KaiserPro

Sorry but this is denial. I know I'm not going to change your mind, however:

it seems very strange to me to put any blame apple here when its just a statistics game. billions of image posts = millions of reports. simple as.

Apple's platform hosts billions of messages and photos. It is the Paedophile’s choice for distributing images and videos. The problem for us is Apple's halfarsedness in tackling this leads to clientside scanning or backdoors in encryption. They are not doing anything at all to stop this, and compared to whatsapp of all fucking apps, they are doing nothing.

360/100k US vs 1200/100k UK.

Sorry but 1200 knife deaths per 100k means the annual rate would be 840,000 murders a year.

last year the total number of murders in the UK was ~600 which is .86 per 100k

(far less than the _gun_ related homicides in the US: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/28/what-the-...)

The reason why I was talking about knife homicides specifically is that comparing knife crime between the us and the uk is hard. the UK systematically records crimes where knives are involved at a national level, the USA doesn't really.

But brum has a murder rate twice that of the national average. Even so its not 28/100k its around 1.25/100k which is still just over a quarter of the _national_ gun homicide rate of the entire USA.(~4.3/100k)

The point is, the UK is demonstrably less murderous than the USA. Even the UKs most murderous city is safer than Sanjose, which accordign to the stats I can find has a 3.2/100k murder rate.

I just looked it up, its the ncmec.org annual report, the one I am referencing is from 2024, not 2021. I mis remembered

Apple reported 250 items

Instagram 3.1million whatsapp 1.1 million facebook 8.8million tiktok 1.3 million snapchat 1.1million

Look I hate meta, more than you would know. But apple have very little excuse here. Even Anthropic reported more CSAM than them. I get your point about group vs 1:1, but frankly that holds only a tiny amount of water. Even if you did want to report it, you can't, not through apple at least. And if you did report it to the police, there is a high chance you'll loose your phone for use as evidence.

will switch to knives and screwdrivers as we see in the UK

London, with a population of ~8 million has the same murder rate as new Orleans, which is 300k people. Not as in x murders per 100k, but as in total murders in a city.

In terms of knife crime the USA has a slightly _higher_ rate of knife crime than the UK. Bear in mind the UK counts attacks with knifes as knife crimes, where as the states only appear to include death by knives.

Which means that even if you took away gun deaths (~70% of all us homicides) you're still more likley to be stabbed in the USA compared to the USA.

yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA.

for the UK, there has been a massive shift to prevent this kind of stuff.

anyone who even volunteers with children or vulnerable adults needs to be screened. Charities are required to have policies for dealing with vulnerable people safely.

but to the point, Apple halfarse CSAM reporting.

Whatsapp which doesn't do "CSAM scanning" reports in one hour more CSAM than apple does in a year. From memory meta (instgram, facebook and whatsapp) reported millions of cases of CSAM for 2021, compared to apple's ~250 (not thousand, just 250)

for facebook its automated scanning, but for whatsapp, its just design. its really obvious how to report a message/image. in imessage, its impossible, there is no mechanism to long press/select/other a message.

Now, Facebook are bastards in virtually every way, but for whatsapp at least, they have made GUI changes that have real positive impact on CSAM protection.

Apple has not.

They made some noise about hashing, but thats invasive and ironically noisier than having user reports.

True, but normally its not possible to just buy them off in public.

yes, more that likely it will

If you leave your bike unlocked in Amsterdam will it get stolen?

yes, and its a higher trust country than the uk

remember that trust and crime are not 100% correlated.

ISn't this just https://www.sparkfun.com/qwiic or https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-adafruit-stemma-qt/wh... ?

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/01/where-mos...

ITs not actually that surprising. Trust is different to cynicism though.

UK is not a high trust society.

sorry but data and experience does not bear that out. Denending on which source you look at, the Uk is a "high trust" society.

Now, your assertion about surveillance, sounds true but kinda rings a bit false.

The places where there are less CCTV cameras tend to be rural areas, and let me tell you, they do not trust anyone they don't know (I used to live in rural england) why? because there is no chance that the police will help you, unless you're being threatened.

Its about pragmatism. The problem is that a lot of software engineering tends to be not about building a product to service the buisness need.

Lets be honest, a lot of the time engineering decisions are made because "it would be cool to use x" rather than "this is the fastest path to achieving business goal z"

"over engineering" in a lot of cases is just either engineering gate keeping "oh you don't know how to do x properly, its soooooo much more 'performant' than y" or design by CV "lets use kafka, k8s, mobile app, AI, RAG" etc etc etc.

in 99% of cases, the architecture really doesn't matter that much, you product is never going to need what ever fancy system you put in. Mainly because people over estimate scale.

The thing that matters is that the customer is able to use it, and know how to use it. Everything else is almost irrelevant.

The key word is "fungibility"

as in, you give back _a_ share not the same share.

So you buy a bunch of shares at x price, you agree to hand them back in n days time.

You make money by selling the shares immediately and then you buy shares later at a lower price, then when you hand back the shares, the profit is the difference between ho much you sold them for, and how much you bought them back again.

The risk is, you _have_ to give the shares back usually at a fixed point in time. So if the price rises, you have to pay the difference. (there is normally a fee as well, to borrow the shares.)

[flagged]

Ooo a TUI version of Sequoia view: https://sequoiaview.win.tue.nl/ nice

But thats the point right, Zelle is an opt in. Bank transfers are universal and instant.

I mean yes, that makes sense.

But, the issue is about capacity. Steel and metals generally are a core part of the UK economy. Yes we could just buy it all in from outside, but when geopoltics intervenes it leaves us high and dry (see natural gas, chemical production, wire making, transformer making, etc etc)

If we end up in a war, which seems fairly reasonable, then we need to have access to a manufacturing, not only prototypes, but large scale manufacturing. we need not only the machines, but the people, experience and pipelines to keep that working.

When I buy something, it doesn't cost my employer, it costs me.

the pedantry here isn't helpful, as its "not other peoples money" is a monetary system that the government lets us use.

I understand that frustration about frivolous spending. It would be better if the argument was on how we evolve and change the steel market here in the UK so its self funding.

BUT!

the whole discourse about "government shouldn't choose winners" is a bit flawed, because we have left it to business to invest in infra, and mostly they've just outsourced to someone else (who's government actually planned with an industrial strategy)

The future is direct payments without middlemen.

direct payment can be good, but thats only part of the service.

First, this is not a "card vendors are good" they are a large buisness entity, with their own motivations. Visa/mastercard are outsized and should have proper competition.

THe point of card vendors in the modern era is to provide credit and protection for both consumers and buisnesses.

Credit is provided to allow instant settling of transaction, but it kinda morphs into escrow as well.

But, in the US your level of direct payment options are frankly shite.

In india, direct transfer is free and mostly instant, same in the UK/EU.

THe UK/EU its a bit more unweildy, as you have to know the name, sort and account number of the person you want to pay. however payment is "instant"

The problem is you don't really get fraud or protection. You can pay someone, and if you make a mistake you can phone your bank up and try and get them to reverse it. but there is no guarentee.

Thank you for this.

You're not the first person to say this. I have some empathy for this view, even though its the opposite of mine.

For me, audiobooks offer, more space for imagination. More recently its also a more consistent way to get unbroken narrative into my head. However I strongly suspect that is down to how I process information.

I didn't really read properly until I was quite old, however talking radio was quite ubiquitous in my house. There were lots of audiobook-like content. so perhaps its training?

sigh

The standards body will have no teeth. whats to stop someone just not bothering?

Next, the threats he is asserting to check for (cyber, chemical, biological) are nice, but also not that useful.

We already have chemical and biological controls, that why I can't by anthrax spores or high concentration nitric acid.

The risks that AI has now are already playing out:

1) the evaporation of trust in the video as medium of "this happened"

2) systematic spying

3) job losses

Increased productivity means job losses, Tiktok, instagram and X are a wash with disinformtion campaign pumping your feeds with AI ragebait.

That is and will continue to fracture society so that only the strictly information controlled (ie authoritarian) have a functioning state.

if the author had bothered to engage with the world outside of tech, or even their local government, they would know that the proposal are dead in the water and frankly superfluous. The knowledge is out there, without AI. let us work on the issues we face now, rather than dipshit tech bro's miopic vision/funding manifesto.

Could you expand on the audiobook part?

Im assuming that screens dont count because its not novels/literature

but audio books are the same content but delivered by a different medium, I am genuinely curious as to your opinion on is not counting

Your edit is actually the nub of the matter.

Its all very well saying "we will ban x" but unless you can define "x" reliably in a way that stands up to court arguing, you're not banning it, you're putting a lawyer tax on it.

The issue is, the vauger the terms, or harder it is to prove, the more money can warp the outcome.

There will always been cornercases to all laws, so you need to choose what you are going to hit and why.

Dark UX patterns can be hard to prove, you need to show that a normal person is not reasonably able to understand. That changes with time. (ie in the 90s asking someone to login and press a link would have been onerous, when a phone service/postal/fax was the done thing.)

So you either build in a proof, which can be gamed, or you target a specific action or thing, which will need updating.

the Law is hard, and, increasingly made by people who are not experts.

I joined VFX at the start of the 2000s, I rode the evolution of VFX from special effects, to fully digital, and back again (well not quite, "practical" effects are rarely practical, just really good VFX.)

I left in the late 2010s, Lots of competition meant that wages were kept down, and hours fucking long. It was fun, I loved being at the intersection of Art, infrastructure and programming.

I fear for the future.

I hope that I am ok, because I have experience of high scale that is not really in the training corpus. I've also been in ML for a reasonably long time, so have more experience of getting the dipshit machine to do useful things.

But thats pretty thin gruel.

I am rapidly approaching middle age, which means that no fucker is going to employ me as an apprentice if I want to re-train. My techincal and artistic skills are basically replaced. They are the equivalent of Linotype expert. Technically impressive but utterly fucking pointless for a world where newspapers are dead and so is analog printing. In 40 years I could possibly make a thin living as an artisan. But I plan on being dead by then.

Would the US government not pour enormous resources in AI labs

I mean they might, but its not clear how they would do it, especially as they are reaching the point where its going to be expensive to borrow.

as it is controlled by central banks and can be arbitrarily increased.

Its really not controlled by central banks. Its influenced, but not controlled.

When central banks "print" money, they effectively just add money to the accounts of investment banks

But investment banks are also "printing" money. Double accounting effectively uses assets to double the available pool of money. If you then sell off those loans based on those assets, then you crystallise that new money. Investment banks are inflationary.

Its been the most anti-slavery religion and was the main motivation for the abolition of slavery.

Which branch of Christianity though? There was a huge disparity in approaches in new england colonies (ie rhode island thought the indigenous should have rights, Massachusetts couldn't give a shit about anyone other than the elected.)

A lot of the english abolitionists were radicals, well outside the mainstream. The Quakers, Methodists, shakers were all deeply scary to the establishment

Translating the arabic texts of science (either copied and expanded from greek, latin and other places, or new research) and claiming that it was widom of the ancients?

I'm Just looking at the rich indigenous culture and languages of the US and how widespread and celebrated it is.

thats why all the signs in downtown Manhattan are in Munsee....

You're gonna have to be more specific. which religion, and what time are you insinuating for spreading in "spreading in squalid, burned down conditions"

Oh I missed that, its more batshit than I had imagined.