II2II

now there's better tech to do native ads without the intrusion and massive bad experience .... the publisher themselves can serve you a small ad

This has always been possible and, from my recollections, was how some early online advertising was done. (I don't know if it was ever the dominant model, but it was certainly more common.)

I suspect the difficulty connecting content providers with advertisers is the root of them problem. After that, it takes effort to maintain that relationship. Having a third party handle everything is simply easier, especially for smaller web sites and smaller companies who want to advertise.

Because every time something new comes along, people will push boundaries while arguing it is acceptable. In this case, they may argue that it is no different from physically furnishing an apartment, taking some photos, then removing the furniture. At least in terms of representing the product. Clearly using AI is much easier and cheaper than physically furnishing the apartment for a couple of hours. Some may even genuinely believe this, seeing it as more a tool of convenience than something that doesn't always represent physical reality.

(Speaking as a parent of three) why can't we just leave all responsibility to the parents?

Then I'm sure that you appreciate that there are both legal and informal checks in place ensuring that you can take responsibility for your children in the offline world. For example: I would be surprised if your children were able to play organized sports without your permission. Failing to ask for permission would deny you the responsibility of protecting your child as you see fit.

While I agree on bit about horrible prices, the TI calculators are well suited to their intended task[1] so I will object to the outdated hardware part. Stability is a good thing in the context of classrooms. Why should schools be spending money on replacement hardware, software, and textbooks when the curriculum itself is fundamentally unchanged?[2]

[1] Except the screens on the older models were truly horrible, from a brightness and contrast perspective.

[2] From my recollection, the calculators interfaced with hardware and software from other vendors. Then, of course, there was the vendor lock-in provided by textbook publishers.

yes there were folks from before that saw a PDP or whatever but they were rare, and usually either deep in academia or IBM etc.

Was it a case of being rare, or of computers being something they used at work (and only work) so they simply didn't talk about computers outside of that context?

Judging from stories of the early days of personal computers, those people mostly fell into two camps: those who were excited about getting their hands on a computer of their own, and those who dismissed personal computers as useless toys. The latter would make the number of people exposed to computers seem artificially small.

I bring this up because I have encountered people who used minis and mainframes over the years. They were a fixture in major corporations and even medium sized businesses by the late 1970's (which is when personal computers started getting the attention of the public).

Thank you for linking that since it sort of answered one of my questions: what would a person who lived in the backwoods of Oregon to escape the distractions of the world think about computers bringing the distractions of the world into their home?

Just log off of Instagram / TikTok / wherever.

A large number of youth will do that, but there is also a reason why children and youth are considered a vulnerable population.

I cannot speak too much on youth since most of my experience is with children. While some of them are more than happy to navigate their social lives by choosing who their friends are and ignoring those who cause them grief, where possible (as you suggested, there is the physical proximity in schools to complicate things), a great many more want to belong. They want to belong even where they are unwelcome and the unwelcomeness is manifested as bullying. What little I've seen of teens suggests that much the same does happen, only the bullying is meaner.

And that only addresses bullying. It does not address content directed towards adults, much of which is perfectly fine for younger people to know but they should also learn about it under the guidance of an adult so they don't come to think it is acceptable or the norm. It also fails to address the manipulative nature of some sites, something that they probably haven't learned to recognize never mind how to handle.

Yes, in a sense, you can turn off the problems and a lot of the problems will just go away. I'm not going to say they will disappear completely. Remember, social media has a larger audience and the others in that audience may bring it back to real life. Also remember that the people we are discussing don't always have the wisdom or experience to turn it off. Heck, a lot of adults don't have that wisdom or experience (but, at least for adults, we can claim they ought to know better).

Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue. I’ve been bullied before social media was mainstream.

The differences with bullying via social media are: the difficulty to escape it in space or time as well as its reach. I don't think we can argue that social media is not an issue on these fronts.

A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize.

I agree, but I also have to wonder if the nature of the Internet has changed to the point where the benefits are secondary to the costs. In the early days, it was far easier to access the positives and far easier to ignore the negatives since we made explicit decisions about where to go. While you can still do that today, by avoiding social media, it is far more difficult. The mainstream has consolidated to the point where you pretty much have to isolate yourself to avoid it. Much of what mainstream social media sites provide is pushed to the user in some for or another. On top of all of that, the online world had far less reach in the past. At least when I was younger, the bullies simply didn't go online and while exploitive people were online there seemed to be far fewer of them.

As for the Internet wide surveillance: I don't think that is the driving force behind the current regulations. We already have Internet wide surveillance. That is why your proposal is all the more important, the bit about moderation and scrutinizing big tech, because we let them get away with far too much.

Perhaps there's stuff going on in the UK that I'm missing but:

- I have not heard of a general cell phone ban for children and youth. They may "ban" the use of phones in schools (in reality: phones must remain in a bag or locker) and parents may choose to forbid their children from having phones (which is difficult to enforce after a certain age), but nothing general.

One may argue that children and youth may use phones to document improper or abusive situations in schools, which certainly can happen, but that is not the dominant use of phones by children and youth in schools and there are other avenues to document such circumstances.

- Most of the regulations we are discussing today are related to access to adult content or sites that are run in an exploitive manner (e.g. "the algorithm"). I have heard of no prohibitions of children and youth accessing sites outside of that context, even though there is plenty of room to question where the boundaries should be.

So I will agree that the author is either misrepresenting or conflating the regulations, to the point where the article is nonsense.

Something tells me people's milage varies based upon how they prompt the LLM. I spent about half an hour using traditional web searches to tackle a software configuration problem today, then about another half an hour poking around the system to see if I could find a solution, then about half an hour with an LLM. Not once was I told by the LLM to use the consensus solution of reinstalling the operating system even though it was clearly bumbling around much as I was earlier. (Eventually I decided to go with the consensus decision.)

I'm sure there are those who would participate, either because they want their data to be captured by AI labs or as a form of compromise.

That said, the approach is flawed. It looks like the people doing the scraping want everything. There are some people who do not want their data to be captured by LLMs. A common crawl would make it easier to those people to opt out, limit what is captured, or to poison the data. (I'm assuming the only way to avoid fragmentation is for the crawl to be done in the open and by consent.) Then there is the question of who would pay for the crawling and hosting. You could try charging for access to the dataset, but that would only encourage others to develop and sell their own dataset (especially since there are likely many who would want their interest in such a dataset to be confidential).

It probably depends upon where you're looking. I never go to the front page, or even mildly popular subreddits for that matter. Ignoring the bot used for moderation, I would be surprised if 1% of the traffic on the subreddits I visit is generated by bots. It wouldn't surprise me if most of Reddit was like that, but you won't hear about them since they aren't the focus of everyone's attention.

Building codes that address this are wonderful, however:

- Plenty of people live or work in older buildings, where are not up to standard. For example: my office probably violates the air quality sensibilities of the Victorian era, which is when it was originally built.

- Equipment breaks down, isn't operated properly, or wasn't installed correctly. Having monitors that measure air quality is an extra check. While you may not be able to get direct action upon a consumer sensor, it can help you push for action.

I've been in buildings of varying quality over the years. I've seen how it takes time to get people in to do air quality testing. Heck, I saw the government claim that the air quality was acceptable in schools during the pandemic because the schools had passive ventilation systems. That meant they could open windows. (To be fair, the air quality in most of those buildings was probably fine since that was how the buildings were designed. That said, such standards make it easy for some buildings to slip through the cracks.)

So yeah, sensors to the people!

To be fair: this was a parent stepping up to offer the students something unique. Doing so with children is easier than it is with teenagers, but I think that has more to do with the values we instill than it does with the nature of schooling. While children are still interested in how the world works, while teenagers are more interested in popular culture.

The reason why I say that is because most children seem to be curious about non-school stuff, but even the little ones can lack curiosity about the things they learn in school. Math is the classic example. While you will always have a few who are intensely curious about it, I have to mentally prepare myself to present how amazing math is anytime I say the word in front of children. (In my case, it's not that hard since I grew up fascinated by math-adjacent subjects. For most people though, that would be difficult.)

I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest. Makers of any kind; participants in the ongoing making of our world.

Thank you for going into the classroom and offering the kids a glimpse into the world that makes our world tick.

I am the odd one out at HN since I run after school programs. Yet I remember my past and I am constantly looking for ways to shoehorn enrichment activities into the program, things that expand the child's world view beyond what the see at home or are exposed to in the classroom. Things like: this is the infrastructure that makes society work. It is encouraging to hear about parents stepping up to the plate and helping out with those efforts!

Both. A person who places the interests of others above their own and lacks ambition is unlikely to achieve wealth in their life. Yet that doesn't mean a wealthy person has limitless ambition, nor does a willingness to place their interests above others mean that they are willing to sacrifice others in their own interest. While one needs to hold certain values to acquire or maintain wealth, there is still an element of "luck" to it (even if part of that luck has to be manufactured).

Take someone like Gates. He is a famously immoral businessman. Kildall once remarked that he had the urge to keep one hand on his wallet and the other on his source code listings when in Gates' presence. Yet Gates also has an interest in the human condition, something he has backed with both influence and money. I have no doubt that his rationale behind these interests differ from his less wealthy kin, but that is not sufficient reason to disregard it just because of his wealth. Now contrast that to someone like Musk. He has arguably done more for the environment by actually getting electric vehicles into mass production and he has arguably done more for science (without actually doing scientific research) through financing the development of launch vehicles. That said, it is doubtful that he has any form of grasp on reality. His morality appears to be of the sort where a pacifist wouldn't trust themselves in Musk's presence.

Anyhow, I've forgotten where I was going beyond that. Hopefully it is enough to illustrate that wealthy people have different values and that wealth should not be used as a metric of their values. That said, I'm not sure that I've convinced anyone (even myself), that some wealthy people have sensible values.

It's not that single person who threatens the world

The question is: is he enabling them, or are they enabling him? I suppose it could be working in both directions. That said: while the "elite" were problematic before his second rise to power, they were also more constrained.

I also have some question as to who the elite are? Certain individuals are more prominent these days, while others have faded in the background. While it may feel good to apply a singular label to the wealthy (or any other group we disagree with), they are not a single ideological entity. It's probably more beneficial to align ourselves with those who agree with us, rather than alienating them based upon a metric that is only tangentially related to their values.

i dont think there is any software on the planet that i would consider "truly life changing"

I consider LLMs life changing in the sense that the Internet was life changing: it makes information much more accessible. In the olden days, learning just about anything outside of your immediate circle (family, friends, teachers) meant a trip to the library or bookstore. If your local library or bookstore didn't have it, you were SOL.

The 21st century problem is different: too much information, while too much of the accessible information is repetitive and of dubious quality. LLMs are fairly good at summarizing human knowledge. If your research is important you can ask the LLM for targeted sources to: vet the LLM's summary, vet the source of the summary, or get further information.

I think hyperbole is problem with the "life changing" crowd. Too many people expect the LLM to do the work for them. Even something like extracting information from a document is your work, not the LLMs work. Writing a piece of software is your work, not the LLMs work. Anything where your responsible for the outcome and where assessing the outcome would involve reproducing the work of the LLM not going to be life changing because it means you still have to do your job.

Leave computers to do what they are good at: massive amounts of calculating and collating. Doing jobs that are beyond human reach because we are not particularly fast nor tireless. Doing jobs where it is more efficient to throw a machine at the task than it is to organize armies of people to do the same. In that respect, LLMs are just tools. As tools, LLMs aren't terribly different from the original computers.

The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day.

A big difference between Reddit/HN is the volume. You need threaded discussion because individual articles can receive as many responses in one day as most forums would accumulate on a single posting over the course of several years.

We need to be careful with our comparisons here.

Even though the Disk ][ was significantly faster than the 4040, the 4040 was significantly faster than the 1541. Apparently the difference was largely due to a bug in the controller used for the Commodore serial bus.

Commodore's 8-bit micros also used IEEE-488 (or a serialized form of IEEE-488) for their floppy drives, rather than a dedicated expansion card that was connected to a bus with direct access to the CPU and RAM. While the expansion bus on the Apple II was fast enough to control the drive directly, the most Commodore could do was send and receive a stream of data to the drive. The drive had to have the smarts to interpret that stream of data. The drive electronics was going to be more complex than Apple's even if Commodore assigned amazing engineers to the task.

Finally, Commodore's approach had its own advantages. Since the drive accepted and handled commands, the CPU could be freed up for other tasks. I don't know how useful that was in general, but the classic example involved two drives autonomously copying floppies. (You could literally remove the cable between the computer and the drives after the operation was setup.) I also recall hearing about classroom setups where multiple computers would share a drive (PET era). It also allowed more drives to be connected to the same bus. Apparently 8 drives were supported. In contrast, the Apple II would support two drives per expansion slot.

The trouble with that is you cannot operate a business where you pay your suppliers for a product then give everything away.

I am saying that as a reflection of reality, not to absolve Sony. Someone at Sony must have understood that their licensing agreements were incompatible with the definition of sale. Someone else likely stuck some clauses into the EULA to reflect that, fully realizing that no-one reads those things (also realizing that it is not reasonable to expect consumers to read an EULA for every transaction in their life). The someone who is now responsible for executing the outcome would also understand that there is the potential for legal action on such a matter, but they also understand that there are legal machinations that will, at worse, limit the damages to a sum that is lower than the cost of refunding the full value of each and every purchase made through their service.

They must feel free to do as they please since they know consumers are trapped.

My take is somewhat difference: Sony is offloading the cost of their prior decisions onto consumers.

For things like movies, they should have negotiated a contract where sold copies are sold copies and cannot be revoked (even if their right to sell/rent copies lapse). For things like the PS3 store, it cannot be run indefinitely. That said, from my understanding, the authorization keys expire if the clock battery on the PS3 dies. That should not be permitted.

I don't think that this is a "do as they please" situation. I think it is a case of bad decisions being made in the past. For some, like the movies, there isn't much they can do to fix the problem after the fact. There is absolutely no incentive for the rights holders to let consumers continue to access previously purchased content (especially with Sony taking all of the blame). Even something like offering refunds to people who purchased the movies is problematic. In all probability, all of their contracts have similar terms. They would have to refund everyone for every purchase in the long run.

Other stuff, like access to PS3 purchases, are likely fixable. The question is: where is the incentive? They could create a patch for old consoles, but it would only affect a small number of customers who still have those consoles. (Worse yet, it wouldn't do anything for those who stored their consoles in the closet -- only to pull it out later to discover the authorization keys are invalid.) The math probably doesn't work out for them so they aren't going to do it.

I'm sorta in the same boat there. There are plenty of people willing to give their work away, sell it DRM free, or sell it at a lower cost (offsetting the fact it is licensed). Plus you have things like libraries and the public domain. There are more than enough alternatives, in many cases, to avoid supporting sketchy business practices. But a lot of people become fixated on getting a particular thing.

The problem is that its unethical

The article is basically a list of examples of how companies that offer legal options often use unethical business practices (sometimes to the point where they should be illegal).

I don't agree with all of their examples, such as conflating removing access to a purchased title with removing a title from a streaming service, but I can certainly understand why people are frustrated.

The thing is, those dealers can end up in jail for selling drugs.

More to the point, if a kid walked into a convenience store and the clerk sold them a pack of cigarettes, the clerk wouldn't get off the hook by claiming, "well, the parents are responsible for their kids." I'm also not sure how one would justify holding parents legally liable for crimes they played no role in committing.

I'm not saying that I agree with these laws. They appear to be taking things too far. But that has more to do with there being no clear way to define sites that are only of interest to adults (no gatekeeping needed) and sites that should be restricted to adults.

Every time I see something interesting about nuclear power, comments like this pop up. Which makes me skittish.

We need responsible growth. We need to acknowledge that there is no magic bullet for power generation, just managed risks. We need to acknowledge that those risks exist for all power sources, to varying degrees, and take different forms (whether it is the environmental impact or reliability of the power grid).

Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion to the point that they're strongly incentivizing, if not actively selecting for, people that are gaming the system in some way or another.

The gaming of the system has been happening for a very long time. When I was a teen looking for my first job, companies were being flooded by resumes due to cheap laser printing (either custom to the employer, or simply duplicated en mass). A few years after that, it was being flooded by online applications or applications via email. Each time businesses had to take a more aggressive stance at filtering since they had more applicants per opening than before.

I suspect that we are going to have to go back to the bad old days of relying on real social networks (not the imaginary ones people create build around finding work) or applicants walking door to do with printed resumes in hand (simply because it is going to be easier to vet someone who walk in the door than false positives from software that filters applicants out).

If it is a formal policy of the store, then it's a different story. They could also manage it in a way to minimize costs. That said, I have run into people who are proud of "discovering" the lifehack version.

I don't go to libraries very often anymore because so often they're effectively homeless shelters.

If someone doesn't go to the library because of homeless people, the problem is with the person who doesn't go to the library.

If someone doesn't go to the library because they are being harassed, the problem is with the library. Let the library know about specific incidents so they can handle it.

I'm not saying the situation is ideal. Yet plenty of homeless people go to the library to access the services they offer, or simply to have a safe place to read a book (even if the book part is incidental). If people sleeping in the library is disturbing, well, let's just say that library security would be kicking out a lot of university students in my area.

While I understand some people think this is clever, all it does is increase costs for businesses which ends up increasing costs for honest consumers. Worse yet: it tends to increase the cost for local businesses, or at least businesses employing local people, so it's giving the finger to your neighbours rather than to the man.