Are these the two Americas everyone keeps telling me about?

Writes Kate Lindsay in The Atlantic:

Today’s teens are similarly wary of oversharing. They joke on TikTok about the terror of their peers finding their parents’ Facebooks. Stephen Balkam, the CEO of the nonprofit Family Online Safety Institute, says that even younger children might experience a “digital coming-of-age” and the discomfort that comes with it. “What we’ve seen is very mature 10-, 11-, 12-year-olds sitting down with their parents, going, ‘Mom, what were you thinking?’” he told me.

This is exactly the kind of scenario I had in mind when our now-almost–11-year-old was just born. It took a tiny bit of convincing, but neither I nor my spouse had posted any baby photos since then; who knows, the lack of dopamine hits may have contributed to neither of us having much of a presence on Facebook or Instagram.

And before I start patting myself on the back, there are of course negative consequences in that old friends and distant family members back in Serbia probably have no idea what any of our children look like, thereby lessening their psycho-social connections, etc. But that is something a visit or two to the old country will, hopefully, heal.

The first article I ever saved to Instapaper — 11 years ago, three years after it was created and quite some time before it turned into my personal graveyard of text — was AOL Hell from the now defunct The Faster Times The link is to the Wikipedia entry which, strangely, says that as of February 2018 the url belonged to someone in Serbia. An odd coincidence.. The titular hell is the one AOL created for the employees producing content for its text mill. Writes Oliver Miller:

My “ideal” turn-around time to produce a column started at thirty-five minutes, then was gradually reduced to half an hour, then twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes to research and write about a show I had never seen — and this twenty-five minute period included time for formatting the article in the AOL blogging system, and choosing and editing a photograph for the article. Errors were inevitably the result. But errors didn’t matter; or rather, they didn’t matter for my bosses.

This is, in fact, why AI will destroy the Web as we know it. And if you have any doubts about the outcome of Large Language Models being set loose on the internet, well, AOL wanted to do it even before it was trivial, destroying a few humans in the process:

The document reveals the same attitude that the bosses at the old Ford Motors factory had, when the assembly line was first introduced. Every week or so, the assembly-line was sped up; incrementally, barely noticeably, but the increase had a staggering, cumulative effect, and soon, those workers who couldn’t keep up found themselves standing by the wayside. If AOL could find a good way for machines to write about Lady Gaga, they would almost certainly fire the writers who remain.

They now have the machines, folks… They have the machines.

Mr. Miller can now be found on Medium, writing poetry.

And in some positive news — can you imagine those still exist? — the US Food and Drug Agency has issued their draft guidance on decentralized trials (PDF download). America is playing catch-up with the UK in this regard, but better late than never!

A beautifully designed essay about an ugly entity: dark patterns. I’ve never heard of The Pudding before, but it seems like they do good work.

A modest proposal: institute gun tax. Use the money to fund schools (or better yet, school vouchers).

Prompted by recent events which, although on the other side of the Atlantic, hit too close to home. You’d have a hard time convincing me they weren’t directly influenced by American gun culture.

Topping the list of offenders is a car with Maryland tags that has 339 outstanding tickets worth $186,000 in fines and penalties.

Ban cars.

The 20th day of the 4th month is a special day for everyone, most of all lovers of murder mysteries and fine art. This year, it is also the end of Ramadan.

But was it all worthy of the most expensive fireworks display to date?

I first hear about “date me” docs a few months ago, when someone I followed on Twitter shared his. Today, Tyler Cowen wrote a brief note about them and pointed to another one, from a (female) acquaintance of his.

As someone who’s been in a stable relationship for 14 years this month, I count my blessings every day that I don’t have to think about dating, in the US, in the 2010s and now the ’20s. And for the reason why, look no further than the ridiculous dating apps, and now “dating docs”, which remove all exploration, randomness, and surprise — which is to say everything human — out of the process of finding a partner. Serendipity Which was surprise in a prior version of the post but serendipity is a much better word; thank you, dear reader. in particular is underrated by those who think these documents are a good idea, both in finding out you have common interests with someone you were interested in, and in discovering new things that you wouldn’t have considered before.

Don’t get me wrong, it obviously works for someone — probably people who think a trustless financial system is a good idea — but it is clearly not for me. More worryingly, a portion of kids these days seems to enjoy eliminating everything Dr. Who ⊕ At least every Dr. Who up to and including David Tennant — things started getting depressing during the Capaldi years and I drifted away from watching…liked about humans. Which is an interesting thing to be happening at the same time when algorithms are starting to “hallucinate”, “lie”, and — let’s call it what it is — bullshit, which have for better or worse been typically human traits.

I shall now grab my walker and shuffle off into the sunset.

For your Saturday reading pleasure: How to Beat Roulette: One Gambler Figured It Out and Won Big

That one gambler was from Croatia, some of his gambling buddies were from Serbia, and the Bloomberg reporter had this typically Balkan interaction:

As I pressed him about computers, he threw up his hands in exasperation and started to argue with his friend. Is he angry, I asked. “No, that’s just how he talks,” the friend replied.

That is indeed just the way we talk.