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Loads of things, but the big thing that changed in past decades is the media. A case of a child getting abducted or killed goes nation- or worldwide now, which makes everyone feel less safe in letting their kids roam free.

Not to mentions calls to weaken child labour laws in certain states to try and make up the difference in abducted workers: https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-standards-state-...

We were ahead of the curve in having our attention spans hijacked by infinite content. This article is from 2003 (but has been updated over time, as e.g. Spotify and Slack came out later) and was already a warning: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/

edit: ah finally; through another HN comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528944) I was able to find the original link to the article (http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2003/07/10/nadd.html) and an archived version of the first version (https://web.archive.org/web/20031008160117/http://www.randsi...). Notably, the list of activities changed:

2003 version:

> Me, I've got a terminal session open to a chat room, I'm listening to music, I've got Safari open with three tabs open where I'm watching Blogshares, tinkering with a web site, and looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I've got iChat open, ESPN.COM is downloading sports new trailers in the background, and I've got two notepads open where I'm capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to do lists. Oh yeah, I'm writing this column, as well.

Current version:

> Me, I’ve got Slack opened and logged into four different teams, I’m listening to music in Spotify, I’ve got Chrome open with three tabs where I’m watching stocks on E*TRADE, I’m tinkering with WordPress, and I’m looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I’ve got iMessage open, Tweetbot is merrily streaming the latest fortune cookies from friends, and I’ve got two Sublime windows open where I’m capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to-do lists. Oh yeah, I’m rewriting this article as well.


We were ahead of the curve in getting our attentions spans hijacked.... and yet most of us work in fields where we must maintain attention for long periods of time?

Maybe, just maybe, it's possible to integrate technology into one's life without it being detrimental?

Also those examples don't really paint the picture you think it does. Currently, I have about 200 browser tabs open, Sublime Text, several games, Docker containers, and a bunch of other stuff.

That doesn't mean I'm doing all those things at once, or within a very short period of time.


To make it a bit tropey, a sheltered kid is much more susceptible to people luring them out of their safe space with promises of excitement and Things Their Parents Would Not Approve Of.

Of course, the data (e.g. teen pregnancies) shows that this isn't a universal / statistically provable truth, but still. It makes sense in my head.


I'd argue their parents are similarly affected with Something - a kind of anxiety or fear that something will happen to their kids or they won't end up alright if they're left to their own devices.

"left to their own devices" has its own meaning nowadays too, and there's more and more calls to NOT let them on their own devices, because they're an attention sink.


It is called class anxiety.

The US is a place where if you don't make it into or stay in at least the middle class your life sucks. You can't get healthcare, you have to work three jobs, you're treated like shit.

If you want less helicopter parenting you have to create a more supportive society in general, one where there are chances to recover from failure, and one where failing to compete at the top is not a sentence to a life of penury.


> You can't get healthcare

Kinda thing only sheltered people say. When I was unemployed and on free gov't health insurance (medi-cal), I got all my healthcare for free and most of my appointments like MRIs were next-day. Not as good as tech company insurance, but "can't get healthcare" is not a thing in the US.

> you have to work three jobs

Plot the number of people working multiple jobs vs time and you'll see a flat line that has no correlation with the stuff mentioned in the article: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620


Medicaid is a poor substitute of a proper PPO plan. The reimbursements are low, so there are fewer providers, and it requires you to not have any assets.

If I wasn't in IT I think I'd love the military, not the stupid political stuff and killing people, but the organization, discipline, routine, focus on predictability, protocols, etc.

Yeah it's boring if it all works but boring is good. And we've been trying to apply this to software development for ages as well - think "continuous deployment" practices (or its new name, DORA metrics in the 2020's).


I wish software wasnt like the wild west where everyone can do as they please... Well defined proven standards would be so cool to have, but no, we have like 20 different ways to do auth and none of them are secure, regular switches from favoring SSR to client side rendering back to SSR again. Just to name some examples.

Hmm, I've been doing webdev for a living since 1998, intimately familiar w/ the complete history and modern practices, and I respectful disagree. Pretty sure it's a good thing we're not all forced to do things the same way. And the new SSR with CSR capabilities is not at all the same as the old SSR. You're right that auth is kind of a hot mess though.

> And the new SSR with CSR capabilities is not at all the same as the old SSR

Yea I know its just a display of the industries indecisiveness. Everytime we need something new and fresh some old favorite is revived until after 5 years its old again. I like being able to do things differently, I hate having to implement "security" features knowing all too well that they aren't secure at all. Minimizing attack surface should not be the default. And its not like this is a new problem. For some reason web devs love to work around a problem instead of fixing it.


Sorry, no, you seem to have misunderstood that I'm disagreeing with you. Modern SSR is not just a return to the same old thing.

It most definitely is. Same old shit with a twist. Also apparently all web devs are cloudslaves nowadays as well. Webdev is dead.

To add, add some "slowness" before starting work - fix the latencies and delays, and plan what you're going to make instead of figuring it out as you go.

Maybe, but the southwest of the US uses more water than it has and can import. With droughts and overconsumption, the water supply is at risk. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_North_American_me...

Nevada only uses a small percentage of the Colorado river water (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact). Most of the water is used for farming in the desert.

I can't answer that, but for a long time, there have been predictions that water and foot shortages will trigger (civil) wars and / or mass migrations. Whether it'll be the one or the other depends, I think, on how free a country is. A non-free country will have a strong police / military force that may resort to deadly violence in the case of an uprising. A truly free country will vote the regime out. Somewhere in the middle it'd be said police / military that would take over.

For my uninformed take, Iran is not a free country, the US is somewhere in the middle but I don't think an insurrection against the current regime (which has been deploying the military to mass-abduct people) would end well.


When they say "don't support it anymore", does that mean they're back to the IE era of using Chrome specific technologies so it doesn't work in any browser, do they use user-agent sniffing and show a big popup, or is it just that they're not testing it in FF anymore? The latter shouldn't be an issue as long as they use standards, the only thing they would run into in this day and age is browser specific bugs - but Safari seems to have that the most.

It's exclusively UA sniffing. IMO, Firefox should take the nuclear option and just start reporting the Chrome UA.

No, they mostly just show a popup telling you to use Chrome. Websites work fine if you switch the user agent.

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