Nobody takes “age-restricted account[s] for children” seriously.
Parental controls and age-restrictions are almost universally half-baked, buggy fig leafs to displace negative attention from software and content providers.
My perspective is very simple: our homes are simply a lot more comfortable than they used to be.
We have better heating/air conditioning, endless television/video games/entertainment, large refrigerators, lower density, etc and so on.
Back then, home covered a narrower set of needs - so the default option was to spend time elsewhere, even if it was just to escape the noise/heat/smells/smoke of home for a minute.
I would strongly encourage everyone to choose two or three friends and say “hey - I want to chat with you, but it’s hard to schedule calls. I’m just going to try calling you sometime when I have a few minutes free. If you can talk, great! If you can’t, no sweat. Sound OK?”
I lowered the stakes for calling/answering/not answering, and I actually catch up with my friends more often.
I'd hate that. I have a (small) group of friends, and we play games (almost) every weekend morning for 1-2 hours while on voice chat. I really enjoy that time but we have to schedule it in advance, we all have stuff going on. But we've been pretty good at making time for each other once a week for that time. Most of us are in different countries now so can no longer meet up in person, and this has been something that works for us.
If I'd get randomly called I'd actually just end up being annoyed, I need a sense of structure in my life lol.
> I’m just going to try calling you sometime when I have a few minutes free. If you can talk, great! If you can’t, no sweat. Sound OK?”
I do it all the time. And unfortunately this still only builds shallow relationships or keeps them alive for longer than they would. Proximity is the only thing that keeps things alive. Physical proximity is obvious, but there are other forms of proximity. Regular (almost daily) texts builds online proximity. Being financially in a similar boat brings financial proximity. Being in similar stages in life brings lifestyle proximity. The more you start drifting away (lose proximity in one or more areas), the more the relationship dies. Married people with kids who own houses rarely stay in touch with single people who are traveling the world.
"Don't ask to ask, just ask" is great in general, but if I tell someone this, I'm not trying to schedule a single call. It's more asking for permission to call whenever. Depending on who you and your friends are, it can be necessary to give this heads-up at least once so that, as another user put it, they don't get a panic attack from an unexpected phone call. As an older Gen Z, it feels like no one my age really calls each other out-of-the-blue, and you need something like this to establish it.
I realize there are generational differences but I still default to the assumption that calling people whenever (outside of 10PM-7AM for non-emergencies) is fine, unless someone specifically tells me otherwise
No, I don't need something like that to establish anything. My friends are relatively sane it appears. Neither do I expect such a behaviour from anyone. I have a phone, feature of that is you can call me. Complaining about that is weird. If you don't want calls, turn the thing off... But yeah, I realize in other parts of the world, there seem to be different "rules". However, still very weird to me.
I just call them. I dont think you have to reach out and send a “hey I have question is it okay to ask”-style entering-the-chat messages. The overarching problem is that everyone started treating communication as a formal business letter.
I agree, but the social norm (for a lot of young people) is not to call spontaneously - at all, ever. Giving people a heads up helps, and then consistently following through, is a step that helps make it happen.
Nah, just call them randomly and leave a message. I’m not going to have a whole social protocol for sending a phone call. If they don’t answer or call back it’s a lost cause communicating with them.
I once dated someone who “didn’t just leave the house for any old outing” and it became exhausting trying to figure out the protocol for what qualified as a worthwhile outing. It was easier to just dump the person instead of playing this little “no you’re holding it wrong” game of comms.
You’re underthinking my counter-reccomendation. What you’re proposing “respond or don’t” is already a given if you send the preemptive message or not. Therefor a waste of time because you could just be initiating the relationship instead. People aren’t more likely to respond because you send them a “i wanna talk” message.
>If they don’t answer or call back it’s a lost cause communicating with them.
I mean, people are busy and schedules don't always align. Seems like the onus is on you if you expect another friend to answer whenever you feel like calling. Even with my parents we will check with each other via text before we call (being on a time zone difference doesn't help)
I have found there’s a reciprocal nature to it. If I keep trying here and there, the friend more often than not does try me back in turn.
Many of us have kids/demanding jobs - so feeling free to just call when I’ve got ten minutes alone in the car means - at minimum - one of us is free at that time.
I hate this. Yes: I want to talk to you. No: I don't want it to interrupt me and I don't want to miss the chance to talk to you either. So it's lose-lose for me.
"Banned" is only meaningful if there are consequences for defying the ban. My experience as a high school English teacher in a handful of schools across several states was that admin is, generally, unwilling to implement a hard ban on smartphones because a significant portion of parents would vocally object (to put it mildly).
Pushing the ban to the state level acknowledges the broad inability of district level leadership to self-police these problems.
Okay the process is simple. You're going to go to another website, called YouTube. Don't be alarmed. First read all the steps so you don't miss any, once you start going to the other site you won't be able to see this one. You might want to write these down on a piece of paper first. Okay here we go:
1. Click in the bar at the top of the page that says ycombinator.com
2. type this in: youtube.com
3. press enter
4. There will be a box at the top that says "search", click that
5. type in "tips and tricks for agentic coding"
6. press enter
7. a list of videos should appear, watch them all
Yes, this can happen. Some people just have the worst luck, and will always find the bad one. This is why Greene made "stay away from unlucky people" law 10 out of 48. It's really that important.
Using LLMs for voice assistants is relatively new at scale that’s the difference between Alexa and Alexa+ and Gemini powered Google Assistant and what Apple has been trying to do with Siri for two years.
It’s really just using LLMs for tool calling. It is just call centers were mostly built before the age of LLMs and companies are slow to update
Understood. This overlaps with a side project where I’m getting acceptable (but not polished) results, so trying to do some digging about optimizations. Thanks!
One of my niches is Amazon Connect - the AWS version of Amazon’s internal call center. It uses Amazon Lex for voice to text. Amazon Lex is still the same old intent based system I mentioned. If it doesn’t find an intent, it goes to the “FallbackIntent” and you can get the text transcription from there and feed it into a Lambda and from the Lambda call a Bedrock hosted LLM. I have found that Nova Lite is the fastest LLM. It’s much faster than Anthropic or any of the other hosted ones.
Somewhat off topic for the thread, but I would love more kids book recommendations for expanding their mental model of the world if we can keep them coming…
While I quite like the choices around physical vs digital controls, this aesthetic feels refined to the most unexciting degree: objectively good, but locked in the past. In fairness, automotive interiors (especially EVs) seem to be having a bit of an identity crisis across the board.
That social networks became social media indicates a clear shift in incentives toward social atomization and shallow substitutes for human connection/affection/bonding/sexual satisfaction/etc.
It is likely possible to disambiguate these concepts and build prosocial networks, if we want such a thing or believe it can work.
Almost every SMB I interact with sounds like this company. Was it founded more than 10 years ago? Probably holding the ship together with spreadsheets and email.
Yep, and there are so many of these examples, as you said - most SMBs. But I know also more recent companies having it similarly.
On the other hand - we did recently pitche some brand new RAG for TBs of complex schematics for a company in the Netherlands, and guess what - they didn't like the enterprise rates that the middleman offered, not because they did not like the demo (which they loved absolutely), and not because it was late or incomplete (it took less than a month). Had I approached this company directly, with normal rates, I would be deploying it in production already. It's very telling, and not good news for large SAAS vendors.
Parental controls and age-restrictions are almost universally half-baked, buggy fig leafs to displace negative attention from software and content providers.
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