2025-12-10 18:34:38
Casey Newton wrote about Australia's new social media ban for under-16s, touching on Jonathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation":
The book has been criticized for its lack of empirical data on the central claim that social networks are largely responsible for the mental health crisis in young people. But it was also a runaway bestseller that spoke to parents' mounting anxieties over what they can see with their own eyes: a generation of children that seems more distracted, depressed, and homebound than any in recent memory.
I'm critical of social media, particularly the algorithmic kind. Wrote a whole post about this back when Haidt's book came out. There's real harm happening. Kids spending hours on platforms built to hack their attention. Parents can see it. The research is mounting.
But there's confirmation bias at play too. We know something's wrong, so it's easy to point at patterns that fit our perspective. Same reason people fall into conspiracy theories or why humanity invented thousands of gods to explain what we couldn't understand. Our brains hate open loops. They'll work overtime to fill in gaps, even if it means forcing square pegs into round holes.
I wrote before about how we all have this gut feeling that social media isn't good for us. Charlie Warzel nailed it when he said we know this connectivity is working on us, but it's hard to pin down exactly how. That difficulty doesn't mean we're imagining things. It just means the mechanisms are complex.
The truth sits somewhere uncomfortable. Yes, modern social platforms are fundamentally different from anything that came before. MTV didn't have an algorithm designed to keep you watching at the expense of everything else in your life. Your Super Nintendo wasn't constantly A/B testing ways to hijack your dopamine system.
But we're also pattern-seeking creatures desperate for simple explanations. Mental health issues in young people are real and rising. Social media usage is real and rising. The correlation is obvious. The causation? That's where things get messy. What bugs me is when people dismiss all concerns as moral panic, when they trot out the "kids these days" line as if nothing's changed. That's lazy thinking. The platforms themselves admit they're designed to maximise engagement. Meta's own research showed Instagram made teen girls feel worse about their bodies. This isn't speculation.
At the same time, treating social media as the singular cause lets everyone else off the hook. The underfunding of mental health services. The housing crisis making young people feel hopeless about their futures. The climate crisis hanging over everything. The pandemic that robbed them of crucial developmental years. All of these things matter too. Australia's ban feels like politicians doing something visible instead of something effective. It's the legislative equivalent of doom scrolling – responding to anxiety with action that makes you feel better but doesn't actually address the root problem.
The science is still developing. Our brains are filling in gaps with assumptions. And while we figure it out, kids are growing up in this weird digital landscape we've created for them.
I still think the algorithm is the problem, not social connection itself. I still think these platforms were built to exploit us. I still think most of the harm traces back to the attention economy and advertising revenue. But I'm trying to hold space for uncertainty too. Trying not to let my own biases fill in gaps the research hasn't actually filled yet. Trying to remember that when everyone's convinced they're right about something this complicated, that's usually when we're all missing something.
2025-12-10 02:03:02
Matt Birchler on what makes you interesting:
Whether it's Tomotometer scores or your online clan deciding something is good or the worst thing ever, I find these systems to make us all dumber and more angry.
I've been thinking about this alongside a recent Vergecast discussion about what happens to taste when everything we consume is mediated by algorithms. The conversation kept circling a question I can't shake. When you open TikTok or Instagram and just let it show you things, is that actually your taste or is that just what the algorithm decided you should see based on keeping you engaged?
I don't think most people can answer that anymore. There's no active choice happening. You're not seeking things out or deciding what you want to consume. You're just accepting whatever appears in the feed. The algorithm does all the work, and you scroll.
We've been outsourcing things to the internet for years now. First it was memory. Why bother remembering facts when you can just look everything up? The information age meant we stopped retaining things and started relying on search. Now we've gone further. We've outsourced decision-making itself. We've outsourced taste.
The influencer age has taken this to another level. It's not just about looking things up anymore. It's about being told what to think, what to like, what to buy. Your favourite tech YouTuber tells you which phone is good. Your online clan decides which film is worth watching. The algorithm decides what music you should listen to based on what kept other people engaged. At every turn, someone or something else is making the choice for you.
The problem isn't that algorithms know what you like. The problem is they're replacing the process of discovering what you like. There's no exploration involved. No stumbling across something weird that becomes a new obsession. No making bad choices and learning from them. Just here's what you liked before, here's more of the same, here's what everyone else who liked that also liked. A closed loop that narrows rather than expands.
I'm guilty of this too. When I stopped using social media properly, I realised how much of my interests were just whatever the algorithm decided to show me. My taste wasn't really mine, it was shaped by what kept me scrolling. When I actually had to seek things out, when I had to make choices about what to consume rather than letting the feed make them for me, everything changed. Turns out I like different things when I'm choosing rather than just accepting.
Taste develops through friction. Through being exposed to things you wouldn't naturally pick. Through actual curation by actual humans who care about the thing they're sharing, not the engagement metrics. That's what's missing from algorithmic feeds. The humanity. The personality. The quirks and obsessions that make someone's recommendations actually interesting rather than just algorithmically relevant.
Your taste is what makes you interesting. Not the things everyone else likes too. Not the consensus opinion. Not whatever TikTok has decided you should see today. The messy, personal, sometimes inexplicable preferences that develop when you actually have to seek things out rather than having them delivered to you. That's taste, and it's worth protecting.
2025-12-09 21:11:47
I've written before about getting itchy feet with technology. That pull toward trying something new, usually an Android phone, before inevitably running back to iPhone a week later because of iMessage or iCloud or whatever excuse I tell myself. My flip phone experiment was the culmination of years of talking about it before my wife basically told me to shut up and do it. I learned I can't escape the smartphone. If I'm stuck with one, it might as well be a good one.
The Oppo Find X9 Pro is a good one.
I wrote recently about how the iPhone camera has a habit of pulling you away from the moment. You're not taking photos. You're operating a computer that happens to produce images. The iPhone processes everything within an inch of its life until photos look perfect, sterile, entirely digital. When you lift it to shoot, you're thinking about the phone, not what you're shooting.
The Find X9 Pro doesn't do this. Oppo paired a 1-inch main sensor with a 200-megapixel periscope telephoto and tuned it with Hasselblad. The specs don't matter. What matters is the photos don't look like they were born in a processor. They have natural depth and colour that reminds me of shooting with my X100vi. Shadows are allowed to be dark. Highlights roll off like they should. It captures what a scene feels like, not just the data of what it looked like.
There's a Master Mode that gives you proper control over exposure and settings. Using it feels tactile and deliberate in a way phone cameras rarely do. It bridges the gap between a phone and a dedicated camera, and more than anything else, it makes me want to just go shoot. Not fiddle with settings or worry about processing. Just look at the world and take photos.
The 200-megapixel telephoto does something I haven't seen on a phone before. It focuses incredibly close, almost like a macro lens, but at 70mm equivalent. You can shoot portraits or small details from a distance that feels natural. The massive resolution means cropping to 6x or even further doesn't destroy the image. I took photos at full zoom that I'd actually use, which is more than I can say for most phone telephotos that turn to mush past 3x.
The Find X9 Pro has a 7,500mAh battery. I'm charging it every two days. Not every night like every other phone I've owned. Every two days. I wake up, track my run, listen to podcasts, check email, doomscroll more than I should, browse the web, and go to sleep with 60% battery left. It fundamentally changes how you use a device when you stop thinking about the battery icon. You just use the phone and forget about it.
When I do charge it, the 80W charging fills it up in about 30 minutes. Plug it in while I make coffee, and it's done before I've finished drinking it. Every flagship phone should have battery life like this. The fact that they don't feels deliberate at this point. The technology exists. Oppo proved it works.
The biggest friction in moving to Android has always been the software. It usually feels (to me) janky, cluttered, or just off in ways that make you want to go back to iOS. ColorOS 16 is different. It's fast, fluid, and polished in a way that rivals iOS without trying to be a bad copy of it. The animations are thoughtful. The haptics are precise. It doesn't feel like a cheap Android skin anymore.
I will write more about the software side and why Android has won me over at last at a later point. However using Gemini as the default assistant is genuinely better than what Siri has been for the past decade. It actually answers questions. It interacts with apps in useful ways. It does what voice assistants have been promising to do since Siri launched and never delivered. I find myself using it more than I ever used Siri, which is saying something.
There's bloatware. About 59 pre-installed apps, including some third-party ones and redundant apps like an App Market when the Play Store exists. It's annoying but manageable. You can delete most of it. It's not the disaster some Android skins used to be where you couldn't remove anything, and thankfully you don’t get stuck between Samsung, Microsoft and Google services like most of my usual dalliances into Android hardware. Oppo are happy to let you be fully immersed in Google and that’s. Great thing.
The final thing that made me think I might actually stick with this phone is O+ Connect. I expected a buggy, half-working utility that would frustrate me every time I tried to use it. Instead, I found something that actually works. You install the app on your Mac, connect both devices to the same Wi-Fi, and you can drag and drop files between them instantly. Your clipboard syncs. Photos transfer in seconds. It just works.
In some ways, it works better than AirDrop. It doesn't try to be clever about figuring out what you want to do. It just creates a connection and gets out of the way. You can even view and edit files on your phone from your Mac without copying them over first. For someone who's been locked into the Apple ecosystem for years, finding out you don't actually need Apple hardware for a working ecosystem is a bit of a revelation.
The design is fine but forgettable. It looks like an iPhone crossed with a Samsung. The colour options are boring, I got Titanium Charcoal and theres also a Silk White one. That's it. After years of phones looking identical, I'd take something with more personality.
The price is steep. At the equivalent of about £1,000, it's competing directly with the iPhone Pro and Samsung Ultra. That's a tough sell when most people are locked into their ecosystems. You're not just buying a phone. You're buying into a different way of doing things.
I bought the Find X9 Pro expecting a fun distraction. Something I'd play with for a week before going back to my iPhone like I always do. I was wrong. This isn't just a great Android phone. It's a great phone that happens to run Android. It has battery life that lasts days, not hours. A camera that feels like a camera, not a computer. Software that's polished enough to rival iOS. And an ecosystem solution that works without Apple's logo on it.
For the first time in years, I'm not looking back over the fence. There is no new iPhone anymore. Just incremental updates that feel like Apple going through the motions. The Find X9 Pro feels like what phones should be doing instead. Big battery. Great camera. Software that works. It's not complicated.
I might actually keep this one.
2025-12-09 02:42:12
A very human vision for going all-in on AI | The Vergecast
I think there is a world where we all may be in this collective experiment where we're deluding ourselves into thinking these things are more effective than they are.
This Vergecast episode gets at something I've been thinking about for months. We're all rushing headfirst into AI integration, convinced it's making us more productive, when really we might just be creating new problems to solve with the old ones.
The distinction between outsourcing your agency and augmenting it is crucial. One makes you dumber. The other might actually help.
When someone copies an AI-generated email response without reading it, that's outsourcing. When someone asks an AI to help them think through a complex problem, that's augmenting. The first one removes you from the process. The second one keeps you in control.
The problem is most people are doing the former whilst convincing themselves they're doing the latter. I've written before about AI slop making my life harder. Emails from professionals, company press releases, healthcare letters. All unchecked. All littered with issues. All sent with the presumption that their AI did the work for them, so why should they bother reading it?
And we are in this moment where it's like, okay, how much worse are we actually all willing to let things be in the name of them happening so much faster and more efficiently?
This is the real question. We've accepted that AI outputs are going to be wrong sometimes. We've accepted that responses will be generic and bland. We've accepted that communication will be less meaningful. All because it's faster.
But faster isn't better if the quality drops below a useful threshold. No one is getting any extra work done. Companies are spending billions on tools that are making workers miserable and killing actual productivity.
The collective delusion is that faster equals better. That automating everything is progress. That outsourcing your thinking to a machine means you're working smarter instead of harder.
I use AI tools regularly. When I'm working on a blog post, I'll often use them to help me think through arguments, to check if I'm missing an obvious counterpoint, or to formulate ideas more clearly. Sometimes I'll paste in a rough draft and ask it to highlight where my thinking is muddy or where I'm being repetitive. That's augmenting.
The difference is I'm still doing the thinking. I'm still making the decisions about what stays and what goes. The AI helps me see my own work from a different angle, like having someone read your draft and point out the weak spots. I've used them to help with my writing and to work through problems. But I read every output. I edit everything. I check for mistakes. The tool augments what I'm doing, it doesn't replace me doing it.
The people who treat AI as a way to avoid thinking entirely are the same people who will complain when their emails are misunderstood, their projects fail, and their relationships suffer from bland, meaningless communication. You can't outsource being present in your own life.
The vision for AI should be human. It should help us think better, not stop us thinking at all.
2025-12-06 15:29:06
The Unseen Effects of High Carb Training:
I'm starting to feel like I trained my stomach to expect 200g + of sugar a day and the gut biome found balance with that. I trained my gut for racing and now it wants that food all of the time. I spend much more of my life not racing than I do racing.
This resonates. You spend months teaching your gut to expect constant sugar, and then the race is over. Back to normal life, but your stomach hasn't got the memo.
The massive consumption of energy gels is a fairly modern thing. Capitalism probably. I see people pounding them on 10k runs. No shaming intended, but it's not good for your stomach or the environment.
When I was training for Manchester, I loaded up with gels for long runs. Felt ridiculous, pockets stuffed with sticky packets, plodding along at recovery pace. But you do it because that's what you're supposed to do.
The problem is you've trained your gut for racing, and racing is maybe a handful of days a year. The rest of the time you're living with a stomach that wants 200g of sugar daily. That's the bit nobody talks about.
People ran marathons before gels existed. They managed fine. Now we've created this system where your gut needs constant feeding just to get through a long run, and you carry that dependency into normal life.
For me, running slower meant I needed less fuel overall. My body adapted, got more efficient, stopped demanding constant sugar.
I'm not against fuelling properly. But training your gut to expect that much sugar for the sake of a few races a year seems like a trade-off worth questioning.
2025-12-05 23:53:30
Manuel Moreale with a spot on observation regarding Ghost CEO John O'Nolan:
You are on your own blog, your own corner of the web, powered by the platform you’re the CEO of, a blog that also serves content via RSS, the thing you’re building a tool for, and you’re telling people to follow the progress on fucking Twitter? Come on John.
This is the exact kind of thing that frustrates me about the current state of the web. I moved again to Ghost recently because I wanted a platform that focused on publishing. It fits my needs. But seeing the person in charge of that platform direct people to a closed silo like X is baffling.
I have written plenty about why social media is broken. The discourse is tired and the platforms are hostile. Sending your user base back into that mess, especially when you run a company built on the premise of independent publishing, feels wrong. It undermines the very product you are selling.
We keep hearing about the open web and ActivityPub. Ghost is actively building this. They promise to let you control your content. Yet, when it comes to the updates that matter, the default is still the billionaire’s playground.
If you believe in the power of the independent web, you have to actually use it. Your blog is right there. Use it.
