I just heard about Tin Can. What a great idea! It's a physical phone for kids that can connect with other Tin Cans for free. For a monthly fee, it can even connect with other phone numbers. Only approved numbers are supported, and best of all, there are no apps! It's an old concept, of course, but something about it seems so exciting, novel, and fun. Imagine kids spending less time on screens and more time actually talking to their friends, building real communication skills.
If cost is fixed and you measure speed, you'll get speed, but not quality. If cost is fixed and you measure quality, you'll get quality, but not speed. If you measure page views or ad impressions, your company may become a clickbait factory. If you measure messages sent within your app, your app might begin boosting outrageous content that makes people argue all the time. (Yes, I'm talking about social media.) If you're a bank and you measure account openings, your employees just might commit fraud to “get those numbers up.”
Incentives rule the world. If you decide to incentivize something by making a measurement a goal, be sure you understand the unintended consequences. Better yet, don't make a measurement a goal at all. As they say, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when a metric becomes a goal, people will inevitably game the system, and you might be surprised by what they do to “win.”
The newly-published video Impossible Challenges (Google Veo 3 ) by demonflyingfox is both an amazing showcase of Google's new Veo 3 AI (to be fair, I'm sure there was post-production) and hilarious commentary on the kind of algorithmic bullshit YouTube is constantly manipulating creators into publishing.
edit (2025-12-30): Although I was sure there had to be post-production when I published this, I'm no longer sure. If there was, there wasn't necessarily much. Sora 2 shows that this technology really is that amazing.
These days, when someone tells me they “did their own research,” I immediately suspect they have no idea what they're talking about and have no idea how to think critically. We know that Google and practically all other search engines customize their results based on what they know about the user and what most pushes their buttons. For that reason and others, sadly, “doing one's own research” is now code for falling prey to confirmation bias and being manipulated by online platforms and filter bubbles.
The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles.
Clickbait, listicles, and affiliate marketing schemes would become worthless overnight. Algorithm-driven platforms like Instagram and TikTok that harvest and monetize attention, destroying youth, would lose their economic foundation.
[…]
Removing these advanced manipulation tools would force everyone—politicians included—to snap back into reality. By outlawing advertising, the machinery of mass delusion would lose its most addictive and toxic fuel.
There should be an app, browser, browser add-on, or some other tool called Deshittify which does everything accomplished by uBlock Origin, Pi-hole, Unhook, DeArrow, SponsorBlock, Fakespot (which is now discontinued), ClearURLs, and more, with reasonable defaults and in one convenient package. God, that's a long list. For those who aren't familiar with those tools, they block ads, trackers, addictive designs on YouTube, fake reviews, and more. The web is a mess.
If anyone wants to steal this idea—not that the idea is all that original—please, go right ahead. Mozilla, Brave, someone: do this!
Irritability is not bad temper. Nor is bad temper irritability. Bad temper carries the heart into it. The bad tempered man really does delight to vex and torture. Irritability flames and is gone. But both ruin happiness.
Again, this is not simply partisan. Zuckerberg was a villain ten years ago, and he's a villain today.
Yes, he's been philanthropic, and he's pledged to donate 99% of his Facebook shares to charity. That is genuinely amazing, and it deserves genuine praise. To be sure, it's a hell of a lot more money than I'll ever donate to charity. Still, what does it matter if he destroys the world in the process? Will his philanthropy even begin to clean up the mess he's created? Surely not. He's done far more than $200 billion worth of harm to society. Try putting a dollar amount on political extremism, a problem his company has massively exacerbated.
Mark Zuckerberg is a villain, and like all villains, he thinks he's doing good for the world. He's not.