As someone who went to a high school (Italy) where in the first two years each student had a laptop they could use in the classroom, I agree that having a computer per student is a bad idea.
In my experience, what ended up happening was that pupils who already knew their way around a computer didn't really get any extra benefit from using cmputers in the classroom and those who didn't like using computers hated it even more when forced to write out an assignment on a keyboard as supposed to handwriting.
Most importantly though, they were a HUGE distraction. Any time the lesson got boring because the teacher wasn't good or just not good at getting the kids engaged in the lesson (which happened quite often sadly, but that is another discussion) we would all just start playing on the computers. Some kids came to school just to play videogames and barely learned anything.
Now, some of these issues (like bad professors, smart kids getting bored because of slow pace of lessons) have always been present in every school all over the world but I do think that having tech in the classroom just makes things worse, as now even those who would have normally followed the lesson are tempted to just turn on their computer and pretend to take notes when really they are playing Candy crush. It's bad enough being a teenager and being bombarded with stimuli from your phone and social media, having that kind of distraction at school just makes things even worse.
So yeah, I think tech in school is one of those things that sounds great but usually just back-fires in spectacular ways (imho).
maybe we should start thinking of payment infrastructure as a core public service if we move away from cash? Just like there is an official entity that can "print" cash, we should start doing the same with digital payments (I believe the EU is doing somethig similar). That way you don't have a duopoly taking a cut of every transaction.
I would also add Brave search. It returns decent results and has a very nice way of displaying reddit posts relevant to the search (saves you from having to type reddit at the end of the query :) )
I got off Instagram and Facebook about 2 years ago and never got on Tik-Tok and I can safely say it was one of the best choices I ever made.
I am still on Twitter which I check about once every few days for about 10 minutes.
I realized how my peers (umivesity students) are affected by social media, most of them are endlessly circling instagram and tik-tok every time there is a spare second. Once I got off I discovered how much time it frees up for thinking and/or doing other activities. I get the feeling that people are losing the joy of being alone with one's thoughts.
The hard part of being off social media is the fact that it is such a central part of our social interactions, sometimes I feel "out of the loop" and I still get A LOT of weird looks when I say to people that I am off social media.
All in all I am still convinced that being off social media is a net positive and I definitely advise people to try and see how it works out for them.
- War against humans and AI commences. The AI content farms will destroy everything by reducing the signal to noise ratio so that all content is worthless regardless of who wrote it.
Honestly, since the release of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion this Us something I have been thinking about a lot. I we thought that what we saw in the last 10-15 years was an explosion in content available online, we cannot even imagine the quantity of content that will come. I am actually surprised this has not happened yet, although I think that we will see more and more articles with contributions by ChatGPT. Short to mid-term I hope that this will not lead to a decrease in content quality/lack of diversity. Long-term I think we will see mechanisms arise to distinguish human writing from AI generated content.
I am aware that this might sound pessimistic, I am actually excited to see where his things will evolve!
I think that when it comes to projects on github the key is in distinguishing between the "I want to be hired" projects and the "I'm doing this because it's interesting and fun" projects. The latter tend to be much higher quality than the former and they're also more fun to work on (because you don't have the pressure of what a recuiter might think about it). Although, as you said, it's not always easy to tell which is which at a first glance.
In a certain sense it feels like it's the right direction. But if you are essentially paying 8$/month how can you justify still displaying ads?
I guess what I am trying to say is that for 8$ every month you should be getting more than just a status symbol (which possibily not that many people care about anyway) and be stuck with ads.
Also, if Twitter is serious about creating a revenue stream for creators it should focus on creating valuable experiences for users that incentivize loyalty to the creators and not hand out verification status (which would become insignificant anyway if everyone has it).
Increasing ad load on instagram could result in a decrease of users because of worse usability of the platform. Are they choosing short term profitability over long-term user base stability/growth?
While I am in favour of efforts like the GDPR to protect users data, I wonder if all this anti-bigtech sentiment is actually justified and where it will eventually lead to
One feature I would love is to get notified via email when new papers are added (or periodically, once a week/daily).