A camera in every pocket isn’t so good for the ASD kid being mainstreamed into high school with a severe phobia of having his picture taken.

Got several kids at regular public schools (not in US) and their policy never allowed phones during school hours from the start. It is pragmatic and doesn’t cause any drama. The kids get messages home if needed and can collect phones when they leave. It is a relatively normal society where kids walk and ride to school by themselves and parents aren’t obsessed with stalking kids or bubble wrapping them.

Schools have a duty of care and sadly are as much baby sitters for working parents as they are places of learning and phones create more problems than they introduce opportunities.

Most of these platforms make no money but have taken huge amounts of VC funding which they have burned through. For the VCs to unload it and cash out they need to show the product can be monetised and them try and shift it before the users leave the platform. Idiot users want all the features of a product developed by lots of talented full time paid staff but don’t want to pay for it themselves so they leap from startup to startup then complain when the inevitable happens while dismissing open source alternatives as inadequate for their needs. Why should we care? I don’t.

I made an effort to only use Firefox because browser diversity is important for the web. It can be rough sometimes when things like.chromecast only work.via unstable extensions but I persist even on mobile.

I suspect the Mozilla corporate structure and leadership needs to be reviewed. They don’t seem to know where they are going and get sidetracked.

Things like lack of good cross platform support for passkeys (fido2/ctap stuff) is going to hurt them even more as people won’t be able to use Firefox to login to many sites on Linux where there is currently no blessed platform libraries for this. Unfortunately stuff like that is going to drag me back to Chrome for some stuff which handles this fine on Linux.

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My kids who are now teens had ipod touches practically from birth (we got the first versions of the Ipad, raspberry pi etc). They looked so clever to non-technical people fluidly swiping puzzle pieces around on a screen in a UI language most adults at the time barely understood. Then one day I put a wooden puzzle in front of them and realised their touch puzzle apps lacked several degree of freedom available in the physical world and they didn’t know how to rotate. The physical world is so much richer in many ways and skills learned in it are often more widely applicable.

It isn’t that technology isn’t valuable and can provide a benefit. It isn’t automatically superior or more complete and some people fetishize it to a ridiculous extent. For decades kids spent a huge amount of time cutting and pasting content into powerpoint in primary schools here at the expense of illustrating, reading and hand writing because companies like Microsoft were engaged in a war for mind share. Most technical people like myself thought this was a very poor use of technology but less technical people probably thought we were luddites. I have seen my kids do animation and story telling with apps that I think is quite a good use of technology but I wouldn’t deny them the experience of doing art with physical materials which I think in most ways is more foundational.

Phones like vapes in schools are there so businesses can profit by exploiting kids. The device hardware is powerful and potentially useful with the right software but the most popular apps are generally exploitative and potentially dangerous to mental health and privacy and because the industry uses dark patterns based on gambling to drive up engagement they are a distraction and reduce attention.

My kids have a lot of access to technology and the Internet at home. I am not opposed to them having phones when they show the right level of maturity and demonstrate a real need but they don’t need them in class. Their school has had a phone policy for a long time which I support. Kids should have the freedom to be themselves at school and make mistakes without them being captured and spread via mobile devices.

I pay for Nebula but watch nebula creators on Youtube. Watching on Youtube boosts them in the algorithm and gives them a small share of premium and it is more discoverable. The problem with distributed alternatives is that using them would disadvantage creators on youtube which is their primary outlet. We may need to concede that unlike Reddit or Twitter that clearly can and should be replaced by distributed alternatives, Youtube has proven to be a natural monopoly and as such needs to be regulated to protect consumers and creators from monopolistic abuses.

As with all monopolies/cartels/prohibitions unsatisfied demand always finds alternatives. If the rules get in the way people circumvent them. Youtube premium price increases will create a bigger demand for ad blocking. Just as the balkanisation of streaming services and reduced value will return many people to piracy. The people who run these organisations are idiots who destroy brands and shareholder value to get short term attention and bonuses.

I am very selective with what I watch but even so the amount of good content on youtube exceeds my available time while other services have a couple of shows a year to binge and then they can be dropped. With writers and actors striking conventional content is only going to get thinner for the other streaming services. There is a limit to what I will pay for a painless ad free experience for the whole family on all their devices and Youtube is rapidly approaching it.

I regularly rotate streaming subscriptions. They all got greedy and there are too many competing services offering too little value. If any service starts locking people in to fixed terms or forcing ads I will drop that service entirely. I don’t like piracy because it doesn’t support creative jobs and I think it should be unnecessary if services behaved reasonably. But the one or two decent shows a year that might be an exclusive to any particular service can be obtained on the high seas or I can live without them.