpace. I don't look forward to that at all.
I would rather go back to when the web was useful, and everything wasn't either paywalled or plastered with ads too. The web will never die, but this version of it is on borrowed time.
I don't think WWW will ever die but I can see a hard split coming eventually. Most people will just put up with the current state of the internet for a long time yet.
Neither does the normal web. It became this way. The ability to run decentralized is not what is preventing enshittification.
I would argue eg. a LoRa based Reticulum network is enshittification resistant, because of physical bandwidth and range limitations. It enforces decentralization and abuse/advertisement/... inherently doesn't scale, is not worth the effort. It favors authentic, low reach human2human information sharing.
Let's not pretend that fact is anything but a happy accident, though. The only reason AI has been practically scrubbed from their website is to try to make us forget the time they preannounced fantastically brilliant AI capabilities and then delivered less than nothing -- not even fixing Siri, which is the obvious #1 product in the world that needs to be rebuilt on LLMs.
Apple, maybe because of ego, is often not the major mover on anything they didn’t come up with first. They tend to take a wait and see approach with a lot of ideas. Hell look at VR (which I’m surprised they even did but clearly they see longterm value)
OK, but it's easy to retroactively declare the "late entry" into smartphones as a galaxy-brain move, to let all those suckers at BlackBerry, Microsoft, Handspring, Nokia, etc. beta-test all the ideas and formfactors, then swoop in as soon as they knew what they had developed would torch the whole market - we know the outcome, and that's frankly quite accurate.
But the difference here is, this iPhone was obviously already far along in development in 2005, when the BlackBerry 8700 was shipping.
In this case, due to their own announcement, we all know that Apple had intended to have LLM technology ready to ship in late 2024. We also know from the copious leaks that they eventually made massive, flailing pivots, and did major reactive internal reorgs to try to get back on track. They've had a lot of setbacks which push them later and later, and unlike in 2005 there is a great likelihood that their competitors can use the delay to significant advantage. (A chance. Of course, Google is the only other player in mobile and they seem sure to do mostly boneheaded things, like the subject of this article!)
But anyway, pretend we don't know any of that, pretend WWDC24 never even happened either. If the assertion is "Apple being at least 3 years late to the market for a major tech industry trend is in this case a sign that they are wisely taking notes from the sidelines, and will eventually pounce with a product that blows us all away, iPhone style" -- my reply is, from the outside and from this moment in time, isn't this also how it would look if they were repeatedly fumbling hard on the execution of this idea, with no clear path to shipping and no clear path to having a superior product to show for it?
> The problem with voting is that people are simply not engaged in politics anymore. I have never voted and never will.
Seems like you identified the problem. I'm definitely the type that thinks there is nothing salvageable from the current U.S. system that was dreamt up by a bunch of racists who thought owning other human beings was acceptable, but I also believe that voting is a form of harm reduction. The people who want to do harm vote, and they do it reliably.
Large chunks of the founders were opposed to slavery. John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Gouverneur Morris, Sam Adams and more.
That's cool that those people who were supposedly opposed to slavery were fine with creating a brand new nation which had, in its constitution, "You can't ban slavery for a few decades" and "Places with more slaves get more power" as primary concerns.
Completely unrelated of course to the growing popularity of abolitionism in Great Britain which banned the atlantic slave trade in 1807 and formally banned slavery in 1833, long before that brand new country which supposedly had so much influence from "anti slavery" folks eventually found cause to ban slavery decades later, and only made black people equal members of the country over a century later.
It was a compromise... After the war the choices were to unite or be taken back over by Britain. Being taken back over would mean everybody who died and suffered from the war would be in vain and slavery would continue on in the colonies just like before.
People like Morris tried to get rid of the 3/5 compromise and get rid of the protection of slavery. He was one of the most vocal against slavery. He called out the hypocrisy and wanted to slow the import of slaves by taxing the import. He and others like him tried their hardest, but were at least able to set things up to allow the eventual ban.
I don't get people like you who can never see that while things weren't perfect, moving in a better direction is good. You let perfect be the enemy of good.
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