Their point is that despite being the designers of such systems, they prevent their own children from using them. Akin to a drug dealer not consuming what he sells.
>“We do limit their time on YouTube and other platforms and other forms of media. On weekdays we tend to be more strict, on weekends we tend to be less so. We’re not perfect by any stretch,”
>He stressed “everything in moderation” is what works best for him and his wife, and that extends to other online services and platforms.
>YouTube’s former CEO Susan Wojcicki, also barred her children from browsing videos on the app, unless they were using YouTube Kids. She also limited the amount of time they spent on the platform.
So they're not completely banning their kids from using YouTube. The current YouTube CEO uses a time limit. The previous YouTube CEO uses a time limit and limits usage to the YouTube Kids app.
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.
My kids aren’t allowed on YouTube. I run a local system that mirrors approved channels to our home server and serves them through Plex. Creators lose ad revenue; that’s unfortunate. The alternative was nonstop ads on children’s content and a recommendation system pushing garbage. That trade-off was unacceptable.
I always think if I had kids this is how I'd do it also. I'm an adult who I think has fairly decent critical thinking skills and also is familiar with the state of technology etc etc. Well, I was following the news on 3I/ATLAS and I caught myself watching a youtube channel that I genuinely thought was Michio Kaku, I'd heard him talk once and it sounded and looked like him, so I put it on, switch tabs and listen as I work. I didn't notice it was AI (in retrospect I should have) but after a couple of days of watching it, I started to think...either this guy is worse than Avi Lobe or this channel is fake, the channel was fake and the content was, probably.. 2 or 3 steps removed from reality.
Regarding ads, wouldn't YouTube Premium solve that? Regarding recommendations, YouTube kids allows you to select certain videos, channels, or collections, and only allow your kids to view those that you've selected.
> I run a local system that mirrors approved channels to our home server and serves them through Plex. Creators lose ad revenue; that’s unfortunate.
Have your home server note when the kids are watching one of your mirrored channels and launch a browser on a computer the kids cannot see that is watching the same video on YouTube without an ad blocker.
The video creators then get exactly the same ad revenue and view counts they would have gotten had the kids used YouTube.
Same here as well as for other streaming. They want to watch the show more than a couple times, I’ll download it. No way I let my kids get brainwashed by these people with their weird algorithms they don’t understand themselves.
Those ads are optional. You can just pay for it. Its actually pretty good value for the money.
Edit: I forgot to mention Family Link. Once you have a family membership (maybe even before?) You can also use Googles family link to enable a restricted mode that hides adult content for specific accounts.
You actually get a pretty great experience for the whole family for about $20/month.
Ads are only half the problem. The real problem with kids using YouTube is it's too easy for them to access any of the content on the platform.
If I could pay YouTube for the privilege of using an app where I choose exactly which videos are available, and no other video will ever appear on or can be accessed from that app, then I might pay for it.
IMO the only way YouTube can be kid-friendly is if there is an app where the primary utility is the ability to whitelist on a per video basis. There could be convenience methods like whitelisting an entire channel's videos with one action, but the whitelist needs to be built around a per video model.
Last I checked, they had nothing remotely like this as an option.
I can't speak for your adolescents, but my kids make generally good decisions. I don't relate to the kids are stupid automatons with no agency or valid opinion mindset that is so prevalent with HN contributors. If your kids would only ever pick junk food, maybe that is a reflection on you more than them?
I myself was recently an adolescent, and still know many adolescents myself. My take is coming from my anecdotal experience, and the behaviour I've observed from my peers. Perhaps your kids don't show that side of them in front of you? I know my peers and I certainly didn't go out of our way to advertise such activities to our parents when we were younger.
That misses the point by a mile and a half: nobody let's their children eat unlimited amounts of chocolate. They do, however, let their children access Tiltok, Youtube, etc.
Except that's not true. Plenty of parents let their kids have unlimited access to junk food and candy. Neighbor kids come over and they don't know what to do because I only have water, fruit, and pretzels. I have been to so many parent's houses who have whole pantries of just sugary snacks.
I wanted to eat unlimited junk food when I was a kid but my parents wouldn't let me.
You can change it even to unlimited protein shakes. It is the same point. It is almost like kids are kind of stupid if you let them do whatever they want.
could you highlight what in the original article made you think they were banning their kids from social media entirely? or were you trying to explain something else?
Although I hate social media with a passion and would be fine if the government banned it outright, I don’t think this is a fair reading.
Do toy manufacturers let their kids play with their toys 24 hours a day and not go outside or do homework? Video game devs? Parents are supposed to help their kids limit their time in everything.
There are actually some pretty big risks especially in terms of like motor development, and considering now they’re adding a splash of AI to everything and a ton of toys have screens, well.
You don’t have to put your kids in front of a TV or tablet. You can simply establish boundaries and leave them to themselves. They will engage in imaginative play for hours on end just like kids have for thousands of years.
Source: my kids have been doing it since 5AM while I lay in bed sick.
You’re the one bringing the conversation back to superficials (blaming society and stuff you have no control over) instead of digging deeper. You don’t need to be rich or stay-at-home to talk to your kids or read books to them, which an increasing fraction of parents don’t do. Restricting tech use is common-sense and free. Books are cheaper than an iPad for each kid.
I’m from Europe. We have early childcare. Kindergarten teachers (I don’t know if that’s the right term) are still seeing obvious issues with screens and really neglected kids that the parents barely interact with. Don’t try to reduce everything issue down to one, the world can face multiple issues simultaneously. So can we talk about tech addiction in kids and parents without changing the topic to a different one?
You also have to think deeper than that, media in the west is propaganda, you have to ask why are they all pushing the "children are in danger from social media" narrative? You should never make the mistake to be so naive to trust in their genuine good intentions, this has nothing to do with children.
The real purpose is to build broad consensus for surveillance, control and censorship of social media, "to protect the children" is the thing they tell you to justify it. They are recognizing they have lost the narrative control. How do you manufacture consent for war and genocide when you have completely lost young people, they see the wall of carnage and dead children and will not be persuadable by the legacy media telling them to close their eyes and ears.
I don't think being closed vs open is the problem because most of the open access journals will ask for thousands of dollars from authors as publication fees. Which is getting paid to them by public funding. The open access model is actually now a lucrative model for the publishers. And they still don't pay authors or reviewers.
I think this is exactly the right intuition. I think people hopelessly underestimate the human tendency to do nothing. We have this idea that if an innovation is good enough it should “sell itself”, and that’s almost never true because across all organizations, it’s almost always safer to do nothing, adopt nothing, keep doing what you’re doing.
No one gets fired for suggesting no change.
It takes a special level of hype where “doing nothing” is no longer the sensible choice.
Do I wish this hype was spread around to other technologies that are also awesome, of course. I’d love to help someone figure out a way to do that but as of now, we don’t know how to do that. Humans are very bad at holding two different ideas in their head.
But we don't need to do anything. We don't need AI and so we don't need a push for it. If AI is just a "normal" technology that has some legitimate uses, it doesn't need a huge boost, it doesn't need any hype at all. It can just be slowly discovered and used by the people who have a legitimate use for it. Doing nothing is often a good move.
“ technology that has some legitimate uses, it doesn't need a huge boost”
That’s what I’m disagreeing with. “Legitimate uses” isn’t something just hanging out in the ether to attach itself to useful technology it happens via a grinding sales process and big industry wide cultural changes.
People don’t like change.
I think AI and its knock-on effects in robotics will have massive productivity boosts in industries where productivity has been lagging for years. It will take decades and multiple boom-busts to happen to drag the population into change but it’ll happen.
I guess what I'd say is that if that grinding sales process and those industry-wide cultural changes have all the negative effects we're seeing with AI, then we shouldn't make that trade. There is simply no urgent need to adopt AI, and the frenzied push to adopt it anyway is actively harmful.
Except NVIDIA is turning the roundabout investments into real silicon, data centers and extraneous software investments (see: IsaacSim, autonomy stack etc). They may not have the returns all the investors are expecting but they are an extreme net good for the ecosystem.
I think the comparison to stock buybacks is ludicrous.
Perhaps depends on what you mean with "ecosystem". Within the AI tech/hype, sure, there it's good. But for the economy as a whole? Is it that good? There are probably some benefits, but do they match the current valuations?
Most likely they don't, because hype cycles inherently overvaluate things for a while because they don't know what will stick. If things were not dramatically overvalued right now then investors would not be acting in their best interest.
Their investments in robotics over the long term will lead to massive unlocks in productivity that hasn’t moved in some industries for decades eg sim2real tech leading to construction robots being used to build housing with 1/3 of the human labor needed now in an industry with widespread labor shortage [1]
Will it match a certain valuation within a certain time period? I guess I don’t really care, I’m not an investor.
How would you differentiate between real estate investment versus speculation? Money goes towards building new housing, say, or buying some houses in a neighborhood to renovate, or a new apartment building, is that speculation or investment or both?
I don’t think speculation was the right word. Scarcity exploitation (something current investment firms love doing) is better and building new housing is not that.
Investing is choosing how to put your money to work just like how you choose what vendor to give your business.
Here's a though experiment. If you could invest today in a company that will result in the destruction of your town (say a mining company) but you got 1% higher return compared to others, you're saying that's a perfect investment and would do it right away?
And if the answer is yes to the above, you can make that a lot darker if you want. See how far your belief goes.
> If you could invest today in a company that will result in the destruction of your town (say a mining company) but you got 1% higher return compared to others, you're saying that's a perfect investment and would do it right away?
If you look at how the money people behaved since always, that's exactly what would happen.
Economics works on larger scale than region or sector. I am sure that people that were copying books in the medieval ages would not have invested in the printing press, but someone else did and it was still good for society even if not for that specific group.
Society works by balancing the interests of various groups, and there will be people with different opinions than yours, including some you don't like.
That’s what regulations are for.
If AI was known to have the destructive capabilities of strip mining, with real evidence of harm then it should be regulated and would have much lower returns regardless of your morals.
This isn’t an opportunity if Open AI is signing deals in a single year 2025 where it commits to pay a bigger number than the entire defense budget despite being deeply unprofitable. It’s a scam. The bubble makes it seem like it’s a good investment. And yes I do believe there are better investments outside the AI bubble.
“I do believe there are better investments outside the AI bubble.”
Then make them! I don’t have the confidence you have in this “scam”. For sure the valuations are inflated but I don’t think this infrastructure investment will be a waste.
I see this take a lot, but it confuses me. There is no guarantee that LP’s would take that money and instead invest it in <tech I respect that is not AI>.
They would just as likely hoover up housing around the country or some such insanity to capitalize on the scarcity.
VC is actually a pretty effective vehicle to separate rich people from their money so society can try crazy things. You just don’t agree with this particular adventure and frankly there will never be the perfect alternative adventure.
Isn't the core issue that this deluge of spending on the hype inflates away adjacent companies valuation (Meta, Google, Tesla, Nvidia, etc.) where people's pensions and savings get directed towards since they become the growth stocks in the index, and when it inevitably corrects there's second/third-order effects on non-rich people?
> They would just as likely hoover up housing around the country or some such insanity to capitalize on the scarcity.
Another core issue in a hyper-financialised economy, the money doesn't get invested in what would be best for society, it keeps chasing either risky endeavours or parked in presumed safe assets (such as housing), inflating away asset classes. Where are the incentives to invest in foundational areas which do compound to make a society have resilient growth, like infrastructure: energy, transportation, etc.? It feels like without government direction to spend in big projects there's simply no appetite from the private, hyper-financialised, system to do the work, unless there's potential to get 10-100x returns. Is that good for society at large?
If hyper-financialisation is not helping the overall economy, and society to become better, why the hell should we still (in the Western world) pursue that? If all it can do is increasingly chase the extremes: hyper-growth vs extremely safe assets, is it any good anymore?
I think if you want the public to accept that the government will be a better shepherd of this money than a decentralized smattering of individuals then the government should provide evidence for this, once it actually opens up from a dysfunctional shutdown.
At least in the American context everything from California High Speed rail to bloated defense spending has shown that VC’s are much better shepherds of their own money.
Completely agree, the American government has become incompetent in delivering any real big project to its citizenry, it went through a whole ideological process of gutting its abilities to do so.
It was designed to lose this ability, and to lean onto private enterprises to do anything but in the past the government was able to rollout highways, go to the moon, build dams, bridges, power plants.
If both the government and VCs are now unreliable to shepherd capital to direct it to the improvement of society at large you might need to rethink the whole system, and work to nudge it into a better path.
Most people wouldn't vote or participate in this investment craze. Maybe we shouldn't let unelected lucky nobodies decide how we invest our time for us.
I’m not saying don’t tax them or let them influence politics.
I’m saying letting them go to space or turning sand into intelligence is infinitely better than buying land and charging us rent (what most rich people have done in history).
They are hoping to invest in the companies that will be the (next) electronic equivalent of rent-seeking land owners, as faang are now. It's better since land is physically necessary to live, but only marginally so.
Buying more land, building more housing to ultimately charge rent would definitely be good for everybody. The housing crisis is a supply side shortage and every dollar going into building new rentals would alleviate that pressure. Instead, the money goes to building more AI datacenters so that the family of 5 with mom and dad working at Walmart can have higher definition cat videos. They'd be better served with more supply in the rental market, ultimately lowering rent.
That code (penal code 632) has a carve out for when there is a “reasonable expectation” of the location being in public so outside of private spaces it doesn’t apply.
The internet is littered with a*holes with cameras testing that carve out and members of the public who don’t know who get into fights. Best to not be interesting in public unless you’re okay with being filmed I guess.
I don’t know about people’s anecdata but this data does not support the claim it makes.
Skills aren’t interchangeable and there is no universal hiring pool called “IT” under which you can hire anyone with an engineering degree and so an H1B swap becomes the only answer.
There are a large number of pools of specializations that fall into and out of favor with time, with people transitioning between them (as they should!). AI has fallen into favor and some frontend/backend jobs have fallen out. Is this what this data shows? Maybe? We’d never know.
Part of me says, “What a clever hack! Can I get a notification feature wrt where I parked?”
The other part of me says “Can we just use Public goods more responsibly instead of scratching and clawing our way through maximizing every second of monopolizing public spaces for our personal property storage”
Dig a little deeper CNBC.