Not really. The US has widely legalized gambling of various forms (sports, prediction markets, etc) in recent years. I'd argue that even more so than nicotine there is zero benefit to gambling.
The article only explains it insofar as making a logical leap from actual proposed UK legislation to ban social media for children under 16 to vague accusations that a shadowy elite want to ban all smart phones from teenagers, and therefore they wouldn't have been able to document this.
The UK is not proposing disallowing 16-17 year olds (or any children) from carrying smart phones on public transit, though, which makes the entire article fall apart.
The author leaps from a proposed ban on 15 year olds using tiktok to wholesale bans on smartphones.
The article spends a long time conflating actual proposed policy in the UK with things that aren't being proposed and sound much worse. I did some googling, the UK's gone a bit further than the US in proposing that < 16 year olds can't use social media with real age verification instead of current "I promise I'm over 13" approaches, curfews on social media specifically for 16-17 year olds that are opt-out, and smart phones must be put away at school.
No one's proposing banning teenagers from owning smart phones entirely. I would agree that not allowing 17 year old girls going out to have phones on trains would be bad policy, if that was actually a thing anyone was suggesting. It's unclear how any of the teens in the anecdote at the start of the story would be affected by the proposed legislation at all.
> It’s watching precisely why young adults need phones, the agency to use them, and the life skills to make their ways in the world with their phones in their pockets.
The link between creepy old men being called out and documented on a train and whether or not 14 year olds should be spending 8+ hours a day scrolling tiktok is unclear to the point of feeling like I'm missing something in the article. I guess the idea is that teens are being punished? And we should be holding our leaders accountable instead of restricting the teens? The counter argument to this would be "holding our leaders accountable" looks a lot like "passing regulations to keep children from being harmed by digital nicotine"
> Many other people, observing our current policy context, have also called out how smartphone and social media bans for young adults (and we are talking about that particular group here, not toddlers and primary schoolers) risk swaddling them in cotton wool and then releasing them into the world, without critical adulting skills, on the day they hit a magic birthday
This is the same reason I think we should give 13 year olds a couple of cigarettes a week, just enough for them to still feel sick from the nicotine and start to figure out how to integrate into adult society.
We've long accepted that certain activities carry enough harm that people under a certain age lack the development for it to be fair to expect them to engage with it in a healthy manner. Does it deny 14 year olds some agency that we don't allow them to ride motorcycles? Yes. Is it sound policy? I think so. We have plenty of evidence for real harms in teenagers with regards to social media, a fact that took me a long time to accept while I worked in the industry, but is plainly obvious in the data and studies done on it over the past decade.
We have decades upon decades of hardware getting dramatically cheaper year over year for the same performance, and ~1 year of the inverse due to dramatic buildout for AI.
It's a surprising example of the recency bias to me to assume anything other than the market returning to its historic norm, even if the AI buildout doesn't slow, producers will scale factories to meet that demand.
I've been using it for a week via opencode in a large, mature codebase for some moderately ambitious feature development, and a bit of debugging. Explicit purpose is evaluating if it may be a good substitute to save money for many tasks. For several tasks I've had both it and opus 4.8 attempt the same task and compared them.
In general, it's comparable across the board. Claude is less "verbose" -- GLM really likes to comment a ton. There were a few things where I think claude would have needed a little bit less back and forth. So opus still has an edge, but it's marginal, very much unlike previous open/competitor models where benchmarks looked good but actual day to day performance was pretty bad. I'm sure fable is "better" but it's so expensive + data retention policies are such that for the moment it was generally available I couldn't use it for work. This is still notably better performance than when claude code took the industry by storm.
I'm understanding why Dario is trying to regulate open weight models away.
> I honestly don't get the hostility against local models in this thread
Consider that there are literally trillions of dollars being wagered on this not being the future state of computing. Not even speculating that HN is being astroturfed (though I see no reason it wouldn't be by interested parties), but many of the US tech employees here have direct financial incentives in various forms to be rooting for the failure of open source and optionally local models.
I really think giving it a year for the hardware market to come back to earth and spending a fraction of that for API access to the same models is a better use of the money.
The open source models have gotten heavily conflated with local development. While that is cool and I'm excited about the future of local LLMs, it is not necessary to play around with these models. Without shilling for companies I don't have a relationship with, there are a number of companies who will give you an API just like Anthropic/OpenAI and you pay per token, albeit much cheaper than the frontier labs.
I've been using the full GLM 5.2 model this way (through opencode) at work for the past week. It's quite impressive.
I think we should go one level higher and question when having opinions and being a multi-dimensional human became a professional risk. That has certainly not always been the case.
Prices have gone down for the entire history of computing reliably with the past year being an extremely notable deviation from that trend line.
I'm pretty sure prices are going down. Maybe not complete builds in nominal dollars, but $/gb for things like RAM and SSDs will be lower in 5 years than it is today almost certainly.
US standards are bad at considering everyone outside the vehicle in general. Headlights are another great example. I've seen videos of headlight designers bragging about how they can put a dim spot in the exact place the regulators measure glare to cheat the test. Most pedestrian deaths are at night.
With many new vehicles on the road with their low beams on coming at me head-on I have no chance of seeing a pedestrian for hundreds of yards because I'm so blinded.
The times article goes very in depth on this. Yes, it is an issue, but it explains at most 10% of the increase in fatalities.
Getting hit by any vehicle over 20mph is going to be a very bad time, it is going to be somewhat worse if it's a large vehicle with a high bumper.
Americans are twice as likely to think it's fine to use a cell phone while driving than Canadians or Europeans, and while illegal in most places it's effectively unenforced - our cops spend half their shifts driving around messing around on a mounted laptop. If you want to improve outcomes, start holding American drivers to the standards that peer nations do.
I can't speak to Australia, and yeah, western Europe has a lot less big trucks, but Canada has as many large 4x4 trucks as anywhere in the US in my experience and has seen decreasing deaths. The times article touches on this but the most they can explain of the increase in deaths from vehicle size is 10%. It's a problem, but it's far from being able to explain the full issue.