A few reasons I can think of, having been through IVF twice now:
- Capability. Many couples are perfectly capable of carrying a pregnancy, they’re just having trouble conceiving.
- Cost. Surrogacy in a lot of countries is very expensive compared to IVF. Where I live in the UK, IVF is free on the NHS, or ~£8,000-£10,000 a round privately. Surrogacy can be £20,000 to £100,000 (or more), depending on the arrangement.
- Legal issues. In the UK, for example, the surrogate mother is the legal mother of the child at birth.
- Availability. Finding a surrogate can be very hard, especially in countries where commercial surrogacy is illegal. People go use surrogates abroad instead, which has its own range of issues (read up on orphaned surrogate kids in Ukraine).
- Ethical barriers. Using a surrogate involves issues of bodily autonomy. You can’t stop your surrogate smoking or drinking while pregnant, for example.
- Emotional barriers. Emotionally, motherhood starts at conception. Most mothers do not want to skip those 9 months of bonding they have with their baby prior to it being born.
It's weird. I was born with the internet being largely a business or academic tool, with normal people barely having a reason to have an email address.
When I was in high school, flip phones could let you text friends, as long as you didn't mind your parents later using your soul to pay the phone bill.
When I was in college, the most addictive thing the internet could offer was foul bachelor frogs and rage comics.
Along the way, I learned how dangerous even those unrefined sugars were. It was like chewing coca leaves or sugarcane. Enough t get you a buzz, but not enough to ruin your life. So I know not to touch the algorithmic fentanyl feeds of TikTok and the like.
But good god, nobody younger or older had any protection from this. My parents and spouses parents, and my zoomer cousins both basically got handed giant bags of refined gigasugar without even the vaguest warnings. I'll refrain from likening it to opiates against because they are on a whole different level, but good god it does seem more dangerous than even refined sugar.
It’s definitely not limited to Facebook. About half of the 50-70 year olds in my family and my wife’s family are screen addicted without Facebook. They live on questionable news websites, messenger apps, Nextdoor, and some others.
It’s strange to hear a 60-something rant about how evil Facebook is and then go on to regurgitate countless conspiracy theories they picked up from whatever websites they’re reading this month.
The parents who scroll Instagram and Facebook feel downright tame in comparison.
For about 2-3 years now youtube itself is flooded with countless channels producing generated content. Whoever are the people behind this they know what they're doing and what kind of stuff will give them views and attention from vulnerable audience.
There's fueling political and social rage with "news", casting doubts on family relations with "true life stories" (daughter-in-law threw me out of my house), religious "coaching" (dead since end of 60s Padre Pio gives you life lessons and "secret" prophecies), worthless tips and tricks (don't eat this nut if you're 50yo woman or your hair will fell off), lewd promotion with twist on history (sexual violence in every thumbnail) or tourism (women in country of x are "ready" all the time). So on and so on.
So I'd say it's not that much strange if you look closely what kind of the content older people can walk onto. And this is just youtube.
I shouldnt be surprised that my mom is obsessed with her smartphone. As a kid, I remember her talking with friends on the landline phone for what seemed like HOURS
My Dad’s got early stage dementia and Facebook is an absolute nightmare. The apps infested with AI slop and the algorithm seems to fill his feed with stuff designed to get him worked up (currently badly behaved cyclists even though he no longer drives).
I have hoarded 61849 short videos (44 GB, filtered, no propaganda, spam or low quality stuff) from 9gag, with this you could build a "Fakebook" of your own and serve your parents whatever you want, I randomly picked 5 videos:
- funny cat video
- superfluid helium document from 60s
- people jumping on a roof and falling through
- abba sos song (in Swedish, or Esperanto, idk)
- kid saving bus driver with stroke
Analyze them with LLM, generate positive comments and you're good to go.
old folks and children both face the same problem with the internet— their initial exposure is to the current internet that has been ab tested into a hyper-addictive hellscape and they are cognitively unprepared. Jumping straight into the deep end before you know how to swim.
Whereas genX and Xennials had the privilege of wading into a pre-social media internet during their formative years which served as a vaccine of sorts. We are by no means immune to tech addiction and disinformation, but we seem much better equipped for spotting trolls/ragebait and giving the side-eye to addictive dark patterns in apps
everyone is vulnerable to it. i think the idea that certain generations are better equipped is more a by product of exposure rather than some sense of immunisation. GenX/Xennials are just more likely to have other things to do than going on social media at the same rate as other cohorts - whether its still busy working or kids or hobbies etc. Intense exposure and the reinforcement that brings is the problem. Its why the problems became even more pronounced through covid years
You don’t have to, of course, but you probably will if you want to be competitive in a professional capacity in the future.
Not doing so seems a bit like a farmer ploughing fields and harvesting crops by hand while seeking to remain competitive with modern machinery, surely?
It remains to be seen whether these analogies will still hold in the longer term, or whether agentic code will come to be seen as cheap but buggy and mediocre.
At this point, when people say this I just assume they’ve not used the latest models or haven’t invested time in learning how to use these tools properly.
There’s slop out there, yes, but in the hands of an engineer who cares to use tools well, LLMs allow you to move much more quickly and increase the quality of your output dramatically.
Good software isn't about quantity but quality of the code.
AI cannot produce better quality code than someone who is actually qualified in the problem domain.
What I've seen AI be very good at is creating a lot of legacy code very quickly, which itself needs extensive use of AI just to maintain it.
A decent approach to move quickly for PoC or prototypes, or to enable product managers to build things without a team. But obviously not something you can build a real company on.
Have you been in the same industry as the rest of us? 90% of all developers out there in the wild create "legacy code very quickly" anyways, they too create "slop" before we coined the term "AI slop". This mythical "someone who is actually qualified in the problem domain" you mention is maybe 5% of the entire software development ecosystem. If you work with only those developers, you're extremely privileged and lucky, but also in a very isolated bubble.
If you work on meaningful tech projects, where tech is a real driver to the businesses and there are genuine challenges to overcome, then you can't afford slop.
I say that, but then it's true I have seen businesses be successful despite low quality of software. It turned out that for those businesses, the value wasn't that much driven by tech after all.
Depends on the size and complexity of the problem that the system is solving. For very complex problems, even the most succinct solution will be complex and not all parts of the code can be throwaway code. You have to start stacking the layers of abstractions and some code becomes critical. Like think of the Linux Kernel, you can't throw away the Linux Kernel. You can't throw away Chromium or the V8 engine... Millions of systems depend on those. If they had issues or vulnerabilities and nobody to maintain, it would be a major problem for the global economy.
companies have been abandoning products for decades, and shuffling ongoing support onto other entities. nothing has to be "thrown away" as you keep suggesting.
Even if a throw away and replace strategy is used, eventually a system's complexity will overrun any intelligence's ability to work effectively with it. Poor engineering will cause that development velocity drop off to happen earlier.
An aside - this monitor is proving surprisingly difficult to buy in the UK. Everywhere I look it seems to be unavailable or out of stock, and I’ve been checking regularly.
Relatedly, I also don’t understand why a half-trillion dollar company makes it so hard to give them my money. There’s no option to order ASUS directly on the UK site. I’m forced to check lots of smaller resellers or Amazon.
Presumably the "big names" are able to (or have already) implemented the requirements under the law and have an economic and reputational incentive to comply.
Unfortunately, I don't see any site being blocked that will make these shameless gremlins in power let go of their authoritarian control over the public's lives.
- Capability. Many couples are perfectly capable of carrying a pregnancy, they’re just having trouble conceiving.
- Cost. Surrogacy in a lot of countries is very expensive compared to IVF. Where I live in the UK, IVF is free on the NHS, or ~£8,000-£10,000 a round privately. Surrogacy can be £20,000 to £100,000 (or more), depending on the arrangement.
- Legal issues. In the UK, for example, the surrogate mother is the legal mother of the child at birth.
- Availability. Finding a surrogate can be very hard, especially in countries where commercial surrogacy is illegal. People go use surrogates abroad instead, which has its own range of issues (read up on orphaned surrogate kids in Ukraine).
- Ethical barriers. Using a surrogate involves issues of bodily autonomy. You can’t stop your surrogate smoking or drinking while pregnant, for example.
- Emotional barriers. Emotionally, motherhood starts at conception. Most mothers do not want to skip those 9 months of bonding they have with their baby prior to it being born.
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