> No amount of government regulation is really going to protect the children from the decisions their parents make behind closed doors.
More people need to be talking about this. The children of parents who abdicate their responsibilities of parenting are going to become the adults we deal with on a daily basis. I think the scope of the issue is not perceptible until you get to know how much damage a person with all the power can bring onto their child. That kind of thing is lifelong and not everyone can afford the therapy you will end up needing.
It shocks me that even the nicest parents I know - on the surface - still give their children phones.
This is why I see the drive for child safety regulation as an unspoken admission that the problems of an individual parent are falsely seen as insurmountable, so people start pointing fingers at whoever is in the vicinity, when in reality the parent was the one responsible for choosing their own fights by purposefully exposing their child to the modern Internet. Parenting has existed for thousands of years, social media for just 20. This is a solvable problem but parents have to change their behavior. When the majority of childhood is spent with one's family, there is no other solution.
I think people who are doing these decomps aren't necessarily passionate about them to that extent. If they were a huge fan of the history of Sonic, they could use the resources now available to see how the game works, but they would also be internally driven to go beyond just a dump of the game's code on a repo. AI cannot decompile the social history of these games and the stories of the people who made them. It's just a matter if the person actually cares about that. Who knows what drives such an unusual amount of passion.
I feel a lot of these decomps were created by people not as passionate as your examples, because they are only showing up now, not in the pre-AI era. There is a flood of AI decomps only now because AI has lowered the barrier enough to where a project a person could not be passionate enough about to spend years of their limited time on Earth toiling on it is now easily accomplishable. It's a huge ask to put years of your life towards one thing. People might have obligations, work, family, children, more important hobbies, yet still wish one day they could get around to that one project, but couldn't find a way of prioritizing it over other things. I can't fault them for that. Now they can get it done in a month and still have time for other things that matter to them.
The claim is "we lose the rich communities that only exist from manual work." I still think the people who want those communities, like the people who still create art by hand in spite of the existence of diffusion, will keep doing their own thing. They were going to from the start, AI or not, but now that AI is a thing the separation is clearer to people on the outside, since they are seen to not rely on AI.
The communities that will appear because we can now organize AI decomp projects wouldn't have appeared at all with the barrier so high, had it not been easy enough to start them. The blocker was other obligations and not having the time to devote that was intrinsically required to finish them by hand, with the vast majority of people still being a member of outer society.
Dare I say it, maybe not all of the people into reverse engineering really enjoyed the process. It's just they put up with learning it because if you wanted to modernize an abandoned game in the pre-AI era, you had no choice but to learn those things. Only the people with the interest and patience remained, and those are the examples we are able to point to, while the people with only enough passion to get it done with AI assistance left a while ago and are only now reappearing.
I think you may be missing a key point here. These communities spring up, at least in part, because a group of people all want X to exist and building X alone isn't really feasible. This necessity of collaboration can be a major driver of community-building, especially for people who are very technically competent but not particularly outgoing.
If an AI-generated version of X already exists, at least some of the people who might have joined the "let's build X together" community aren't going to sign up anymore. Some of them may feel discouraged because AI got there first, while some may simply feel like the AI version is good enough for their purposes.
You may be right that new and different communities will spring up around AI-generated projects. I'd argue something is still lost, even if something new is gained in the process. I think there's something special about communities of people who are passionate enough to do truly hard things that require dedicating large amounts of time and effort. While AI can help people accomplish far more than they otherwise would've, reducing the amount of human effort and attention that goes into any given task is almost inherent in any AI use.
It is sad that these communities will be lost. Unfortunately, to a lot of people who just wanted the code and some mods, they now are an artifact of their time. Machine code was meant to be read by machines, not humans. The challenge of turning machine code into code that humans can read was a hard problem requiring months or years of effort that was only an unintentional byproduct of the compilation process, not a challenge deliberately laid out by every compiler for humans to gain a sense of accomplishment each time they emitted an object file. That we are creative enough to derive a sense of satisfaction by creating those challenges for ourselves was a happy coincidence always vulnerable to this kind of disruption.
I am not saying that this way is better, but people might start asking themselves when they have a tool sitting right in front of them that they can use to increase their productivity in this domain on the order of 1,000 times or more, if the value of holding together their community overrides the amount of time and maintenance they will have to devote to maintaining it and the project by rejecting AI. Accomplishing the goal they set out for to begin with, having the source code of the game delivered, can be accomplished by any single person now, and that leaves the technically competent communities fragile to breaking up by any one person splitting off, dumping all the code somewhere, and the less passionate leaving one community for another. How many of those people are there for the community itself, and how many are there to just have the code? It will become clearer with anyone being able to split off and use AI to finish things, but I am confident the most passionate people will still remain on the other side. It's just that the motivations of those involved were not as obvious without the distinction between hobby-as-passion and the primarily goal-driven, until now.
It does happen, and it happened to me. At the same time it doesn't mean you can blanket accuse parents whose children fail to thrive that it's their fault when in practice the truth of what really happened will only be known between the children and adults. Oftentimes before the child is wise enough to gather evidence of their mistreatment, so it is lost to time.
At the same time not having any definitive sign pointing to parents being the cause of behavioral issues later in life and reluctance to talk about family issues is a reason why the effects of this kind childhood trauma occur and nobody realizes or talks about it. That was certainly the case for me for far too long. I framed my issues myself in terms of medical disorders, not an upbringing that nobody should have to suffer through, largely because of the messages society gave me when I was younger and more impressionable. One is not always preventable, but there is no good reason the other should ever have to happen.
Relief if correctly diagnosed, decades of wasted effort if incorrectly diagnosed. Especially if the underlying issue lies elsewhere, but is ignored in favor of the mistaken one.
It's rarely reminded that when dealing with professionals (doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.), it's important to get second opinions if you have any doubts.
Almost no parent is ever going to admit their own behavior triggered their child's ADHD or depression. But if they did, then they did. It can still happen.
Exact same thing happened to me, and yet it was never cracked open. I am pretty much the only person that knows the truth, that I don't have this constellation of diagnoses but that they were a coverup for the abuse foisted upon me by my own family.
Sadly it is still (and probably will be) too easy to deflect responsibility and have everyone believe their side. They will probably pass on with nobody realizing what they've done to me. It took me long enough for me to realize my own situation, was how severe it was. I hope more people wake up to the fact that people like me are out there.
The false diagnosis is a perfect distraction for you to continue to blame yourself for all your faults while they get away with everything, for decades. That lost time will never come back.
I know someone similar who gave their kid a phone at age 6. 95% of the time I see them they're on TikTok.
Child safety features are not going to solve this problem. All it takes is one parent giving their kid a phone with an adult account and all that progress is undone. I am convinced it is going to take a cultural shift for any positive change to occur - self-policing and, if necessary, social stigma.
This kind of behavior of giving young children phones will have to be outmoded in a generation or two. Until then, there is going to be a lot of growing pains.
You sound so certain that these other parents are being negligent. Despite the fact that my 9yo doesn't have a phone or tiktok, I'm going to argue the other side's case.
You're right "we don't know what it does to kids brains". But that means we should give parents discretion. Some parents want to run an experiment where they give their kids constant tiktok. Maybe we'll find out in a generation or two that this was bad, good, or a nothingburger.
I'm in my 50s. I have watched sooo many moral panics evaporate to nothing. TV, video games, D&D, heavy metal music, porn, literal satanism, and now everyone's favorite whipping boy, social media.
Let it go. Parent your own child, let other people parent theirs.
You should be able to recognize there are big differences between modern day social media and tv/videogames/dnd. For one you were not watching TV every waking moment of your life including while using a public bathroom. So just imagine that. There are people out there who no longer even think. Every spare second is spent scrolling because it really can be spent like that with the lack of friction that a constantly connected mobile device offers. No, this time it really is different. There was never a time where you would just not think for an entire day, maybe if you were holed up in a crack house or opium den. If you can't see that, wake up, look around and be shocked how more people aren't getting hit by cars or crashing off the road, and somehow can still string together a sentence of coherent thought. Maybe that fades too soon; functional literacy already declines by the year.
I encourage you next time you are in an elevator or using a urinal or waiting to cross the street to look around and see what other people are doing with their spare moment of free thought.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.
And if your parents suck? (Mine did.)
I think the power for parents to have free reign over everything in a child's life should be reduced if the parents are abusive, but of course there is no way to do this short of infallible and invasive surveillance. All to say, there is no easy solution here.
Abusive parents are not going to "think of the children" either way, no matter what arguments the well-meaning parents give. They will not see a problem with their own behavior. So assuming the parent is a sacrosanct figure that always knows what's best is unworkable.
I understand that no parent wants to be accused of being abusive, but just because it is taboo to say it out loud, does not mean these people do not exist. They're out there. They will fuck up their child's minds and cause long-lasting damage, Internet access or not.
It's no wonder children react poorly to the Internet when the two people they have to depend on for their literal survival don't support them at a good enough level. They seek out comfort when they can't get it elsewhere and now it's supposedly a tech CEO's fault they're addicted. My life could have been different if one single adult I could trust had supported me, but I didn't get one. Not all children will, either.
Everyone's parents "suck"--they're humans, they're learning, they have problems of their own they struggle with, etc. There are no purely good parents. I'm not excusing actually wretched family conditions, but have been noticing almost every young adult now deplores an unfair childhood--and I can't help but think we'd all be healthier if we could recognize that a childhood with some problems is statistically quite "fair."
I sincerely hope that your ability to make better choices with your loved ones than your parents did with you brings you some comfort.
In my view, removing access to information from my child would be a sucky thing to do to him. But the choice to do so is not a luxury I enjoy thanks to the billionaire ruling class.
Some parents will berate their kids or discipline them inappropriately and instill stress and anxiety in them that causes them to seek out things that should be off limits. It's easier to see a solution for the second issue when the first is not socially acceptable to talk about out loud. Nobody wants to be told they are parenting their own kids inappropriately. But in some cases, that just reality. Tech CEOs are a 100% reliable source of blame; parents - the people who are physically around their children the most - are not. (Source: myself. The best I managed to escape childhood with was C-PTSD, and I have had to get therapy to be able to manage my digital device usage ever since.)
So rather than work on the first problem, which is admittedly difficult, you want to remove the outlet that helps them cope? What do you imagine to be the most immediate consequences?
I don't believe the old web was filled with people pining about how the current web is awful and them participating in recreating the web they inhabit is better. People on the old web just posted things, because before that there was no non-old web to compare to. But that in itself is what makes the old web so appealing to people wanting it to return. Back then there was no other web necessary to escape from.
So when people construct versions of the old web today, they make a conscious decision to do something most people would not, and by doing so it sometimes comes off as indicating what they think of the other design decisions they chose not to make. It's not a bad thing, but it's not quite the same as it was anymore. That is why some of the spark is gone, in my eyes. It's kind of like counterculture being mistaken as the opposite of culture.
It is even more pronounced when people talk about "the old web" on old web websites all day.
> I don't believe the old web was filled with people pining about how the current web is awful and them participating in recreating the web they inhabit is better
TBH I do recall a lot of gloating over how AOL was full of clueless lusers who were inferior to the Internet
More people need to be talking about this. The children of parents who abdicate their responsibilities of parenting are going to become the adults we deal with on a daily basis. I think the scope of the issue is not perceptible until you get to know how much damage a person with all the power can bring onto their child. That kind of thing is lifelong and not everyone can afford the therapy you will end up needing.
It shocks me that even the nicest parents I know - on the surface - still give their children phones.
This is why I see the drive for child safety regulation as an unspoken admission that the problems of an individual parent are falsely seen as insurmountable, so people start pointing fingers at whoever is in the vicinity, when in reality the parent was the one responsible for choosing their own fights by purposefully exposing their child to the modern Internet. Parenting has existed for thousands of years, social media for just 20. This is a solvable problem but parents have to change their behavior. When the majority of childhood is spent with one's family, there is no other solution.
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