This idea has been around as long as the web, but you can't get momentum behind it.
A much better idea was a .kids domain where the content was vetted, and you could allow-list your child's device to that. Much easier than trying to migrate everyone over to specific TLDs, especially when that ship has sailed already. But that never got traction either.
Edit to add: I used to work on "family safety" software. Blocking bad content doesn't work - it's too difficult of a problem. Walled gardens do work, however. The fact that there's not a push for the equivalent of an Apple App Store for kids is probably evidence of ulterior motives on behalf of regulators.
One of the problems is the binary nature: we lump everyone between 0 and 18 years old into a "kids" bucket, but the content appropriate for a 17 year old is very different from the content appropriate for a 4 year old.
My family has tried the curated "kids" content from the major players: It's junk and not going to be interesting to a teenager. Your 14 year old is not going to be satisfied with a version of Netflix that's all Bluey and Daniel Tiger. And your 5 year old probably shouldn't be watching stuff that's made for teenagers. But our regulatory hammer knows only "kid" or "not-kid". You can't make a single walled garden.
Even within a single age. My 15 year old might not be ready for content that your 15 year old finds to be routine. How is YouTube going to know what is appropriate for any given 15 year old? Walled-off content and numerical age gating is just not a workable solution.
I haven't tried this because I haven't played Magic in over 20 years, but I always thought it would be more fun if you had two draw decks where the second was only allowed to include basic lands.
Then in the draw phase you could choose which deck to draw from, eliminating the mana flood/drought possibility that ruins games.
Maybe some additional rules to limit how many lands you're allowed to draw in the initial draw to one or two, I dunno.
This is similar to how VS system worked, it was a short lived superhero CCG in the mid 2000s, you could play up to one card per turn facedown as a “land”, but you still drew from one deck.
There’s a few modern TCGs who take this approach, like Riftbound (the League of Legends TCG that launched last year) and Sorcery Contested Realm.
Other attempts to fix the mana problem include games like Lorcana and Flesh and Blood, in which cards have dual modes where they can be played or used for resources.
I absolutely adored the psychedelic stylings of the pinball number count as a kid and still do. The kids tv stuff from that era even in conservative Ireland was well weird and funky. Check out the into to this mainstay of children’s tv I grew up with:
I believe this look traces back to the work of Push Pin Studios[1], an influential graphic design studio founded in the mid-sixties. It is hard to underestimate how much this style dominated the time; as a kid in the seventies these psychedelic stylized chrome reflections were everywhere.
I mostly think of it by association with artists who were well-known for it, such as the Pushpin guys, or Peter Max.
Worth looking at: the catalog from this exhibition of some of Push Pin's work. [2]
Maybe. I never got the impression Jim Henson needed psychedelics though. It was certainly in the zeitgeist of the time if you were counter culture which I think sesame street was certainly trying to be at the time.
The value prop is the dissolution of your own ego.
We experience reality filtered through our senses and our own concept of "self," which is an incredibly limited view of the world. Imagine being able to see/experience a less filtered version of reality, if only for a short period of time.
Or imagine expanding the frequencies of visible light you can see. That alone could certainly be a catalyst to change your perspective on many things.
It's not so much "losing control" as it is "losing unconscious bias." Loss of control is not the goal.
It's also one of those things that you have to experience to understand, and even then, sober you won't completely understand.
But done right, these experiences can be incredibly important to people. If it's not for you, fine, but it's funny how many people with zero experience with these substances think there can't be anything worthwhile there.
The comedown is more taboo than the high can ever be.
I think this is the root of the social calamity. It’s an unwillingness and inability to be candid about the entire process that perpetuates the situation.
Why did that person lose interest in aspects of life that other people find perplexing? Haircuts or hard shoes, for example.
We can’t advance until we’re willing to address and enhance the wax wings.
> The value prop is the dissolution of your own ego.
We experience reality filtered through our senses and our own concept of "self," which is an incredibly limited view of the world.
It's interesting how everything is a balance abd experience and mastery count for a lot, but nobody acknowledges this in blog posts.
There is an appropriate amount of architecture and design that should go into systems. One aspect of that is how much effort you put into scalable design. Building and maintaining scalable systems isn't free, so the "right amount" is pretty much somewhere between "none" and "we are AWS."
Knowing when adding complexity is worth doing takes experience, humility, and maturity, the exact qualities that are sorely lacking in many egomaniac software developers.
It's why we get ridiculous fads and pendulum swings where people get fed up with bad design and then go do the opposite thing, having learned nothing.
At this point any personalized ads I see are effectively ads for a competing product (possibly the always competitive nothing product). I'm personally already pissed off by Internet surveillance capitalism; if tone deaf ad firms want to try and bring personalized psychological manipulation into public spaces as well, I doubt it will have quite the reaction that they expect.
Imagine a star trek transporter was a real thing. In that show, I think the common explanation was that the transporter didn't send you places, but merely created a copy of you somewhere else and destroyed the original.
Now imagine if it were possible to instantly and cheaply travel to Paris this way. Many people would likely be just fine with doing this.
Now imagine that one day, the transporter doesn't destroy the original you and now two copies of you exist. From that moment on, the individual experiences diverge but each copy believes it's the original.
If ten days after that a technician came and said "ok, time to disintegrate you, don't worry, your copy in Paris is A-OK" I think that most people wouldn't agree to be disintegrated just because another mostly identical consciousness is alive.
And yet, if it were to happen flawlessly and instantaneously, likely that same existential fear doesn't exist. Most people think the star trek transporter is pretty cool.
But why? We have to realize that our consciousness is really an evolutionary trick that's expedient for our continued survival. The idea that the survival of my own ego and continuous conscious experience is pretty much the basest mechanism I have that makes me value staying alive.
But there's a paradox in the case of my exact copy. Logically, I shouldn't care of the star trek transporter works instantaneously or not. Let's say that it makes a copy that exists for twenty minutes before disintegrating me, but I have no way of knowing that and instead just sit in a room bored for twenty minutes until disintegration. Functionally that's a nearly identical experience to instant transport, but also seems a lot more like the broken transporter scenario.
But let's say this is the future of travel and everyone accepts the fact that my continued conscious experience is what's really important, so I'm willing to be disintegrated painlessly as long as a copy of me exists somewhere else in the universe.
That's not too big a leap to make, but it seems strange, right? Why am I not then just fine being disintegrated as long as any consciousness continues to exist?
My answer to that question is that it's an evolutionary advantage to want to live, therefore we want to live. A bit of circular reasoning. It's also our species' biggest unquestioned assumption too - that consciousness and self-awareness is better than the alternative. But "better" might just be "important to the survival of the human species."
Would many people really be totally fine with getting disintegrated and a copy made immediately, if they knew that's what was happening? Even if it's instant I think that if you told someone they would be killed and an exact clone of them could get a free trip to Paris there'd be a very low chance they'd agree to it.
Because it's a one-time cost and you can cheaply throw more CPU power at the problem, or just wait and then you're done.
If you're doing this at such a scale that encoding speed matters (like if you're Instagram) the major concern would likely be cost, which you're going to save in bandwidth every time an image is viewed.
"you can cheaply throw more CPU power at the problem, or just wait and then you're done"
How am I going to "throw more CPU power at the problem" when I'm using a scanner hooked up to my laptop? Should I buy myself a new, more powerful laptop? That doesn't sound cheap.
As for "just" waiting... my time is valuable, and I have better things to do with it than wait... and, unfortunately, the process of scanning and encoding needs a lot of babysitting from me, so I can't just dump a bunch of photos in my scanner and come back when it's all over if I want even half-decent results, not to mention archival quality images.
In this real-world scenario, a quicker encoding speed would save me a lot of valuable time, and there's no getting around it short of hiring a skilled and trusted person to do it for me.
Like Tomovo above already said; your workflow would benefit from using an intermediate format that is faster to encode. You can then automate the conversion to the output format to occur unattended at a more convenient time.
The use of intermediate formats is a well proven technique in video editing where encoding real time to AVC/HEVC at high quality is not possible. Codecs like ProRes are used that are much easier to encode to at the expense of storage space.
A much better idea was a .kids domain where the content was vetted, and you could allow-list your child's device to that. Much easier than trying to migrate everyone over to specific TLDs, especially when that ship has sailed already. But that never got traction either.
Edit to add: I used to work on "family safety" software. Blocking bad content doesn't work - it's too difficult of a problem. Walled gardens do work, however. The fact that there's not a push for the equivalent of an Apple App Store for kids is probably evidence of ulterior motives on behalf of regulators.
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