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Exactly right. Also, better to be overly restrictive here given the well documented harms of social media on young minds. If the law stipulates that you must be 15 to obtain social media access, and most people don't get their IDs until 18, then most people will stay off social media for another three years: no big deal.

100% correct. At this point the harms to children from social media use are very well documented.

Like everything else in society, there are tradeoffs here, I'm much more concerned with the damage done to children's developing brains than I am to violations of data privacy, so I'm okay with age verification, however draconian it may be.


> At this point the harms to children from social media use are very well documented

Our middle child (aged 12) has an Android phone, but it has Family Link on it.

Nominally he gets 60 mins of phone time per day, but he rarely even comes close to that, according to Family Link he used it for a total of 17 minutes yesterday. One comes to the conclusion that with no social media apps, the phone just isn't that attractive.

He seems to spend most of his spare time reading or playing sports...


I commend this but I always try to think about the arguments for something like cigarettes. People didn’t buy the argument that parents need to be preventing their kids from smoking

most kids dont have parents who care to that degree.

As part of the unofficial bargain in which we limit screen time I get to spend a big chunk of my spare time driving him (and his siblings) to and from various sports fixtures.

Just one of the many joys of parenting :)


We need to destroy privacy and anonymity online for the noble goal of the government banning teenagers from looking at Twitter and Instagram?

If it's a concern, parents can prevent or limit their children's use. If all this were being done to prevent consistent successful terrorist attacks in the US with tens of thousands of annual casualties, I'd say okay maybe there is an unavoidable trade-off that must be made here, but this is so absurd.


"Preserving privacy and anonymity online" is not an inherent good. It depends on how it is being used and what the consequences on society are.

Thus far, privacy and anonymity have been used to get children addicted to garbage, distribute CSAM, create elaborate schemes of financial fraud (cryptocurrency), and develop drug distribution networks.

It's completely reasonable to limit privacy in order to combat these social evils.


It isn’t just about teenagers though I think I outlined that? We need to make sure people online are real people and yes we should prevent kids from being exposed to algorithms designed to addict then.

Adults are nearly as susceptible to such addiction. If this is the goal then the actual legislation should be to prohibit social media companies from doing it to anyone. (I think this would be government overreach and a possible first amendment violation, though. I say this as a center-left person who deeply hates what Musk has done to Twitter. I would even describe myself as an anti-free speech person; I just respect the nation's laws and the principle that the state should not be able to imprison you just for speech.)

Do you genuinely believe the major tech companies and gov reps actually want to close their addiction revenue taps?

100%. I do this all the time, this will be very useful internally.


This was the norm about a decade ago. When I was at Hulu, we built our own analytics platform on top of Hadoop, we almost certainly wouldn't have done that today with the amount of off-the-shelf stuff available.

Even things like protobuf or Avro weren't as broadly adopted (>80%) at the time, many many companies at the time persisted stuff using JSON or other text formats (which in retrospect was very dumb, but it was very normal for a while).


Beyond that, someone as emotionally brittle and allergic to criticism as he is will inevitably create a yes-men culture, which will destroy engineering discipline & lead to declining quality. No way around it.

The one thing you absolutely need to preserve engineering quality is the ability to take criticism.


It isn't clear Tesla ever had quality. His management persona was in place day one and has very consistently made decisions that negatively affect quality, much less the real challenge of building a car company from scratch. Teslas have pretty consistently ranked low on quality rankings.


What are you talking about? Removing turn signal stalks and adding a yoke with no progressive steering is engineering at its absolute finest. Do you really think Elon would just surround himself with yes men that implement stupid ideas just because he thinks it "looks cool"?


> Do you really think Elon would just surround himself with yes men that implement stupid ideas just because he thinks it "looks cool"?

Yes, I suspect a lot of us do think exactly that.


I think the commenter was being sarcastic via the "Removing turn signal stalks and adding a yoke with no progressive steering is engineering at its absolute finest" remark.


I was definitely being sarcastic!


Sorry for taking that wrong. The fanboy logic can be so ridiculous at times that it's really hard to tell.


I honestly struggle to tell these days.


Me too. I use the sarcastic mark (/s) nowadays when conveying that through text.


I would argue that it made sense for performance-sensitive code until the maturation of Rust, so it made sense even in 2015. But not today.


you pay a performance penalty

and i don’t want to learn another language and package management system


I understand wanting to defend your baby, and I think C++ was VASTLY better than most other languages for performance sensitive code until maybe 5 years ago - but the combination of memory safety and thread safety that Rust offers means that there are very few situations where C++ is the appropriate choice for a new project now.

I have written professionally in C++ for 20 years now, and I would pick Rust for a _new_ project/fresh codebase in a heartbeat. tokio alone is so vastly superior to anything you can do in async C++ that it makes zero sense to select C++ for a _new_ project (obviously if you have an existing codebase the price of interop may not be worth it).

Bjarne is being deliberately obtuse here.


This is a great writeup, I work on batch/streaming stuff at Google and I'm very excited by some of the stuff I see in the Rust ecosystem, Arroyo included.


I wouldn't say "infinite", its still susceptible to read hotspotting; and while fine-grained locking enables generally higher write throughputs, you can still get in a situation where interconnected updates end up being pretty slow.

That said, its way better than anything else I've used in my career.


Exactly. I used Unity starting from almost the first release, and attended Unite in 2007.

Unity was seen as a hobby engine then, we used it for the web, but for desktop used Unreal. Godot today is way ahead of where Unity was in 2007ish.


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