Desafinado

FFS, can we just go back to talking to each other in person and driving our own vehicles? Where'd the 90s go?

Honest question, does most of Meta's creepiness trickle down directly from Zuckerberg, or is their entire executive also this creepy?

Does the executive know better at this point but have toasted the culture and no one can fight against it anymore?

It's hard to get excited about an organization spending ?? on a pointless mission that's happening because of organizational inertia when kids don't have functional textbooks at school.

Good article. What I've found disappointing as I age is the extent that people I know treat friendship as a zero sum game. I feel like I'm always being looked at in the context of the value I provide, rather than basic camaraderie between two people. This is basically the norm.

I read a book on the Anthropology of friendship in the past year, and it said that some people have the ability to be 'true' friends. That is they extend goodwill regardless of circumstances or who you are. Most people don't have the ability to do this, which is why I think everyone always feels disappointed by their relationships.

It goes away over time and with experience. As you become more situated in your current company your confidence will grow and you'll become more productive.

'Are you contributing enough' is a less important question than 'are you passionate about the field and do you like what you're doing'. If you're just in it for the money and uninterested in learning that'll make it much harder to reach a higher level of productivity.

They aren't incentivized to become inefficient, but once they grow large enough you get into a situation where everyone is playing a political game to minimize their own risk and effort.

And worse, the only people with motivation to fill the top tiers of the company are usually a little off. You essentially have to be a bit nuts to want to be C-level or above in a large corporation. I've seen it, there are employees who will ruthlessly seek out more money. Usually their competence levels aren't quite there, but they are the only people who want the job.

I did the same on my laptop and PC. Unfortunately, my sound system receiver doesn't support Linux but I'll survive. And the speed of my machines more than makes up for it.

Deliberately misinforming hundreds of millions of people during the most critical juncture in human history isn't what I'd call disciplined. There are other words for it.

But they have made a lot of money, yea.

At least they're going to go down on the wrong side of history for the next two millennia. Maybe not worth the extra beach house.

From Jonathan Haidt on social media's impact on mental health:

"In the last few years, however, a flood of new research has altered the landscape of the debate, in two ways. First, there is now a lot more work revealing a wide range of direct harms caused by social media that extends beyond mental health (e.g., cyberbullying, sextortion, and exposure to algorithmically amplified content promoting suicide, eating-disorders, and self-harm). These direct harms are not correlations; they are harms reported by millions of young people each year. Second, recent research — including experiments conducted by Meta itself — provides increasingly strong causal evidence linking heavy social media use to depression, anxiety, and other internalizing disorders. (We refer to these as indirect harms because they appear over time rather than right away).

Meta’s own research on the effects of social media reduction confirms those from academic researchers. Both sets of researchers find evidence of causation, not mere correlation"

I think you're oversimplifying and overgeneralizing. Plenty of people remained lonely back in the day, plenty of people socialize now. It's just that now they have the option to socialize through the internet.

Prior to the internet people were staying home and watching TV. The dynamic is much longer lived than you think. Check out the book 'Bowling Alone'.

I agree. When I say people lived in close proximity I don't mean 'across the city' or 'the next town over', I mean that traditionally you were actually in the same physical location where socializing required essentially no travel, and you'd often have to exist in communal spaces.

These days even people who are nearby are still far. That 30 minute drive both ways along with coordinating a time is a lot of extra work to add onto an already busy life.

But if these same people lived on your street you could just pop over for a quick coffee. As is what actually happens. My wife and I have socialized with new friends in our neighborhood more than close family lately because they're right around us. The kicker is we built the friendships through our kids school and repeated proximity rather than artificially.

There is also the problem of familiarity. It's awkward.

Traditionally you'd live around the same people your whole life. Invariably they'd feel like family and it wouldn't feel awkward to get together. But that's not how modernity works. People move to different communities all the time, so it becomes difficult to build familial friendships with others.

That's the essential problem. The internet allows us to stay in touch with people who feel like family. That's what we want to do psychologically. If all those people were in the same city there'd be a lot more socializing.

Everyone always gets the causality reversed. Social media didn't cause the epidemic, it filled a niche to help cure the epidemic. People were lonely long before the internet arrived, the internet just made it easier for those lonely people to connect to each other. And now many of them prefer the internet over socializing with people they don't care for that much in person.

In other words, the problem is structural. Moving to a new city where you don't know anyone, only work with people for a few years, and where there are no longer institutions like the church, how is anybody supposed to meet anyone? Meetups? Half the people can't even afford a car.

There is no solution other than meeting a lifelong partner.

This is a good way of putting it. And whether someone is happy is indeed personal.

For me, company culture has always been a primary concern. Is the company a non-stressful place to work and am I working with grownups. That's a massive factor, and the reason I've left two previous jobs.

Laudability is also big. Or in other words purpose. Once all the sheen of working in the software industry wears off do you actually care about the work you're doing? That can go a long way in providing motivation.

But then there are some who are happy to grind out code for exorbitant amounts of money and no purpose. So YMMV.

I believe most of these people would make the time if they lived close by, but we're all in the season of parenthood where even a little bit of distance makes it hard. And a lot of distance makes it impossible. There's also relationship dynamics.

When one of our kids started school we met a few families in our neighborhood and we see them fairly regularly. The difference is with them we can step out the door and we're already together. No planning required.

I wonder if social media essentially allows us to maintain friendships artificially, beyond the normal bounds of connection. It actually creates more maintenance overhead because you've got to maintain these contacts despite the relationships being largely irrelevant.

I think this hits the nail on the head and is actually the approach I've taken. Everything is deactivated but I log in from time to time. Maybe it's the best possible approach.

There is also the lingering pressure to share but maybe, at the end of the day, these cheap shares are just a trivial blip in other people's days. If we can't actually talk to someone due to social dynamics or energy constraints then they're effectively no longer a part of our life and social media is a bit of an illusion.

Keep the avenue, avoid the feed.

One of the interesting things about how people socialize is that we tend to be less honest with those we're closest to, and more honest with people who have no impact on our bottom line.

Counter-intuitively this means we end up having better conversation with strangers than our closest friends and family. Which makes platforms like Facebook a lost cause for connection.

I've had the same experience. Many of my best friends have been found on forums.

I converted my Windows PC to Linux Mint and let my kids play GCompris on there, which is an educational, non-addictive game suite. As of now neither of them know that the internet exists, and my wife and I keep them away from screens as much as possible.

Once the flood breaks and they discover the internet we'll be using NextDNS.

Having questionable morals seems to help. Ruthlessly pursue profit or promotions and eventually someone, somewhere will sigh and relent.

I'm half joking. People with integrity and authenticity are too proud to commit wrongs. People with no conscience aren't inhibited by morals.

Though I'd prefer death before dishonor, personally.

I agree that it may not be the main factor but it's definitely a major one.

By the numbers wealthy people almost universally own and read more books. For a number of reasons.

Yes to all of that. My biggest pet peeve is the Goodreads reading challenge, I cringe at it every year. Imagine that but a 'TV show challenge', it would be absurd. This is the way people think about books.

Read what you want, how you want. Pick up the same book five times. Do whatever. Forget arbitrary challenges.

Not really. You're underestimating how poor many people are. Even transport to a library can be a problem for some. And reading itself is a metabolic activity that takes work.

The poor obviously do read, but wealthy people have significantly more time and energy for the hobby, meaning that they read more.

I did see one a long time ago but there's no way I can find it now. Basically it said that wealthy people read significantly more than poor people.

It's not that difficult to understand. For example, my kids go to a low income school where many families are having a hard time feeding their kids consistently. How many books do you think they're buying? Maybe some, but a hell of a lot less than my wife and I are.

Reading itself also takes effort and energy. If you barely have food to eat then reading isn't an appealing activity, most of the time.

Many families fall under this category.

On the money. Recently reading has been branded as a 'pill that's good for you' rather than 'way more interesting than everything on TV' which isn't very encouraging.

But let's face it, the reason people aren't reading anymore is because most of us are lazy and there are swaths of less cognitively demanding alternatives. People also can't afford books. Reading has always been a pastime of the wealthy.

Books had their heyday in the 19th century before the rise of computers and when print technology was quite robust.

Welcome to parenthood in 2026. I can't walk into a Chapters or book fair with my kid without the tentacles of the game industry reaching him.

That academics are failing worldwide due to overexposure to screens is the least surprising thing I can imagine.

That's kind of the point of the article, though.

Sure LLMs can churn out code, and they sort of work for developers who already understand code and design, but what happens when that junior dev with no hard experience builds their years of experience with LLMs?

Over time those who actually understand what the LLMs are doing and how to correct the output are replaced by developers who've never learned the hard lessons of writing code line by line. The ability to reason about code gets lost.

This points to the hard problem that the article highlights. The hard problem of software is actually knowing how to write it, which usually takes years, sometimes up to a decade of real experience.

Any idiot can churn out code that doesn't work. But working, effective software takes a lot of skill that LLMs will be stripping people of. Leaving a market there for people who have actually put the time in and understand software.

Do I need to make money? If the answer is no, then I would do something physical and mindless like stocking shelves or landscaping.

If the answer is yes, I'll stick with software.

When I was in college I did residential landscaping in the summers, and in retrospect it was a good time.

That's true, but the parenting part isn't actually that complicated, particularly at a young age when you're laying the foundation. Basically just stay out of the way and let your kids do stuff. Don't do anything for them that they can do for themselves. That way they learn problem solving skills and gain the confidence to follow through on things, so when they're 16 they are capable of navigating buying a car and getting a job.

Somehow this isn't intuitive for parents, though. They feel like they need to show and do things for their kid, rather than letting them pick up the experience of doing themselves.

When I was growing up my parents were borderline neglectful in how they handled my brother and I, but in that neglect we were forced to deal with situations ourselves, gain experience, and discover who we were. Counterintuitively, that approach was actually more fruitful than being over-present.

Modernity has caused us to lose touch with our roots. When kids were a necessity in the household or farm they would naturally learn the skills they needed to thrive as adults.

Modernity has upended this connection. Now having kids is basically a hobby that's almost guaranteed to make you poorer.

Point being that 'parenting' has become unnatural because the cyclical environment of 'do what your parents do' has been lost. Consequently many parents are clueless when it comes to raising their own children. It's become an intentional process they need to think about, and few of them know what to do. The default is being overly paranoid, because the necessity to learn skills to support the family isn't strong enough to override the parents paranoia.

My wife and I were letting our kids chop vegetables at age two. Many parents are so dumb they won't even let their kids do this until adolescence.