For a bit of context, Juneau Alaska deals with a smaller scale version of this most years. There's a bowl off of the Mendenhall Glacier named Suicide Basin. Each summer that basin gets filled with meltwater, which forms a lake because the glacier blocks the water from leaving the basin. At some point the lake fills with enough water that part of the blockage gives way and the lake suddenly releases.
In Juneau, this is a well-defined basin with well-established dynamics. The city still wrestles with how best to handle this. Recent years have seen higher river levels when the basin releases, and the downstream banks of the Mendenhall River have eroded much faster than people were expecting. The city and individual homeowners are engaged in multiple projects to manage the annual flooding.
In the Nepal case the scale is much larger, and the variables are less known and less stable. This is absolutely devastating to see.
Reminds me of the Fargo-Moorhead diversion project. The Red River flows north through Fargo, which means that down-river portions can ice over in the winter and cause upstream flooding. The diversion project should wrap up soon, and hopefully it works. As I understand it, the city is going to appeal with insurance companies to drop costly flood insurance requirements.
I completely disagree. The variables in these situations are WELL known. The difference is scale, and in the Himalayas there is no cost effective, completely safe way to deal with them. The hydroelectric potential in that part of the world is the main driver for the continuous build -> flood --> destruction --> build cycle. Obviously, the last event was nothing short of astonishing, devastating and horrific. The worst part is that it will happen again, just differently.
It seems to me that the two of you are actually in agreement. If we had a better understanding of the variables we'd have been able to predict what happened in advance from the reams of satellite data we have.
No. It will happen again the only thing that will change is the amount of water and debris. More or less people will die depending on the incentives to live in the district. Humans should not inhabit those valleys.
That's not a response to what I wrote? If we had a better understanding of the variables then we'd almost certainly be able to leverage all the data we have to warn people in time to evacuate. Similar to how wildfires used to kill a lot more people but these days even in the most fire prone regions you'll almost always have time to get out if you heed the evacuation notice.
I agree with you that flood prone areas are generally a poor choice of place to live but it seems to me that's neither here nor there.
I think they mean a resource ripe for extraction. There is huge stored gravitational energy in that ice and water up so high, which is also exactly why it was such a disaster.
Potential as in possibility, not as voltage. It's an awkward phrase...
Huh? I mean, if you look at the actual damage reports you see quite a bit of energy taken of both Nepal and Chinese grids. Further deduction leads to the obvious conclusion that hydroelectric generation in the district is VERY important.
Yes, most of our problems with the shifting climate are not physical, their not engineering, they're nothing but stupid, stupid "social studies". The kind of thing billionaires want to buy their way out of, which they can't, so they do the next best thing: abandon all hope and build their bunkers cause real philanthropy is complex, and real society isn't just something an LLM can dictate and people will just follow.
Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better.
AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere.
If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping students learn better, and teachers teach better.
I have tried memorisation systems like Anki, but nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing consolidates my knowledge better than writing the actual concept down with pen and paper.
I've done 35,000+ Anki card reviews over the years, and I strongly suspect that most of the obvious and encouraged ways of using Anki are counterproductive. (Full disclosure: The following thoughts are heavily influenced by using Anki for language learning, and may not fully generalize to subjects like medicine.)
- Use Anki as an "exposure amplifier", not a database of raw facts to memorize. Think "tampering with the relative frequency of input to your brain", not "I will memorize every fact."
- Automate card creation as a much as possible. This will almost always require custom tooling. Card creation is part of the learning process, but you still want to automate everything you can possibly automate. Imagine tools to turn ebook highlights into cards, or to turn entire movies worth of subtitles into listening cards.
- Delete cards ruthlessly. If a card makes you say "Ugh", just delete it. If you're automating as much of card creation as possible, and if you're treating Anki as an "exposure amplifier", then deleting cards is cheap. And a significant amount of review pain comes from a small minority of the cards. Cull them, and reviews start to feel like popping bubblewrap, and not like getting a root canal.
- Prioritize large context and small active recall. For language learning, you might capture several sentences of context from a book or web page you're reading. Read or ignore the context depending on your mood. The active recall portion of a card significantly boosts how much you retain. But oddly, it seems OK to make the active recall portion really small. Try hiding half a word, or a single preposition in a phrase. For passive cards, just boldface an interesting expression in context, and mark the card as passed if you mostly understand it in that context.
- Introduce new cards slowly. Total review burden will stabilize around 5-6 times the number of new cards you learn a day. So 10 cards is a good default, and 20 is a significant commitment.
- The critical window seems to happen around 20-30 days after you introduce a card. This is when either your memory magically "consolidates" somehow (and formerly challenging cards suddenly become blindly obvious), or when a card enters repeated failure territory (and should thus be deleted ruthlessly). You could probably do just fine if you auto-suspended any card that you successfully recalled after a 20- or 30-day gap.
Also, this kind of tooling is the sort of thing you could just vibe code these days. If you do, make the "Delete" button really big.
For the recall part of education, the book's exercise, or simply covering up the relevant part with hand and forcing a recall, writing about what you learned, teaching someone else - all work great, and the flow is much more natural.
Notes on pen and paper do help retention, but there are pros and cons. I know people who write on touchscreens or take photos of handwritten notes for portability to get the best of both.
One to one teaching and self teaching are much better than a good teacher in a class though.
Technology can be very useful - research, resources, ebooks, visualisations, interactivity etc.
What I find interesting is the contrast between the West and China here. Most people in the West expect that AI will make their lives worse in some way. Meanwhile, 84% of Chinese are excited about this tech, and expect that it will be used to make their lives better. it's a really vivid contrast between the way new technology becomes integrated into each type of society.
The same probably holds without AI. China is still in the stage of development, where people reasonably expect that the future will be better. The West has not really been optimistic about the future since the 90s. There is always something around the corner threatening to make the future worse. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's climate change, maybe immigration, or terrorism, or war, or whatever.
It's worth noting that China has seen decades of steady development, and has avoided the boom/bust cycles we see happening in the west. While we've lived through dotCom bubble, the 2008 crash, covid, and now the looming AI bubble, China has just seen steady progress without the working majority getting screwed every decade like clockwork. While future can always bring something unexpected, it is possible to have a resilient system that adapts to the problems as they surface.
The protests in HK weren't due to failing economic conditions either. And having been to HK recently, I can tell you it's far more developed than it was before being repatriated.
China obviously has problems like any human society, and it's far from perfect. However, they demonstrably have not had the kinds of economic crashes we have in the west and the standard of living keeps rising steadily. And here are some numbers to put things in perspective.
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-peop...
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w231...
Don't forget the completely unaccountable megacorps who are increasingly invading our day-to-day lives, and the politicians whose main priority seems to be competing for their bribes.
The depressing part isn't that we are facing hard challenges and declining as a society. The depressing part is that it is a deliberate action.
Yes, we should not forget this. The West is not worried about some vague inanimate "something" around the corner threatening to make things worse. We are worried about people deliberately doing this.
AI slop, omnipresent ads, job loss, fake reviews, income inequality, climate collapse, these are not natural phenomenon or amorphous "things" lurking in the shadows. They are deliberately being imposed on us by actual people that you could point to if you could get close enough to them.
I think it's more about institutional trust than the technology itself. AI could be a great common good in the west, but look at the companies and politicians controlling its development. The notion that trump/elon/altman/zuck/etc would choose to deploy this in a way that helps the general good at the expensive of massively enriching themselves as much as possible is laughable to most people.
Of course this is going to be deployed in the most exploitative way possible. When have these people ever done differently? Elon just spent most of last year gleefully destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I'm sure he'll get right on developing a model to solve world hunger next...
No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it while the people I know who hate it all seem to be idelogically motivated (seemingly this is a cause de célèbre on the left right now?)
What AI has done to my job as a software developer is make my personal output higher while taking away almost every ounce of enjoyment, interest, and passion I had for the job. Overnight I went from loving my job to hating my job as much as everybody I know outside of tech hates their jobs.
I won't even get into what it has done to the already-awful experience of working with low-quality contractors.
I found it meant I could produce loads and loads of code I can't mentally keep track of, and therefore have no hope of understanding without ........ a LLM.
Effective organizations are busy replacing the low-quality contractors with AI. Seize the opportunity to demonstrate how you can get more done with a $1,000/month token budget than with $10,000/month in contractor salary.
That probably is exactly what is being referred to: the combination of low quality contractors who have access to AI means even more slop to wade through.
If AI is a 10xer the question is what is it 10xing.
I don't love this either, but at least it's a short-term economic quirk. At some point fabs will figure out what the long-term demand looks like and scale up production accordingly.
Fabs take a long time to build. The price will come down once the new fabs come on line. It’s expensive because there isn’t enough of it. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s supply and demand. We’ve see this boom and bust cycle again and again.
This cycle might need more competitors, not only more fabs. It's in the interest of three companies to keep supply constrained to raise prices, and they act as a cartel so until the cartel breaks or a competitor grows large enough to have fabs that can make a dent in the demand we will keep seeing high prices.
For a relevant competitor to show up takes much longer than building a fab (which is already a long enough endeavour).
I'm not that hopeful the price for RAM and other PC parts will come down in any meaningful way for the next 3-5 years.
Why does everyone play the game where everything ought to be assumed above-board until someone painstakingly proves otherwise.
> To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.
We are not the courts. The most reasonable and truth based position is operating with a fuzzy impression that most businesses are substantially more dodgy than their carefully manufactured PR releases are meant to portray themselves as.
And in this case, that includes acknowledging that a literal criminal conspiracy in well within the realm of possibility.
The reason for the price increase isn't hard to figure out. The AI boom is here and the demand is off the charts. Supply is limited and increasing production is difficult and slow.
> Why does everyone play the game where everything ought to be assumed above-board until someone painstakingly proves otherwise.
Because conspiracies are generally not true and it's not needed to explain this situation.
It could be a medium/long term political quirk, because as long as RAM and GPU prices stay high the BigCos maintain a monopoly on non-trivial AI compute, and personal AI can't happen.
I still can't work out if data centre mania is an irrational faddy bandwagon event or a covert socio-political monopolisation strategy.
Or rather creditors scrapping AI datacenters once all the money burning "AI labs" are finally insolvent & repurposong the hardware into something actually useful for people, possibly on chip level with custom PCBs.
That’s honestly plausible with RAM and SSDs, the same kits of RAM I spent around $50 on years ago were being scalped for $500+ because there was absolutely no supply.
A normal RAM kit went up a lot but it's still more like 6x. SSD, more like 2.5-3x.
But what percent of your PC price is RAM? When it was cheap it was probably less than 10%. I assume a long-planned upgrade means a mostly new build, and it's a pretty rare setup where that has gone up more than 50-100%. If this long-planned upgrade is just new RAM then the price could skyrocket, but it's still not that much of the overall build.
I hate that people keep trying to add LLM spam to Wikipedia, imposing extra work on the volunteers trying to write articles. I hate that people keep posting LLM spam on social media sites that at some point in the past mostly consisted of human-generated comments. I hate that many students are now using LLMs to do all of their homework, resulting in a significant part of the next generation being incompetent at basic scholarly tasks and unprepared for more serious work. I hate that lawyers are using LLMs to write legal briefs, not bothering to check that their cited cases say something exactly the opposite of what their briefs say. I hate that government officials are using LLMs to write public statements that get basic facts wrong. I hate that graphic designers are losing their jobs because their bosses would rather "just use AI, it's cheaper". I hate that Google Search results are now overwhelmed with LLM-generated slop which ranges from dubious to outright wrong, and it's now much more difficult than it used to be to find the information I'm looking for on the open web. I hate that researchers are now publishing LLM slop in journal articles, making it significantly harder to tell the difference between careful scholarship and someone lazily phoning it in. I hate that friends and neighbors now ask ChatGPT as their first source of information about any topic and it frequently tells them something completely misleading or wrong, but they don't bother double checking.
Am I "ideologically motivated"? I guess, where my ideology is: I want to have myself and other people get accurate information, and I want people to actually do their work instead of trying to cheat their way out of as much of it as possible, no matter what the downsides might be.
So far, AI lowers the quality and increases the quantity of the media we experience.
Blogslam has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
Bot operations on social media sites and forums have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
Advertising content has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
The content of streaming music, online art communities, and video platforms has beckme cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
The content of public code repositories, and the issue and PR channels associated with those repositories, have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
Customer support services have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
When individuals use AI themselves, towards tasks that they mean to acheive, many of them are individually happy with the results. But pretty much everyone who looks around sees that AI in aggregate is quickly saturating almost everything to which it can be applied to with endless, suffocating slop.
It feels great to pull the handle on the slot machine. It's pretty grim when you stop for a second to look around at the casino and take in the big picture.
I do think this is true but I think it also reflects negatively on the general populace that this new technology is evaluated in terms of the negative effects on their consumption pattens
Transformer models solved the Protein Folding problem in totality but they are categorically "bad" because more of the videos in my feed are low-quality or the advertisement for a cheeseburger looks fake
It's predictable but I do think the entire technology is being collectively processed through the lens of media consumption which is sort of tip of the iceberg of what it does and honestly the least important dimension of it
Did they? From what I heard, transformer models gave scientists better starting points for computational methods, but we're still far from solving the protein folding problem.
> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
Data centers and their side effects (higher electricity prices, etc) and job layoffs attributed to AI; plus a bunch of industry specific objections (like say, how it's currently destroying the educational system).
> Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it
Not sure what crowd you're running with. Myself and coworkers use AI and are generally positive about its effect on our productivity. But I don't think they'd say they 'enjoy' it, and we're probably the _best_ case. Who in the world 'enjoys' using AI?
Depends on the person, I never really had fun telling someone else what I wanted built or drawn. I've always enjoyed the process more than just the results, and having the results without the intellectual activity is boring.
For software, the increase usage of AI code makes my team move much faster, but our software isn't robust anymore and I fear that our longterm mission is being compromised by the endless slop. Favoring quick implementations that AI can make versus good implementations, and lazily relying on AI makes my teammates not develop a deep understanding of the work, which ultimately limits the solutions they can develop. YMMV.
Also, I don't understand what's funny about your image? Is it that it's bad?
It's that I asked for an SVG of a circle and it created a beautiful gradient filled animated technical diagram. I wanted something closer to <svg><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="40"/></svg>
Qwen 3.8 27B on xhigh is a delightfully weird over-achiever.
Here's another fun one: "Generate an SVG of a pelican eating caviar and drinking expensive wine in a tony SF restaurant" - it thought about that for almost an hour! SVG and thinking trace here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
Aside from fun with over-engineered SVGs, I'm finding the challenge of getting AI-generated code to be robust, maintainable and better quality than if I'd typed it out myself to be deeply intellectually stimulating.
> I'm finding the challenge of getting AI-generated code to be robust, maintainable and better quality than if I'd typed it out myself to be deeply intellectually stimulating.
Yea that's why I started my comment with "it depends on the person", in response to you asking what's not fun about having AIs do what you tell them. For many, coercing a tool to do something you can likely do yourself better isn't ideal, and at least for me, is just inefficient use of time (in the long run) and a headache. It also zaps the fun out of any task since now you move from searching for a good solution using your priors, to now validating that the LLM has a solution that works, even if it's not optimal. The searching for a good solution is for some, the fun part, which is eliminated by agentic coding, since that search inherently relies on you writing code and seeing what works IMO. The coding is an essential part of the thinking here. An analogy would be doing a math problem by hand versus reading the solution in a textbook. I can give concrete examples if you'd like.
For your SVG examples, I have used AI for a similar use case, the construction of 3D scenes for robotics via a text prompt and an asset catalog. I wish I could get the same richness as your SVG examples, the LLMs fail too hard on all 3D tasks given, even after spending a high amount of engineering effort on a suitable harness + tools. Also like your SVG example, it often doesn't give a realistic, or even nice output, and coercing it to do so, likely takes longer than just creating the image/3D scene yourself.
I love using AI. Getting my crazy ideas turn into software has never been easier. I like to architect software, not the code itself. The code has always been the means to my ends. I also love learning complicated concepts, from academics, math, physics, to art, philosophy, religion. It's wonderful to translate knowledge that is already out there but hard to understand somehow, because you can ask about it over and over and over and in the way you understand about things. Like a professor who understands you and never gets tired about silly questions. I don't know, it's just amazing at so many things. Of course, it's also pretty important to know how to use it, and when. I would never use it to replace my speech when speaking to someone else. That's bad. I would not like other people to do that to me either. Otherwise, why would I want to talk with that somebody when I can just ask an AI instead. We can love human beings and AI, and be critic of both at the same time.
Have you ever asked an expert in these areas to evaluate your knowledge? My experience is that people using ai to learn think they are learning but really aren’t.
Have you ever wondered how ridiculous it would be to say you love cars and then not have a clue about how it works? As in, "I've built a wonderful car", but have no idea how the engine or any of the components work.
Replace "car" with "application" or "software", and that's what you're doing. Would you get in a car "built" by someone who knows nothing about cars?
This doesn't sound like someone who is uninterested in understanding software though, everything they said talks about how they like being able to learn from it. They didn't say anything about making slop or replacing the need for knowledge
> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
You google something, and the AI overview makes shit up. Just happened the other day with my oven - it hallucinated a diagnostic step that doesn't exist on my model.
You go to type an email in gmail, and it tries to suggest sentences as you're typing. Press the wrong key and now you have to delete what it inserted. The things it suggests are just wordy platitudes, not things you actually intend to say.
You open instagram and the feed is full of slop, or worse - incendiary AI generated videos of things that never happened.
You get 3 page rambling replies to your posts online that obviously aren't human, and now you get the choice of ignoring the lies or arguing with a bot.
You go to work and half the QA team has been fired - replaced with AI. Now tickets you were talking with a human about get closed without resolution or meander off into meaninglessness without the human who actual encountered the issue, and your job gets harder.
Your boss leans on you all day, every day - why aren't you using AI for X, Y, Z? "I tried", you say, "and it kept hallucinating a library that doesn't exist". Doesn't matter, velocity must be higher now because we're AI native.
You turn on the news and Sam Altman is talking about how in 2 years you won't have a job anymore. Don't worry, they say, this is inevitable.
You call your doctor about some heartburn. Instead of a human, you get a machine. The receptionist you knew for 5 years is gone. You describe your symptoms and good news! There's an appointment available in 3 months. You schedule it, and go. You have to describe all your symptoms again, because the transcription has hallucinations in it and didn't catch that bit where you mumbled. Your doctor bill is higher, again, despite the lower staffing.
You get your electric bill and it's gone up again - 20% higher than last year. The datacenter down the street is getting a tax break though, good for them.
On and on it goes. Prices get higher, quality of service gets worse. It gets harder to find accurate information. Google used to be reliable, now half the results are slop.
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Meanwhile, people with $350k salaries, fantastic health insurance, and 2500 shares of GOOGL vesting are looking around - "why don't you love it?"
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This is how a lot of people are experiencing the current AI revolution.
as regards posts online, left out the part where you fret (or do not know enough to fret) about the fact that you not knowing if it is a bot or not is part of the problem, or how it could affect you if you reply or not. many times, so many bots and drones have been unleashed looking for a juicy person to take down or troll that you find it difficult to interact online under your own identity, then find it difficult to show you have an online presence when you need to without worrying that that identity will get taken down a notch or three if someone who knows your online handle interacts with one that then goes after their contacts, and so on.
the part about medical "hallucinations" is especially spot on. my last attempt at an ai-enabled zoom session was so wrong it got almost every identifying thing about me wrong (eg, race), read my blood results wrong even though the outside of normal range color guidance was there (I am anemic), then near as I can tell the person after me was (redacted) and showed me as (redacted) (I have had at least five blood panels this year; i am not (redacted)). they may have also had some other diagnoses but i think maybe i am supposed to be bound by the hipaa the ai was ignoring. pretty bad.
> as regards posts online, left out the part where you fret (or do not know enough to fret) about the fact that you not knowing if it is a bot or not is part of the problem, or how it could affect you if you reply or not. many times, so many bots and drones have been unleashed looking for a juicy person to take down or troll that you find it difficult to interact online under your own identity, then find it difficult to show you have an online presence when you need to without worrying that that identity will get taken down a notch or three if someone who knows your online handle interacts with one that then goes after their contacts, and so on.
Yep, I just went from the top of my head and I left a lot of other negative experiences out. I think a lot of people are moving to burner accounts or otherwise choosing to not interact under their real identities - it's just too easy to spin up automated harassment now.
> the part about medical "hallucinations" is especially spot on. my last attempt at an ai-enabled zoom session was so wrong it got almost every identifying thing about me wrong, read my blood results wrong even though the outside of normal range color guidance was there, then near as I can tell the person after me was (redacted) and showed me as (redacted) (I have had at least five blood panels this year; i am not (redacted)).
Another fun one: a friend of mine said he "was driving a car to Sedona" during a phone call describing a neck injury several months ago. His last two follow up appointments have both had a note to "follow up on the carcinoma". Now that it's in the context, it seems impossible to get LLMs to ignore it, because "carcinoma" is an important word. A human would not have this problem.
I agree that sucks, though if the LLMs aren't following him with it, that might be beneficial if annoying; physicians are more likely to remember to follow up on that diagnosis than an upper spinal issue.
then again. during covid I had the same small set of ads show up on youtube over and over so much while I was working that I had to move, wipe everything, get a new laptop and nic cards, and create new email addresses to avoid those keywords which I never looked up in the first place. so yes, that following him would suck. if he or anyone he knows works near AI, take my advice and make sure it is corrected. it SUCKS.
aye. at the same time it is harder to get an email account not linked to your real identity in some way (most services want sms; even if you pay for something, your gps is there). i mean, some people abuse things. that doesn't mean i or you should be silenced or treated like dirt. even if it does not fit a norm, it is still better than being hunted to be silenced. this is what i have witnessed ai being used for, and it is getting worse with kids.
people forget people from different stratas use tech in different ways. the way a middle class kid picks on another kid and a lower or upper class one does is different, just as the way they use tech to do so varies.
most of these complaints aren't because of AI though, managers have always looked to make staff redundant when there is a cheaper alternative regardless of quality, politicians giving tax breaks to giant corporations? was always happening before AI came along
You are perfectly welcome to blame it on capitalism, and you're not entirely wrong, but before LLMs machines couldn't fill these roles at all - so LLMs are the enabling technology here that is being used to justify the cuts.
sure but capitalism is ultimately the driving force to making more profit at the expense of making things ultimately shittier? capitalism has inherently always done this, this is not a new concept, I don't understand why everyone acts like it's so different when it comes to AI. AI is a tool that's useful for some things, not so good at other things.
Again - we’re on a discussion thread about why people don’t like AI right now.
Yes, the root problem is generally enshittification and capitalism, but AI is the tool that is being used the most for this enshittification now, so it is completely understandable that people are pissed off at AI.
In a vacuum, LLMs and AI are cool. In practice, in the real world today, they are being used to make most peoples lives worse, while funneling a ton of money to ~25 people.
i think it is more correct to call it hypercapitalism at this point (and a particularly sociopathic variety of it); as a "response", the "other side" has created their own bizarre oppositional belief system. neither are healthy, both lead to bad things.
The "obvious" one: supply chain chaos due to everyone and their dog spending as much as possible for AI boxen
Every investor being full on AI has lead to big corps massively increasing AI spend, instead of "just" hiring people (talk to people who graduated from school in the past year...)
I've seen some commentary about how SV turning from an "infinite cash reserves" place to a "let's massively load up on debt" place is unraveling a lot of the financial status quo (There's an only slightly curved line from this dynamic changing to East Asian currency pains, and then from there to impeding US debt crisis)
A big undercurrent of _entire demographics being driven insane_ by all the AI nonsense. People have always had problems with "fake" imagery/etc, but it used to take a bit of time. And it used to require a lot of time to convince yourself that you were a super genius by reading a bunch of Wikipedia and coming up with your own pet theory of the world.
There are rumors that Trump is getting shown AI vids on the state of the war.
And way low on the scale of things: every goddamn restaurant since 2024 using AI image gen, meaning you have no goddamn clue what the food you're ordering actually is. Or you do but you know that it's _not_ what is pictured. And the logos are all ugly.
> And way low on the scale of things: every goddamn restaurant since 2024 using AI image gen, meaning you have no goddamn clue what the food you're ordering actually is. Or you do but you know that it's _not_ what is pictured. And the logos are all ugly.
Pictures in menus just vaguely resembling the actual dish. Dunno what value the authors think a made up picture provides except for tourist traps. Like, I wont trust your menu twice.
I didn't anticipate McDonalds menu pictures becoming in the authentic and informative range of menus.
The AI slop that's everywhere is making it worse. Even if someone doesn't care about AI, their feeds (YT, Instagram, LinkedIn) is now filled with AI slop
IME people actually adore the videos of people eating a dripping and crunchy pulav (soft and dry rice dish) and it filling the stomach in 3 swallows, completely unchewed.
There is nothing about using the most popular social media platforms in the world that implies someone doesn't have an active and healthy social life. If you think it does, you may be projecting.
Clearly there are people who enjoy the slop though, otherwise it would simply get no engagement and then get hidden by the algo like 99.99% of YT videos
Yeah most normies I know who dislike it just generally are not interested in it or think it is dumb and are annoyed by hearing about it so much
And the people who actively hate it almost always relate it to a broader pre-existing worldview about the downfall of society, the climate being destroyed, financial markets being a ponzi, oligarchy having too much power etc
> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
I’m not sure I was go quite as far. But there are certainly
Makes my life better: LLM chat subscription
Makes my life worse: “AI” features that don’t work replacing perfectly good non “AI” features (notably Google Maps and LinkedIn job board). I don’t want fuzzy AI filters, I want concrete filters that let me drill down and browse a result list.
The bar should probably be even higher in education than elsewhere. If an AI tool saves a student 30 minutes but also removes the 30 minutes where they would have struggled with the material, it may look like a productivity win while being an educational loss
Most people I know that hate AI have faulty versions (1 year behind the frontier) pushed on them at their jobs. People who are free to experiment with frontier models capabilities at their own pace mostly love it or at least are impressed by its capability.
This sounds like some variation of correlation // causation. The people that already like working with (or are addicted to) LLMs would look to try the frontier models on their own time.
I wouldn't say so. I recently gifted ZCode with a sub to a non-programmer that didn't have much contact with AI and not really any truly unique positive one (only free tier), and wasn't an enthusiast.
In few days she created an already useful app for writing for herself with zero assistance from me. And she's delighted with the process, even seeing its flaws (as mucb as non-programmer can see them).
The thing is, she's very intelligent, even though only mildly technical. She's very communicative and thoughtful, so she finds "talking" to AI interesting psychologically (while being fully aware AI doesn't have feelings or consciousness). And she has no history of AI getting pushed on her in any context.
Compare to my other friend that's ecologically conscious amateur artist. Initially she was interested in using it in AI generated art, but it wasn't all that good (amd steerable) back then. Then her work started pushing it. With their CEO saying things to the tune of "do or die" and people losing their jobs regardless. And the thing they were pushing was some crappy version of Copilot, that she gave a chance but it was more burden than help at her job most of the times. She pretty much hates AI now and as for the art, she sees it getting better but decides that what's attractive for her in art is the physical process of drawing and tools associated. AI tools don't give her the kind of joy she seeks.
Of course this is just a bunch of anecdotes. But I'd be surprised if pushing bad AI on people with additional stressful factors wouldn't cause them to like it less and hate it more.
You also have to answer why, if the AI project pans out, we would care about education.
We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it.
We're building mechanical brains, and the human thought that was needed before the intelligence revolution is no longer important; some people may still study, but it'll be a hobby, and the people who participate in the intelligence revolution (rather than being crushed by it) will no longer need to think.
> We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it.
The amount of strength required for the median job may have decreased, but that doesn't mean that nobody needs to do it. The health ramifications of not strength training are constant, and the same can be said for using (or not using) our brains.
You can say that, but check how many people are going to the gym regularly, let alone training up to the standard of strength of an average manual laborer from before the industrial revolution.
If AI fills its promise, some people will be telling others they should think more, but people will get lazy.
If AI fulfills its promise and we get superintelligence, humans will not be capable of contributing anything of economic value via thought, possibly outside of small, comstrained niches.
You may as well try to outlift a crane.
Either this whole AI thing fails, and we never make the last small number of breakthroughs (or scaling) that gets us intelligent machines, or the obsolescence of the human brain is inevitable.
I'm betting that machines are going to end up intelligent, at least in the moderate future.
This is the quality of thought that I come to HN to experience because I have a hard time finding it in other places.
The amount of assumptions about what it might mean to "think" coupled with a seeming obliviousness to those assumptions is quire masterful.
The dumbest people making the most confident statements about thinking...
I love it.
I am going to print it out so that when my great-great-grand kids are hunting angus beef on the plains of what used to be the US they will have some understanding of how the late 21st C version of a Butlerian Jihad came to be.
This is beautiful and I hope that all you folks actually do stop thinking even harder than you already have, because it might liberate the rest of the humans from the Torment Nexus v3.0 you folks seem so dead set on rolling out post haste.
Its definitely a hype phase and yes a lot of usage is questionable at the moment. To me the scary part is that some of the impacts/decisions would take years if not decades to be measurable and its possible that its a lost battle by then.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claim about most people hating AI because it’s making their life worse? Or are you simply spewing opinion as fact because of your own anecdotal experience? It’s okay to have an opinion on something, but don’t lie and claim it as truth.
Absence of like is quite far from hate. I expect most people feel about it the way they do about most tools: mostly they have better things to think about
It's made my life way better. I love it, it's incredible boost on my ability to learn and produce.
Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either.
Remember when people said open-sourcing GPT2 would cause world destruction? They keep saying this with every new model release? And it keeps not happening? Hmm.
This is all FUD. All evidence suggests more AI is better, and all claims to the contrary keep being proven wrong, and all predictions of doom keep refusing to manifest.
I have and, Microsoft aside, it all works great. Don't need search engines anymore, AI does all my research now and produces better information anyway.
Are you living with your head under a rock. AI has absolutely made my life worse, and is set to do so further. I know very few people who are seriously enthusiastic about it.
"All evidence suggests more AI is better" is ignoring an awful lot of the evidence, and the doom is already happening all around you and you just can't see it.
Really don't understand this sentiment. Whatever you imagine you can now build; whatever you wish to learn you can learn; all for virtually nothing. How does that make life worse?
I think pessimism clouds your judgment and AI is the scapegoat. Doomerism is just yet another dogmatic religion predicting ends times, with all the usual associated dogma.
What you imagine is what you manifest. Better to be optimistic and wrong then pessimistic and right.
Better to envision a positive future and help make it happen; ignore the doomers who can only envision destruction, as that is all they are capable of.
fwiw I enjoy AI. but it is extraordinarily dangerous and does not belong in the hands of most people, and definitely not in the hands of most companies. it is a munition.
> it certainly belongs in the hands of citizens to defend themselves against corporations and governments.
this strategy is only employed by one country in the planet.
the goverment used illegal funds to start a paramilitary border police that has murdered multiple legal citizens on camera. No ICE agent has been shot by anyone defending themselves against goverment overreach
Companies like Flock have deployed swarms of survaillance with no civillian uprising, companies like Palantir and Meta are openly in bed with the goverment while they pass patents like "facial recognition in all their glasses and its not opt out"
That country even saw a bunch of insurrectionists enter its capitol and the traitors werent shot on sight by patriots.
Idk man, the whole "we need guns to defend ourselves" doesnt seem to work when morons crave the boot in their neck more than freedom. It mostly seems to just escalate minor disagreements, facilitate self harm, and making schools into increasingly dangerous institutions for children. I guess it also gives insecure men an incredibly dangerous tool to try and hide their feelings of irrelevance.
Maybe therapy is cheaper than an AR-15 to hide the fact that 50% of the population cant read at a 6th grade level and feel dumb, scared and unimportant
¿Por qué no los dos? "We deem those happy who, from the experience of life, have learned to bear its ills without being overcome by them."
> to hide the fact that 50% of the population cant read at a 6th grade level and feel dumb, scared and unimportant
If you must remain in the jurisdiction, manage your risk with the tools available to you. If you do not want to remain, leaving is an option. Do what is best for you. "It is what it is."
Bugdet and also because convincing idiots with guns to go see an expert who is going to trigger their fear of irrelevance is a quick way to get them to use that gun, either on the therapist or themselves.
> If you must remain in the jurisdiction, manage your risk with the tools available to you.
Great quote to support my initial point. The jurisdiction is the country and the tool availeble is the prohibition of guns.
Thus managing the provable increased risk of death against the unrealised potential of civilian uprising to fascism. Which came with claps and no shots
Everyone I know loves AI. It is actively making their lives better. All kinds of people, all kind of ages - universally love it and use it every day for all kind of stuff (shopping, health, learning, home improvement, etc, etc).
The people I know who like it the most are at least aware of a lot of the problems with it. I’m surprised everyone in your friend group is uncritically enamored by it.
I see it ruining interactions at work. There's a lot of meat-proxy-ism going on, where people copy-and-paste back and forth between AI.
It's filling the Internet with trash. Look around anywhere: Reddit, YouTube, individual blogs, it doesn't matter. You'll find generative garbage as far as the eye can see. Not all generative content is bad, but a lot of it is outright crap.
It can be a productive tool though. Still, I don't find it enjoyable to use. If you like the "journey" of programming (tinkering, "figuring things out", problem solving), you won't like AI as much. It removes the fun part. If you like the "destination" (the end result of building a thing), you'll love it.
You must live in a bubble; 16% of Americans think AI is making their lives better, the remainder are evenly split between not knowing and disliking it.
It's still inevitable, but people aren't dumb, and they know that it's only going to help those who manage to escape the permanent underclass.
It'll eliminate the toil of thinking, but that also means that the people who make a living selling their thinking will end up replaced. Educators especially -- because, once we've automated thinking, it becomes economically worthless. Strength used to be very important, until the industrial revolution replaced muscle with steam and steel. AI will do the same for brains, and thinking will become a sport, similar to weight lifting; most people simply won't bother. Some people will win in this world, lots are going to lose.
We're obviously not there yet, but if you think to where we were two years ago, we're probably only a few breakthroughs and improvements away.
US views on AI are interesting. There is actually some nuance in the answers people give :
"50% say they’re more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021.
10% are more excited than concerned.
38% say they’re equally excited and concerned."
I'm not American, but most people I know who are not in tech just use ChatGPT like they'd use Google but better e.g. what bird is this, what's a good word for X or Y, what's the weather, what was that movie with Z. Edit this meme for me, make this photo not have the guy in the back, how do I grow chillies, etc.
Now if you ask them if AI is making their lives better, they might say they don't know.
What country/region of country (if US) do you live in? Everyone I know absolutely hates it and hates the direction things are going. I'm pulling from a wide sample here too -- I have a lot of friends who work blue collar jobs that hate it just as much as my tech worker friends. However I will say I'm in my late 20s and it seems like my age group and younger are more anti-AI than any other age bracket.
I think the thing people can't face is that it makes our lives worse not because it's worse than us.
It makes our lives worse because it is better. It is superior. And our lives are worse because it is actively replacing us and we are actively trying to keep up with it.
Currently: generating hype at a lower cost without emotion. Is the product itself better? Often no. But salaries have a large weight in the consideration, and hype corroborates the choice.
If the hype wasn't real why have people stopped coding by hand? People like you are delusional. The hype is real.
Now, that being said there is something to be said about AI making your life easier. It's not making your life easier. It's upping your output by 10x but it's also upping the demand for output by 10x.
It's an interesting approach that's way simpler than relying on soil moisture sensors placed high up on mountainsides. It's not as widely applicable as measuring soil moisture directly, but it's been running steadily for over 5 years now.
I didn't see this until this morning, and the continuing through for the whole 18 words was a really good experience. I got 14/18, and that was much more satisfying than ending at my first failure.
There's a 7-minute version, with two more verses that aren't in the version you always hear on the radio. The one starting at 3:45 in that video is particularly powerful and chilling.
> Every now and then, I know you'll never be the boy
you always wanted to be. But every now and then, I know you'll always be the only boy who wanted me the way that I am. Every now and then, I know there's no one in the universe as magical and wondrous as you. Every now and then, I know there's nothing any better. There's nothing that I just wouldn't do.
Well, I never knew this till now:
> With 'Total Eclipse of the Heart', I was trying to come up with a love song and I remembered I actually wrote that to be a vampire love song. Its original title was 'Vampires in Love' because I was working on a musical of Nosferatu, the other great vampire story. If anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines. It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in the dark.
Not sure why you were downvoted, it is super interesting. I know nothing of songwriting but it seems like that could be read by a singing performer in similarly to how sheet music is read by an instrument performer. In the graph, there's additional information than just the words that a singer would need to perform the song accurately.
/re-iterate i know almost nothing of music except what i like which i've been informed over and over is incorrect hah.
I've been a musician for nearly 3 decades and this diagram is how really good songwriters think about structuring popular music. They just usually don't write it down like this. It's not only useful for lyrics, but for harmonic progression as well. As for the downvotes, it's probably because most here don't understand songwriting and think the diagram was nothing more than a joke.
I think there should be "An Infinite Literature Contest", where the contestants would submit a formal grammar and the texts in the language would be judged for literary and other qualities.
It doesn't look like the second has been cut off to get the first, because the font is different. It looks like the second was an attempt to extend the first (also, it kills the joke)
When vehicles were starting to get noticeably bigger about 20 years ago, I asked some family members why they were buying vehicles they had to climb up into.
"On the highway, I'd rather kill someone than be killed in a wreck."
They would not recognize that while that might work for a while, it wasn't going to lead anywhere good for our society. A generation of people thinking like that has filled our roads with vehicles that protect their occupants while making it more dangerous for everyone else.
> In fact, I think Guido himself resigned due to the experience he had trying to get a PEP through the committee.
If you're referring to the steering council, that group was created in response to Guido stepping down.
He stepped down partly in response to the changing nature of online discussions around changes to the language. He just didn't want to be at the center of every polarizing discussion anymore. I think he also recognized that the transition needed to happen at some point, and that was as good a time as any.
> But adoption is the starting line, not the scoreboard.
Yes yes, shout it from the rooftops! Over the next few years I think we're going to see that companies that get this point will keep doing meaningful things, and stand a chance of weathering this transition period.
I think we're going to see a bunch of companies that went all in on AI for AI's sake go under because they've lost their mission, lost their implementation, and won't have a way to get those back in a reasonable timeframe and at a reasonable cost.
This is great, but it's also easy to go too far in this direction. This can work through elementary school and into middle school, but I don't think it works in high school.
It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young age, but it's way more isolating than people realize. You might have a landline, but if no other high school age people are making voice calls to communicate, no one's going to call that landline. And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities.
We have plenty of conflict in our home around devices, so I don't criticize any particular approaches. I'd just say that if you're taking this approach, it's probably a good idea to figure out how you're going to transition to kids having devices as they get into their high school years.
Protecting your kids from dopamine-drip algorithms and the effects of social media and short-form video during their most formative years and gradually letting them take over as they mature sounds like… parenting.
I've been there, but going to cybercafés instead of having an internet connection at home until very late. A simlar case with a mobile phone, having to use the one from my dad until I had 18.
I nearly ended up alone, as anynone would expected. Parents understood too late the value of sharing common culture points, up to the point to apologyze and feeling really desperate on the consecuences.
Cracking up wifi and such saved me up a little, but not much. I missed TONS of stuff and experiences. When I could finally got all the media and proper skills, it was really damn late.
Don't do this to your kids, then. Time doesn't roll back. Ever. Don't be a shitty narcisist parent and let your kids develop their OWN tastes.
I’m sorry this happened to you. However nothing in my reply implies cutting your children off from the world. Helping them avoid the harms of algorithmic feeds until they have developed the maturity to navigate them helps them be more connected to the world, not less.
With all due respect I think you are reading more there due to your own experiences, which sound like abuse, not parenting.
Indeed. But in the skills case, ahem, formally, in paper. When I did a finished and advanced trade (pre-University IT, syadmin role), I aced the results as I had plenty of time to even make small patches to BTTV to support my $ELCHEAPO Conceptronic TV card. Having no internet at home made me really 'roguery' on how to achieve stuff, from cracking cable TV to inspect DVB packets, hack cable modems and pirate wifi. No formal education, just by myself, and I could do a trade from age 23 to 27 being lazy as hell because everything was trivial as I could read tons of the bundled books in the Debian Sarge DVD's.
I became really competent on how to 'survive' offline and Unix skills, far more than even the best ones in the grade (and even some math skills from a first year of College, among Lisp), but with really bad social skills but better since I met my SO at age 23 which convinced me to earn a trade. But I'm still a bit depressive for what I suffered.
Parents, listen to your kids, listen to your kids instead of sending them to a therapist, that won't work. Help on their tastes, support them, don't be a hardcore Mc Scrooge Cheapskate.
Spoiled kids are bad, OFC, but the polar opposite can be pretty much as dangerous if not more.
I coudn't even spend the money I had on Christmas on my own preferences since age 14 to 18, and I had to return a Chinese Megadrive console clone I won in a holyday lottery bingo in 1997 because you had to actually buy a separate cartridge.
I coudn't even buy cartridges for a NES I've got from my parents' friends because that was 'wasting money'. So, yes, I played all the games my peers got... about 7 years later, feeling myself more and more disconnected from the world and having to do huge efforst to switch from PC gaming and such back and forth. It was tiring. That would really burn you because you are like having to swtich back and forth from totally opposite cultures, my parents' one and my uncle/aunts' one.
I purchased Mudita Kompakt phones for my kids when they started secondary school. There has been some pushback but overall it’s been a success.
The fact that they occasionally forget to take it with them or they leave it downstairs when they go to bed, makes me comfortable that it doesn’t have addicting properties.
And, because it’s android any apps demanded by school can easily be side loaded.
That costs more than the last seven phones I've bought. Not total, but each. I was expecting maybe $100, but $400? Is this a joke? A $400 dumbphone that isn't gold plated?
I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school.
In Australia this is normal. The distribution of phones increases slowly during high school, not before. Kids don't really use phones anyway, they use some combination of online games and messaging apps so they can do it from a computer or tablet without a phone.
My kids used the home phone for many years before they got their own cell phones. They would call their friends and grandparents. (The grandparents loved it)
I don't think enough parents have internalized that if they're the "I don't let my teenager have a phone" parent in 2026, that also means they're the "I don't let my teenager have friends" parent.
There's a line to toe - each kid is different, but with my daughter she went from a flip phone in middle school, to a smart phone in high school.
We didn't turn on mobile data for her smart phone (hand me down pixel) until about a year ago.
She is very responsible with it and it hasn't been much of an issue. She had no problems making friends, and if her phone was filtering shallow people out her friend pool a bit that probably wasn't a bad thing.
Now, my oldest son is dying to have a smartphone but really he just wants to use it as a tablet. I installed lineageOS on an old D821/Nexus5 and it can run some mobile games, and we have a chromebook.
We'll try the same flip phone in middle-school route for him. It fulfills the basic needs of emergency contact, and is a good test of responsibility with lower stakes.
My gut reaction was "well, you can give them a phone, just lock down tiktok and other crap" but then I was thinking "well, in the end that doesn't matter in practice, they can buy a used device from a friend for pocket money and hiding it from me will be trivial", so... it all comes down to my relationship with the kid. Nothing else will work.
This is a symptom of not encouraging children into extracurricular activities. If all you have to bond over is social media, your friendship is empty. That's how you create terminally-online, mentally ill people. Everyone needs third spaces like sports, scouts, music, church, clubs, and the like. They get you out of your house and head and surround you with people who share similar interests.
my kid's extracurricular activity groups like to chat outside of club-time, too. being the only one of the group not able to do so would be ostracizing.
I understand deeply. My parents delayed my driver's license until I was 17 because of financial tightness at the time, and that distanced me from some of my friends at the time. You know what I gained from that? I got to see who my real friends were, and even more importantly, I learned that not all friends are the same in a visceral way. I learned how to confront my parents in a way to communicate my viewpoint in a way they could understand. We learned together how to compromise and renegotiate our entire relationship, helping transition from child/parent to adult/parent.
You have two jobs as a parent: create a safe environment for your children and prepare them for the adult world that is wildly unsafe. Unfortunately, these two goals are both required and contradictory. A line must be walked. Too much deviation to one side or the other will cause severe problems.
That line cannot be prescribed. It's different for each child, but there's a big problem with how you put your point. You aren't trying to prepare the child for a dangerous and difficult world, you are trying to protect them in a different way, minimizing the other dangers. I completely understand. It hurts to see your child hurt. All you want to do is make the pain go away.
Instead of helping them avoid the pain of learning about relationships, you should guide them. Help them understand. They won't at first. Like a toddler throwing a tantrum that you won't let them stick objects in wall outlets, parents have to be the "bad guy" from time to time. Eventually, the toddler will grow up enough so that you can explain dangers to them and you won't have to do it for that thing anymore. The same applies here. They won't understand at first. Help them understand the dangers. When they do, you can teach them how to safely use the metaphorical wall outlet. Then you don't have to be the bad guy anymore.
You're right. If you think you are walking that line for each of your children, then you are the authority. It's just a common argument I hear from parents who want to avoid feeling bad, so I did make some assumptions.
My extracurricular activities were full of nerds (martial arts) with Play Stations and internet at home. So, as an owner of no inet or a console at home was pretty much hell from 2001 to 2005. Oh, and no cell phone until ~18.
The outcome? Really shitty social skills until I hit 27 or so. My dad really regreted what it did, and my mom become aware on how utterly shitty was to let a nerdy kid disconnected from their peers.
It hasn't been a problem for us. Our child has a cellular enabled Apple Watch (it has its own phone number). At home, the iPad satisfies all the other needs, and is restricted with Screen Time and Downtime. YMMV (kids are different)
So many areas in the US are much less walkable and bikeable than they used to be. I say that as someone who bicycle commuted for years. When I rode my bike to school as a kid I dealt with 25-35 mph traffic. The traffic was much lighter, the vehicles were much smaller, the drivers weren't perfect but they were way less distracted, and the shoulders were in better shape.
We can try to raise our kids with values that are consistent with the ones we grew up with. But trying to give them the same conditions because "it's what we did" doesn't always match up with reality.
Is it true that pickup truck drivers often threaten to run over bikes to assert dominance or is that just one of those myths about how crazy America is?
It depends on your definition of "threaten", but the short answer is yes. I live in a mountainous area that's a destination for road bikers and mountain bikers. There's lots of sources of tension between cyclists and drivers.
On a regular basis I see people racing past cyclists, rolling coal at cyclists (I can't believe that's even a term now), blaring horns, and a number of other behaviors that fall under "threatening".
US vehicles, especially pickups, have outgrown a lot of rural roads that had their origins as footpaths and horse paths. Even with well-intentioned cyclists and drivers, it's often times a setup for conflict.
I wear Lycra, ride a funny-looking carbon road bike, and average about 3,000 miles a year. In college, I rode a beater bike everywhere for transportation instead of owning a car. I’ve never experienced that kind of thing, though I’ve heard occasional stories.
Drivers don’t pay attention and seem like they’re trying to kill you, but that feels more like recklessness than malice.
Ah, beautiful times. I remember that me and my friend abused Orange's feature to send voicemail messages directly to the voicemail inbox, without calling the other person at all. Since it was billed by the second, if you spoke very fast, it became much cheaper than SMS.
Works great until your kid's the one that can't join their friends on, say, grabbing dinner after band practice, because they have no way of telling you "hey, change of plans".
If your kid can only participate in things that are planned well in advance, your kid is going to be missing out on ~80% of gatherings. Because everyone else is in the habit of making spontaneous plans, made possible by interconnectivity.
Are we talking about 8 year olds, or 15 year olds?
I think it's fine to give your 8th grader a flip phone. A third grader isn't "grabbing dinner after band practice".
For sports practice, I'd just take the sports bus home; the 30-60 minutes between the end of practice and the time the bus left was perfect for a little quiet reading or homework.
For band practice, I'd call my parents from the office phone, or plan to get a ride home from an older student who lived nearby, or just accept that I might miss out on something when mom picked me up at 6:30 and that's ok.
And: payphones were ubiquitous. Car parks, bus stops, restaurants, bars, other businesses, random street corners, airports, bus depots, train stations. Probably several at a given high school at different locations. So long as you had loose change they were a reliable option. These started to disappear in the late 1990s, though support continued generally through the late aughts, and in certain locales (e.g., NYC) through the late 2010s.
There's some interesting technological anthropology in The Paper Chase, a film set at Harvard Law School in the early 1970s (released 1973), there is a payphone on the dorm floor, and it is the only phone available. That and a number of other elements date the film in ways that other set-dressing (costumes, architecture, cars) don't convey as emphatically.
The issue isn't that it couldn't be done without technology. The problem is when everyone else has moved on to the technology based solution (mobile phones) if you don't you're just out of luck.
In Juneau, this is a well-defined basin with well-established dynamics. The city still wrestles with how best to handle this. Recent years have seen higher river levels when the basin releases, and the downstream banks of the Mendenhall River have eroded much faster than people were expecting. The city and individual homeowners are engaged in multiple projects to manage the annual flooding.
In the Nepal case the scale is much larger, and the variables are less known and less stable. This is absolutely devastating to see.
https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/2026/08/12/juneau-officials-...
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