supersquirrel

Focus apps are failing neurodivergent minds, new research finds

Recent reporting by Nieman Lab describes how some major news organizations—including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit—are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. As stated in the article, these organizations are blocking access largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using the Wayback Machine as a backdoor for large-scale scraping. These concerns are understandable, but unfounded. The Wayback Machine is not intended to be a backdoor for large-scale commercial scraping and, like others on the web today, we expend significant time and effort working to prevent such abuse. Whatever legitimate concerns people may have about generative AI, libraries are not the problem, and blocking access to web archives is not the solution; doing so risks serious harm to the public record.

Check out the article

en.defence-ua.com/…/russia_adds_ew_cages_to_prote…

Kinda looks like a big target to me but I know billionaires shouldn’t exist period so…

The new standard makes it possible to stream data from sensors married to passive tags, by allocating a frequency channel to each device. When radio waves reaches a tag, the device wakes up and broadcasts the basic info it contains and then negotiates a clear channel on which to stream data.

The company is also collaborating with Boeing to develop the Ramjet 155 long-range projectile, which is designed to strike targets at ranges of up to 150 km. To achieve this, a ramjet engine is being used, although there is still no information on when mass production will begin.

We’ve been covering Australia’s monumentally stupid social media ban for kids under 16 since before it went into effect. We noted how dumb the whole premise was, how the rollout was an immediate mess, how a gambling ad agency helped push the whole thing, and how two massive studies involving 125,000 kids found the entire “social media is inherently harmful” narrative doesn’t hold up. But theory and data are one thing. Now we’re getting real-world stories of actual kids being harmed by a law that was supposedly designed to protect them. And wouldn’t you know it, the harm is falling hardest on the kids who were already most vulnerable. Just like many people predicted. If you thought this was a good idea you are part of the harm against these kids, wake the fuck up and use your brain, this is a moral panic, you are hardly different than villagers yelling for a witch to be burned at the stake and you should feel ashamed of your stupidity. Do better fediverse and if you are one of those people who casually waxes lyrical about denying kids access to the tools you use everyday because you honestly believe letting young people on social media is equivalent to giving them physically addictive drugs and that this place should have young people restricted from it because it is fundamentally unhealthy, please leave. You bring this place down and you undermine any sense of optimism about digital communities that motivates the rest of us to be here. “The current research does not support the usefulness of banning kids from social media. Research studies do not suggest there is a correlation between time spent on social media and youth mental health. Further, reducing social media time does not improve mental health. This ban is likely to be a waste of time and resources. Further, it prevents opportunities to teach kids how to use social media responsibly. Like most moral panics, these kinds of efforts do harm in distracting us from real sources of youth mental health problems, mainly families in distress and failing schools. We have to remember we’ve been through this all before many times from video games, to rock and roll, books to the radio. These panics over media and technology never do anything to help kids.” … “Perhaps because of that balance and because many other factors are known to have a much larger impact on childhood, current evidence suggests very small effects at a population level when it comes to associations between social media/smartphone use on wellbeing e.g., McCrae et al., 2017; Vahedi & Zannella, 2021; Yoon et al.,2019). Note that not all the above reviews involve children. Also, that these are all reporting associations, not cause and effect. “When it comes to the general use of social media and smartphones, the effects on mood or wellbeing are so small ‘that they require implausibly large behavioral changes to produce even minor mood shifts.’ (Winbush et al., 2025; p6) sciencemediacentre.org/expert-comments-on-evidenc… news.ucsb.edu/…/brain-science-social-media-and-mo… theguardian.com/…/social-media-time-does-not-incr… …lse.ac.uk/…/social-media-age-bans-toxic-business… ox.ac.uk/…/2026-01-23-expert-comment-under-16-soc… aap.org/…/the-good-and-bad-of-social-media-what-r… businessinsider.com/kids-parenting-social-media-b… cacbrevard.org/should-teens-be-banned-from-social… publications.ieu.asn.au/ie-220/…/help-or-harm?coo… medium.com/…/banning-social-media-for-teens-is-da… theconversation.com/i-research-the-harm-that-can-… …edu.au/…/australia-social-media-ban-under-16s thebureauinvestigates.com/…/a-social-media-ban-fo… jezebel.com/social-media-bans-teens-europe-uk-spa… thedrum.com/…/social-media-regulation-is-being-sh…

Why AI shouldn't be used even to decide 'simple' court cases

Ukraine Is Producing 200 Long-Range Strike Drones a Day—And Says Output Can Triple

Fuck AI

The tech press is nearly worthless as anything other than a press release service for big tech and the rich techbros who own it. Any cool tech publication worth their salt would have been writing articles about how cool Mastodon is not trying to help out their buds at Bluesky cash in on their investment by casting shade for no reason on Mastodon.

If you can't physically keep a small (flying OR submersed) drone from hitting your naval ship you shouldn't be in the business of having a navy lol. We aren't talking about a tank that may move through thick brush and complex terrain that could mask threats anywhere, *we are talking about a large boat in the water which by definition is a large expanse.* I mean yes whatever works works, but it is undeniably pathetic and a direct admission that the russian navy barely exists as a serious concept the way we typically think about navies.

I just want you to SHOW me you care in a way you are PHYSICALLY incapable of!

*Pink Pussy Club*?

Rare photos of 'enchanting' owl captured after happenstance sighting

Sometimes its not the dad you start with that matters but the dads you meet along the way.

Can't argue with that.

Jealous, I only pee once in a piss-moon.

Yes?

You mean bullshit destroyers? Yeah those people are usually called Science Educators.

In a more just reality this would be being celebrated right now in a massive wrestling showdown show called COAL SMACKDOWN that brought together activists, scientists and of course pro wrestlers.

Not technically Alpha, but the large corporation released him into the world before he was ready so more like "Should Still Be In Alpha".

Thank you for telling us about your methods, Blender is amazing.

I don't agree with this, you need a massive amount of ground crews to distribute shaheds and launch them. Further, there is a big topic of discussion in unmanned vehicle design about how to manage more than a small number of drones as a human overseer. You can say "make it all automated" and wave your hands but those weapons are going to be stiff, unreactive and easily flankable along infinite dimensions by actual human pilots using FPV drones and such. A swarm of HUMAN PILOTED drones is terrifying, but that is in large part because you brought together a bunch of highly trained human beings who are all extremely motivated to accomplish an objective together. I am not saying the point you are making is totally wrong, I am saying it is nuanced and the failure of the russian navy here is far deeper than just failing to properly protect against drones.

::: spoiler long response also see subcomments with examples of how The Battle Of Lake Eyrie and the St. Nazaire Raid relate directly to this moment

Why do Drones make people's brains go to mush about swarms?

What the hell do you think Dive Bombers in WW2 attacking ships were?

What do you think the dense formations of level bombers in WW2 were?

What do you think the military strategy of China has been for awhile now since before drones even proliferated?

No, this isn't the same thing as torpodoes. Torpodoes are very high value precison guided munitions.

Yes, the threat of the "swarm" is always real, but the idea of naval power since before any of these technologies ever came into being was already in consideration of this force you claim is new. Naval power is about extending organized power over vast distances, with resiliency, duration and unimpeded ability to expedition.

The force of resistance a power such as this will encounter will always take the form of a "swarm" coming from some littoral context, and thus the question of fighting drones with naval ships isn't really a new one though it may seem to be.

Even before drones proliferated, most military analysts foresaw a conflict in the Strait Of Hormuz would involve Iran swarming with lots of independent, highly mobile "cheap" agents to overwhelm the US military. I don't point that out to negate the reality of the threat, but to emphasize that this isn't some radical new consideration but rather an acceleration of an old tactic.

[2002]

Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy, in particular, simulating using old methods to evade Blue's sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper simulated using motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications in the model.

Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships: one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of Blue's six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.

...

**After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. [The Following "Virtual Cope Cages" Were Implemented-->] Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and during a combined parachute assault by the 82nd Airborne Division and Marines air assaulting on the then new and still controversial MV-22, Van Riper's forces were ordered not to shoot down any of the approaching aircraft.[8][9] Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed.[10] The postmortem JFCOM report on MC02 would say "As the exercise progressed, the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. This scripting ensured a blue team operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for transition operations."[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

"Cope Cages" aren't a new concept, it is just in the past they weren't usually so literal.

A Naval ship with a cage around the wheelhouse is not projecting power, it is a target, if somebody was in charge who was actually well versed in Naval Strategy on the russian side they would know that you have to set the conditions to build a Navy before you can do so. If you cannot defend your own littoral waterways and high value ports against small unit enemy incursions and sabotage, you have not set the conditions to build a Navy. It does not matter if you already possess ships and submarines, you still have not set the proper strategic conditions to begin to build a Navy and thus those vessels are worse than useless as they will distract the public into thinking they possess a Navy when they do not.

This has been true since navies used Triremes, it is just reflected into a new context journalists like to hallucinate as new instead of as part of a long developing story that was ignored by some until they had no choice but to learn it the hard way.

Contrast this with Ukraine acquiring Minesweepers as a very intentional choice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkmaar-class_minehunter

---

A note on "swarms" and how they won the Battle Of Midway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_SBD_Dauntless

At the Battle of Midway, Marine Corps SBDs were not as effective. One squadron, VMSB-241, flying from Midway Atoll, was not trained in the techniques of dive bombing with their new Dauntlesses (having just partially converted from the SB2U Vindicator).[13] Its pilots resorted to the slower but easier glide bombing technique. This led to many of the SBDs being shot down during their glide, although one survivor from these attacks, now on display at the National Naval Aviation Museum, is the last surviving aircraft to have flown in the battle. The carrier-borne squadrons were effective, especially when they were escorted by Grumman F4F Wildcats.[14] The success of dive bombing resulted from one important factor,

Unlike American squadrons that attacked shortly before one at a time, allowing defending Japanese Zero fighters to concentrate on each squadron to shoot them down or drive them away from the carriers, three squadrons totaling 47 SBDs (VS-6, VB-6, and VB-3), one squadron of 12 TBD torpedo aircraft (VT-3), and six F4F fighters (from VF-3) all arrived simultaneously, with two of the SBD squadrons (VS-6 and VB-6) arriving from a different direction from the other squadrons. Without central fighter direction, the approximately 40 Zeros concentrated on the TBDs, with some fighting the F4Fs covering the TBDs, leaving the SBDs unhindered by fighter opposition in their approach and attack (although most of the TBDs were shot down).[15]

The concept of The Swarm is not new....

:::

Which is why one of the lagrange points of Comfort is Horror.

I don't want entertainment, I want you to think harder before you resort to kneejerk reactions and I want you to cite your sources when you make bold claims.

Advocacy group Children and Young People with Disability Australia (CYDA) says social media and the internet is “often a lifeline for young people with disability, providing one of the few truly accessible ways to build connections and find community”.

In a submission to the Senate inquiry around the laws, CYDA said social media was: “a place where young people can choose how they want to represent themselves and their disability and learn from others going through similar things”.

“It provides an avenue to experiment and find new opportunities and can help lessen the sting of loneliness,” the submission said. “Cutting off that access ignores the lived reality of thousands and risks isolating disabled youth from their peer networks and broader society.”

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/06/ive-lost-my-friends-advocacy-groups-warn-australias-social-media-ban-risks-isolating-kids-with-disabilities

You sure about that buddy? Confident enough to maim the fragile social networks that young people living in hostile environments may rely on imperfectly in favor of another solution you haven't even come up with yet?

Leave this place if this is how you see social media, by your own viewpoint digital communities aren't good for people so why are you here?

Why are you here then?

How the hell are you going to ban all underage people from social media, who are you going to bestow complete authority over our digital identities to and who gets the authority to decide the details of how it is done?

You are being intellectually lazy and it shows.

if you need more information as to why, go speak to any schoolteacher in America who can't get their students to pay attention for more than 60 seconds, or who can't retain information that is literally written on the board in front of them.

https://edspace.american.edu/thecfebeat/2025/01/01/the-myth-of-the-shrinking-attention-span-shed-siliman/

Spring 2025

A few weeks ago, a YouTube short caught my attention. The short was yet another commentary on how Gen Z supposedly can’t focus on a particular thing for more than a few seconds. I scrolled through the YouTube comments and noticed a refrain: studies prove it. Everyone’s attention span is shorter, studies prove, as we become more deeply immersed in a digital, screen-filled world (insert unknown source here). Today’s teens, studies prove, bear the brunt of this crisis with an attention span shorter than that of a goldfish.

Something about that claim gnawed at me. After years of experience in the field of educational development, I knew the reality was more complicated than these sweeping generalizations. Where were these studies everyone kept referencing? What evidence existed behind this seemingly universal belief about our shrinking ability to focus?

I suspected I might find only a few studies to support the claim. I was not prepared, however, to find absolutely no evidence.

...

The only substantive research I found came from Gloria Mark, who studied digital screen use and multitasking. Her work suggested that people today switch between screens more rapidly (see her studies on attention to screens in 2004, 2012, and 2016), but this hardly proves a universal decline in human attention. The notion that attention can be measured in simple “spans” is itself questionable: as Yoo et al. (2022) state, “there is no singular neural measure of a person’s overall attentional functioning across tasks,” adding, “attention is not a unitary construct but rather multi-faceted” (p. 782).

*Duck Nipples* will be the name of my memoir.

Ok but what if you make the boat out of a series of isolated cages and stack them all together like a big floating row of lobster traps? Surely that will be impenetrable.

Disgusting

Cite your sources or stop making these claims

I agree but it looks most like a future reef to me.

Another example from WW2 where what became the British Commandos purposefully destroyed the only repair base large enough for the German Tirpitz Battleship to be repaired if she was damaged in battle (which is always going to happen eventually) through a small unit incursion/sabotage raid that was unfortunately mostly a one way ticket for many British.

Germany believed they had an Atlantic Surface Navy in WW2 and what Britain did here was point out Germany had not properly set the conditions to build a Navy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Nazaire_Raid

St Nazaire was attacked because the loss of its dry dock would force Germany's largest battleship, Tirpitz, to return to home waters if she were damaged. This would expose her to attack by British forces including the Home Fleet in the English Channel or the North Sea.

The obsolete destroyer HMS Campbeltown, accompanied by 18 smaller craft, crossed the English Channel to the Atlantic coast of France and rammed into the Normandie dry dock south gate. The ship had been packed with delayed-action explosives, well hidden within a steel and concrete case, that detonated later that day, putting the dock out of service until 1948.[4]

...

The battleship Tirpitz never entered the Atlantic. She remained in Norwegian fjords to threaten Allied shipping until she was destroyed by the RAF in Operation Catechism on 12 November 1944.[82]

The image of the Tirpitz cowering amid towering Fjord walls and a bristle of anti-aircraft gun nests and troop emplacements until her final moment of annihilation is the exact same one as the image posted at the top of this article of russia's warship with a Cope Cage around the wheelhouse, just reflected backwards in time into a different context of fascism.

False, Childish Power...

The problem of people losing their cognitive abilities

Cite your sources or don't casually assert such claims

Actually there has been a lot of breakthrough innovations in Human Resources capability in the last couple of years, we are quickly approaching the point where scientists may be able to offload accountability from greedy CEOs onto computers using advanced cutting edge technology!

As a child would it be ok for you to watch porn all day?

How does this relate to the conversation at hand?...... further do you honestly believe porn isn't accessible to people under 18...???.........??????????...........????????????????????

Why not just let children smoke?

What evidence do you have that letting kids access social media is equivalent to exposing them to one of the most physically addictive cancer causing agents on earth?

Let me state the obvious, letting kids smoke cigarettes would lead to many many many many MANY young people dying prematurely. What you are suggesting, cutting off young people from social media, will likely also kill kids who are ostracized in their local in-person social networks when they become desperately isolated from anyone who isn't bigoted.

I know this seems silly to state explicitly because it is so obvious but social media does not prematurely end people's lives by massively raising the risk of a terminal illness that can't be cured, to equate them is an offense to anyone who has lost a loved one to lung cancer or some other health complication from cigarettes.

::: spoiler another example from military history with The Battle Of Lake Eyrie

Here is another good example of how a Naval War always involves setting the conditions to build a Navy first. If the British could have sent a random yahoo in to burn the ships being assembled on the Great Lakes the question would not have been how to defend the ships better against people but rather where the failure to properly set the conditions to build a Navy happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lake_Erie

Nevertheless, the Americans lacked any counter to the British armed vessels. The only American warship on Lake Erie, the brig Adams, was not ready for service at the start of the war, and when the American army of Brigadier General William Hull abandoned its invasion of Canada, Adams was pinned down in Detroit by the British batteries at Sandwich on the Canadian side of the Detroit River. The British Major-General Isaac Brock used his control of the lake to defeat Hull's army at the Siege of Detroit, by cutting the American supply lines and rapidly transferring himself and some reinforcements to Amherstburg from where they launched a successful landing on the American side of the Detroit River.

The British took Adams when Detroit was surrendered, renaming her Detroit. Together with the brig Caledonia, which had been commandeered from the Canadian North West Company, she was boarded and captured near Fort Erie on 9 October, by American sailors and soldiers led by Lieutenant Jesse Elliott. Detroit ran aground on an island in the middle of the Niagara River and was set on fire to prevent her being recaptured. Caledonia was taken to the navy yard at Black Rock and commissioned into the United States Navy.[4] Also present at Black Rock were the schooners Somers and Ohio and the sloop-rigged Trippe, which had all been purchased by the United States Navy and were being converted into gunboats.[5] While the British held Fort Erie and the nearby batteries which dominated the Niagara River, all these vessels were pinned down and unable to leave Black Rock.

This is the most analagous point for russia here in the Battle Of Lake Erie, they have had their ability to concentrate and deploy Naval power utterly shattered and what remains of their Navy is atomized into protected strongholds unable to manuever.

In January 1813, William Jones (who had replaced Hamilton as the United States Secretary of the Navy) ordered the construction of two brig-rigged corvettes at Presque Isle, and transferred shipwright Noah Brown there from Sackets Harbor on Lake Ontario to take charge of construction. Other than their rig and crude construction (such as using wooden pegs instead of nails because of shortages of the latter), the two brigs were close copies of the contemporary USS Hornet. The heaviest armament for the ships came from foundries on Chesapeake Bay, and were moved to Presque Isle only with great difficulty. (The Americans were fortunate in that some of their largest cannon had been dispatched shortly before raiding parties under Rear-Admiral George Cockburn destroyed a foundry at Frenchtown on the eastern seaboard.)[9] [Note, the British ALMOST destroyed the necessary conditions for the US to build a Navy, but the raid came too late.]. However, the Americans could get other materials and fittings from Pittsburgh, which was expanding as a manufacturing center, and smaller guns were borrowed from the Army.

^ The above step is where russia is stuck. If the US could not protect their shipyards that could release a Naval force onto the Great Lakes, the problem would not have been a lack of protection from human attack by the ships themselves, it would have been in a failure to adequately set the conditions to build a Navy.

To put it another way, my entire point is that russia is admitting they are stuck at this step by putting Cope Cages on their warships while they still awkwardly have left over ships from when they could more credibly claim they posessed a true Navy and so they are still stuck pretending they do.

:::

Yeah protect your roads with drone nets, sure. Protect your howitzers with drone nets too sure. Heck, place cages on your armored vehicles, just make sure to do it in a way that isn't overly bulky and defeats the purpose (i.e. why Turtle "Tanks" are a failure). Placing a cage on a naval ship around the wheelhouse though? *That is an admission you don't have a warship but a target.* This has nothing to do with tactics and how drones change them and everything to do with in military terms what it means to actually *build a Navy*.

Right but you did not show me positive evidence. Pointing at a forest and saying "Bigfoot is in there, that is proof, I don't have time to show you, find Bigfoot yourself!" doesn't count as proof Bigfoot exists..

It is a search result for four words, not a list of positive evidence supporting your argument....?

There is nothing more low effort than linking to search results for words without any additional context or any indicators which of the search results are relevant or even necessarily support your conclusions...

You.... sent me a search result for keywords... you want to be specific?

Yeah, I included that to show some breadth in my evidence, but the evidence for gaming addiction is fraught with structural issues as well. Certainly people get addicted to video games, but it is also decidedly a moral panic and thus comparing social media to it weakens the case for banning it in my opinion.

Fair enough, but for the record I am not just arbitrarily mad about this. This is the fediverse. We should be excited about the possibility of social media when it is employed in a kind way for adults and younger people. How am I supposed to feel optimistic when *even here* people resort to kneejerk reductions about social media moral panics without engaging with the nuance? Yeah it is frustrating, but you aren't wrong. I am angry because I care.

Yes

How you ever seen how spacehorses make their men pregnant?