> Yet we never 'see' this in the article. It just restates it a few times without providing any proof.
I'm honestly shocked by the number of upvotes this article has on Hacker News. It's extremely low quality. It's obviously written with ChatGPT. The tells are:
(1) Incorrect technology "hype cycle". It shows "Trigger, Disillusionment, Englightnment Productivity". It's missing the very important "Inflated Expectations".
(2) Too many pauses that disrupt the flow of ideas:
- Lots of em-dashes. ChatGPT loves to break up sentences with em-dashes.
- Lots of short sentences to sound pithy and profound. Example: "The executives get excited. The consultants circle like sharks. PowerPoint decks multiply. Budgets shift."
(3) "It isn't just X, it's X+1", where X is a normal descriptor, where X+1 is a more emphatic rephrasing of X. ChatGPT uses this construct a lot. Here are some from the article:
SCOTUS ruled in Mathews v. United States (1998) and in Jacobson v. United States (1992) that the government cannot induce a person to commit a crime, then arrest that individual for that crime.
Now the government is rolling out fully-automated entrapment bots.
I don't disagree with the claim that brainrot literally rots brains. But, I strongly oppose laws that ban social media on the grounds of "protecting children."
Parents are fully capable of monitoring and regulating their children's internet usage without Daddy Government getting involved.
I am an engineering manager for a large team of developers. Part of my job is to estimate the cost and potential revenue of big projects. I have a spreadsheet of everyone's salaries (including bonus compensation, other perks).
I've done the math at my own company: average developer salary is approximately $100k. Our largest teams have 10 developers, so about $1M in labor costs. These teams work on projects that bring the company $10M every year.
We literally earn $1,000,000 for every $100,000 developer salary. Developers are some of the most productive workers in the world, but only keep 10-20% of the fruits of their own labor.
I am shocked that developers haven't figured this out. Almost all of the value they create goes into the pockets of their CEO.
Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook ban people all the time for calls to violence. Reddit made the national news last year because moderators of r/The_Donald failed to police the numerous posts of users who plotted to murder the governor of Michigan.
Parler, by contrast, did not moderate calls to violence. It quickly became a safe space for neo-fascists to plan, coordinate, and execute plots against the US government.
Parler was playing a completely different game to Twitter, Reddit, and FB. Parler was deservedly ejected from the stadium.
The Capitol riots killed 6 people, including two police officers. The crowd was armed to the teeth with guns, pipebombs, and ziptie handcuffs. They constructed a gallows. They coordinated with police sympathizers to gain access to the building, while one GOP congresswoman live-tweeted the known whereabouts of Nancy Pelosi.
They were planning to murder political opposition and violently overthrow a fair democratic election to appoint their leader instead.
If not for the plan devolving into a disorganized mob, and a quick thinking capitol officer who lead rioters away from the chamber where House Reps had been evacuated, rioters may have claimed many more lives.
Kudos for Amazon, Apple, Google, and all other tech companies for deplatforming violent neo-fascists and their enablers.
I've known a handful of pathological liars, one of whom is my nephew. My nephew's caregivers are not model parents. They are extremely hot and cold: either ignoring the kids for hours at a time, or screaming at the kids over every trivial accident and annoyance. Example: nephew was pouring a glass of water, knocked the cup on the floor, and his parents screamed at him and hit him until he was broken down in tears.
Newphew's day-to-day routine is an exercise in walking on eggshells to avoid triggering mom and dad's short temper. Anytime his parent's said a word to him, nephew assumed he'd done something bad again. He began lying at a very young age as a defense mechanism to avoid punishment.
He became very distrustful of adults. We had a family get-together once where my nephew was playing with toy dinosaurs. I walk up behind him and say "hey buddy what are doing over there" and he immediately startles and says "I didn't do anything!"
I noticed that he started lying habitually. And even lying about things that didn't even matter. If he had a bowl of cereal for breakfast, he'd tell everyone he had a bagel. If he got up early, he said he'd slept in late. If he watched Finding Nemo, he'd say he watched Spongebob.
I started challenging him on these things: "why did you just tell me ate a bagel? I was right here fixing the computer when you rolled out of bed at 10am to eat a bowl of cereal this morning." He'd double down, "well actually I got up early and ate a bagel when you didn't see me. And then I had cereal afterward." I'd say "why are you lying to me about something so stupid? I'm not mad, I just don't see why you'd lie about it. What's the point?" "I'm not lying, I swear!"
He's 11 years old and his lies are getting bigger, more absurd. He told me his friend's dad is the president of the Pokemon factory and he can get any rare Pokemon card he wants for free, and that he gets to ride around in his friends Lamborghini.
I literally think he's lying for sport now, like a game to see what he can get away with. He's going to have a hard time making and keeping friends if he doesn't break the habit soon.
I think all of this started from bad parenting. The kid didn't feel safe in his own home, and his defense mechanism became habit, which then became a pathological obsession.
I planned to park my house in a trailer park, and purposefully built my house to have the same kind of hookups as an RV or manufactured home.
For power, I installed a 50amp RV-style power inlet to my house. I ran a 50-amp cable from from the power pole to my house.
For water, I was able to connect a standard drinking-water hose from the water line to the inlet into my house.
For natural gas, I ran copper flex tubing from the gas meter to the gas inlet in my house. I ensured that all of my gas appliances had the correct orifices.
For sewer, I drained all of my water fixtures (two sinks, shower, and toilet) through the floor, connected them to a common drain line, and through a sewer hookup below the house.
I built a tiny house on wheels. My house totaled about $55K, due to my preference for premium materials and contracting out work that I did not feel comfortable doing myself (e.g. wiring a 50amp power box).
My house was built to be on grid and could be parked in any trailer park. I could connect to city power, water, natural gas, and sewage.
Off-grid homes are more expensive due to the need to install solar panels, drill wells, bury a giant propane tank, and purchase land.
$50K is honestly one of the cheapest builds I've seen for an off-grid cabin. Their house looks amazing.
The article is headlined "The Weird World of Vegan YouTube Stars", but it's not about vegans. It's about the weirdo microminority who punish their body with daily enemas, 30-day juice cleanses, and believe that menstruation is the body's way of shedding "toxins".
Any sufficiently large group has it's outliers, zealots, and weirdos.
Raw-foodies / fruitarians are the weirdo subset of vegans.
Flat-earthers are the weirdo subset of Christians.
Sovereign Citizens are the weirdo subset of Libertarians.
White Nationalists are the weirdo subset of Conservatives.
Parents who speak exclusively to their kids in Klingon are the weirdo subset of Star Trek fandom.
I was a volunteer instructor through Girls Who Code through the 2016-2017 school year. It was a hugely rewarding experience.
I had a class of middle school girls who had never seen a line of code before. By the end of the course, they had learned enough of the basics of HTML, CSS, and Python to build a personal homepage and a simple game.