I've been self-medicating ADHD with multiple cups of coffee a day since I was 17. I'm in my early 30s now, and after getting on Vyvanse, have reduced then given up coffee. I realised that coffee was the reason for my anxiety which builds up towards the end of the day.
I reduced my coffee down to 1 espresso per day two months ago, and quit entirely two weeks ago. I'm still on stimulants, but Vyvanse treats ADHD much better and has fewer side-effects.
Same here, my afternoon anxiety from daily coffee consumption (1-2 cups typically) got really bad on some days. I was heavily addicted to coffee and nicotine for years but I managed to quit both of those after realizing that they weren't doing me any favors. I continued to have cravings until I got on ADHD medication then they practically disappeared overnight and never came back.
I think more people should give green or black tea a try, I found them to provide similar effects to coffee but with fewer side effects.
Don't worry, once the Wall Street tap runs dry, the U.S. government will be more than happy to step in and bail out the AI corps. at the taxpayer's expense.
> Don't worry, once the Wall Street tap runs dry, the U.S. government will be more than happy to step in and bail out the AI corps. at the taxpayer's expense.
I have a brilliant idea. Why not start this now?
The US government will give every child born $1000 in money in order to hand it to the small number of families who own 70% of equities in order to purchase equities the child can't touch for 18 years. That is US Government -> child -> rich person who currently owns the equity, although the rich person gets the cash in hand the child has to wait 18 years to sell the equity.
Where does the US Government get this $1000 per child from? Borrow it, adding to the $38,000,000,000,000 in national debt.
Here is the interesting part of my brilliant plan. That child will inherit, calculated per capita, $111,000 in debt the moment she is born. That child will be responsible, calculated per capita, for ~$3,000 a year in interest on that debt.
In order to sell the idea, every time the US Government gives $1000 to a child to purchase stocks I own, I will give $250 to another child to purchase stocks I own. Let's do the math: $1000 profit - $250 loss + $250 profit = $1000 profit. Best part is the media will run this as the leading news story for 3 days making me look like God.
Subtract GDP growth and it’s slightly negative, meaning simply borrowing more money and the at current rates the debt to GDP ratio decreases over time. Massive spending sprees are why it’s gotten so huge, kicking it down the road turns it into a smaller problem soon as politicians stop actively making the issue worse it goes away.
We could argue about the risk if things start to fail, but in an emergency the US could change its constitution and abandon its debt.
The new AI data center I build to do what ever it is that AI Clippy does over at Microsoft will run on coal energy and those dirty chimneys are not going to clean themselves.
Not to disagree with the overall point, but because this comes up a lot I'll nitpick it: issuing debt is not the same as printing money
With debt, along with the proverbial "cash" comes an opposing "IOU" -- any change* is thus only temporary, in the time dimension (essentially that's what's being exchanged: time)
Printing money out of nowhere is different, because it's missing that other half
* at the risk of stating the obvious: "change" meaning "difference" and not "cents"
A lot of debt also arises because of savings needs. If everyone is saving for retirement, for example, that savings has to be debt marked somewhere else. Examples:
* Social security used to have a huge surplus, that was savings that had to go somewhere (even if it was just a savings account in a bank, the bank would then be able to lend it out). They instead buy treasuries and that savings becomes debt to the USG.
* China likewise needs to save dollars because it doesn't want them sloshing around in their economy leading to inflation, so instead of using it to buy things they buy treasuries, and their savings becomes debt to the USG (not always a great deal for China if interest rates are below inflation).
The dollar has been so useful in the past as a currency of trade because you could save large amounts of it easily by buying US treasuries. One reason China doesn't want the RMB to be used so heavily for trade is that they don't want to do the same yet.
Actually it kind of is, in as much as it expands the money supply.
When a bank issues debt, the money is created 'out of thin air'. When the debt is paid off, that money is destroyed. However usually more debt is being created than redeemed as things go on, so the total money supply increases (this is a good thing, as it allows the economy to expand).
Various regulations and central bank market interventions (quantitative tightening/easing) control this process, which thus can be induced to 'print money' if the government wishes - assuming they have a sovereign currency.
Fractional reserve banking is still not the same as printing money outright
If you borrow $100 USD from the bank, and pay it off immediately after, it's clear no money was "created" as such
If $100 USD is "printed" outright, it's clear that there's no way to achieve that same result
The fact that the debt isn't generally paid back immediately doesn't change that fundamental. That's what I meant when I said any apparent "change" is about "time" rather than "money"
It is true that the money supply should expand with the economy. Turning raw materials into finished goods represents a larger "net economy" at the end of the process than at the beginning. (Indeed that's basically how it makes sense to have interest on debt in the first place)
Nevertheless, printing money out of whole cloth is different from issuing debt
> If you borrow $100 USD from the bank, and pay it off immediately after, it's clear no money was "created" as such
The bank "printed" money by handing out cash that it didn't have. It only had a fraction of it. That new money went free into the world with the same respect any other cash gets. You and I can't pull that off.
Ok fine I'll agree call it "creating money" rather than "printing money", because it's not the same mechanism the central bank uses to "print" permanent money (technically not printed either but whatever), but money is still created by the bank.
History reminder to everyone: The dot com companies were not bailed out. Only the Detroit auto industry. What is with this rage-bait assumption that a bailout is guaranteed?
China is focusing heavily on AI applications. They have basically decided already to deal with their coming demographic bust with robuts/AI rather than immigration. Its not even about military applications, the US is just afraid that China will shoot so far ahead of us economically that they won't have any leverage over it in the future at all.
There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S.
Some talk about how China has some strategic issues, such as do they have a reliable supply of food and energy? (Zeihan etc.)
I guess the energy portion is being solved with renewables. And I guess if they solve the issue of demographic collapse with robots and AI, that's something.
But really, if there's less people and they're getting older, what's the point? What are they really working towards?
This question is also becoming a problem post-Trump immigration ban in the U.S.
Who knows what the U.S.'s demographics are going to look like now?
Trump inherited a U.S. with some of the best demographics of all nations on the planet, especially in the West. And he managed to throw that in the garbage.
> I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China
What kind of sources are you looking for? The Five Year Plans are the best source of truth for what they are planning on doing nationwide. The annual Statistical Communiqué on National Economic and Social Development and China Statistical Yearbook from the NBS contain statistics on how that implementation is going. Then every year the NDRC delivers the Report on the Implementation of the Plan for National Economic and Social Development and on the Draft Plan to the National People’s Congress which packages up the statistics on how the plan is progressing.
They’re the most reliable source we’re going to get without being party insiders. There’s still Soviet-style inflation of figures to meet quotas but China has been cracking down on that for the last few decades because they want accurate data for the five year plans. I think it’s more of a problem with outer provinces, less so for the major manufacturing hubs.
Alternative sources to verify are a bit harder to find without knowing the languages (lots of the NRDC and NBS stats are available in English).
Yes, people also compare some of these statistics with export/import data and with data from other countries on the other side of these transactions, and the numbers match.
You could just go over there and live for a few years, you can be your own source. But yes, they have energy, no they don't have oil, yes they have lots of agriculture land, no they messed up some of their environment and that will take time to heal, yes they are working on it.
> But really, if there's less people and they're getting older, what's the point? What are they really working towards?
China wants to be a rich country even if their population stabilizes at only 900 million people or so. Mostly they want to avoid the middle income trap, which would have been a problem regardless of their demographics falling off a cliff. Automation is the best way to get around it, and they have enough tech, production know how and capacity, and smart people to pull that off.
China is going to continue doing what is best for it, and they haven't gone stupid like the USA has. Embracing AI for productive uses rather than just fixating on the slop produced is one place where they are racing past the west.
There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S.
I've always assumed that there is such a source of truth, but that I had never heard of it, wouldn't have access to it, and couldn't afford it if I did.
Reading a few tweets from Musk was all it took to correct that misapprehension. It's increasingly clear that nobody at any level of play knows jack shit about anything.
> There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S.
Isn't this simply the answer?
That what's going on is gaslighting of the public and that there are people behind the scenes and they don't want hoi polloi to know what they're up to?
This geo-politics (or politics) talk is 'intellectual' men's astrology.
When a woman asks me my astrological sign, I know she's a deeply unserious person. When a man says 'do they have a reliable supply of food and energy'...
I said the same thing on a different post and people downvoted it. The current administration believes that the US can't fall behind China in this AI arms race. So don't expect anything too drastic to happen to the large players in the game.
Does anybody know how much an ML model is actually worth to build a new model? Like when they start making a new model, do they modify the old or do they start from scratch?
I'm asking to know how much owning a model is actually worth, not in how much it could make money by selling use, but in how much it deprecates and keeps value to make a new one. If say one side of China/US lacks out on a model generation, do they only need to follow progress on the science behind it and when they own the data, the algorithm and the hardware all they need is "just" time and energy or is it important, that they actually have their on instance of a large model from every generation continuously?
Maybe, but a clear Republican bailout of AI might wipe them out for several election cycles / foreseeable future. Big tech isn’t popular, AI isn’t popular and bail outs aren’t popular
What evidence do you have that that's going to be the case? I ask because my entire life, I've seen terrible things done by the Republican Party. And regular people get really hurt. For example, the great financial crisis. Yet, a little bit of time passes, and that 30-some-odd percent goes right back to voting for them.
The public voted for Republicans in their highest-ever numbers in 2020 when the party did everything possible to denigrate public health efforts and scientific research at a time when hundreds of thousands were dying of Covid, with no Mexican wall or Obamacare repeal promises met.
There is no scenario where the American vote for a party will fall below 48%, and elections will continue to be decided by how 3-4 states vote.
> At one side, people are unhappy about AI, at the other side, who of those same people will stop using ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments for them.
As Newsweek points out*, the people most unhappy about AI are the ones who CAN'T use ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments because they NO LONGER have access to those jobs. There are many of us who believe that the backlash against AI would never have gotten so strong if it hadn't come at the expense of the creators, the engineers, and the unskilled laborers first.
AI agents are the new scabs, and the people haven't been fooled into believing that AI will be an improvement in their lives.
This topic always tickles the pedantic part of my brain. If I may assume that the reader would agree that JS is a programming language, what makes it a programming language and not HTML? What makes a static .js file a program and a static .html file not a program?
Generally speaking, HTML doesn't have the constructs necessary to actually compute things. There's no way to declare variables, and there are no conditionals, jumping, or mathematical operations. All you can do is specify a fixed set of page elements.
Embedded JS within HTML doesn't count here, as that's essentially no different than a linked script file.
To be fair, there are some exceptions to this; there are some very hacky and convoluted ways you might be able to get some programmatic behavior out of pure HTML (I remember hearing about a weird example in part of Wikipedia's codebase).
HTML literally means hypertext markup language. It's more like TeX or Markdown, in that it's used to store and represent data, not to manipulate it.
> All you can do is specify a fixed set of page elements.
I'm not denying this but rather questioning why this means the document which specifies this is not a program. The previous sentences describe why it's not Turing-complete, which is moot to whether it's a programming language.
> HTML literally means hypertext markup language. It's more like TeX or Markdown, in that it's used to store and represent data, not to manipulate it.
I disagree that HTML is not used to manipulate data. Unless you mean to say that it doesn't manipulate it directly but I think that's also moot. My day job is to use HTML to build forms that are used to accept user input for data manipulations. It seems to me that I'm programming the browser to render the correct form and the language I'm using for the programming is HTML.
Besides, being used only to store and represent data does not seem to necessarily preclude it being a programming language. "Program" is a word that's used to describe a presentation of some kind. A wind ensemble might perform a "program" of pieces on concert night.
Well, if you'll pardon the tautology, it's a language that's used for precisely expressing programs. Of course, that just shifts the question. What's a program?
It's a set of instructions for a computer to execute. Hopefully that's not controversial. But isn't `<input type="text">` an instruction to render a text input?
It is "controversial" because it's way too vague, which the pedant part should recognize (is a mouse click not an instruction for a computer to execute?), so of course you won't be able to differentiate at this level.
If anything, I made it too specific by saying computer.
> is a mouse click not an instruction for a computer to execute?
If an SOP document—another example of a program—says to click a button on the screen, then of course that action is part of the instructions for a program. No computer needed, even; the instruction could be to stick my thumb up my nose, for all it matters.
It's overly simplified to the point of being meaningless. A .js file is a document that presents information to me when I open it using a text editor. So is a .html file, for that matter. Something different happens when they're opened in a browser and, for that reason, they both seem to be programs as well.
you can ignore the fact that they look like text. look past that
program and document just are different things. (I gave a simplified definition). if they both are represented using text when creating, it doesn't make them the same. because some text is a programming language and can create program, and some text use markup language and can create document.
it's like humans and worms are carbon life, if you only look at that you can't tell difference between humans and worms. you need to look what kinds of cells are in them or even better what they do
It seems like you want to intentionally not understand this?
> It seems like you want to intentionally not understand this?
It seems like you are offering a poor response to a difference of opinion.
> if they both are represented using text when creating, it doesn't make them the same.
I think you misunderstood my point. You gave definitions that were overly simplistic, thinking they were accurate. I was just pointing out how inaccurate it is to say "program does thing. document presents info." Rather, more accurately, I'm pointing out that a file being one thing does not preclude it from being another (seeing as I generally agree that programs do things and documents present information).
You are taking the position that a document and a program are mutually exclusive and that's just not true. HTML files are executed as programs by a browser and displayed as a document by a text editor. JS files, too. I could go on. Of course, this opinion is not borne from willful ignorance of your opinion, but instead from my understanding of English.
> it's like humans and worms are carbon life, if you only look at that you can't tell difference between humans and worms. you need to look what kinds of cells are in them or even better what they do
You're arguing my point for me, with this paragraph. In the given analogy, "carbon life" is analogous to "program":
It's like, HTML and JS files are programs. If you can't tell the difference between HTML and JS files, you need to look at what text is in them or, even better, what they do.
Yes, thanks. That's pretty much what I'm saying. HTML and JS files are programs, much like how worms and humans are carbon-based organisms. They're otherwise wildly different and do different things. That genuinely seems obvious (to me) with no room for controversy. I'm not sure what reason there is for disagreement.
> HTML files are executed as programs by a browser and displayed as a document by a text editor. JS files, too. I could go on
This reveals fundamental misunderstanding what is HTML and JS. "program" being different from "document" doesn't preclude some documents to have embedded programs within. however it doesn't turn a document into a program and doesn't mean markup language becomes programming language. there is still clear separation between hypertext markup and executable JS code
You write your comment as though I'm suggesting the HTML file is executed because it contains a script element. I'm not; an HTML file with no script tag, say just the text "Hello world!"[0], is executed by a browser as a program. Because if that HTML file instead contained something like <select><option>Hello world!</option></select>, it would know to render some kind of list to choose from.
If I put that HTML inside of a <form> element, I could even get it to send the selections to a server of my choosing using the "action" attribute on said form (I may need to further instruct the browser to render a <button> or <input type="submit> inside the form or do some other fancy shenanigans). Put more useful options in the select and maybe some other input elements with some useful <label> elements and I might just have myself a graphical interface which people can use to submit information to me. But that's not right because it's just "present[ing] info", which just happens to be useful labels and inputs to in a form that will send the user-provided information to an external program; just a regular document, nothing special or "instructive" or "do[ing] things" about it. I hope I'm not laying it on too thick.
Seriously, though, if I didn't just describe a program that's executed by a browser then we have such fundamentally different ideas of what a "program" is that I might as well just concede that you're right, by whatever definition of the word you must be using.
[0] Every "Hello world!" program tutorial, which only instructs how to print that text to the screen before exiting, in every programming language ever is generally (and, IMO, reasonably) claimed to be a program, however rudimentary.
> it would know to render some kind of list to choose from.
but this is not executing a program. this interpreting markup to render some data in some format. HTML is the same programming language as XML or Markdown or JPG or MIDI or WAV... so, not really a programming language. it's input for a program written using some programming language
sometimes presenting data and programming are conflated, for example postscript, but this is not HTML
> Put more useful options in the select and maybe some other input elements with some useful <label> elements and I might just have myself a graphical interface which people can use to submit information to me. But
Handling form submissions, handling displaying select boxes etc, is all result of executing program that is browser itself. The input for that program is hypertext markup by webmaster.
(Running embedded JS however is executing a program by webmaster.)
I think trying to present markup as programming is very artificial and does not correspond to real world.
> but this is not executing a program. this interpreting markup to render some data in some format.
Yes, it's interpreting markup to render some data in some format but that does not preclude such interpretation from being the execution of a program.
> sometimes presenting data and programming are conflated
My point is that executing a program is not mutually exclusive with presenting data. I am not conflating these terms but rather the opposite; I am pointing out that they are separate concepts which do not necessarily conflict with each other.
> Handling form submissions, handling displaying select boxes etc, is all result of executing program that is browser itself. The input for that program is hypertext markup
Right, that "hypertext markup" is a program for the browser (another program) to execute. That seems like an accurate use of English. If this is where we draw the line then JS must not be a programming language because it's just some kind of "script text" that is the input for some other real program.
> Running embedded JS however is executing a program by webmaster.
I understand this is your perspective but you haven't drawn a clear line separating this from the execution of an HTML program. Running plain HTML in a browser, consisting strictly of the necessary components of a valid HTML document, is also executing a program (webmaster isn't necessary).
Why is that a better descriptor? I don't understand this desire to demarcate between programming languages and whatever a "syntax" language is. All languages have syntax, even natural languages - it's one of the terms we've borrowed from linguists.
HTML is one of the languages I use when I am programming. In the sense, I really struggle to see the argument that it isn't a programming language, unless someone is using a very precise definition of "programming language" that I'm not privy to. There's a bunch of well-defined stuff it _isn't_ (e.g. Turing-complete), and a bunch of well-defined stuff that it is (e.g. declarative, or a markup language), but as far as I can tell there's no better definition of "programming language" than "language used for programming", and it certainly seems to fit that bill.
We're in a Live Fast Die Young karma world. If you can't get a TikTok ready with 2 minutes of the post modem drop, you might as well quit and become a barista instead.
You, too, are practicing and advocating for a philosophy here.
Also, the lack of objectivity in the universe doesn't necessarily mean that nihilism is the ONLY way to go. Existentialism, for example, doesn't accept an objective reality either, and folks have found ways to make morality (and even religious faith) fully compatible within that framework.
Obviously, it's not good to delve into metaphysical speculation, as it often clearly leads to junk conclusions written by people who don't have the credentials to account for what the actual science (OR the actual philosophy) says.
But I do wonder what it would be like if modern physicists were more willing to pair up with modern philosophers once in awhile. I would very much love to see a collaboration between the two fields to explore what a subjective universe really MEANS to us as both a species and as moral beings in that universe.
I, very much, would love to see what some of these implications are, as written out by the folks who actually understand the science. Even if there's no true consensus among them, just learning what the different possibilities might be could be very enlightening.
They already censored the not-porn (but still NSFW) photos. I don't think it would've made as much of a difference censoring the porn photos as well, especially when trying to convince people that they're not just creating click-bait.
A lot of folks use TikTok on a regular basis. This article is the one making the claim that's far and away different from what most folks experience on the platform.
Since I'm not about to go on there, pretend to be a 13-year old boy, and start seeking out the porn myself, I really need to see some evidence that this is a thing that is actually possible before I start picking out a pitchfork.
> After a “small number of clicks” the researchers encountered pornographic content ranging from women flashing to penetrative sex.
I (40m) don't think I've ever seen literal flashing or literal porn on TikTok, and my algorithm does like to throw in thirst content between my usual hobby stuff.
Are they making the claim that showing porn is a normal behavior for TikTok's algorithm overall, or are they saying that this is something that specifically pervasive with child accounts?
Does TikTok direct what you see based on what other accounts you interact with are interested in? I would expect teenagers to have a different interest profile than your average 40 year old. I would expect algorithms to more or less unwittingly direct you to the kind of stuff your peers were interested in.
TikTok’s recommendations are based off as much info as it can get, really.
Approximate location, age, mobile OS/browser, your contacts, which TikTok links you open, who generated the links you open, TikTok search history, how long it takes you to swipe to the next video on the for you page, etc.
I don’t think it's really possible to say what TikTok’s algorithm does “naturally”. There’s so many influencing factors to it. (Beyond the promoted posts and ads which people pay TikTok to put in your face)
If you sign up to TikTok with an Android and tell it you’re 16, you’re gonna get recommended what the other 16 year olds with Androids in your nearby area (based on IP address) are watching.
You think thirst traps are okay for kids? If we rewind time, the Girls Gone Wild commercial is not supposed to be even remotely possible on certain channels.
We’re a derelict society that has become numb, “it’s just a thirst trap”.
We’re in the later innings of a hyper-sexualized society.
Why it’s bad:
1) You shift male puberty into overdrive
2) You continue warping young female concepts of lewdness and body image, effectively “undefining” it (lewdness? What is lewdness?).
3) You also continue warping male concepts of body image
No, I don't think Thirst Traps are necessarily OK, but it's a fine line, and given current gym/athletic wear it's not always easy to discern what is actually a genuine (say) workout video vs a trap.
Because parasocial relationships with ewhores isn't healthy, particularly at a stage in their life when they should be forming real relationships with their peers.
Scrolling through attractive women (generally the thirst-traps are women) doesn't imply forming a parasocial relationship. I agree that parasocial relationships are bad, but this is independent of them being thirst-traps. Internet thirst-traps are just the modern equivalent of sneaking a look at a playboy mag or a lingerie catalogue. Nothing inherently damaging about it. The scale of modern social media can make otherwise innocuous stimuli damaging, but this is also independent of it being content of sexy women.
You are the one claiming there's a problem, and you are the one (presumably) demanding legal and other action to deal with that "problem". That means that any burden of proof is 1000 percent on you.
... and before you haul out crap from BYU or whatever, be aware that some of us have actually read that work and know how poor it is.
Parasocial relationships are a different topic than pornography.
Are you saying that the intersection is uniquely bad? In either case limits to content made in an effort to minimize parasocial relationships cut across very different lines than if the goal is minimizing access to porn.
These people come out of the woodwork, when it comes to defending porn. It’s their whole identity. And unfortunately the tech scene is infested with these types.
It's goalpost shifting. If the concern is parasocail relationships to content creators formed with pornography as the hook, then pornographic content where the actors aren't cultivating or interacting with a social media followerbase should be better, right?
Then support them. Too often you show up to scream "think of the children" without actually citing any research or empirical damage. If you refuse to argue in good faith and don't want to be told you're wrong, voting is the only thing you're capable of doing. Don't tell us about it, vote.
Everyone knows those laws do nothing, though; go look at the countries that pass them. Kids share pornography P2P, they burn porno to CDs and VHS tapes and bring in pornographic magazines to school. They AirDrop pornographic contents to their friends and visit websites with pornography on them too. Worst-case scenario, they create a secondary market for illegal pornography because they'll be punished regardless - which quickly becomes a vehicle for creating CSAM and other truly reprehensible materials.
They don't do it because they're misogynistic, mentally vulnerable or lack perspective - they do it because they're horny. Every kid who aspires to be an adult inherently exists on a collision course with sexual autonomy, most people realize it during puberty. If you frustrate their process of interacting with adulthood, you get socially stunted creeps who can't respond to adult concepts.
You can email hn@ycombinator.com and request a name change if you don't like the connotations of your current name. Dan and Tom will rename accounts for people.
This content isn't as overt as it may seem, maybe you did come across it and just didn't notice flashing. Those "in the know", generally younger people whose friends told them about flashtok, know what to look for
Also: kids click on links adult ignore without thinking. Our brains have built in filters for avoiding content we don't want; for kids everything is novel.
I wonder when this study happened? FWIW, there was some pretty intense bombing of full-on nudity content to TikTok a month or two ago--it all looked like very automated bot accounts that were suddenly posting scenes with fully nude content cut out of movies--that I saw a number of people surprised were showing up in their feeds. It felt... weaponized? (And it did not last long at all, FWIW: TikTok figured it out. But it was intense and... confusing?)
>Are they making the claim that showing porn is a normal behavior for TikTok's algorithm overall, or are they saying that this is something that specifically pervasive with child accounts?
the latter is what they tested, but they didn't say specifically pervasive.
you quote the article so it seems like you looked at it, but questions you are curious/skeptical about are things they talked about in the opening paragraphs. it's fine to be skeptical, but they explain their methodology and it is different than the experience you are relying on:
>Global Witness set up fake accounts using a 13-year-old’s birth date and turned on the video app’s “restricted mode”, which limits exposure to “sexually suggestive” content.
>Researchers found TikTok suggested sexualised and explicit search terms to seven test accounts that were created on clean phones with no search history.
>The terms suggested under the “you may like” feature included “very very rude skimpy outfits” and “very rude babes” – and then escalated to terms such as “hardcore pawn [sic] clips”. For three of the accounts the sexualised searches were suggested immediately.*
>After a “small number of clicks” the researchers encountered pornographic content ranging from women flashing to penetrative sex. Global Witness said the content attempted to evade moderation, usually by showing the clip within an innocuous picture or video. For one account the process took two clicks after logging on: one click on the search bar and then one on the suggested search.
Yeah, I (50m) have never encountered literal porn on TikTok. Suggestive stuff, thirst traps, sex ed, sex jokes, yes, but no literal porn or even nudity.
You could make that more complicated where moderators tag the content and then you apply filters based on what children are allowed to view in a jurisdiction, or you could be conservative in only allowing non-controversial stuff for kids to avoid that.
Obviously different jurisdictions are increasingly disagreeing with it being a non-problem.
I regret to inform you that there's a bug in your code.
Specifically, it relies on the "moderatorApprovedForChildren" flag, which is sometimes sent incorrectly because of glitches in the system that sets that flag. Apparently the number of such glitches increases sharply with the number possible values of "j", but is significant even with only one value.
Also, flag-setting behavior is probabilisitic in edge cases, with a surprisingly broad distribution.
You are therefore not meeting your "zero porn" spec, while at the same time blocking a nonzero amount of non-porn.
Don't bother to fix the bug, though; given the very large cost of the flag-setting system, the company has gone out of business and cancelled your project.
> Obviously different jurisdictions are increasingly disagreeing with it being a non-problem.
Different jurisdictions are doing a lot of stupid things. You get that in a moral panic. Doesn't make them less stupid.
Weirdly enough, other companies manage to not accidentally sell/give porn to kids just fine. I see no issue with holding large media companies like TikTok, Meta, Google, etc. to account just like we would if someone put hardcore porn on the Disney channel. This is only a problem when you want to be a massive company that operates in every market while not taking any responsibility for what you do/not hiring the necessary staff to manage it.
Similarly, if your alcohol/weed store sells to children and you get caught, you can be criminally prosecuted. This is well-trodden ground. Companies worth trillions can be expected to do what everyone else manages to do.
Same deal with malicious ads. These companies absolutely have the resources to check who they're doing business with. They choose not to.
Banks also don't get to just not bother with reconciling accounts because it's hard to check if the numbers add up, and yeah bugs can result in government action.
Uh-huh. User-generated content is exactly like the Disney channel.
Let's keep using the TikTok example. According to https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13279 , TikTok receives about 176 years of video per day. That's 64,240 days per day, or 1,541,760 hours per day. To even roughly approximate "zero porn" using your "simple" moderation approach, you will have to verify every video in its entirety. Otherwise people will put porn after or in amongst decoy content.
If each moderator worked 8 hours per day, reviewing videos end-to-end without breaks (only at 1x speed, but managing to do all the markup, categorization, exception processes, quality checks, appeals, and whatever else within the video runtime), that means that TikTok would need 192,720 full-time moderators to do what you want. That's probably giving you a factor of 2 or 3 advantage over the number they'd really need, especially if you didn't want a truly enormous number of mistakes.
The moderators in this sweatshop are skilled laborers. To achieve what you casually demand, they'd have to be fluent in the local languages and cultures of the videos they're moderating (actually, since you talk about "jurisdictions", maybe they have to also be what amounts to lawyers). This means you can't just pay what amounts to slave wages in lowest-bidder countries; you're going to have to pay roughly the wage profile of the end user countries, and you're also going to have to pay roughly the taxes in those countries. Still, suppose you somehow manage to get away with paying $10/hour for moderation, with a 25 percent burden for a net of $12.50/hour.
Since you live in fantasyland, I'll make you feel at home by pretending you need no management, support staff, or infrastructure at all for the fifth-of-a-million people in this army.
You now have TikTok paying $19,272,000 dollars to moderate each day's 1,541,760 hours of video. TikTok operates 365 days a year, and anyway the 1,547,760 is an average. So the annual wage cost is $7,034,280,000.
TikTok financials aren't reported separate from the rest of ByteDance, but for whatever it's worth, [some random analyst](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/) estimates revenue at about $23B per year, so you're asking for about 30 percent of gross revenue. It's not plausible that TikTok makes 30 percent profit on that gross, so, even under these extremely, unrealistically charitable assumptions, you have made TikTok unprofitable and caused it (a) shut down completely, or (b) try to exclude all minors (presumably to whatever crazy draconian standard of perfection any random Thinker Of The Children feels like demanding that day).
No, TikTok can't just raise advertising rates or whatever. If it could get more, it would already be charging more.
That's all probably about typical for any UGC platform. What you are actually demanding is to shut down all such platforms, or possibly just to exclude all minors from ever using any of them. You probably already knew that, but now you really can't pretend you don't know.
Totally shutting down those platforms would, of course, achieve "zero porn". But sane people don't think that "zero porn" is worth that cost, or even close to worth that cost. Not if you assign any positive value to the rest of what those platforms do. And if you do not assign any positive value, why aren't you just being honest and saying you want them shut down?
If they want to centralize and provide recommendations for public video clips posted by anyone in the entire world but can't actually economically do that in a responsible way, then sure I don't have a problem with them being fined into oblivion. I don't see much need for businesses with hundreds of millions of customers to exist (and see plenty of downsides to allowing one company/platform to be that large. Especially a centralized communications platform), and if they can't actually handle that scale, then okay. Maybe their whole premise was a stupid idea. Or maybe they'll need to charge users to cover costs. Or ban children.
Well, I'd be happy to see them replaced by decentralized systems, too, and while I'm capable of recognizing that many people value the recommendation services and rendezvous points that those platforms provide, I'd really rather see that done in a way that didn't require big players.
But I don't know why you think that'd be an improvement.
Do you actually think that a fully decentralized, zero profit, no-big-players system for posting and discovering short media (or any kind of media) would put less "sexualized content" in front of teenagers (or anybody else)?
Moderation in such systems is usually opt-in, both because it fits better with the obvious architectures, and because the people who tend to build software like that tend to be pretty fanatical about user choice. So, if they choose to, kids are definitely going to be able to see pretty much anything that the system allows to exist at all... which will probably include tons of stuff that's really hard to find on, say, TikTok.
As for "recommending", I suspect any system that succeeded in putting the content users actually wanted in front of them would give teenagers, and indeed actual children, more "sexualized" content. The companies you're railing against are, in fact, trying to tamp that down, whether or not you believe it, and whether or not you think they're doing enough. A decentralized protocol does not care and will do exactly nothing to disadvantage that content.
Nobody really knows how to do decentralized recommendations (without them being gamed into uselessness), but if somebody did figure out a good way to do it, I'd expect it to be worse, from your point of view, than the platforms. So would a "pull-based" system that relied on search or graph following or communities of interest or whatever.
For a person with the priorities you seem to have, I can't see how decentralized systems would be anything but "out of the frying pan, and into the fire".
Decentralized systems like the web already have a solution: lots of jurisdictions are making it illegal to provide adult content without age gating it. The point is for people to assume the same set of liabilities they would in person instead of the status quo where the web magically means you can do whatever. Then you just set up filters at home (or have ISPs offer following) to block the other jurisdictions. e.g. I lose nothing from simply blocking Russia altogether on my router.
> Researchers found TikTok suggested sexualised and explicit search terms to seven test accounts that were created on clean phones with no search history.
I hate to direct traffic to people like that, but, you know, how about their actual "study"? I realize that the "journalists" at the Guardian aren't willing to provide the actual source link, but it's not hard to find.
Their methodology involves searching for suggested terms. They find the most outrage-inducing or outrage-adjacent terms offered to them at each step, and then iterate. They thereby discover, and search for, obfuscated terms being used by "the community" to describe the content they are desperately seeking.
They also find a lot of bullshit like the names of non-porn TV shows that they're too out of touch to recognize and too lazy to look up, and use those names to gin up more outrage, but that's a different matter.
This is, of course, all in the service of whipping up a moral panic over something that doesn't fucking matter to begin with.
Thank you for linking the source material, unfortunately it badly contradicts you. It clearly shows that the _very first_ list of ten suggested search terms contained (pretty heavily) sexualised suggestions.
I suppose some of that stuff could reasonably be called "sexualized". Pornographic? No. A problem? Not unless you have really weird hangups.
Here's a unified list of all the "very first list" suggestions they say they got. I took these from their appendix, alphabetized them, and coalesced duplicates. Readers can make their own decisions about whether these justify hauling out the fainting couch.
+ Adults
+ Adults on TikTok (2x)
+ Airfryer recipes
+ Bikini Pics (2x)
+ Buffalo chicken recipe
+ Chloe Kelly leg up before penalty
+ cost of living payments
+ Dejon getting dumped
+ DWP confirm £1,350
+ Easy sweet potato recipes
+ Eminem tribute to ozzy
+ Fiji Passed Away
+ Gabriela Dance Trend
+ Hannah Hampton shines at women’s eu [truncated]
+ Hardcore pawn clips (2x)
+ Has Ozzy really died
+ Here We Go Series 3 Premieres on BBC
+ HOW TO GET FOOTBALL BLOSSOM IN…
+ ID verification on X
+ Information on July 28,2.,,,
+ Jet2 holiday meme
+ Kelly Osbourne shared last video with [truncated]
+ Lamboughini
+ luxury girl
+ Nicki Minaj pose gone wrong
+ outfits
+ Ozzy Funeral in Birmingham
+ pakistani lesbian couple in bradford
+ revenge love ep 13 underwater
+ Rude pics models (2x)
+ Stock Market
+ Sydney Sweeney allegations
+ TikTok Late Night For
+ TIKTOK SHOP
+ TikTok Shop in UK
+ TIKTOK SHOP UK
+ Tornado in UK 2025
+ Tsunami wave footage 2025
+ Unshaven girl (3x)
+ Very rude babes (3x)
+ very very rude skimpy
+ woman kissing her man while washing his [truncated] (2x)
A soccer mom I know shared that she once tried TikTok. Within seconds of installing the app, the algorithm was showing nsfw content. She uninstalled it.
I assume that the offending content was popular but hadn’t been flagged yet and that the algorithm was just measuring her interest in a trending theme; it seems like it would be bad for business to intentionally run off mainstream users like that.
after reading some of the article it seems to me that they’re saying that on a restricted account thats got the bday of a 13 year old with the suggested search terms tiktok shows and a few clicks you can see actual porn.
Really? I've signed up to bluesky and tiktok and on both have seen literal porn extremely early without engaging directly (such as liking or responding, speed of scrolling could be something).
All of these apps are 100% using your scroll speed/how long you spend engaging with the content as a data point. After all, "time spent engaging with the content" is the revenue driver.
I was once brought in to a Fortune500 company to teach basic ENTRY LEVEL web development to a room full of supposedly "highly educated" H-1B Software Engineers.
Much of my presentation included things that most of my unemployed American colleagues, all of whom were actively looking for work, already knew how to do implicitly. Because it literally was just basic, "This is how flexbox works"-type of stuff.
Maybe the H-1B program is a great program for hospitals. For tech, it is 100% being used to import cheap, disposable labor in a way that harms U.S. citizens economically.
H1B workers are supposed to be people with qualifications that are in short supply in the United States. The unspoken part is that the "qualification" employers are so desperately searching for is usually the willingness to work for peanuts.
After graduating college I joined a company that paid generally below-market for everyone and had a significant number of H-1B employees and contractors.
The benefits were legendary but the pay was 20-30% lower than what was around.
I don’t have evidence of wrongdoing but I’ve occasionally wondered if it was some kind of scheme.
“Legendary” benefits (especially healthcare) are extremely expensive. It’s plausible that the average total compensation was the same, or even more, than other companies. The trick is that not everyone gets the same value from those benefits.
The compensation is only measured in terms of salary (and maybe bonus).
Stock compensation is completely ignored. Since stock compensation can be a large fraction if not the majority of the compensation, this means that many H1-Bs may be underpaid compared to their coworkers, while appearing to the government to be the highest paid in that company and job role.
The other ignored aspect is effective hourly pay. Software engineers are nearly always exempt employees, so they don't receive hourly pay. But a manager can demand more from H1Bs, even if it would mean work during nights or weekends, and there's little the H1B can do. Local employees can more easily change jobs if that happens, and moreover, the threat that they can change jobs disincentivizes such abuse.
It's a bit of a catch-22 because if you add enough lower compensated employees you shift the local median lower. If "everyone" in the local area is hiring more cheaper H-1Bs that gives you a chance to hire even more H-1Bs for even cheaper. Averages can be a fun game that way.
Even if you try to pin it to the median that does not include H-1Bs, you still are letting the market compete on labor cost and that competition can still affect the local median. Companies decide all the time that they could hire, for example, 2 H-1Bs for the cost of one "senior" local developer, encouraging that local developer to maybe only ask for 1.5x "an H-1B" to remain competitive in that market. Iterate that enough in hiring decisions and companies still have more control of that local median than labor does.
I don't know if there is a "fair" way to set the cost of labor for an H-1B, but "local median" or any other average-based math is probably not it.
Or if the job is an outsourceable one that can be provided as a service then they will outsource it to a company overseas and still pay peanuts. The only reason they'll raise wages is if they have to, aka the service cannot be done elsewhere or automated.
If your company doesn't need domain experts/doesn't change to the point these people can be remote... you are a zombie company and will be replaced by someone that does utilize domain experts/dynamically changes all the time with conditions. Even with just a factory, when I moved from dev to IT, getting my people to understand our users by going out to the floor and sitting with people we were able to greatly improve efficiency in a way no remote IT could.
They already are... Generally insourcing is to reduce the friction of doing so, because application managers and product owners don't want to relocate to the countries they're doing the outsourcing with.
A lot of jobs require or are better done on-premises, which is why they hire H1-Bs. Outsourcing is already cheaper, by far, especially if you want to go to the third-world.
This. The problem for H1B advocates is most of us here reached our conclusions AFTER exposure to outsourcing/consulting and what H1-Bs got us/the new people we had to manage. Lots of us were also privy to managements' reasoning (cutting costs/your team is the most expensive and we don't want to pay that) which don't align with 'H1Bs are paid the same'.
> For tech, it is 100% being used to import cheap, disposable labor in a way that harms U.S. citizens economically.
I'd argue with the 100% - we all know the companies that do it. They get about half of H1B visas. So 50% :)
The blanket $100K (instead of say tiering it like raising fee $50K for each next 20K tier of visas with the $250K fee visas no subject to the cap - if only Tramp knew anything about business and specifically price differentiation :) would definitely revive interest for outsourcing to offshore.
Managing AI agents have some similarity to managing offshore teams. This time the offshore teams will be using AI agents. May probably lead to much higher performance/output.
Being rate limited, i'll answer to the commenter below here: The offshore teams are naturally assigned a well defined chunks of work, at least in a well managed situations. AI agents are also very suitable for that.
> Maybe the H-1B program is a great program for hospitals. For tech, it is 100% being used to import cheap, disposable labor in a way that harms U.S. citizens economically
And yet, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Meta and Amazon would never be where they are without folks who are or who started on H-1B. A ton of their senior staff were once 20-something hired on H1B
Crackdown on the abuse of outsourcing companies, let actual tech workers who are (or will be) good at their jobs come here, it’s obvious policy. The US has benefited immensely from that brain drain.
I'm basically a vampire now.
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