Technology

Time to make web forums great again?

I want to pose a question: Is it possible that online users just have nonstop shiny object syndrome, and even if forums worked correctly and did the job, users would still move onto something else because we’re never happy? I think the argument is pretty strongly yes. That said, I do think that as the internet matures into something that is more furniture in our lives, perhaps some of us will slow down. Maybe we’ll log into a…

The internet is still good

The internet may be a dumpster fire. Much of it probably is. But there are still plenty of corners that haven't been engulfed by the raging wildfire that's laying waste to everything in its path. For all our complaints about the internet—and many of those complaints are entirely justified—it remains one of the…

Digg is back?

Kevin Rose is building Digg: https://di.gg/ai

Indonesia bans social media for teens

Indonesia will ban social media for children under 16, Communication and Digital Affairs Minister Meutya Hafid said Friday. Hafid in a statement to media said that she just signed a government regulation that will mean children under the age of 16 can no longer have accounts on high-risk digital platforms, including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox. The implementation will start gradually…

Cognitive war

China knows exactly what this does. Their domestic version of TikTok caps kids under 14 at 40 minutes a day, locks access between 6am and 10pm, and swaps the entire feed to educational content. Science, history, museums. The version they export to everyone else? Unlimited, unrestricted, pure dopamine on demand. When kids in the US and China were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, the number one answer in America…

Social media bans are hard to enforce

Moreover, the proponents of bans ignore how they would deprive children of the benefits of social media. They are a blessing to children who feel isolated: perhaps because of their location, their sexuality, or because their brains work differently from those of others. Social media can broaden young minds, giving children from all backgrounds a window onto fresh places and people. Like it or not, social sites are now one of…

Be alone!

“Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born,” said Nikola Tesla in 1934. The inventor spawned his “earthly miracles” not in a busy lab, but in the countless hours spent tinkering away at electrical systems and radio technology on his own. “Originality thrives in seclusion,” he said, “free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind.” Philosopher Blaise Pascal made a…

People were, are, and will be dumb

A lot of people who think everyone went insane because of social media really don't remember how fundamentally insane people were before social media A lot of otherwise normal teenagers and adults around me

Will Storr on smartphones

Yet my smartphone has affected my life in often negative ways. The world I disappear to inside it has made me – and probably you – angrier. That’s my main impression of how the world has changed since 2007: we’re all a lot more pissed off with each other. And I really do blame phones. Humans are profoundly social and wired to solve the problems of existence by forming into collaborative groups. When we feel we belong and are…

Finland considers social media ban for kids under 15

The concerns over social media, and in particular the effects on children, have been well-documented — but Finnish researcher Silja Kosola's recent description of the phenomenon as an "uncontrolled human experiment" has grabbed people's attention once again. Kosola, an associate professor in adolescent medicine, has researched the impact of social media on young people, and tells Yle News that the consequences are not very…

How to write a good spec for AI coding agents

A great guide on how to use AI agents to build good software. Although this is for developers, there are plenty of takeaways of normies as well.

Influentists

This pattern of “hype first and context later” is actually part of a growing trend. I call the individuals participating to that trend “The Influentists”. Those people are members of a scientific or technical community, and leverage their large audiences to propagate claims that are, at best, unproven and, at worst, intentionally misleading. But how can we spot them? I personally identify these “Influentists” by four…

On AI coding

Since Claude can’t create the good abstractions. Claude’s powers are limited by how good the blocks you give it are. Have no illusions; Claude cannot reproduce Sentry and Terraform and Playwright. These are incredibly complex and well-designed pieces of code. And since Claude can’t create good abstractions on its own, there’s a limit to how much anyone can do with Claude alone. Even though everyone on X thinks you can…

The future of coding

The new leverage comes from moving one layer up. Instead of doing every task ourselves, we design systems that can do them for us. A single agent can now execute autonomously what used to require long hours my time, freeing my attention for higher-level decisions, design, judgment. And maybe just... enjoying the life with my loved ones? This all immensely increases the leverage of single engineer. Technically, you're one well…

AI is killing software jobs

I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it. But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are…

Industrial-scale production of software

Our appetite for AI slop is likely to be similarly insatiable. The adoption curve we’ve seen so far may pale beside what happens when disposable software production becomes truly mainstream. If the democratisation of software mirrors the impact of ubiquitous photo, video, and audio capture enabled by the smartphone, we may see user-generated software created, shared, and discarded at social-media scale. Should that happen,…

You can just do things

François Chollet: Social media is the sedative that makes us forget we ever had freedom and agency. You can just do things, but first you have to close the app.

Summoning Ghosts: Why You Need to Try AI Coding Tools

Andrej Karpathy: I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of…

The digital world is the only escape

As an adult now living in the city, I often find myself wondering, where do kids go for that kind of independent play today? This is exactly what evolutionary anthropologist Eli Stark-Elster explores in a recent essay. We like to blame tech companies for trapping our kids in digital spaces – and sure, the slot-machine mechanics are real. But Stark-Elster argues we’re missing the bigger picture: “Digital space is the only…

The prerequisites for scientific progress

Mokyr has long argued that Europe’s Republic of Letters encouraged broad scientific and technological innovation by providing a setting where new ideas could be evaluated and disseminated. For him, Europe occupied the ideal midpoint between political fragmentation and cultural unity: enough polycentrism to prevent the suppression of ideas by heavy-handed rulers, but enough common ground to sustain serious dialogue and a deep…

What is artificial intelligence (AI)?

So, I was asked to come and explain AI again at SuperAI. I always think a good place to start if we want to understand this is to ask, "Well, what is it that we mean when we say AI?" This is a really important observation from 1970 from Larry Tesler, who was an AI scientist. He said, "AI is whatever machines can't do yet, because once it works, we say, 'Well, that's not AI anymore. That's just software.'" AI is the stuff that…

What It Means to Be Human in the Age of AI

We stand at the threshold of perhaps the most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced. As AI systems increasingly match or exceed our cognitive abilities, we’re witnessing the twilight of human intellectual supremacy—a position we’ve held unchallenged for our entire existence. This transformation won’t arrive in some distant future; it’s unfolding now, reshaping not just our economy but our very understanding of what…

The world won't end with a bang but with a shrug of indifference

Digging deeper into the data, which comes from the Understanding America Study, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments. While a full explanation of these shifts requires thorough investigation, and there will be many factors at work, smartphones and streaming services seem…