well it is a half lie, because he’s not thinking about them at all, not just in Iran talks.

there are countless apps that do the exact same thing and they have been out there for many, many years.

I haven’t seen them changing anything.

EDIT: also google knows this very well and the feature is clearly designed to be as useless as possible and to be ignored by 99% of the users.

An anti-doomscrolling feature is now built into Android. (Yes, things have gotten that bad.)

On Tuesday, Google announced Pause Point, which is designed to keep users from engaging with addictive apps on Android, the mobile operating system that powers Google’s Pixel smartphones, Samsung devices, and others.

Pause Point works by requiring a 10-second pause after you open any app you’ve labeled for yourself as being a distraction. TikTok, Instagram, X, and even Google’s YouTube could be the kinds of apps labeled as “distracting” by Android device owners worried about the power of time-sucking algorithms to eat away at their day.

With the addition, Google isn’t only thinking of users’ well-being, of course.

It’s reacting to increasing regulatory pressure around social media harms and algorithmic dangers. Today, many countries and U.S. states have created laws to restrict or ban minors from using social media, as the impacts of these apps on young people’s mental well-being have become better understood.

Google can now point to a feature like Pause Point to claim it’s part of the solution, not the problem.

“Android is more capable than ever, but we also want to give you the tools to disconnect when you need to,” explained Dieter Bohn, previously executive editor at The Verge, now director of product operations for Google’s Platforms & Ecosystems organization, in a press briefing about the Android 17 update.

“I think that we are all guilty of going into our phone and then opening some app and getting stuck on autopilot, and an hour has gone by,” he said.

To date, social media app makers, including YouTube, have turned to the idea of app timers as a way to remind you to take a break or stop scrolling. Pause Point flips that idea on its head, as it interrupts the app’s launch — and the dopamine flood that follows — to force you to stop and rethink whether this is what you actually want to do, or is just a habit you’d like to break.

Google says you could use the time Pause Point enables to do a short breathing exercise or to think about other things you could do instead of scrolling. For instance, the feature can suggest more worthwhile apps, like a favorite fitness app, an audiobook app, the Kindle or Google Play Books app, or others.

You can also choose to scroll through some favorite photos for ideas — perhaps those reminding you of other engaging activities, like outdoor walks, your pets, or arts and crafts.

Plus, Pause Point lets you choose to set an app timer before you dive in, which makes the time you spend in-app feel more intentional at the start. This could work better than a default timer, which is always set for the same length of time, even as the circumstances leading you to take a break from scrolling can vary.

The feature is harder to turn off than traditional app timers, too, many of which can simply be ignored. Instead, Pause Point requires a phone restart to turn it off, Google says, which also makes you think before disabling it.

Pause Point may not be as fun (or adorable) as the screen-time-focused or self-care apps like Finch or Hank Green’s Focus Friend, but it does have the advantage of being built into Android itself, which could help it gain traction.

thank you, I didn’t read the comments to be honest.

sounds not only absurd but also counterproductive based on the images.

also the head is hotter while wearing the device?

it definitely must not be as easy as it seems.

what could possibly go wrong?

This disables the QUIC graceful shutdown feature, and thus closes the leak. The mitigation will persist across reboots, but it may be undone by system updates, in which case the steps will need to be repeated.

Performing this mitigation means that the server-side QUIC socket will remain half-open until it times out, which should generally not negatively affect the Android device or apps running on it. However, only use the command at your own risk if you understand the implications.

does anyone know what are the implications of the fix proposed?

Philosopher Nick Bostrom recently posted a paper, where he postulated that a small chance of AI annihilating all humans might be worth the risk, because advanced AI might relieve humanity of “its universal death sentence.” That upbeat gamble is quite a leap from his previous dark musings on AI, which made him a doomer godfather. His 2014 book Superintelligence was an early examination of AI’s existential risk. One memorable thought experiment: An AI tasked with making paper clips winds up destroying humanity because all those resource-needy people are an impediment to paper clip production. His more recent book, Deep Utopia, reflects a shift in his focus. Bostrom, who leads Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, dwells on the “solved world” that comes if we get AI right.

STEVEN LEVY: Deep Utopia is more optimistic than your previous book. What changed for you?

NICK BOSTROM: I call myself a fretful optimist. I am very excited about the potential for radically improving human life and unlocking possibilities for our civilization. That’s consistent with the real possibility of things going wrong.

You wrote a paper with a striking argument: Since we’re all going to die anyway, the worst that can happen with AI is that we die sooner. But if AI works out, it might extend our lives, maybe indefinitely.

That paper explicitly looks at only one aspect of this. In any given academic paper, you can’t address life, the universe, and the meaning of everything. So let’s just look at this little issue and try to nail that down.

That isn’t a little issue.

I guess I’ve been irked by some of the arguments made by doomers who say that if you build AI, you’re going to kill me and my children and how dare you. Like the recent book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Even more probable is that if nobody builds it, everyone dies! That’s been the experience for the last several 100,000 years.

But in the doomer scenario everybody dies and there’s no more people being born. Big difference.

I have obviously been very concerned with that. But in this paper, I’m looking at a different question, which is, what would be best for the currently existing human population like you and me and our families and the people in Bangladesh? It does seem like our life expectancy would go up if we develop AI, even if it is quite risky.

In Deep Utopia you speculate that AI could create incredible abundance, so much that humanity might have a huge problem with finding purpose. I live in the United States. We’re a very rich country, but our government, ostensibly with support of the people, has policies that deny services to the poor and distribute rewards to the rich. I think that even if AI was able to provide abundance for everyone, we would not supply it to everyone.

You might be right. Deep Utopia takes as its starting point the postulation that everything goes extremely well. If we do a reasonably good job on governance, everybody gets a share. There is quite a deep philosophical question of what a good human life would look like under these ideal circumstances.

The meaning of life is something you hear a lot about in Woody Allen movies and maybe in the philosophers community. I’m worried more about the wherewithal to support oneself and get a stake in this abundance.

The book is not only about meaning. That’s one out of a bunch of different values that it considers. This could be a wonderful emancipation from the drudgery that humans have been subjected to. If you have to give up, say, half of your waking hours as an adult just to make ends meet, doing some work you don’t enjoy and that you don’t believe in, that’s a sad condition. Society is so used to it that we’ve invented all kinds of rationalizations around it. It’s like a partial form of slavery.

When the moment comes when AI writes philosophy papers better than you do, will some meaning be drained from your existence?

I think so. The ability to make some big contribution to the world, or help save the world, or ensure the future will be out of my hands, and maybe out of everybody’s hands.

On the other hand, a philosophy paper written by a human could be more valuable than a much cleverer, deeper philosophy paper written by a nonhuman, because I’m a human and that relates to me.

I guess you could have philosophy as kind of a sport.

That’s not just sport. The proclamations of a robot aren’t as meaningful to me as those of a fellow human.

I guess it’s the same if you retire after a career you’re passionate about and feel you’re good at. Maybe you have a great retirement, and you enjoy relaxing and reading the books you have time for, and playing with your grandkids, but there’s still something probably that you might miss, that you feel is lost. Maybe this will be analogous to a big retirement for humanity, but hopefully a retirement of enormous vitality. These utopians living in the solved world would be doing things like games and aesthetic, spiritual, and religious activities.

If you were in charge of one of the hyperscalers, what would you do differently than what they’re doing now?

A bigger effort should be done on the welfare of digital minds. Anthropic has been a pioneer there. It’s not clear that current AIs have moral status yet, but starting the process brings us into a mindset as a civilization to do more as these systems become sophisticated. It’s very plausible that some of these digital minds that we’re constructing will have various degrees of moral status, just as we think pigs and dogs have moral status. If you kick somebody’s dog, maybe you harm the owner, but it’s also bad because it hurts the dog. If AIs have a conception of self as existing through time and life, goals that they want to achieve, and the ability to form reciprocal relationships with other beings and humans, then I think there would be ways of treating them that would be wrong.

In your book you say maybe we shouldn’t treat “digital minds” as if they were animals in factory farming. I’m worried about whether they might make us the animals in some equivalent of factory farming.

Hence the importance of the alignment problem. We are not just waiting for these AI super-beings to come into existence and hoping that they will be friendly, we get to shape them and raise them. That gives us an opportunity to increase the chances that they will have some affinity for us.

If AIs have goals that run counter to ours, wouldn’t that be a failure to align them with human values?

If we fail to solve the alignment, as we probably will do at least to some degree, it’s important that they can be accommodated and given a good future. There are a lot of win-win opportunities that arise if we approach them not merely as objects to be exploited to the maximum degree, but try to foster a positive relationship. The most important relationship, ultimately, might be the one between humans and AIs. So it would be more promising that the relationship goes well if we start by taking some steps towards being generous and kind and respectful.

[This interview was edited for length and coherence.]

nice, gonna use the fix as soon as I get home.

EDIT:

This disables the QUIC graceful shutdown feature, and thus closes the leak. The mitigation will persist across reboots, but it may be undone by system updates, in which case the steps will need to be repeated.

Performing this mitigation means that the server-side QUIC socket will remain half-open until it times out, which should generally not negatively affect the Android device or apps running on it. However, only use the command at your own risk if you understand the implications.

anyone knows the implications of this?

it depends where you draw the line.

for me it’s absurd to force me to use a google-rigged device.

for someone else becoming an androidcentipede could be acceptable.

your (you and the other user too) comparisons and depiction of Linux devices and software are the only things in bad faith here.

even more so since we aren’t talking about ideals and philosophies here, but about google actually attempting to “close” Android.

so, once more, where do you draw the line?

personally I’ve already ditched google years ago because it was the right thing to do, now my current phone will be the last android device I’ll use because it’s gonna be the next right thing to do.

there isn’t much to argue here: keep using android and expect worse than this, or ditch it and boycott that turd of google.

the point being “I prefer being sodomized by corporations instead of putting some effort in switching to an alternative”?

well yes, as I already said you totally can, but it’s already backfiring so I wonder where do you people draw the line, assuming there is a line at all.

see my other comment for an answer.

you are mixing privacy and freedom, but generally speaking all alternatives need effort, including the one I already gave you.

be the change you want to see, as they say.

or don’t but then this happens and it sucks more than not having NFC or whatever.

then give up your freedom for the features you are used to, but don’t complain later.

step 1 - buy Linux phone

step 2 - profit!

clickbait gonna clickbait

they gonna bomb themselves now?