It's arguably LESS distracting, since you can lock down the available actions on a Chromebook, for example, while I was doodling away in my notebooks as a 90's kid. I don't think you can really make sweeping statements about which is better overall.
It tells us nothing. People act like this is some big hypocrisy or revelation. First of all, Jobs DID allow his children to use iPads, but it was limited. People take a single quote from the Isaacson biography out of context, assuming that he never let his children have access to iPads at all, forever. Other interviews he gave talked about limiting access - like ALL families should do.
Jobs was literally just parenting. Limiting screen time is something all parents should do. We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess. Calling tech executives hypocrites for having common sense parenting limits is not really a dunk.
Not to mention the iPad was only on the market for a year and a half before Jobs passed, in which there was no time for real educational software with traction to make it into schools.
He was talking about a future he was aiming for. I know it's hard to remember the tech optimism we still had heading into 2010, but most people still viewed things as getting better at that time. When Jobs announced the iPad, the iPhone had been on the market for 2.5 years and we basically only saw the conveniences of how cool it was to be able to check Facebook on the go with a cool futuristic touchscreen experience.
It's really easy to see how misguided Jobs was with 15 years of hindsight.
> We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess.
Maybe you do, but not everybody does. 19.7% of American kids are obese. The hypocrisy is that tech executives promote and lobby for excessive use of their products (even manufacturing addiction), but know better for their kids.
If the fact that these CEOs responsible for propagating disruptive technologies - CEOs exposed to the effects every day, have unprecedented insights (internal analytics) and the best staff around them to assess the tech's potential positive and negative consequences - DO NOT want to their own to partake in it even though advertising it to anyone else, then - if that tells you nothing - you are just plain ignorant or vested in their companies.
Except that the supposed views held by these CEOs (iPads, social media, AI, etc. can be bad for kids) are also widely held mainstream views. That's the only reason people are bringing the views up here...because they already agree with them!
There's absolutely nothing insightful about CEOs with "unprecedented insights" coming to the same conclusions as everyone else.
Is this the same Jobs that famously denied paternity of his daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, and was only forced to accept her as his daughter when a US federal court forced a DNA test on him proving she was in fact his daughter?
Yeah, something tells me we shouldn't be taking advice regarding children from this man.
This meme where people liken electronics with tobacco is foolish. Smoking is physically harmful in any significant dose. Screens are perfectly fine in moderation and can even be beneficial when used correctly.
Its a luxury that affluent people have to limit these things. When you're at your limit after a long day of work and still have stuff to do at home the kid gets the phone, iPad, or whatever while parents do the needed to run the household. Wonder why obesity is such a problem for poorer families. Convenience.
Yes, tech companies are liable for pushing this technology that they know to be addictive.
There is no apologist revisionist history for billionaires that are actively making the world a worse place. People act like Jobs was some kind of hero. Dude was a snake. Made some damn good products, but you don't achieve that level of wealth by being a kind person.
> Wonder why obesity is such a problem for poorer families. Convenience.
Assuming this were to be the case, one would need to explain why this doesn't happen to men.
> Among men, the prevalence of obesity was lower in both the lowest (31.5%) and highest (32.6%) income groups compared with the middle-income group (38.5%).
And among women, one would need to explain why it doesn't happen to Black women.
> Among non-Hispanic black women, there was no difference in obesity prevalence among the income groups.
It also needs to explain why no statistically significant result happens for Asian women
> Among women, prevalence was lower in the highest income group (29.7%) than in the middle (42.9%) and lowest (45.2%) income groups. This pattern was observed among non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Asian, and Hispanic women, but it was only significant for white women.
Without looking deeper into the issue, the natural thing the income vs. obesity thing overall shows is a population blend issue (Simpson's paradox). It gets too tortured otherwise: yeah, Black women always have inconvenience, Asian women mostly don't have more convenient lives as they become richer, and White women get massively more convenient lives as they get wealthier. Men until 2008 got less convenient lives as they got wealthier and then their lives got neither more convenient nor less convenient but stayed the same.
That's pretty rough number of epicycles to stick into this convenience angle.
Not really. Osteosarcoma rates have remained very stable for decades. Some young people are getting diagnosed with colon/breast cancer at increasing rates, but most of that comes down to better diagnostics and imagining, catching things at earlier ages.
But isn‘t colon cancer in young people primarily an example of rates actually increasing, because young people specifically often get easily dismissed based on their age.
I'm not sure why the other reply here was flagged and killed. The US absolutely has NOT acknowledged that they killed school children. The DoW and other government officials have only publicly stated that an investigation is taking place.
Getting a feeling of "wanting to keep going" with something does not automatically make it an "addiction".
> I don’t want to depend on something doing the work I earn money with.
A tale as old as time, and a valid feeling, though not particularly helpful to dwell on since the technology will never go away and never get worse than it is right now.
> I don’t want to give up my brain and become lazy and not think for myself anymore.
Your brain will think about other important things and you don't need to become "lazy" just because a machine is doing something that used to require more effort on your part.
> I enjoy technical discussions with (human) co-workers.
So what? You can still have those discussion.
> I enjoy reading blog posts and tutorials and learning from other developers.
So what? You can still read those blogs, but the subjects might shift away from coding minutiae to other topics.
> I want to learn and grow and become better at what I am doing by trial and error and mistakes I make all by myself.
Going forward, that trial and error process will start to happen more at the product/project level rather than the source code level.
> I don’t want to be part of a trend/hype destroying our planet even faster than we already do without it.
Doubt. When the money dries up, there won't be many people who will care enough to learn and discuss computer science or whatever else. The AI already knows all of it and people will absolutely be satisfied by that.
Kind of a useless analysis if it doesn't compare the risk after stopping GLP-1s to the risk of NEVER taking GLP-1s in the first place.
We probably don't know the numbers yet, but one can easily envision a scenario like: risk of CE without GLP-1 weight loss: 20%. Risk after taking GLP-1s for 2 years: 10%. Risk after stopping GLP-1s: 12%. "Your heart attack chance goes up 20% after stopping GLP-1s!!!"
The data on the results section shows almost parity between the control group and participants who discontinued for 2 years.
Note that while it is a well conducted study at the US VA with 300,000+ patients, it is not a randomized study so fully eliminating confounding variables and reverse causality is hard.
There is a recent one, which shows that the weight was generally stable after 1 year of discontinuation of GLP-1.
> In this cohort study of adults with overweight or obesity who initiated treatment with injectable semaglutide or tirzepatide and discontinued the index medication between 3 and 12 months after initiation, 19.6% restarted the index medication and 35.2% received an alternative treatment in the year after initial treatment discontinuation. The average weight change 1 year after index medication discontinuation was relatively small; however, there was considerable individual-level variability.
Thanks for sharing. Note that the data quality from this study is quite low because 54.8% of the cohort eventually restarted their medication or transitioned to an alternative therapy (mostly a different weight loss medication).
I don't know why a study that focuses on discontinuation didn't split the groups that restarted or transitioned against the group that actually just stopped.
The discontinued and paused groups in the actual study had lower BMI than the continuing groups - so it seems like this is at least partially independent of any weight regain.
Which makes sense since we have strong evidence for the GLP-1s providing significant protective benefit even without weight loss.
A tale older than the use of GLP-1. People do X to lose weight, they hit a target weight, declare victory and continue the habits that got them in trouble in the first place. You can go a little bit heavier on the meals and loosen the exercise if you desire, but you still have to keep yourself within maintenance threshold or the weight comes back.
GLP-1 masks the problem and people don't realize their actions aren't ideal once the mask is removed.
Scientifically it's valid, and good scientists and doctors would immediately pick up on the nuance.
The issue is shameless "science" reporting like this which packages up the results for non experts, without explaining the nuance because they know the sensational headlines will get more attention, and they know non-expert readers will get scared and share the article on places like HN or Facebook.
It's such an obvious play: find one doctor who'll make a loaded statement with the word "whiplash", write on this one study as if it's gospel truth, get everyone reading it as scared as possible. Throw in links to other emotional articles like "Can you die of a broken heart?" throughout the text to trigger secondary emotional reactions that will get confused with the main ones. Boom, social media sharing heaven, who cares if the science was valid or not?
And to be clear, the science underneath might be valid, probably even is, but it would need the expertise of someone who understands statistics and medicine to decide whether you should take action based on this or not.
"You're not allowed to tell me that the fledgling technology that has been getting steadily better for the past 3 years is likely to continue getting better." ...and there's my cue to close the window.
We've already seen signs that progress is slowing. Companies are so desperate to try and prove that this is linear or even expontial growth. But in reality it feels logarithmic.
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