Disabling the YouTube app and installing NewPipe on my phone (and unhook in my browser) helped me a lot to reduce YT since it only shows your subscriptions (no Home, no sidebar or endcard recommendations), rather than an endless stream of videos you might like.
novaria
Karma: 4
- novaria 9 Feb 2026 9:19 UTC3 points1in reply to: Luiza’s comment on: Do One New Thing A Day To Solve Your Problems
Hmm, being afraid of the race dynamics between countries and AI labs and “likely put[ting] an end to humanity” seems quite separate from whether or not someone uses AI, which itself is quite separate from AI usage by children and the effect this has on their education (which they could also use to learn more, rather than just skip out on homework). For sure, there is some connection between us getting used to the technology, to paying for it and the labs racing, but I imagine that the amount of investment they get dwarfs a single $20 subscription so much, that it’s imperceptible.
So, to me “AI will likely put an end to humanity” and “one should not personally use it” (or “one should not use it all that much”) don’t really follow from one another. (An argument of “the more people use AI, the more normalized it gets, the more integrated it becomes, which might make us want to regulate it less, might make it feel more mundane and less magical/scary, might make us give more power to AI systems, might increase the chances of doom” follows more, but there’s still a disconnect between “AI usage” and “AI usage normalization” in that one could just use AI a lot but not mentioning it outside of AI Safety circles.)
But if they were to, then “a chance of a happy ending” doesn’t feel like a great justification. Like, “smoking doesn’t guarantee cancer” is not a great justification for smoking. But then again, it’d be a collective action problem here, not a personal do-I-accept-my-personal-risk-of-cancer-from-smoking choice and the “everyone should just do their part; not more, not less” and “my individual choice doesn’t matter, if it doesn’t make everyone else (or at least most) others also change” dichotomy would still be there.