There is a huge amount of UK infra now that is dependant on US companies either directly or indirectly (AWS, Microsoft/Azure). Code, data and infra is locked into US platforms. When US-EAST-1 when down last week, it halted our whole operations at our workplace. Looking at freelancer groups I am part of (whatsapp, slack etc), they had the same experience.
The UK being blocked from the outside won't happen anyway. The large tech giants will just either cut a deal (this already happen with Apple/iCloud), or they will comply with the new acts. The sites that don't comply won't be big enough for anyone to care in normie land and thus there will be no real pressure on the UK gov.
I don't think that would happen. Most of the large tech platforms will essentially just comply or come to a deal e.g. The IPA Demand for the UK gov to have a global backdoor iCloud was only rescinded when some deal was made between the current US administration and the UK gov.
The smaller companies like 4chan are going to court to have the matter settled. If that is settled in 4chan's favour, legally the UK won't be able to do anything.
YouTube recommendations are tailored to what you watch. I end up being recommended car repair videos, security/hacking/surveillance videos, repairing old vintage computers and some like comedy and music stuff I like.
The stuff that you mention. You can literally say "Not Interested" on the video and it will show you less of content. I see none of it.
Recommendations are mostly tailored to your history, except with a couple hardcoded slots populated with some general-purpose "engaging" trash from your locale/geographical location, pretty much always political content.
And if you click on one, by mistake or curiosity, now you've sent a signal that you like it and will get much more of it in the next batch of recommendations.
They're not short-sighted; there's science behind it. The science of getting people to waste as much time as possible generating "engagement". All of this is A/B tested to hell and people's careers live and die by it.
Yes, maybe shortsighted is not the right word, but regardless, they misunderstand signal constantly.
I go out of my way to block accounts that post stuff I don't want in my feed and pretty much all of them see that as an invitation to give me more of the same content. Likely because I "interact" longer with the content since it takes clicks to block the account.
> Recommendations are mostly tailored to your history, except with a couple hardcoded slots populated with some general-purpose "engaging" trash from your locale/geographical location, pretty much always political content.
I don't see that at all. I use YouTube most evenings (I watch YouTube instead of TV).
I do have like traditional news media sometimes on the third or fourth row and you can dismiss that quickly.
> And if you click on one, by mistake or curiosity, now you've sent a signal that you like it and will get much more of it in the next batch of recommendations.
You fix that by simply pressing "Not Interested" a few times. It can be annoying. It isn't the end of the world.
This is not true. I have never seen that at all. I rarely use the YouTube main feed, but looking at it right now, it's 100% bicycle repair and cooking.
The idea that YouTube pushes a political point of view is itself a falsehood pushed by people holding a particular point of view.
I don't know about pushing a certain political point of view, but my 3rd or 4th row of recommendations frequently becomes a labelled "news" section if something big happens either federally or in my state. Separate from normal recommendations.
This is an important caveat. I get recommended what the parent commenter you replied to stated, mostly videos on home repair, tech, and technological skepticism because those are what I watch. I also get Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and other alt-right pipeline dorks in my recommendations solely because of my gender and age. I never engage with political content on YouTube and I’ve cleared my watch history multiple times, these still show up.
I actually ended up disabling watch history all together and I’ve installed an extension (Unhook) that hides the sidebar recommendations, Shorts, and other useless features.
> I also get Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and other alt-right pipeline dorks in my recommendations solely because of my gender and age. I never engage with political content on YouTube and I’ve cleared my watch history multiple times, these still show up.
That doesn't happen. Firstly you literally click on the video and say "don't recommend channel" and you will never see a JRE episode again.
Also, just by how you phrased that whole paragraph. I don't believe you are telling the truth.
None of those characters are "alt-right". "alt-right" essentially means White Nationalist.
You cannot tell me that Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are White Nationalists because of their support for Israel and one of them is Jewish. White nationalists really don't like Israel and Jewish people. They however were labelled as "alt right" to smear them, by other political commentators and publications who are typically on the left and American.
You would only use that framing if you were listening to those commentators and/or publications that used similar phrasing.
Also Jordan Peterson actually talked about addiction on a Joe Rogan podcast and it was one of the things that put me on the road to dealing with my drinking issues. I stopped listening to Joe Rogan about episode 1000 after they stopped being live and were prerecorded.
I have plenty of criticisms of them now. But I Jordan Peterson did help me at least indirectly. I don't watch either of them anymore and haven't watched them for quite a number of years at this point.
There are some subtleties here. One of my friends and I are both interested in camping and outdoor gear. This keeps causing YouTube to recommend videos on prepping and guns. Go ahead and block channels and select less of this and it sort of works for a while
But then it comes back with more. There are lots of prepping and guns channels. Maybe a pepper who talks about gardens gets highlighted or a gun thing that has a manufacturing complication or business hook comes up. There are many such channels, lots of content, and the connections are very strong, at least with YouTube recommendations.
He fixes up a lot of different type of vehicles and actually explains in detail what he is doing. A lot of car stuff is just people like do a dyno test of like suped up car, I don't find it very interesting. I end up just blocking those channels.
I really think that people are nitpicking a system that works reasonably well for the most part.
They do not. The alt-right hate Jews or people who support Israel. Ben Shapiro is a Jew, Jordan Peterson supports Israel and used to work for Daily Wire that had a Jewish host. No white nationalist would ever support that.
You are either lying, or have no idea what you are on about.
We all get showed the alt right rage bait on youtube. It's full of "shapiro destroys libtards", "peterson annihilates the woke left", and "Rogan talks to <alt right conspiracy theorist> and wakes up to the real truth".
You can't deny what is right in front of everyone to see.
> We all get showed the alt right rage bait on youtube. t's full of "shapiro destroys libtards", "peterson annihilates the woke left", and "Rogan talks to <alt right conspiracy theorist> and wakes up to the real truth".
Firstly. None of that is alt-right. It is America Republican slop rage-bait. Alt-right specifically means White Nationalist.
> The alt-right (abbreviated from alternative right), or dissident right, is a far-right, white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s before increasing in popularity and establishing a presence in other countries during the mid-2010s.
White Nationalists literally hate the Jews, Israel and anyone that support them.
- Jordan Peterson supports Israel and last time I checked worked for the Daily Wire. The Daily Wire was co-founded by Ben Shapiro.
- Joe Rogan is 90s style liberal who is into UFOs, Big Foot and other kooky shit. He literally named his comedy bar "The Mothership". Nothing about that is White Nationalist/Alt-right.
None of them are White Nationalists, nor would they be accepted by White Nationalists. So you are 100% incorrect on that.
Secondly, The Ben Shapiro Ownage stuff was popular circa 2015-2018. Guess what was popular before that? "Hitch Slap", which was Christopher Hitchens basically berating people are various religions.
I've not seen any of that content described in years and it fell out of favour back in 2018-2019.
> You can't deny what is right in front of everyone to see.
It isn't though.
None of the ownage videos have been popular for years and quite honestly I don't believe you have seen them unless you've specifically gone looking for them.
I have tested whether this does come up on a fresh browser profile using a VPN set to the US (as I am in the UK). I used several different locations in the US. I didn't see one of these videos.
I believe you and others are lying because they have a political axe to grind.
You’re too focused on labels. Humans don’t work that neatly. Political labels can work if you and the other person are educated on politics (95%+ of HN isn’t) but otherwise focusing on labels mislead the convo and vibe.
A lot of white nationalists love Israel. Saying they don’t is like saying a lot of fascists don’t love fascism (aka Israel). A lot don’t and a lot do.
Similarly there are plenty of people who are progressive except for Palestine/Israel (it’s a known saying). And plenty of conservative or right wing people who are not progressive except about Palestine.
> You would only use that framing if you were listening to those commentators and/or publications that used similar phrasing.
> You’re too focused on labels. Humans don’t work that neatly.
No I am using the terms correctly. You (from later on in your reply) aren't.
> Political labels can work if you and the other person are educated on politics (95%+ of HN isn’t) but otherwise focusing on labels mislead the convo and vibe.
These are specific political positions that are held by prominent members. Calling Ben Shapiro a white nationalist is simply idiotic. If you aren't informed about it, maybe you should not make strong claims about it.
> A lot of white nationalists love Israel. Saying they don’t is like saying a lot of fascists don’t love fascism (aka Israel). A lot don’t and a lot do.
No they don't. No white nationalist would support the Jews or Israel. I am sorry you are simply showing your ignorance.
As an aside, Fascism is a wildly misunderstood and misused term. I actually loathe ever talking about it today because like the term "Nazi" it has been totally misused by idiots. You do not understand the term fascist.
> Similarly there are plenty of people who are progressive except for Palestine/Israel (it’s a known saying). And plenty of conservative or right wing people who are not progressive except about Palestine.
Obviously there are splinter groups in any organisation that believe different things. Those people btw are referred to differently.
> Projection
No at all. I am just calling it as I see it. I also lost any good will I would have had with you in the conversation as a result of this jab.
You make it sound like anti-semites will always dislike Israel as if the average evangelical isn’t an anti-semite. This is why normies who don’t understand politics and over emphasis idpol and labels are always surprised when anti-semites can and do love Israel.
This exact thing goes on in my YouTube sidebar. Let's say I watch a video game streamer. The sidebar will end up consisting of:
- Same streamer, different video
- Different streamer
- Far right pundit blasts immigration
- Video game streamer
- Video game streamer
- Video game review
- Same streamer, similar content
- Ben Shapiro OWNS Liberals with FACTS
- Video game streamer
- Video game streamer
It's obvious that some slots are simply reserved for whatever YouTube thinks will enrage/engage. Nothing I do seems to stop this. I can click "Don't Show Me This" until I'm exhausted, and next time around, while they might not recommend that exact channel, they just fill these slots with different ragebait. There's no way to say "Don't recommend this shit or anything like it."
I think you've drawn the wrong conclusion from this observation. The realization you should have reached instead is that game streamers are highly aligned with the radical right. Those videos are in there because other viewers sought them out after watching the streams.
Or that the youtube algorithm is leading you toward videos that will maximize their metrics (engagement). Video Games is just the example here but I get the same things from other anodyne hobby videos.
The "gamer to alt-right pipeline"[1] is weirdly real, but what I don't understand is why all these social media companies are trying to funnel gamers as a particular group into extreme right political content, and why is the alt-right targeting gamers in particular? I guess it's possible that gamers tend intentionally seek out this content, so the algorithm matches this energy, but it would surprise me. Why would gamers want this crap?
Disaffected male youth almost universally play (or watch people play) video games as their primary form of entertainment.
The point of my comment though, was that it’s not just video game content leading here, it seems to be any male leaning hobby, including weightlifting, sports, tabletop gaming, etc.
I think it's just the overlap between gamers and a desirable younger male voting demographic that helped Trump win in 2024. These guys aren't watching cable news so it seems logical to try and reach them on the internet.
yeah but then they sometime just emerge some random stuff in your feed, and if you give in to it once and click on it, they will assume this is all you want from now on.
YouTube recommendations are always so rage-baity for me to the point where I blocked them entirely.
Can't look up a movie or a gadget without getting a thumbnail with big red letters saying that the thing sucks, this despite me avoiding review/reaction content like the plague.
> I've found the opposite to be true. If I engage with a video in any way shape or form, even to say I don't want it, they consider that engagement
I don't think that is the case. If I click Not Interested. Similar video don't show.
> Now you get baited with Member Only videos too. I'm already paying you $30 a month..
To members? Or to YouTube to remove ads? If it is the former, you have shown YouTube that you are willing to pay for memberships, so they going to recommend them.
> This is an incredibly ignorant take on addiction. It's never a choice - by definition.
It isn't that clear cut either way IME.
I had a big drinking problem. I was the one that choose to start drinking. I was the one chose to stop drinking. Nobody forced me to go to the bar or the off-licence.
I accept for other people it isn't that simple.
> Hey, do you want to chat about how when I tried to quit nicotine, I went through 2 weeks of physical and mental hell, how exhausted I felt not being able to sleep more than an hour without waking up, still feeling exhausted, with mental fog so severe that made quitting feel impossible?
I had similar issues when I quit drink. Sleep was irregular, I went hot and cold for the first month. I had this like weird wave feeling go through me one night (it the only way I can describe it). I think that took like a month or two.
> Nobody forced me to go to the bar or the off-licence.
Of course, but that doesn't mean that you had a real choice. What would've happened if you didn't go - physically, psychologically, emotionally? I'm not looking for an answer, it's just worth thinking about.
Are you being forced to eat, drink, breathe? Can you choose not to, and for how long before you can't take it anymore and relent?
It's so easy for people to cast swift moral judgement over other people's "choices", simply because they happen to enjoy a mixture of brain chemicals that is more conducive to behavior that they see as morally righteous, and they assume that everyone else has it as easy as they do - physiologically speaking. You should be careful not to internalize that.
> Of course, but that doesn't mean that you had a real choice.
Yes I did. I actually find it very insulting that you would deny me my own agency.
I cured my addiction by simply not buying alcohol and abstaining. That was a choice I could have made at any point in the past.
There are people that can drink responsibly. I am not one of those people. I made the responsible choice as an adult, to abstain from it. I don't miss it either BTW. I feel actually free.
> What would've happened if you didn't go - physically, psychologically, emotionally? I'm not looking for an answer, it's just worth thinking about.
I would have a lot more money, I wouldn't have got into stupid situations, some which I almost got myself killed, I wouldn't have had to spend 5 years rebuilding my career.
> Are you being forced to eat, drink, breathe? Can you choose not to, and for how long before you can't take it anymore and relent?
The comparison you are making here is asinine.
> It's so easy for people to cast swift moral judgement over other people's "choices", simply because they happen to enjoy a mixture of brain chemicals that is more conducive to behavior that they see as morally righteous, and they assume that everyone else has it as easy as they do - physiologically speaking. You should be careful not to internalize that.
The moral judgement is often painted by some as subjective. A lot of the times it can be, but very often it simply isn't. There are good reasons it is correct for people to judge someone poorly because they abuse drugs or alcohol.
It isn't just the fact that they are making different choice that they disapprove of, it is the behaviour and consequences of that behaviour. This behaviour is frequently at best makes the person difficult to deal with, and at worst anti-social and dangerous and can often have dire consequences. That is simply a fact. Those people are correct to judge those people poorly.
I am certainty not dyed in the wool conservative either.
You just don't know what you are talking about tbh.
There seems to be a strong culture towards removing agency from people and allowing them to escape any form of judgement on the consequences of their actions.
Sure, maybe some people really do have thyroid problems; but this idea that overweight people are somehow not responsible for their own condition is ridiculous and dangerous.
I had drug and alcohol problems in the past, it was my own choice, and my own choice to get out of that situation.
I smoked, I chose to stop.
I was unfit due to laziness, and I fixed that too.
None of those situations were the result of anything other than personal choice.
19.7% of children and adolescents are obese in the United States[0]. These are definitely forces outside their control during critical years of development. It's like blaming someone for being impoverished when they grew up in an impoverished atmosphere (also a popular view in the States).
Sure they could beat the odds on either issue when get older, but it's tough when you live in a system that works against you. It's good to say individuals should hold themselves accountable and not give up in the face of adversity, but from a macro-level it doesn't help fix the problem. I'd argue the your fault / deal with it attitude on these trends make those problems worse for a population.
> Sure, maybe some people really do have thyroid problems; but this idea that overweight people are somehow not responsible for their own condition is ridiculous and dangerous.
You’re not wrong, but I think you’re missing the bigger picture. These are systemic issues, and solving them on an individual level can only go so far.
People are responsible for their own health, but we also live in a world where billions of dollars are spent on marketing and lobbying to get them addicted to junk food and make it the easiest choice. It’s still a choice, but the game is rigged.
“Just decide to stop” may have worked for you - it worked for me, too! - but on a societal level you need societal change. A lot fewer people smoke today than just a couple decades ago - not because everyone has individually somehow built up stronger willpower, but because of legislation that made tobacco harder to market, more expensive, and forbidden in many public spaces.
It doesn't have to be one extreme or another. But we already learned that there's a decent chemical component to addictions of many kinds. GLP1 significantly lowers drugs, alcohol, tobacco and other cravings in many people with addictive behaviours. So it's neither completely a choice nor completely body driven.
Suppose that I discover a chemical combination that causes people to eat more. I arrange with all the biggest food manufacturers to put this in all their food. People eat lots and get fat. Whose fault is it?
Depends on how much information the people have. If they are aware this chemical is present and its effects, the consumers. If they are not, the criminals who poisoned the food secretly.
Although I think that if people notice themselves getting fat they should probably take action for their own sakes anyway, it falls down a bit here with this idea no one has agency..
Regulators fault for not picking up on it. Also the peoples fault for voting these kinda regulators into their position. Happened decades ago with all the teflon thats now in all of our bloodstreams and will continue in the future.
> Yes I did. I actually find it very insulting that you would deny me my own agency.
I am not denying you anything. If you choose to believe in mind-body dualism you're free to do so, but this belief that you have agency which is completely independent of your physiology goes against everything we know about our brains and addiction.
Dualism is what's behind harmful attitudes towards addiction and every other psychological disorder. People use the same exact reasoning to delegitimize depression, ADHD, anxiety, or whatever else they can use to feel superior.
> I am certainty not dyed in the wool conservative either. You just don't know what you are talking about tbh.
> If you choose to believe in mind-body dualism you're free to do so, but this belief that you have agency which is completely independent of your physiology goes against everything we know about our brains and addiction.
This is classic over-intellectualising that often done by people, often to "win" an argument.
I never denied that the body itself can become dependant on substances and affect choices. That is obvious. The point is that people have their own agency. I had to accept I had an issue and decided to face up reality, everything after that was relatively straight forward IME.
This process took a year, so it wasn't like I woke up one morning and my mind was changed.
> Yeah, sure, whatever you say.
You are trying to latch onto anything to invalidate my point of view on the matter, based on an incorrect preconceptions of my beliefs. Which is unfortunate.
The fact is that moral judgements made by people are often for very good reasons. Even if they can't verbalise them effectively. Rather than dismissing them because you politically disagree with them, it is often worth finding out why they exist.
> This is classic over-intellectualising that often done by people, often to "win" an argument.
No, this is well-established scientific understanding of how our body and brain work. Our bodies/brains have extremely strong control over our minds. If they didn't, the entire field of psychiatry couldn't exist to treat them.
> I never denied that the body itself can become dependant on substances and affect choices.
This applies to many behaviors that have nothing to do with substance abuse, physical dependence or withdrawals, e.g. those resulting from depression and ADHD.
> No, this is well-established scientific understanding of how our body and brain work. Our bodies/brains have extremely strong control over our minds.
Yes you are. Ultimately you have to want to quit. That is a decision made by me. That requires my own agency.
From your jab earlier about my apparent "conservationism" (like that would matter at all), you've lost any good will I may of had with you in this discussion.
> Our bodies/brains have extremely strong control over our minds.
Brain / Mind are synonyms for the most. I don't even think you know what you are saying.
> If they didn't, the entire field of psychiatry couldn't exist to treat them.
I think psychiatry can help some people. However it isn't the be all and end all of how deal with addiction or the human condition in general.
> This applies to many behaviors that have nothing to do with substance abuse, physical dependence or withdrawals, e.g. those resulting from depression and ADHD.
Obviously. That doesn't mean that addicts don't have agency.
> I was an addict. I know what I am talking about.
You know what your lived experience was, that doesn't make you an expert on how addiction works on a physiological level.
> Ultimately you have to want to quit. That is a decision made by me. That requires my own agency.
You're just repeating truisms. Yes of course people have to want to quit, but out of the people who want to quit, most are unable to follow through. They relapse despite fighting like hell inside their own minds.
> From your jab earlier about my apparent "conservationism"
You mean the thing that didn't even cross my mind until you brought it up, unprompted, after repeating the exact ideas I would expect from the group you claimed that you weren't apart of? And then in the same breath accusing me of not understanding anything about addiction?
That was slightly amusing, yes. I'm sorry you found that offensive.
P.S. I don't know why you accept that you were in full control of your addiction, nor do I care because I'm not trying to take away from your own personal experience. If that makes it easier for you to move forward, I'm genuinely happy for you, but you don't get to use it to lift yourself up and put others down the way you've been doing.
> You know what your lived experience was, that doesn't make you an expert on how addiction works on a physiological level.
I actually edited out that from my reply because I knew that this would be used this way. Also "lived experience" is such a stupid phrase. Obviously I was alive when this happened.
I am not claiming to be an expert. I am claiming you are over-intellectualising something. This is something that people constantly try to do, with almost everything now. Everything is a condition, every failing someone has can be scientifically explained. I find it nauseating tbh.
> You mean the thing that didn't even cross my mind until you brought it up, unprompted, after repeating the exact ideas I would expect from the group you claimed that you weren't apart of? And then in the same breath accusing me of not understanding anything about addiction?
1) You brought this up by talking moral judgements of others. So it did cross your mind. So that is a lie. Also I feel extremely guilty about what I did. I should do.
2) I am not part of that group. I specifically said so. What I was trying to explain is that "While I am not one of these and do dogmatically believe it, there some rationale and value behind it".
> And then in the same breath accusing me of not understanding anything about addiction?
I said you didn't know what you was talking with regards to moral judgements. I specifically quoted the piece of text I was responding to. What you wrote was kinda tripe tbh.
> That was slightly amusing, yes. I'm sorry you found that offensive.
What you did was make a jab at me because you assumed I was dogmatically believed in a set of ideas. You seem to be attempting to retcon this now. I don't find it offensive. I find it tiresome. I am not an American, and I am not a conservative.
> I don't know why you accept that you were in full control of your addiction, nor do I care because I'm not trying to take away from your own personal experience.
I am not saying I was in full control of addiction.
I did make a choice to drink. Every-time I bought the alcohol (often while sober) I made a choice, full cognisant of the consequences. It was my own hubris to stopped me from taking the correct course of action sooner. There doesn't need to be a more complex explanation because it is the truth. I don't need to intellectualise it further.
I have seen other people do exactly the same thing as I did.
> but you don't get to use it to lift yourself up and put others down the way you've been doing.
I am not doing either. I have throughout this thread said "this was my mistake, I take full responsibility". I am specifically telling you that I am not better than anyone else and in fact people were correct in judging me poorly due to my own behaviour at the time.
So your argument is that smokers and obese people have literally no control over their consumption because of non-duality? I mean, I’m a buddhist, I probably have a stronger sense of non-duality than most and that’s just horseshit unless I misunderstood you.
edit: this is like saying rapists aren’t responsible for their crimes because they had a physiological response to seeing someone they found attractive.
Urges of all kinds (never wanted to slap someone and didn’t?) can be overcome with an only a little discipline.
No, I'm saying that, to a very significant degree, our behavior is driven by physiological processes inside of our brains, and overcoming these can be extremely difficult. If people could just choose not to eat then they wouldn't be obese to begin with.
You would know if you ever experienced depression, ADHD, or any other disorder takes away your executive function. I take it you don't consider these to be real disorders?
> Urges of all kinds (never wanted to slap someone and didn’t?) can be overcome with an only a little discipline.
Oh no I think they’re real, but I also I think the proportion of people who genuinely have no control over these parameters is vanishingly small.
In all things, generalisation is probably too blunt, but removing the agency from everyone, turning them into victims of their own brain chemistry and advancing the narrative that they can’t possibly change their situation does them far more harm than good.
Even depression, there are things which you can do to overcome it. I’m not saying it’s easy, but you seem to be arguing it’s impossible.
Stop painting everything so black & white. I am not arguing that it's impossible, nor that people have "no control" over anything. I am arguing that it's difficult and that it's ignorant and harmful to paint their problems as just "lack of discipline".
The problem is that dualists (like the person I originally responded to) assume that willpower is separate from physiology, therefore what's easy for them should be easy for others, and therefore if others can't achieve the same things they are achieving then they must be lazy, lack discipline, and don't deserve additional help or compassion.
These sorts of ignorant beliefs then shape policy and make it harder for people to get help to deal with their problems, perpetuating the cycle, for example the rather famous failure of "the war on drugs". That's the only thing I'm arguing - that people need to accept that addiction is a complex and individual health problem and to start treating it as such, it's the only way we're going to move forward.
Of course it’s difficult. Do you think having drive enough to overcome an addiction, or fight to change your situation is simply “easy” if you have discipline? What kind of argument is that? You need discipline precisely because things are difficult, I don’t really see where we disagree on this.
You continue to assume that discipline is something you innately have or don't have as part of your character/soul/whatever you want to call it, independent of your body and brain chemistry, that's where we disagree.
The way people judge "effort" and "difficulty" is broken, that's part of the problem. Whether you have or lack discipline is judged by the outcome, not by the effort that person made because the effort is invisible to the outside world.
Person A quits smoking (with 1 unit of effort), therefore they have "discipline"
Person B fails to quit smoking (with 10 units of effort), therefore they're judged to "lack discipline".
No, Ive never said that discipline is a quality some innately have, and its not what I think.
The problem is with your attempt to grade difficulty here. I dont think, outside of some outliers that are statically insignificant (e.g someone who can kick heroin with no problems or whatever) that the difficulty of getting in shape or quitting smoking is higher for some people than others. It's really difficult for everyone.
I think discipline is probably the wrong term, I guess drive may come closer, but whatever you want to call it, it's a function of your will to change and its a stronger force than any addiction -- clearly, or no one would ever beat any addictions.
This idea of grading and judging people on their 'difficult units' is nonsense, and pushing that as an excuse for people to be helpless is a really harmful narrative to put out there.
> Urges of all kinds (never wanted to slap someone and didn’t?) can be overcome with an only a little discipline.
Okay, but where do you think that discipline comes from? Is it an inherent quality that a person is born with? I’d argue that it’s not, and it’s something that needs to be learned and exercised. Many people didn’t get the opportunity to learn it (yet?), and I don’t believe it makes them somehow inferior.
I don’t think it’s in inherent quality either. Why do some people decide to put the cake down and hit the weights and others don’t? I don’t know, all i’m saying is the option existed for both and in the end it’s a choice.
Alcohol doesn’t affect me much personally, so I’ve never understood why anyone would start drinking in the first place. But that’s where I would argue that addictions are less of a choice and more circumstantial.
You know what is the funniest thing. I used to drink all these different Ales and artisan beers.
After I quit drinking alcohol. I used to have a 4 pack of these 0% Ales/Larger that was supposed to taste similar. The packaging differs from the regular beer in that it has a silver top instead of dark blue on this particular. I picked up the alcoholic ones inadvertently as they were in the wrong place on the shelf.
When I took a sip, I thought it had gone off. It tasted terrible, like poison! Obviously once I checked the can, I realised my mistake. I gave them to my rest of the pack to one of my neighbours I think.
Yes it is an over the top comparison. I am a recovered / former addict (alcohol). I would never compare the two. I was spending too much time on Twitter a few years ago. I deleted my account. The problem was solved. It took me an entire year to accept that I had a serious problem and then another 9 months to finally stop drinking.
The brewery, the bar nor the bar ever made me drink. I chose to drink. I also was the one that chose to stop drinking. BTW drink is as dangerous or more dangerous as many illegal drugs IMO.
> Making tech companies answerable for having developed algorithms that serve up hours of obvious brainrot content at a time would go a long way.
You get recommended what you already watch. Most of my YouTube feed is things like old guys repairing old cars, guys writing a JSON parse in haskell and stuff about how exploits work and some music. That is because that is what I already watched on the platform.
Right, and recommendations for old car repair videos that you watch a few of per week is reasonable.
The argument I’m making is that it’s not beyond the pale for YouTube to detect “hey it’s been over an hour of ai bullshit / political rage bait / thirst traps / whatever, the algorithm is going to intentionally steer you in a different direction for the next little bit.”
They actually do show a several notices that says "Fancy something different, click here". They already have a mechanism in place that does something similar to what you describe.
What YouTube recommends to you is more of what you already watch. Removing stuff the you describe is as easy as clicking "Not interested" or "Do not recommend channel".
Also YouTube algorithm is rewarding watch time these days. So click bait isn't rewarded on platform as much. I actually watch a comedy show where they ridicule many of the click-baiters and they are all complaining about the ad-revenue and reach decreasing.
Also a lot of the political rage-bait is kinda going away. People are growing out of it. YouTube kinda has "metas" where a particular type of content will be super popular for a while and then go away.
I don't agree with this take. Some people are going to be more susceptible than others, just as with alcohol or other drugs. An individual choosing to stop doesn't mean much for society in aggregate.
I don't go down the political rage bait video pipeline, nevertheless next to any unrelated YouTube video I see all sorts of click/rage-bait littered in the sidebar just asking to start me down a rabbit hole.
As an example I opened a math channel/video in a private mode tab. Under it (mobile), alongside the expected math-adjacent recommendations I see things about socialist housing plans, 2025 gold rush debasement trades, the 7-stage empire collapse pattern ("the US is at stage 5"), and so on. So about 10% are unrelated political rage-bait.
It is similar enough. People would just find the first thing in a disagreement that had headline that corroborated their opinion, this was often Wikipedia or the Summary on google.
People did this with code as well. DDG used to show you the first Stackoverflow post that was close to what you searched. However sometimes this was obviously wrong, people have just copied and pasted that wholesale.
> I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly disgusting an industry I could participate in and still, literally, sleep at night!) and it answered a question for me.
I worked in online gambling for about 10 years in the UK. I found how charities and local/national government worked far worse and I was far more frustrated with their attitudes.
e.g. I found an SQL Injection vulnerability with dynamic SQL in a large UK charity (I won't say which one). I reported this to my boss. He kinda just shrugged his shoulders. Similar attitudes were present in local government. The gambling industry was the complete opposite and took security very seriously.
What bothered me the most about charities and government was that on the outside they were giving the impression of having a virtuous purpose. Whereas the gambling sites didn't, it was simply "Try to win some cash".
As a former addict (alcohol), I don't have much sympathy for people that blame the companies for the problems of addicts. The problem ultimately lies with the individual. I was the one that choose to drink. The brewary, the bar, or the off-license never forced the drink down my throat. People choose to go to the casino, in the same way they choose to go to the bar.
> The question was: “How did professional gaming get so incredibly big so very fast?” Its quick rise seemed to me to have started well before the broad normalization and rise of gaming in mainstream pop culture, so had always seemed to me like the cart coming before the horse, and I’d never been able to figure out how or why it’d happened that way.
Many of the classic videos games were made to relieve you of change in Arcades. Nearby to where I live there are still classic seaside arcade. They still have machines similar to Sega Rally and Time Crisis there. Video gaming and quasi-gambling have been intertwined since the birth of the industry.
> The answer was gambling. Professional video gaming is all but completely a gambling industry. That’s where the money and promotion came from. Sponsorships, sure, but that’s secondary and would drop off to a large degree without the boost from gambling. And I mean gambling on the matches, not just sponsorship by gambling sites. It’s a betting industry.
This is all professional sports (even going back to long ago as the Roman Empire). There is nothing special about professional video gaming.
The industry saw that people were interested in watching matches between highly skilled people. Any form of entertainment/news/sports is bankrolled by advertising and/or gambling.
Many of these large events came out of more grass roots events like large lan parties. These were pretty big in the late 90s to early 2000s.
> (Online gambling’s also all wrapped up in right wing political money and funding right wing media[!] in, at least, the US, was another thing I learned that I hadn’t expected)
Gambling tends to attract the more profit orientated which roughly aligns with what is considered "right wing" (at least in the US). I found the industry to be pretty apolitical as a whole. Many of the C-suite and above seemed to be actually relatively left-wing at least in some view points. It was odd when the top executives were far at least on somethings far more to the left than I was.
The UK being blocked from the outside won't happen anyway. The large tech giants will just either cut a deal (this already happen with Apple/iCloud), or they will comply with the new acts. The sites that don't comply won't be big enough for anyone to care in normie land and thus there will be no real pressure on the UK gov.