It’s really hard to make predictions, but one thing I am certain about is that the pervasiveness of endless entertainment and distractions, in combination with the ease of outsourcing any mental effort to LLMs, will have significant effects on people’s cognitive performance. Especially for young people who have the misfortune of never knowing a world without these things.

Another thing is climate change. At least for those of us living in the west, climate change is still limited to concerning news you read, a bit more heat in the summer, and a few more natural disasters than usual. There are effects, but we’re not really affected yet. In 10 years, our lives will be significantly affected by the increasing heat and even more natural disasters. In other parts of the world, these things are already happening and they will be significantly worse in 10 years.

True. Yesterday I saw a gen alpha kid watching YT on his phone on one hand while he was walking his dog with the other. In an urban area with some traffic and occasional cyclists.

I agree that reddit sucks but why do you think it’s not anime friendly?

There’s this Norwegian metal band called Kvelertak and I absolutely love their sound, but have no idea what the lyrics are about as I don’t speak the language.

I think your fundamental misunderstanding is how many people just scroll, lurk and at most comment. Let’s call those passive users. They are many and therefore worth catering to. Reddit, especially the big subreddits, are engagement generators. Their point is not to answer the questions that you as an individual might have. Their point is to maximize engagement. Providing the kind of content that keeps thousands of passive users engaged in the app has more monetary value than letting you as an individual post your personal question. So it’s geared towards letting users with a solid track record of creating engagement post easily, while being careful with users who don’t have that track record.

You can see this in supermarkets too. Hundred different types of sweets but if I simply want nuts roasted without oil, I’m out of luck? Why? Because there’s orders of magnitude more people who will buy stuff without reading the ingredients. The people who care about not having oil added to their nuts are so relatively few that they’re not worth catering to by a mass-appealing supermarket.

At least those are my theories, not that I have any inside knowledge.

class CountToTen is the perfect example of why I dislike Java.

Bilde ich mir das ein oder sieht sie in dem Thumbnail aus wie Richard Precht?

When people want to enter a bus, especially a crowded one, it makes a lot more sense to wait for the people who want to get out of the bus to leave first.

This one is so baffling to me, it’s really changed my view of how stupid some people really are. What do they even expect, that the other passengers magically disappear? It’s really not an abstract problem if the other passengers are trying to leave right in front of you. Trying to enter a bus is also not a rare situation, so you’d expect people to understand this at least after the first few times. Unbelievable.