On RMS and Woz specifically, how much have they ever been opposed?
I only know a little about them, but I think of both as good-natured, high-impact, little-bit weird hackers, with substantial common ground in philosophies or thinking.
They went very different life directions, with pretty young career decisions. But I could imagine Woz today supporting what RMS has done, while not seeing a need for all the philosophy and seriousness.
RMS is certainly critical of Apple. But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.
But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.
Apple has always been patronising and thought of users as exploitables to be controlled and herded; the Macintosh, and even more so the Lisa that came before it, were far more closed systems in comparison to the IBM PC.
That would be a cynical '84 TV ad. (Like the extremely common revolutionary leader who pretends to want to free the people, but actually just wants to be the dictator instead.)
I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications. And they also just wanted to build what they thought of as a nice machine. But definitely not a hacker machine, but they wanted to empower everyone who wasn't a computer nerd.
I don't know whether impression is accurate, but if it is, then I'd say they are closer -- in terms of intentions -- to RMS, than to contemporary Apple.
Inside Macintosh was great documentation (I’d argue that the second generation in the 1990s, split up by topics, was the peak of Apple’s documentation writing), but I would not classify it as “Internals” in the sense of how a 1970s computer would be documented. There was a clearly delineated API boundary beyond which it was discouraged to venture.
Yes, Apple was/is mostly about computing as an appliance (realized fully in iOS), but there was occasional dabbling with User computing, especially with HyperCard, and to some extent with AppleScript. It seems that ultimately these did not have enough uptake to warrant investing more into them.
The more time I spend getting elderly people’s entertainment systems back into a state where they can watch their 3 favorite TV channels in peace without getting lured into the paywalls of their Android TVs or cable providers, the more sympathetic I’m getting to the “appliance” view.
I used that name because I did not recall exactly the naming and was too lazy to search for the actual one. :)
Something like Hypercard naturally allowed for experimentation and playground, and if anything, a proof how to balance programming in the context of appliances.
You can find something more recent like Dreams for the PlayStation, which is also no longer.
> I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications.
One could say exactly the same for the original IBM PC, which had infinitely more tech pubs at introduction than the Mac.
I think a more obvious candidate is self-selection. People with known mental issues that want a pet are wise to choose those that demand less maintenance. It's hard to go walk the dog while undergoing a mental breakdown. Cats, on the other hand, don't require people to walk them, and are mostly self-cleaning. They are a safer pick for people whose routines are subject to sporadic disruption.
A tiny economy compared to Florida, a deeply right wing government and culture, it’s already fully built up with no room for newcomers, hurricanes and rising sea levels also make it an insane choice. Please be serious.
I was just on a ski-trip in Aspen. just about 75% of people I met there were “just in Miami” or “just in Key West” (mostly Miami) but “came up for Christmas and New Years” Billionaires have a “home State” as much as I have hair (you probably are guessing correctly now that I am bald…)
I don't believe that the whole billionaire-led VC industry in California is going to relocate to Florida, in part because of the weather, in part because of the cost, and many other factors. As far as "everyone leaving" California, I don't think that's true, but I'm on the other side of the country and it doesn't bother me either way.
A topic for more in depth study to be sure. However:
1) video streaming has been around for a while and nobody, as far as I'm aware, has been talking about building multiple nuclear tractors to handle the energy needs
2) video needs a CPU and a hard drive. LLM needs a mountain of gpus.
3) I have concerns that the "national center for AI" might have some bias
I can find websites also talking about the earth being flat. I don't bother examining their contents because it just doesn't pass the smell test.
Although thanks for the challenge to my preexisting beliefs. I'll have to do some of my own calculations to see how things compare.
Those statistics include the viewing device in the energy usage for streaming energy usage, but not for GenAI. Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison.
The 0.077 kWh figure assumes 70% of users watching on a 50 inch TV. It goes down to 0.018 kWh if we assume 100% laptop viewing. And for cell phones the chart bar is so small I can't even click it to view the number.
Compare generative AI video to streamed video, and generative text to streamed text etc. The differences are closer to an order of magnitude. The comparison to be made is the processing power required to deliver the content, not to display it.
(That's just one genre of brainrot I came across recently. I also had my front page flooded with monkey-themed AI slop because someone in my household watched animal documentaries. Thanks algorithm!)
It's not just about per-unit resource usage, but also about the total resource usage. If GenAI doubles our global resource usage, that matters.
I doubt Youtube is running on as many data centers as all Google GenAI projects are running (with GenAI probably greatly outnumbering Youtube - and the trend is also not in favor of GenAI).
Videos produce benefits (arguably much less now with the AI generated spam) that are difficult to reproduce with other less energy hungry ways. compare this with this message that it would have cost nothing to a human to type instead of going through the inference of AI not only wasting energy for something that could have been accomplished much easier but removing also the essence of the activity. No-One was actually thankful for that thankyou message.
I think part of what makes this site special (on the modern web at least) is that the moderators like yourself think thoroughly and deeply about all of this. It’s pretty awesome y’all do that.
I remember playing the original Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 back in the day after I rented it from Blockbuster. That game was an incredible experience.
Thank you to Vince Zampella and everyone else who worked on that game for those memories.
Titanfall 2 is a really good one. Not something I expected to have such a strong emotional element. I didn't know Vince Zampella's name, but it is another project of his, so it seems fitting to recommend it here.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice (the original, I haven't played the sequel) was crazy good. Gameplay-wise it's fine, but story wise it is one of the most emotionally intense games I have ever played. I recommend going into it spoiler-free. Look it up and see if it's something you're interested in, and if you want to play it, stop reading and play it.
It’s frustrating to me to see this article promote Bluesky. Both Bluesky and Mastadon can lead to the same negativity, mental health issues, and addiction and misery and so on as all of the other social media platforms.
Maybe the Bluesky and Mastadon algorithms are or are not as addiction producing as Twitter or Facebook. I don’t know. But the harms are still there.
I agree. I was optimistic that one of Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads would emerge as a better version of Twitter without the problems, but that hasn't been the case for me. In fact, a lot of the people I followed who migrated to those platforms have seemingly spiraled deeper into negativity and doom on those platforms.
One person I followed described Bluesky as the place to go if you want to be viciously attacked and torn apart by people who 98% agree with what you're saying.
Interesting to see this level of cooperation between the United States and India in 1965. Especially between the American and Indian intelligence agencies.
Historians of this time period usually describe India as having a more frigid relationship with America by the mid 1960’s with India moving closer to the Soviet Union and the United States moving closer to Pakistan. But articles like this demonstrate that the situation may have been more complex than that.
Of course geopolitics can sometimes change quickly. The leadership in the US and in India did change between 1965, the early 1970’s and the late 1970’s so that was a factor as well.
Based on only a little understanding, India's geopolitical position makes it neutral in US-Russia/Soviet and US-China rivalries. India could and can securely ignore the rivalies:
Its location isn't strategic (valuable) to those rivalries, unlike Europe or Japan; for example, India shares a border with China but the Himlayas are an uncrossable barrier for large military operations - India is no threat to and is not threatened by China in a serious way, and is far from Russia and its strategic interests.
Its enormous size and population make it very expensive to influence militarily or politically, unlike smaller countries in Africa, for example. Those factors plus India's location made them less economically dependent on the rivarly countries. And India was very poor, so it provided little value to control economically.
For India, the obvious choice was and is to stay out of those fights - they have little to gain and much to lose, both in money spent on military, and other geopolitical costs including sovereignty. Instead, they can sit securely in South Asia and invest in themselves (or the leaders can cash in on corruption).
Now India has much more value economically, but that also makes them more secure. They verbally becoming more aggressive, but they have few targets and it seems like the commonplace tactic of nationalism.
> the situation may have been more complex than that
It always is on a micro level, but India is not becoming a US ally.
> India's geopolitical position makes it neutral in US-Russia/Soviet and US-China rivalries
Neutral with the Russians, a natural ally against the Chinese. (China and India have extant border disputes. And China has been working with Pakistan to contain India for decades.)
> China and India have extant border disputes. And China has been working with Pakistan to contain India for decades.
That greatly exaggerates the picture, as I understand it. They have symbolic border disputes which are difficult to resolve (you can't really fight a war in the Himalyas). Neither can appear to surrender (see alephnerd's comments on this page), but otherwise no interests are really at stake. They can't affect each other militarily, not much geopolitically - two oceans and the Himalyas separate them - and so far not much economically.
The US has been trying to enlist India against China but India, as usual, is happy to accept our gifts of trade, technolgy, and miltary aid and to smile for the cameras, but isn't participating in our geopolitical struggles.
Why would they get involved in our fight? To win some glaciers in the Himalyas? India also lacks the military and really the economic power to compete with China, and has many other things to spend money on.
China is building naval bases in Pakistan [2] and Sri Lanka [3]. India is heavily dependent on seaborne oil imports [4].
I'm not even going into the various chokes China has on India along the Himalayas. (India lacks similar game-over pinch points on Beijing.)
In the same way India controls the upstream Indus to Pakistan, China controls the upstream Brahmaputra to India [5]. (India maintains Nepal and Bhutan as de facto suzerainties.)
> not much geopolitically
Pakistan just beat India in an air battle. India flew Russian and French jets. Pakistan fielded an integrated Chinese air defence system.
> US has been trying to enlist India against China but India, as usual, is happy to accept our gifts of trade, technolgy, and miltary aid and to smile for the cameras, but isn't participating in our geopolitical struggles
India was banning Chinese imports before Trump. Which makes sense. China is building capabilities that would let it unilaterally shut down the Indian economy and potentially, if it can pressure Russia, military, on the order of months. That means territories, alliances and even market access terms New Delhi would prefer to determine as a sovereign become ones it must defer to Beijing on.
India won't (and shouldn't) fight America's fight for it. It's a properly sovereign state. But sovereignty takes work. And much of that work dovetails with the alliances America is building in the region.
I'm aware of all that. I didn't say there was no competition, but I don't think it adds up to nearly the sum that you say. A border skirmish is a long way from a war, and fits with symbolic conflict.
> China is building capabilities that would let it unilaterally shut down the Indian economy
They can cause problems, but again, that's overstating it imho.
Yeah, the problem with that argument is that the US has been actively working with Pakistan for influence in Central Asia for several decades, and has formally designated it a major non-NATO ally for the last couple decades. Which kind of undercuts any “natural” anti-China alliance with India.
> Which kind of undercuts any “natural” anti-China alliance with India
True. I've always meant to research how India and Pakistan polarised into their respective Soviet and American spheres, particularly given China and Pakistan's nuclear coöperation.
> the US has been actively working with Pakistan for influence in Central Asia for several decades
That was the case awhile ago. After the Afghan war the US switched to India, who they would much prefer as an ally - huge economy, growing military, relevant in sea lanes. The US basically abandoned Central Asia along with exiting Afghanistan.
It's literally still true right now (Major Non-NATO Ally status is an official designation with legal effects on trade in security-related trade and contracting eligibility effects), which has trust implications on the policy shift to try to woo India more tightly.
The US isn't working much with Pakistan, regardless of their status (afaik). Pakistan has little to offer with Afghanistan over, and hurst the valuable relationship with India.
There is an interesting video by Sarah Paine on Youtube discussing the geopolitics of this. (Paraphrasing from memory) she says that the US tried to be friends with both but, because the scars of partition were so painful, this wasn't possible and they just ended up pissing off both. Apparently Pakistan was very strategic due to the presence of US listening posts and U2 bases.
Sarah Paine is an expert on China and covers this (and lots more besides). If you are at all interested in geopolitics, then I recommend watching some of her videos.
As someone who was adjacent to China studies back in it's early days in the late 2000s/early 2010s (it was not mainstream back then - everyone was concentrating on Russia and the MidEast during that era and those of us who warned about China's potential were ignored), I think she is decent, but I wouldn't really call her a China expert (she is absolutely a Naval strategy expert though). To become a policy expert in a region, you need to understand it's institutional and organizational mores.
I'd recommend following academics affiliated with the FSI@Stanford or the Fairbanks Center@Harvard instead. They tend to be the ones most in touch with policymakers on both sides of the Pacific, and are often a conduit for Track 1.5 and Track 2 dialogues.
There has been a deluge of academics in the US entering "China studies" in the same way you saw "Mid East experts" proliferate in the 2000s and "Kremlinologists" in the 1980s-90s.
That was my take. I don't know that she calls herself that. She certainly seems very knowledgeable about China (and Japan and Russia).
From Wikipedia:
"She spent ten years on her doctoral research in Russian and Chinese history at Columbia University, which included five years of research and language study in China, Taiwan, Russia, Japan, and Australia.'
Most of her early research on China was with regards to Imperial Russia and Imperial China's rivalry in East and North Asia (ended up being published into a book back in the 1980s [0]), but was largely superficial and done in the context of US-China normalization in the 70s as a check against the USSR. Her limited Putonghua fluency is a major issue as well for someone who is a supposed China scholar.
Much of her work about that time period has been superseded by Yuhua Wang [1] and other younger and more quantitative scholars who took more of an institutionalist approach.
Even during my (limited) time, she was not viewed as a significant academic in the space - that remains to be students of John Fairbanks, Kenneth Lieberthal, Mary Gallagher, Rodrick MacFarquhar, and Yasheng Huang because a large portion of Chinese decisionmakers today either studied under them or under faculty who were advised by them in the 1980s-2000s period.
Furthermore, she has a history of media self promotion, and the loudest academics (especially on YouTube) tend to be the least regarded, because media engagements are such a time sink that it means you aren't really participating in policymaking adjacent work like Track Diplomacy.
This is why I take a dim view of her - she started off in the 70s as a Latin America researcher who pivoted to Russian history in the 80s, Japanese history in the 90s, Naval history in the 2000s when trying to get tenure, and China recently in the 2010s. These aren't the hallmarks of a domain expert and I say this as someone who studied under a couple of those. Instead, these are the hallmarks of a pop academic like Perun or Michio Kaku (if you want a STEM equivalent).
Heck, she's started trying to pivot/shoehorn India studies over the past 2 years the same way as the others becuase there is a vacuum in the field now that the most relevant contemporary India academics in the US (Raghuram Rajan, Aravind Subramanian, Karthik Subramanian, Ashutosh Varshney, Karthik Muralidharan, Nirupam Bajpai, and Milan Vaishav) have taken steps back from US academia because they are all either transitioning or transitioned into Indian policymaking roles, or like Ashley Tellis were caught in a Biden-era espionage investigation for leaking documents on behalf of China [2] around the same time his public advocacy suddenly shifted from being China-antagonistic and India-leaning to China-leaning and India-antagonistic [3] (2021-24 period). Now that "Indo-Pac Studies" is where academic funding in the policy space has started shifting towards, and the vacuum that has developed, grifters like Paine are trying to enter the field like they did China studies 15 years ago and MidEast studies 20 years ago.
Is she actually considered an expert, by other experts? I watched a couple clips of her which were recommended to me on YouTube, and she just came across as a self-congratulatory booster for the inevitable triumph of Western liberal democracy, the sort of end-of-history talk we all now mock when it comes from e.g. Fukuyama.
>she just came across as a self-congratulatory booster for the inevitable triumph of Western liberal democracy
I've watched 2 or 3 hours of videos and that isn't what I took away. She does argue that a rules based international order, free trade, democracy and liberalism is a superior system to authoritarianism, but I don't think too many people (in the West, at least) would disagree with that.
As the article mentions, this was about their shared worry of Mao's China and their nuclear advances. India then as now has a strong connection to the USSR/Russia -- they flew, and still fly, MiG planes, for example.
The US shifted to becoming de facto allied with China in the early 1970s as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, and Pakistan helped with the initial backdoor diplomacy [0][1] that lead to US-Chinese normalization in the 1970s.
India, having fought a war against both Pakistan and China in the 1960s, pivoted to the Soviet Union as a result, who were also miffed at China because of the Sino-Soviet split and were looking for a bulwark.
> Historians of this time period usually describe India as having a more frigid relationship with America by the mid 1960’s with India moving closer to the Soviet Union and the United States moving closer to Pakistan
A major reason was Brzezinski - LBJ and later Carter's foreign policy czar.
He was a "realist" whose primary goal was boxing in the USSR (he spent his early childhood in Moscow during the Stalinist purge and Poland before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). As such, he pivoted the US away from India in favor of Pakistan and China.
The is why the US went from building IITs and allowing it's tech companies like Burroughs and IBM building joint ventures in 1960s India to de facto sanctions in the 1970s.
Kissinger followed a similar policy as Brzezinski, and IMO a major reason was that both grew up in pre-War Europe and their past experiences colored their views as a result.
The Indo-Soviet Treaty in 1971 [0], Soviet tech transfers to India starting in 1972 [1] that made India a semiconductor exporter to the Eastern Bloc [2] and become a mini-Taiwan before Taiwan [3], and support for India's military modernization initiative [4] under Indira Gandhi that surprised Western observers in the 1980s [5].
Finally, the NAM movement began fading from 1962 following the Sino-Indian war and died by the late 1970s with the US pivot to China [6]
Couldn't we say the US has a similar relationship with India now, at least before Trump II? We send them goodies to keep them friendly, but little geopolitical support that has significant consequence is exchanged. ?
For example, India didn't/doesn't permit military bases, if either the US or USSR wanted them. The US/USSR didn't cause an Indian victory against their neighbors (or did the Soviets have material effect on the Pakistan-Bangladesh split in 1971?).
No worries. This is my kvetching/random posting throwaway.
> Couldn't we say the US has a similar relationship with India now, at least before Trump II
Not to the same degree simply because
1. India's economy today has reached the same inflection point that the Chinese economy did in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
2. Middle Powers like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, France, and Israel have either caught up to or exceed American capacity in a number of critical technologies, and have begun mass scale capital and tech transfers to India
For 1,
India is essentially following the same trajectory as China, but 10-15 years behind because the economic isolation India faced from 1976-1991 along with the Warsaw Bloc's weakening economic heft lead to the 1990s era political and economic crisis.
India wasn't the only Soviet-leaning country that faced this issue. Even Vietnam - which used to have a HDI and GDP PPP per Capita well above the PRC until the late 1990s - suffered a lost decade for the same reasons India did due to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.
For 2,
A major reason China took off in the 2000s was because Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese partners like TDK, Toshiba, Samsung, UMC, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, etc all began transferring IP related to energy, biotech, military hardware, semiconductors, automobiles, and other STEM industries to China via JVs. For example, BYD and CATL got their head starts in the 2000d thanks to Samsung and TDK respectively transferring battery chemistry IP to them in the 2000s.
Japanese, Taiwanese, South Korea, French, and Israeli firms all started similarly mass IP and capital transfers to Indian JVs from 2014 due to a mix of economic and geopolitical tensions with China along with the fact that India has become the last large greenfield economy that Chinese competitors cannot operate within.
-------
Because of 1 and 2, India has started exhibiting similar hallmarks to China back when I was observing them closely (and being ignored) in the late 2000s and early 2010s. In the Indian policymaking space, policies similar in scale and ambition to those that the PRC adopted in the early 2010s are being constantly enacted, and just like "China Shock" 15 years ago, an "India Shock" has started arising at least in IP heavy industries.
The fact that India is now spending around $205B on infra [0] (comparable to Chinese infra spend in the early 2010s), a combined [1] $30B [2] on semiconductor development (comparable in size to the Chinese Big Fund 1.0), $12B in government provided DeepTech VC funding [3] that is being matched dollar-for-dollar by private giants like Nvidia and Qualcomm [4], and similarly sized initiatives by the Japanese [5], Korean [6], Taiwanese [7], French [8], and Israeli [9] champions, and subsidizing electronic components [10] and rare earth [11] processing upskilling, enacting China-style labor reforms [12], and opening the entire Nuclear [13] and Electricity [14] sector to 100% private investment means a lot of capacity is in the process of being built out at the same scale as was in China during the early years of the Xi admin's "Make in China" initiative.
This is why I keep harping about India - even if a large portion of the funds are misallocated, they would still end up developing an ecosystem. The same thing happened with mismanagement of funds in the first iteration of "Make in China" but administrative capacity got better.
If we mismanage the India relationship, we may inadvertently end up making another ambivalent continental scale rival like China and Russia (yes they are in a recession and nowhere near as powerful as they were at their peak, yet they can enact severe pain nonetheless).
My biggest worry about India is that they'll ally, to some degree, with China. That may be pretty far out: I've never heard it discussed, they have some competing interests and some border disputes. But those are resolvable or manageable and with the Himalayas and two oceans between them, they can each safely operate in their own domain, for the most part, without really bothering the other.
With ~1/3 of the world population and those two economies, allied they might be unstoppable if the two nationalists can hold it together. Imagine a wide-ranging trade agreement and dominating the most strategic region in the world. And what could South Asian and SE Asian countries do but go along.
...
On another note, you've amazingly generated about 50 footnotes. I always prefer them and those are credible sources, but how do you crank this out? Do you just know what you're looking for and search nytimes.com or have an LLM find the articles? I'd love to find these things that quickly.
I'm usually the person in the conversation who knows the most about this history. It's been very interesting; thanks again.
> My biggest worry about India is that they'll ally, to some degree, with China
> But those are resolvable or manageable...
It won't happen unless China gives up claims on Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh. The issue is China cannot because these are ethnic Tibetan regions.
Additionally, Paharis (a catch all term for the Indo-European speaking ethnic group that straddles the High Himalayas) are overrepresented in the Indian Armed Forces, and everyone in the community is 1-2 degrees separated from someone who was either impacted in one of the various Indo-China standoffs or knows people impacted by the Chinese invasion of Tibet. For a large portion of Paharis, the view on China is similar to how Poles view Russian aggression in Ukraine.
> but how do you crank this out? Do you just know what you're looking for and search nytimes.com or have an LLM find the articles
The former. I concentrated in Computer Science but got a secondary in Government primarily concentrating on an institutionalist approach to Asia and MidEast studies.
You remember that Watson quote in A Study in Scarlet about Sherlock Holmes' limited knowledge outside of a couple areas [0] - that's the same for me.
I cannot differentiate between Brad Pitt and Leonardo DeCaprio (I do watch movies and shows - I just don't know or care about the names of most actors), I don't know any song by Taylor Swift (I do listen to music, but I'm not the most knowledgeable of the latest trend), I have almost no knowledge of contemporary literature (I do read modern lit, but I'm usually 3-5 years behind the trend or zeitgeist), and I don't really follow sports aside from UFC (but I have been actively cross-training BJJ/Judo, Muay Thai/TKD, and trail running from grade school to yesterday). I also never read the news aside from a couple of primary and industry sources (eg. Reuters, Bloomberg Terminal, FT, The Economist, Axios, Politico (US and EU), TechCrunch, and a couple region specific sources) and constantly avoid narrative-based journalism (they are fun to read, but tend to waste time when trying to get to the point). I also don't use social media except hate-posting on HN or nerding out on Lobsters.
Basically, my equivalent of gossip and faux moi is the intersection of tech (I have another similarly in-depth throwaway for the technical niches I'm interested in), policy, and business.
> I'd love to find these things that quickly
If your actually interested in these topics and can afford it, I'd recommend doing a part-time masters at the Harvard Extension School in Government [1], the MLA program at Stanford [2], or the distance MA in War Studies at KCL [3].
Alternatively, intensely studying the reading list for a specific field (eg. The PPE required reading list for Balliol College, Oxford [4] or the CS tripos at Cambridge) builds the conceptual foundation needed to apply to a field.
Once you build the conceptual models and table stakes skills needed for a specific field, everything else falls into place.
Thanks for the suggestions. Reliably having time for scheduled classes is an obstacle. And there are so many things I value, I don't know if IR will make the top despite my obvious interest - and all that in addition to professional work and study. Maybe ancient Greek next (to read Homer, Socrates et. al., Greek theater in the original). Still, I'd love to learn IR fundamentals, as you say, and the Balliol reading list looks like a perfect opportunity.
I also cut everything I don't value especially - music (outside occasional jazz/classical concerts), sports, pop culture, social media, YouTube. I highly value arts but cut the time required to converse topically about them; few artists face our surreal current reality anyway. So I read literature or see film (the Criterion Channel could fill my time itself) or other arts of any provenance, in order to find the truly extraordinary and the next frontier for my mind. But even that leaves far too many options. I also began to create art myself (with no training, for a very intimate circle) - that has changed my life more than anything. That is something I highly recommend.
For exceptional IR articles you might see Just Security . Their core team is high-level IR attorneys (e.g., State Department, ICRC, etc.), and they don't hold back intellect or sophistication, though I can't talk about their a theoretical perspective. Their curated daily news brief is very useful.
The issue is that the business models of these platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, tik tok) are based on maximizing engagement. And maximizing engagement in this context means spending ever increased amounts of time on one platform over another or over doing offline activities like reading a book and going outside.
So the tech leaders preach moderation but the design of all these apps are built to be addictive and to maximize the time that other people and other people’s kids spend on it. It seems to be poor kids who have overworked stressed parents who seem to spend the largest chuck of time endlessly scrolling on these apps harming their minds and mental health and so on
That’s because internet addiction isn’t sufficiently taken seriously as a society, even for adults. We haven’t fully adapted properly to this reality on a social level because it’s very new so people are panicking. It will eventually become standard parenting and as far as I can tell it already is becoming standard. More adults need to look at their own behaviour to fix their kids.
Every cellphone already comes with the ability to limit those things. It doesn’t require coming home from work early to toggle parental controls at a certain time.
When the Starks and the Lannisters are eating and drinking in the room together. Before they go their seperate ways and fight and all that.
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