ImPleadThe5th

I think it's complicated by the turning tide on the health effects of social media.

So people are kind of primed for "makes sense to keep kids from these attention driven platforms"

But I think the average person isn't understanding the implications of the facial/id scanning.

Hmm, I think it was more the rise of streaming services which were more convenient and offered a better experience with less risk than illegally downloading music or movies.

That's a good point I suppose.

I guess I'm just kind of sad. LLMS appropriately sourcing material could have been such a boom for artists in a way. I guess I feel like it was a missed opportunity for some mutual benefit.

Would have been a really interesting at least.

I wish archive websites would take a harder stance on LLMS.

Liberating/archiving human for humans is fine albeit a bit morally grey.

Liberating/archiving human works for wealthy companies so they can make money on it feels less ritcheous.

All those billions of dollars of investments that could be sustaining the arts by appropriately compensating artists willing to have their content used, instead used to ... Quadruple the cost of consumer grade ram and steal water from rural communities.

It really would be less bad though wouldn't it?

The more we resist turning this into a state-sided solution which provides a service to private companies with a YES/NO age verification, the more likely your data is going to be given to botton-of-the-barrel third party private companies.

I'm genuinely curious what the argument is against state-run privacy focused age verification is here. We already protect real life adult spaces with IDs. You hand your ID to a random store clerk who scans it with a random device when you want to buy alcohol or cigarettes.

What makes these social media platforms special that they have entirely different rules?

I will say, if they came for small privately-hosted communities, I can understand the cause for alarm. But so far it appears to be limited to massive misinformation machines.

It's not hypothetical. And in fact the girl who was being targeted was expelled not the boys who did it [1].

Those boys absolutely should be held accountable. But I also don't think that Grok should be able to quickly and easily generate fake revenge porn for minors.

[1] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/girl-...

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A lot of these UPFs are targeted at young people who don't have the same ability to think of long term consequences. If you start young, it's a much harder habit to break later in life.

And in many places UPFs are cheaper and more widely available than unprocessed food. If you're worried about paying rent, you're not questioning cheap calories for your family.

Even if we can agree that people should exercise more willpower, isn't there something wrong with companies weaponizing science to make food as addictive as possible?

I feel like if the conclusion is "ban it for everyone too" I'm okay with it?

But the argument seems to get a little lost along the way.

Yes, adults are susceptible to the same vices as children. However (as the author writes) children have poorer impulse control. They are also less inclined to or unable to consider the repercussions of their actions.

You wouldn't try to get a toddler to stop smoking by telling them it'll put them at a high risk for cancer at old age.

Speaking of smoking, anti-smoking campaigns in the US in the 90s led to a vast reduction in teen use and adult use alike.

So there is notable lasting benefit in protecting children while they lack the foresight.

After spending most of my career hacking on these systems, I feel like queues very quickly become a hammer and every entity quickly becomes a nail.

Just because you can keep two systems in complete sync doesn't mean you should. If you ever find yourself with more-or-less identical tables in two services you may have gone too far.

Eventually you find yourself backfilling downstream services due to minor domain or business logic changes and scaling is a problem again.

Total touch grass moment.

There's more to education than just trivia and there's more to travel than just learning about the place you're in.

The only way to learn about the human condition is by meeting other humans.

Meeting someone from a vastly different culture and finding similarities is far more education than simply eading about how they are different.

Experiencing the flow of life _now_ and feeling the influence of history can only enrich the book knowledge of a place.

Sounds like this person could use some travel to teach them about empathy and patience for others. Their books don't seem to be sufficient.

Good advice. Doesn't work in bad culture.

I once was told "we cannot promote you because the work you've done checks the boxes for 2 rolls above you and does not check the boxes for your next roll"

I've heard it's actually beneficial for your ankles long term to get some tilt/pan on them. It reduces your chances of injury by strengthening the twitch muscles in your ankle and legs.

Important to note the point is "trail running" not "alpine running", gravel and dirt vs, steep inclines and big rocks.

Anecdotally, just adjust your pace/length until you're comfortable. I've always done mixed asphalt/dirt-trail and there is a notable difference in my knee fatigue when there is a bigger ratio of one or the other, would always prefer a nice gravel or dirt over the road.

I enjoy when: Things are simple. Things are a complicated, but I can learn something useful.

I do not enjoy when: Things are arbitrarily complicated. Things are a complicated, but I'm just using AI to blindly get something done instead of learning. Things are arbitrarily complicated and not incentivized to improve because now "everyone can just use AI"

It feels like instead of all stepping back and saying "we need to simplify things" we've doubled down on abstraction _again_

I really do not like working with uncle bob hardliners

There have been so many times where I have commented _why_ I think some uncle bob-ism made the code unclear and the response is always:

*Sends link to Clean Code, maybe you don't know about this?

No, I do, and I am allowed to disagree with it. To which they always clutch their pearls "How do you think you know better than uncle bob!?", this is a Well Established Pattern TM.

I don't think I know better than Uncle Bob, but I don't think Uncle Bob works on this codebase nearly as much as you or I.

I have an old FPGA sitting around at home and I'm relatively comfortable with VHDL.

I've never really thought of any interesting projects to do with it. Anyone know of anything?

Thanks for taking the time to answer! I think I'll be giving this a shot for some upcoming projects.

Naive question here: with WireGuard VPN, does all traffic route through the VPN or only those packets bound for the other devices in the mesh?

Can anyone explain to me (someone not so network security savvy) if there are any privacy or security concerns using a wire guard provider like this?

As I understand it, with traditional VPNs, you basically have to trust third-party audits to verify the VPN isn't logging all traffic and selling it. Does the WireGuard protocol address theses issues? Or is there still the same risk as a more traditional VPN provider?

"If you research police corruption you'll probably find out the police are corrupt."

Large corporations and the police both have statistically significant problems to be a concern to the average person.

Frequency isn't the issue it's recurrence across municipalities. That's what makes it clear there is a systemic issue.

Imagine if we didn't make laws about murder because "It's not that frequent of a problem only 1 in 500,000 people are murdered"

Probably because Microsoft knows vibe coding is _not_ an actual viable way to build production ready code and does not want to deal with the liability issues of prompting customers to move from a working Excel sheet to a broken piece of software that looks like it works.

In my experience, it's actually quite hard to move a business from an excel sheet to software. Because an excel sheet allows the end user to easily handle every edge case and they likely don't even think in terms of "edge cases"

How can all this consolidation in media even be justified?

Even if AI poetry/music/movies gets really high quality, it's still gonna be slop to me.

The reality is that the internet has become decentralized; rather than people staying in one gigantic, unified group with shared trends and moments like they used to, users go their separate ways, with social media algorithms providing hyper- curated content that pushes users toward smaller groups with niche shared interests.

Erm. What's with the optimism at the end here? Isn't this the example of the exact opposite? Despite being promised "curated niche interests" somehow these attention algorithms on huge centralized platforms find a way to turn everyone on the platform into a consumer of a particular trendy item?

I find it so disturbing that a lot of "niche interests" on the Internet these days seem very consumer focused.

I will always find it weird that people who think the fact their consciousness randomly popped into existence through pure luck in a privileged country means that they deserve it more than someone who popped into existence somewhere else.

Even that aside, how does that give them the right to infringe on the rights and privacy of citizens?

The industrial design is really nice! I like the fun LED display as opposed to an LCD. I am surprised there doesn't seem to be any physical controls!

I'm sure this will be on every photography youtuber's channel shortly, can't wait to see it in action.

This sounds really interesting! Do you have any info about that scanning process?

I can tell you _haven't_ meaningfully traveled a lot because you're making assertions about "correctness" on cultural differences.

Some places smile, some don't. That's all fine. But thinking your way is the one right way is kind of sad.

To clarify my stance, I do think that AI research is a good thing and that it can help us understand our own consciousness by studying it. I just think anyone concerned about AGI at this point is drinking too much kool-aid.

I think science fiction makes us feel like AGI is closer and more relevant than it really is. Are we really so close that there's "no time" to regulate for it? Are we even close enough to give a care at all? Is there any evidence at this time at all that AGI would be a existential threat? Is all this talk coming from decades of "Creator vs. Daemon" stories combined with LLMs abilities to sound human? Does someone gain something from pointing our attention at the far-far scifi imagined future instead of current day issues with AI?

To your simulation point. We talk about our bodies, brains and conciousness like they are machines, computers, and software. They are not. They are organic and their function is highly emergent. Think about all the endless input our bodies receive, we probably don't even fully understand all the sensitivities our "consciousness" has. We don't "execute" a program based on input, in fact the input is likely part of the system. Its why our gut biome can affect our mental health, why our cells communicate with each other locally and likely guide our behaviour in ways we don't understand yet.

In other words, we're not any closer to simulating human consciousness than we are to simulating the universe itself.

So I do think its hubris to think that a rock with some switches on it running some mathematical probability model can come even close to generating consciousness.

exceed animal capabilities

Hubris like this. We don't even have a way to measure this. We've just made a math equation that can spit out language, you're comparing this to things that can actually _experience_ without someone clicking enter on a keyboard.

I'm kind of shocked by this thread. I cant get over the hubris that we think concepts that were introduced to society at large by science fiction in and before the 19th century is _inevitable_ just because we made a really really good predictive text engine in the 21st century.

Just because a concept exists star trek episode does not guarantee technology moving in that direction. I understand art has an effect on reality, but how hard are we spinning our gears because some writer made something so compelling it lives in our collective psyche?

You can point to the communicator from star trek and I'll point to the reanimation of Frankenstein's monster.