Well congratulations! You've produced the thing you wanted to make and that's awesome! And I bet you learned heaps along the way.
We're moving into a really weird time where this grade of thing you have made with its robust infrastructure is going to be absolutely everywhere. Those things won't be the differentiating factor. It will be taste, opinion, and passion.
I'll probably be a meme in ten years for this but I don't think this is the one that's going to take off and make you wealthy(er?). People's brains are too addled by strobing media, mine included, for a simplicity to hold on to them. But I do think you have shown really valuable traits in shipping this that indicate you will have success sooner or later. And you can be proud of yourself for this. Well done.
This is terrific work. Thank you for writing and sharing it. It captures the unease I have felt about UBI. It describes the feeling of regret I get about the state of public works. I'm sure I'm going to keep coming back to this.
How do you deal with two people bidding to replace the same message?
I'm most curious about your development process. This has a very strong feel of being vibe coded, which I have nothing against. And your replies here also sound heavily LLM influenced. I als have no issues with that. I am more interested to know if my instinct about these things is accurate. Has developed in this way, over engineered as you say, essentially because the cost to do so is practically nothing with the advent of LLM coding?
This is the kind of abstraction I was hoping to avoid. It's obviously intellectually dishonest to compare AI to a shovel. I'll not bother with more. You're not in the market for thinking.
There's nothing stopping any tool maker from doing those things. In fact, they do those things all the time! So if tool makers and tools are all limiting use in a self-serving way anyway, why should we not also expect them to limit use in a way that protects children from sexual exploitation through the use of those tools? I respect the principle but I think this is an idealistic extreme and not really based in any practicality or realism.
Do you really think that when people make things that have risks associated with the use or misuse of those tools that they have no responsibility to mitigate those risks or prevent misuse?
> it is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. It helps, but not much.
The lipstick helps? This had me in stitches. Sorry for the non-additive reply. This is the funniest way I have seen this or any other phrase explained. By far. Honestly has made my day and set me up for the whole week.
That last line was humor. Those are recognised "productive" activities. I guess if I had to really explain it, I was trying to offer a rephrased take on what I saw as the meaning of that line in the article. And so highlight that expecting children to do strictly productive things is silly. Dunno. Does that make sense now? I guess I've learned my lesson about my sense of humor not travelling well.
But you didn't say that. You just said I didn't know what 'indulge' means. Although I'm sure the irony of your final quip has escaped you, you have editorialised it into a valid criticism of my take, which I totally accept. Not everyone reads and uses the word with the tone it conveys in my vernacular, and which I'm sure must be, at least implied, in any respectable dictionary definition. Fair enough. Out of curiosity, do you think this is a geo-cultural difference? I am Australian. I imagine most commonwealth and formerly commonwealth countries read it the same way. Where are you from?
I apologise for you misunderstanding my example as a strict definition?
For anyone who hasn't understood my meaning:
Indulge is a word that implies that you're allowing yourself something that you might not ordinarily. The point being: it is (or should be) silly to suggest that a child can be said to indulge in a hobby. This is because the further implication is that an eight year old might show some restraint and focus on their book learning and networking.
There's something about this that stands out as very concerning for me.
This, clearly very clever, young man is 14 years old. The article says: "Wu had always been fascinated with the ancient Japanese art of origami, but he really began indulging in it as a hobby about six years ago."
At eight. He was *indulging* in a hobby at eight years old. Indulging in a hobby should be a pre-retirement activity. What an incredible weight the attitude of the writer puts on kids.