It is crazy to me that any parent of young children would let their kids watch YouTube videos on their own. Maybe this happened gradually enough that some parents didn't notice, but we had our first kid a couple years ago and I nope'd out of YouTube pretty quickly when I saw what was there. Even the channels known for being good - which we occasionally let the kids watch as long as we were present and choosing the videos - started to clearly optimize for engagement over quality, and so now we're done with it entirely. The stuff there for "kids" legitimately horrifies me.

We blocked YouTube recently in the household for all devices but one approved tv device that our kids are only able to watch with us.

I let my oldest daughter at 10 watch stuff there a couple times a week which she largely watches Minecraft videos. I know everything she consumes for now.

Eventually that will stop and she's on her own when she is more responsible as an older teenager but the important point here is this isn't helicopter parenting, it's survival at protecting her brain from dopamine overload making her a content addict.

I don't want to go full Amish as I think it's important to prepare our kids for the inevitable world they will be exposed too but I feel I'd fail them letting them loose.

Agreed - even older children shouldn't be exposing themselves to that garbage. Totally garbage in garbage out situation. Youtube can be good if its highly curated -- otherwise its just trash.

Agreed. We understand that some parents in our milieu rely on YouTube for when they need to get stuff done, it’s pretty relatable.

What we ended up doing: download a few dozen videos from the channels we think are good for kids. I hate CocoMelon’s fast-paced videos, but find SuperSimpleSongs agreeable, so we now have a Jellyfin section for toddler videos that teach him something.

Screen time in general is highly advised against, but for that odd moment where we need extra entertainment, at least he’s watching something we’ve vetted. YouTube Kids is a cesspool of content, and your ability to block bad channels is ineffective since they pop up like moles.

> We understand that some parents in our milieu rely on YouTube for when they need to get stuff done

Certainly is, I can't get around this sometimes in order to do chores either. This is why I have a variety of kids movies, shows, series on disk. Plenty of variety, but all vetted.

We were strictly no-screen parents until we were both super sick and the toddler was his usual energetic self. “Just let him watch some videos…” </3

My son does not care about video (yet?), which is good. But sometimes when I'm alone and I just must do the chore and they just won't play on their own for 10 minutes (which thankfully they often do), I don't see another way. I mean, I don't feel safe handling hot pans when a toddler just glues itself to my legs. I can lock them in their rooms, but that does not seem better to me (they'll be very upset).

You have joined a year and a half ago, have low activity, and 74 karma.

OP has been here for over a decade and has loads of activity.

You aren't in a position to post this.

I create a new account every few months. If you think account age = authority, maybe think about that for a minute or two.

Not authority, but likelihood of astroturfing.

That said, unlike GP, I don't think you were accusing OP of astroturfing. Your comment was confusing, but it seemed you were complaining about astroturfing in general, not about this post in particular.

This is even more misleading. You have to eat to live, but absolutely not all water usage for food is mandatory.

If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans.

The water argument has always felt so intellectually dishonest to me because it's never approached from the perspective of "hey, we're using too much water, how can we conserve it?" If we approached it from that perspective, reducing AI usage would not even crack the the top 100 list of things we would do. But that's not the goal of the water argument, because it quite obviously actually has nothing to do with water.

This is the response to have in mind when confronted with AI-water arguments. It's not about HOW the water is used, it's that, if you're truly concerned about water usage, AI is a non-factor compared to basically everything else you do on a daily basis.

This is a HN comment reply masquerading as a novel submission.

It is wild that people are still posting this kind of thing in 2026. Some folks really are living in a different world.

I liken it to VR. That was a big hype before AI and while I really love the tech (I have 5 headsets) I could have told anyone that the expectations were insane. The investors truly believed that in 2-3 years time everyone would be doing everything with a big headset on. It was dragged into lots of situations where it didn't belong.

Then of course the hype collapsed and now even the usecases where VR shines are deemed a flop. But no, it's exceptionally good at simulation (racing/flight) and visualising complex designs while 3D designing.

I see the same with generative AI and LLM. It's really good with programming. It's definitely good at making quick art drafts or even final ones for those who don't care too much about the specifics of the output. I use it a lot for inspiration.

But it's not good for everything that it's trying to be sold as. Just like the VR craze they're dragging it by the hairs into usecases where it has no business being. A lot of these products are begging to die.

For example an automation tool using real world language. For that it's a disaster, it's inconsistent and constantly confuses itself. It's the reason openclaw is a foot bazooka. It's also not very great at meeting summaries especially those where many speakers are in a room on the same microphone.

I don't think AI will disappear but a realignment to the usecases where it actually adds value, yes I hope that happens soon.

> It's also not very great at meeting summaries especially those where many speakers are in a room on the same microphone.

It is astonishingly poor at this. My intuition was that it should be good at this (it is basically a translation problem right? And LLMs are fundamentally translation systems) but the practical results are so poor. Not just mis-identifying speakers (frequently saying PersonX responded to PersonX) but managing complete opposite conclusions from what was actually said.

I'm genuinely intrigued as to what approaches have been taken in this space and what the "hard problem" is that is stopping it being good.

I mean it is a tough problem, you'd really have to voiceprint each speaker. But I'm sure this is technically possible considering voice cloning is pretty commonplace now.

And yeah the transcription quality also drops a lot. Where humans are still quite capable at reading it. Sometimes when I read the transcript I'm quite surprised it manages to make any intelligble minutes out of it at all.

I just don't understand how Microsoft place this feature as a minute-taking replacement when it's not ready for really super common usecases.

Ugh... a balanced take, this isn't appropriate for social media! /s

We’re reaching “Don’t Look Up” levels of denial about the impact of AI on this site.

For real. Very worried about when other CEOs follow suit and there is a flood of people into unemployment.

As someone that is only five years into their career at this point, I feel so helpless.

Same. Plus I have kids and a mortgage. My company just had a 5% layoff and I survived. Seems like it will be the first of many rounds. It's a really stressful time.

To be clear, I'm confident the impact of AI is going to be massive, and that massive impact is already underway rather than years away. But, separate from that, having seen it up close Block was bloated as hell

Yeah. We are coping. Just today, I had a simple bug where the data received was throwing undefined because it was in 2 alternate formats.

I showed ChatGPT(free-tier) the API response and the part of the code reading it, and it fixed it in 5 seconds. Would've been pretty short either way less than 30-40 mins but it's very good for simple tasks like these. The solution is just correct.

Even if they are right about quality, people on here vastly overstate the value of quality. From socks to dishwashers to airfares, slop is a valid product as long as it is cheap. Security from a business perspective has been proven not quite optional, but it is hardly catastrophic if it fails.

> Even if they are right about quality, people on here vastly overstate the value of quality

I always found the quality argument strange; what software are these people using that makes them think quality is a high priority?

I recognize that my experience may not be typical, but I spend the vast majority of my development time improving the quality of the systems I work on, in response to specific customer demands for it. The last time I had multiple consecutive weeks of greenfield development was in 2021.

Eh, it can get a lot worse. The horrendous quality of government IT in much of Asia for example.

This thread is a great discussion and I have kept coming back to it over the last couple days to read more of it when I have a chance. I’m kind of disappointed that it artificially ended. I think at some useful comment threshold level you just have to let it go.

>But it shouldn't matter if he gave 5 bullets to Chat gpt that expanded it to a full page with a detailed plan.

The coworker should just give me the five bullet points they put into ChatGPT. I can trivially dump it into ChatGPT or any other LLM myself to turn it into a "plan."

I feel the same way, if all one is doing is feeding stuff into AI without doing any actual work themselves, just include your prompt and workflow into how you got AI to spit this content out, it might be useful for others to learn how to use these LLMs and shows train of thought.

I had a coworker schedule a meeting to discuss a technical design of an upcoming feature, I didn't have much time so I only checked the research doc moments before the meeting, it was 26 pages long with over 70 references, of which about 30+ were reddit links. This wasn't a huge architectural decision so I was dumbfounded, seemed he barely edited the document to his own preferences, the actual meeting was maybe my most awkward meeting I've ever attended as we were expected to weigh in on the options presented but no one had opinions, not even the author, on the whole thing. It was just too much of an AI document to even process.

If ChatGPT can make a good plan for you from 5 bullet points, why was there a ticket for making a plan in the first place? If it makes a bad plan then the coworker submitted a bad plan and there's already avenues for when coworkers do bad work.

How do you know the coworker didn't bully the LLM for 20 minutes to get the desired output? It isn't often trivial to one-shot a task unless it's very basic and you don't care about details.

Asking for the prompt is also far more hostile than your coworker providing LLM-assisted word docs.

Honestly if you have a working relationship/communication norms where that's expected, I agree just send the 5 bullets.

In most of my work contexts, people want more formal documents with clean headings titles, detailed risks even if it's the same risks we've put on every project.

On this topic I think it’s pretty off base to call HN a “well insulated bubble” - AI skepticism and outright hate is pretty common here and AI negative comments often get a lot of support. This thread itself offers plenty of examples.

Surely we all know that when we post or upvote comments like this that we are being incredibly disingenuous.