"Treat" != "cure"

I see more of these comments now but it's not enough that it's bothered me. I wonder why our experiences differ.

My observation of Epstein "mania" is that politicians are revealing themselves to not particularly care about children being sexualized.

The push for age verification seems to stem from conservative states trying to appear to care about children through symbolic gestures while cutting other funding and protections for children.

Conservative states? California passed this bill first! And it's on the docket in Colorado! This is weapons-grade dark money bullshit, not a blue-or-red problem.

"Used" seems to be a typo.

Being anti-Oxford comma is baffling. It's almost zero extra effort and reduces confusion.

Whether GP is low-info or not, HN guidelines say to assume the best of someone and not to insult them.

Calling people ignorant doesn't make them want to change their minds. It just makes them dislike you.

Why do you think the US couldn't take over the Strait of Hormuz (or any other territory not currently held by a nuclear military)?

I imagine that if they can't even stop the hail of missiles on tanker ships, they certainly can't take over the strait.

I mean, er, see Iraq, Afghanistan (multiple times), Ukraine, etc etc. Invading places tends to, in practice, be rather difficult.

This is a valid question. I agree politically with a lot of Bluesky users and still find it to be an awful space to hang out in.

I agree, I'm sorry to say.

I personally believe it's because they replicated the same incentive structure as Twitter. Being provocative generates engagement, which gets you reach and creates the perception of relevance.

At first, people were just happy to be at an alternative to Elon Twitter. But good vibes only get you so far when the incentives point the other direction.

It's insufferable, yes. Even though I'm a left-liberal, it feels foreign to me. Twitter is worse at the limit (endless neo-Nazis and Maoists) but at least I feel some diversity while I'm there. Bluesky is so uniform in the annoyingness of its community.

Gemini, Waymo, and Wing are very experimental

Pichai is being evaluated for his effect on stock price. His shareholders don't care if every product and service they offer has gotten worse for users in the meantime.

Gemini keeping pace with Claude and ChatGPT is clearly some kind of management victory, because Zuckerberg and Musk don't seem to be able to do it despite having limitless cash to spend.

Don't give Pichai credit for that. Google had the strongest ML research org on the planet before he took over, and it had Demis, arguably the best researcher in the field (and it had Geoffrey Hinton before that). The fact that goog was so far behind OAI despite Demis blazing frontiers was a major management failure.

Sundar's enshittification has also juiced short term share prices at the cost of long term health. It might turn out to be a decent decision for search because it's in the midst of being disrupted, but that's a happy accident for Sundar, not 4d chess (and you can argue the enshittification hastened the disruption).

naive question: which product and service has gotten worse?

Like they removed the youtube dislike button

what else?

Everything seems to be getting better. Tying incentives to Waymo is almost unfair because Waymo is amazing and just keeps getting better.

Text search (without Gemini) and Gmail are much worse than they used to be. Android is less open, Chrome doesn't allow proper ad-blocking, YouTube has insane ads if you don't have Premium.