It’s no different than traditional social media, except in intensity. It’s less intense, because of its text-based format as opposed to video, the clickbait-resistant culture, and the fact that while it’s very large, it’s not infinite. You can consume the top page under half an hour and there are only so many stories posted here a day.
Depending on where you are in the AuDHD spectrum, you can be as addicted to HN as a teenager with 7hrs daily Instagram usage. pg acknowledges this.
I agree with the author, but can’t agree with his stance that self-restricting is not effective. I use tools like Screen Time heavily with a setup that is not bypassable on a weak moment (I don’t know the PIN).
Nowadays when waiting for something I might take my iPhone 15 Pro out of my pocket and unlock its boring-ass greyscale screen. There are no new notifications from any apps whatsoever, because I keep my phone on Do Not Disturb all the time.
I’ll first peek over the Mail app: no red notification badge. Still, I’ll sometimes compulsively open it and check my inbox. There is no new mail, there is almost never any new mail aside from Google sign-in notifications. (I unsubscribed from all marketing emails).
Then I might check WhatsApp. Nobody important texted me. If they did I’d receive a notification. I didn’t receive a notification in the past few hours. There are no infinite content feeds on my phone. Even my web browser only allows a specified set of websites.
Sometimes when waiting for something, and if I ran out of books I pre-downloaded for free from Internet Archive, I’ll open the Maps app and go all around Antarctica trying to find scientific bases. It can be kinda fun. Especially when you don’t have any social media or unrestricted internet on your phone.
I have ADHD.
Before implementing Screen Time restrictions on my phone, I was glued to the screen all day and night long. These restrictions were the difference between functioning and not.
I’m not a US citizen, nor living there. Pretty much nothing surprised me about US news till the last Trump administration, even then, I chalked it up with “oh guess they have an actual dictator with unlimited power now”.
Last week I looked up the ICE and it shocked me. How can people let citizens and neighbors literally get kidnapped out of the street and then held in prisons indefinitely, with intentional zero traceability. You can get lost in the system and be held forever as a prisoner in inhumane conditions, without even being told on which continent you are on.
All because you made comments on social media criticizing the current administration. Or because of your skin color or country of origin.
> How can people let citizens and neighbors literally get kidnapped out of the street and then held in prisons indefinitely, with intentional zero traceability.
I recently watched a Youtube video saying this is actually pretty normal in North Korea.
It's because they crossed a border illegally. At which point when discovered they are entitled to exactly one habeus hearing which basically asks "Well did you actually enter illegally?" and if you did, you are returned to your country of origin (or if they won't accept you, the nearest neighbor that will).
If your country of origin wants to hold you in prison forever.. well that's not a problem the US can solve.
At no point is it because of your skin color, country of origin or your speech. It is because you chose to immigrate illegally.
That nobody else caught you or prosecuted you for 20 or 30 years is a problem, but not a defense. If you murdered someone 30 years ago, you are still guilty of murder.
And reminder, lying on immigration paperwork is also a form of illegal immigration that gets you returned home.
Are you so heartless that you're okay with fucking up people's lives who are living in and contributing to communities? And then there's people who have been following the rules and are being grabbed at green card hearings or immigration appointments. What is wrong with you?
You are not eligible for a greencard (and by extension, immigration hearing) if you have entered illegally.
The feds (ICE) do really like getting deportees at courthouses, especially criminal trials, because they are already handcuffed when going into or leaving the courtroom so they can just literally give the court officers the paperwork and take the deportee.
If these people are such valuable contributors, why do you insist on deprieving their home country of them?
Depriving? They are human beings making choices. Who am I to judge them?
And yes, ICE is apprehending green card holders, people with valid work visas, citizens even (see the raid on the Chicago apartment building).
Your willingness to believe the government is going to use this power responsibly is naive at best.
So, as I customarily offer these days... may the actions you are so supportive of be visited on you and yours. Please tell me how much you like it then.
Nobody who is an American should be ok with this, regardless of your politics. We need to stand up together and clearly indicate this is not what anybody voted for. Forget the Constitution, these people are breaking the Magna Carta. We cannot tolerate Federal actors that exist outside the legal system. We tolerated the FBI only because it was necessary, and we were careful. But local police departments should be standing up to ICE, and judges should be ordering their arrest for this behavior. It is unacceptable in a Democracy. I would encourage local politicians to discuss this with their local police departments and state police. I've worked with State Police before, I know exactly what they would say, at least most of them. They would say this extra-legal shit does not belong in this country, that it is unacceptable. If there would be a civil war happening, it will be between local and state police and ICE. Our friends and neighbors in the police departments should not be ok with this.
> clearly indicate this is not what anybody voted for.
No, this is explicitly what many people voted for. Trump's entire political career started with a speech calling American Hispanics criminals and yelling about building a wall.
There are now counter-protesters showing up to ICE arrests to cheer them.
And you'd have to live under a rock to not have seen Fox news or OAN or whatever spend the last decade (or, wow, is it really two decades now) demanding the imprisonment of their opposition.
The guy who spent his life researching how to live rationally chooses suicide at age 90, upon seeing “increasing metal lapses”, presumably in order to not ever live irrationally.
Ironic is the opposite of what you mean, don't you think? By your explanation, Kahneman acted according to his life's work.
> The guy who spent his life researching how to live rationally chooses suicide at age 90, upon seeing “increasing metal lapses”, presumably in order to not ever live irrationally.
That was possibly part of his motivation. But also the pain, suffering (goes broader than physical pain), confusion, and cost -- to him and his family.
> “They dragged little Greta [Thunberg] by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag. They did everything imaginable to her, as a warning to others,” the Turkish activist Ersin Çelik, a participant in the Sumud flotilla, told Anadolu news agency.
> Lorenzo D’Agostino, a journalist and another flotilla participant, said after returning to Istanbul that Thunberg was “wrapped in the Israeli flag and paraded like a trophy” – a scene described with disbelief and anger by those who witnessed it.
> Thunberg is among 437 activists, parliamentarians and lawyers who were part of the Global Sumud flotilla, a coalition of more than 40 vessels carrying humanitarian aid whose goal was to breach Israel’s 16-year maritime blockade of Gaza.
You are not safe even if you are a citizen of the wealthy and peaceful European nation of Sweden, you are not safe even if you are a global icon of activism and peace, you are not safe.
There are no rules for Israel, nothing is off-limits for them.
Everyone should learn the concept of a Skinner Box. [1]
Reddit is a Skinner Box. HN is too, though to a much lesser extent [2]. Every Skinner Box has one dominant opinion on every matter, which means, by simply using the product, your beliefs on any matter will shift towards the dominant opinion of the platform.
I was a chronically online Reddit user once. I can spot any chronically online Reddit user in just a few minutes in any social event by their mannerisms and the way they talk. I’ll ask and without fail indeed they are a daily Reddit user. It’s even more obvious in writing where you can spot them in just a few always-grammatically-correct text messages flavored with reddit-funny remarks and snarks and jokes.
Same goes for chronic X users. Their signature behavior is talking about social/political issues unprompted. It’s even easier to spot them.
I think the main reason behind platforms shaping user behavior is this: The most upvoted content will always surface to the top, where it will be seen by most users, meaning, its belief-shaping impact is exponential instead of linear. In the same manner unpopular opinions will be pushed to the bottom, and will have exponentially small impact. Some opinions will even be banned or shadowbanned, which means they are beyond the Overton Window of the specific platform.
This way, the platform both nudges you towards the dominant opinion and limits the range of possible opinions you will be exposed to. Over time, this affects your personality and character.
I’ll never understand this sentiment expressed online that Liquid Glass is bad design.
After reading how awful it is on HN, I upgraded to see it for myself. After some pondering it was obvious why Apple went with this design.
Today’s apps’ problem is every app has its own UI language, and users have to first learn that before being able to use an app. Apple recognized this. If you can’t see why it’s a problem, try to teach your mom or grandma how to use a new app.
To design a unified UI framework, you need a lot of things: common elements (e.g. date picker), typography (fonts, text styling), iconography (the same icon in every app for the Share button), etc. Both Apple annd Android vendors already have UI frameworks dictating these for native apps today.
The hard problem that remained unsolved until Liquid Glass is these UI toolkits can’t dictate a color for interactive elements, because every other app has its own, different color scheme. Any color you pick will inevitably look out of place in some apps. The answer here is, unsurprisingly, transparent elements.
But there is historically a huge issue with transparent elements, a hard problem where many previous attempts have failed: how can you make a transparent element (e.g a button) still be recognizable on various content?
Apple’s answer here works beautifully: make the controls appear floating an inch over the content, by mimicking the properties of the two most familiar physical transparent objects - water and glass.
“Today’s apps’ problem is every app has its own UI language, and users have to first learn that before being able to use an app.”
Liquid Glass is far from the first attempt at this. See “material design”. Apple has had UI guidelines for years now, and all of their apps were more or less as consistent as they are now after the transition. My complaint is that shiny effects aren’t necessary for UI consistency, and it slows older devices and consumes their already degraded battery capacity even faster. At least you can “reduce transparency”, but it actually makes the UI looks less transparent than it was before.
However, my biggest complaint is how half-baked it is. iOS 26 is riddled with bugs. As an example that is ridiculously easy to reproduce:
1) Enable “reduce transparency” in accessibility.
2) Open the Files app to any directory.
3) Enable dark mode. Congratulations, the directory name at the top of the screen is now illegible due to black text on a black background. The same bug is also present in Freeform, except it also makes the status bar illegible. They removed the backing UI element without refactoring the text, and nobody noticed. And unless they didn’t mention it in the release notes, it looks like they still haven’t fixed this in the 26.1 beta.
I never said Liquid Glass is bad design. I never even mentioned anything about individual elements, nor brought up anything about who it is bad for (and this is one of those occasions where no, it's not a "people aren't used to change" kind of things).
But to suggest the current implementation in iOS and macOS isn't problematic would mean you'd need to be incredibly unaware of basic accessibility needs of a significant portion of people, and right now both operating systems have made it significantly worse. That's not a design opinion, its fact.
It’s weird to complain about accessibility in macOS when it has such a huge amount of easily discoverable accessibility settings to handle just about every need… including the option to turn off liquid glass effect!
So you're saying its fine to go backwards on a11y as long as you dont remove some settings to switch to an afterthought that doesn't always have feature parity, and is often buggy with little care or thought being given to those who have a11y neds (As has already been explained above in another chain of this discussion)
