You messing with a computer and teens doom-scrolling social media are two entirely different things.
Yes, some teens are creative with uploading videos, most are not. But teens can still be creative with a smart phone, just don’t post that stuff on social media.
But they don't - either through lack of knowledge or just can't be bothered to enforce it because they don't want to upset their kid. If parents were doing this already, the government wouldn't have to step in.
There were pedophiles, porn, extreme gore, cults, scams and a primitive notion of brainrot. Music and games (not that I played games, but honestly my mum thought that this is why I liked computers and what I was doing) were generally thought to turn kids into killers.
Computer users even in the best conditions (and not children) were looked at negatively- as if they were no life losers. The techbro thing, and the normalisation of computer use is a very modern notion.
FWIW I had the same exact situation as the parent, and heard it all from my mum. The computer was considered undesirable at best and actively harmful at worst.
Their point is: for some individuals it can be beneficial.
My point is: on a societal level, the numbers are pretty clear that teens consume too much media (and social media is even more addictive) and their skills and attention span deteriorate.
I think you understood my point and you understand the reasons for the act. But I'm just protesting on behalf of the kids that will pretty much have their lives ruined or made worse for this decision, for what it's worth.
It would be unkind to single anyone out so I am not going to. The thing is, I can for the life of me not think of a single photo influencer/youtuber who is also a popular _photographer_. They're popular influencers/youtubers.
As for what I mean by mediocre: let's say you are looking at a portrait of someone you don't know. If you can't remember it 10-30 minutes later, it was probably mediocre or worse. Would you recognize the subject if you met them on the a street one day later?
Most portraits tend to be bad because they completely fail to capture the subject. People fuss over lighting and editing and color grading and whatnot, but they don't actually pay attention to the person they are shooting. I see quite a few of these people with huge social media followings who can't, for the life of them, take pictures of humans. And yet, they teach their inability to make portraits to others.
I also know professional photographers who are genuinely bad at taking portraits. And then there are those rare people who just nail it most of the time. Notice this when looking at a portrait of someone you know. Is it "them"?
Another category where you see a lot of bad photos is wildlife photography. You will see endless pictures of birds that possibly could go in a bird-spotting book purely for identification purposes. But, to steal a line from my wife after looking at a certain facebook group "it's just a bunch of tack sharp ducks set against blurred out sky". And my wife spends an inordinate amount of time looking at birds.
All you need to make bad nature photography is a big lens, a location and some time. It takes no talent. All you need to make technically good, but completely pointless nature photos is a big lens, a location, time and a decent modern camera. Then turn on 3D tracking and spray whenever something moves. Animals live in nature -- they belong in context -- they do things. Good nature photographers manage to communicate this.
(I was actually tempted to name the "it's just a bunch of tack sharp ducks..."-group, but I'm not going to. Though it isn't that hard to guess).
We drown in technically excellent images that are dull as crap.
(To be clear: I'm a mediocre photographer. I'm very aware of it. I occasionally shoot something that may be worth looking at -- but still rarely something you'd remember)
Same. Lack of search and lack of scrollbars make me wonder why this project got so much attention in the first place. iTerm2 seems way more capable.
I suspect it is "just" the very nice-looking default theme in Ghostty. I updated my iTerm2 colors with colors I picked from Tailwind‘s excellent color palette and iterm2 now feels fresh and has all the features I want.
Mitchell’s attempts at more correctness and better speed, plus the no-nonsense UX. iTerm2 is confusing and overwhelming and bloated for those of us who just want a terminal that works.
Not sure what to make of this. React is missing entirely. Or is this report also assuming that React is the default for everything and not worth mentioning at all? Just like shadcn/ui's first mention of React is somewhere down the page or hidden in the docs?
Furthermore, what's the point of "no tools named"? Why would I restrict myself like that? If I put "use Nodejs, Hono, TypeScript and use Hono's html helper to generate HTML on the server like its 2010, write custom CSS, minimize client-side JS, no Tailwind" in CLAUDE.md, it happily follows this.
As someone who runs a small dev agency, I'm very interested in research like this.
Let's say some Doctor decides to vibecode an app on the weekend, with next to 0 exposure to software development until she started hearing about how easy it was to create software with these tools. She makes incredible progress and is delighted in how well it works, but as she considers actually opening it up the world she keeps running into issues. How do I know this is secure? How do I keep this maintained and running?
I want to be in a position where she can find me to get professional help, so it's very helpful to know what stacks these kinds of apps are being built in.
claudecode _loves_ shadcn/ui. I hadn't even heard of it until i was playing around with claudecode. It seems fine to me and if the coding agent loves it then more power to it, i don't really care. That's the problem.
I think that makes coding agent choices extremely suspect, like i don't really care what it uses as long as what's produced works and functions inline with my expectations. I can totally see companies paying Anthropic to promote their tool of choice to the top of claudecodes preferences. After thinking about it, i'm not sure if that's a problem or not. I don't really care what it uses as long as my requirements (all of them) are met.
I once mailed the maker of a little German indie game called Clonk about wanting to learn programming. It was my favorite game for a while. Never heard back from him, which I found disappointing.
Now, I answer every single email my app customers are sending me and have been doing this for close to 20 years and I get a lot of positive reviews for the great customer support.
Wow, I didn't expect to see Clonk on HN today! Almost 20 years ago, as a 13 year old in the US I managed to make friends with an older player from Germany, and then we collaborated on making Clonk Rage mods together in c4script. It was an amazing experience and did help me get more into programming, so I'm so sorry to hear about your experience! I do recall members of the development team at the time being accessible and active in the community, specifically Sven2, but I'm not sure about MatthesB.
Awesome, Clonk fans on HN! To this day, I don't think there's any game series I spent more total hours in than Clonk. Also starting in 1998 with Clonk 4, especially with one particular friend from school, we played these sometimes every day for hours, all through Planet, GWE, Endeavour, and Rage (did I miss one?). As far as splitscreen multiplayer is concerned, it's still one of the best and most versatile computer games ever written, in my opinion. Bastard of a learning curve, though, which is why I never managed to get anyone beyond that one friend hooked, and I stopped playing it when our life paths started diverging... :(
I also remember Matthes Bender as more of a distant, benevolent ruler keeping the project running but staying very much in the background. IIRC by the time Clonk 4 came out he already had his consultancy going, so he was probably glad to offload the community stuff to other people.
By the way, Clonk is still going: there's OpenClonk, as well as an open-source continuation of the original Rage branch. Even the CCAN is still online!
Nice, a dedicated Clonk player. My obsession didn't last as long. Many years later, King Arthur's Gold scratched a very similar itch: https://kag2d.com/en/
The community is very small now. Peak was 10 years ago, but still an excellent multiplayer game.
I think it must’ve around '98 when I played Clonk 4. I even downloaded some custom assets via an Internet cafe to floppy disks to play with them back home. The mail was actually a physical letter. Maybe the devs became more active later when internet communities started to grow.
So true. I used Pinterest for art references and inspiration and they have 3 issues that are entirely self-owned:
1. Ads, ads and more ads. I had their app and it had to go, because every third pin was an ad.
2. Ads that seem to be pins: there are ads that are a mini collage. One image, 2-3 thumbs below. All "images" with the same rounded border like the regular pins. So you click them and because the upper image is visually detached from the rest of the ad, you don’t realize that you just clicked an ad when it is too late. A very nasty dark pattern.
3. No timestamps. It’s sometimes hard to tell if something is AI-generated. I don’t want AI-generated when it comes to art. Pinterest could choose to display pin timestamps when they were pinned for the first time, but they don’t.
So, they dug their own hole and I have zero sympathy for them, too.
Yes, some teens are creative with uploading videos, most are not. But teens can still be creative with a smart phone, just don’t post that stuff on social media.
reply