digiown

I agree with controls on addictive/exploitative platforms like Facebook or Instagram. These can be feasibly controlled at the source.

In principle I agree with keeping some content away from children, but I don't think any of the implementations will work without causing worse problems, so I disagree with implementing those.

in the day to day practical way

There's a world of difference between practically required and it being illegal to use anything else, even if initially for a small set of population. You still have a choice to avoid those now. Moreover there is a fairly large subculture of gamers etc opposed to these movements, and open computing platforms will take a long time to fizzle out without intervention.

If you mandate locked down devices for kids, it will very quickly become locked down devices for everyone except for "licensed developers", because no one gets a bunch of new computers upon becoming an adult, and a new campaign from big tech will try to associate open computers with criminals.

That seems to require having control of the discord, and can't be done by individual users. A hostile moderator can also kick/ban you which stops from deleting things.

I don't mean that type of archive, but rather "just in case" data like "last month's scrape of this website" after we scraped it 5 more times this month or higher resolution versions of book scans. You might want to still be able to dump it out quickly if you need it. Money is no object for these companies and the cost of HDDs is more than low enough for the flexibility they provide.

Obvious note but if you run this on anything other than your own computer it nullifies E2EE.

Buried here is the fact that Gajim seems to have had big updates lately. I might just switch back to XMPP from Matrix, as all the matrix clients on Linux suck frankly. Conversations on Android is significantly better than any Matrix client I've used.

Semi-ephemeral is the wrong way to view Discord et al. It's only that way if you actively remove your messages after a while, but they have made it as difficult as possible.

Though the fact that it's hard to archive too, perhaps make it more ephemeral on the whole, since few people will have a backup when do you get around to remove it.

I don't think the HDDs are being used for any intensive loads. They have too much latency for most of that. It's probably just archival storage for their scraped content and generated slop.

don't see much possibility of actual widespread bans

Why do you think there would be regulation to honor the "underage signal", but not explicitly ban social media sites for "unverified" users?

seems pointless to avoid using that capability

It's not pointless, because relying on it will soon make these locked down devices mandatory for everyone under 18, and they will keep using it past 18. Everyone will lose general purpose computing, along with adblocking and other mitigations that protect you from various harms. It also leads to widespread surveillance being possible as parents will want to be able to "audit" their teen's usage.

put an additional system of control front and center

The problem should be controlled at the source, not the destination, if feasible.

Many laptops from last few years have soldered memory. Your previous laptop's SSD can also be reused, since those don't die that quickly compared to the laptop.

Bingo. A number of corporate interests don't want to let you own your personal computers for different reasons. Google/Apple wants you to get locked down devices, and cloud/AI providers want you to use their services from a weak client.

I think banning facebook/instagram/etc is one of the special cases where it makes more sense to be enforced by the site, because people use these out of mainly peer pressure and network effect. If a majority is kept off, the rest have little use for it regardless of their personal wishes. Heck, I'd reckon most kids don't actually want to use them all that much. Regardless of technical details, giving parents this control will also cause a lot of resentment if most parents don't go along.

As opposed to censoring internet content in general, which does not work because there will always be sites not under your jurisdiction and things like VPNs. I don't support any such censorship measures as a result.

Individual used pieces of clothes are not nearly the same as unsold or returned (~new) available in bulk quantities.

If you have enough cores, av1an can do it pretty quickly by splitting the video into chunks.

I really suggest not using GPU encodes for this purpose unless it's mostly worthless archival content. You can save way more space using AV1 on CPU via things like av1an. If you really like H265 using it on CPU also gets much better quality/size tradeoff.

Meanwhile, over the border in France, software patents aren't a thing. That's why VLC gets to ignore it, by the way.

I'm not sure what I feel about depriving teens of general purpose computing devices, either, which is the logical consequence of both the pseudo-ZKP scheme and parent's "underage signal". I believe most of us here learned programming through being able to run arbitrary programs, and that would never have happened if we only had access to locked down devices. And that habit of viewing computers as appliances controlled by other people isn't going to go away on their 18th birthday either.

Overall I think while there is a reasonable argument in favor of age verification for some types of sites, the harms of implementing it would drastically outweigh any benefits that it should not be done.

You can make it zero too if going by this argument. Count up the individual points at which crimes were committed. The area adds up to zero since the number of crimes is finite.

I wonder if there would be standing to sue, since public schools are an agent of the government and sending your kids to school is mandatory. Lawsuits are the usual way these types of shenanigans get sorted. Can the government really force you into contracts with private parties?

A ZKP will work as a base, but the proof mechanism will have to be combined with anti-user measures like device attestation to prevent things like me offering an API to continually sign requests for strangers. You can rate-limit it, or you can add an identifier, both of which makes it not zero knowledge.

Parent's proposal is better in that it would only take away general purpose computing from children rather than from everyone. A sympathetic parent can also allow it anyway, just like how a parent can legally provide a teen with alcohol in most places. As a society we generally consider that parents have a right to decide which things are appropriate for their children.

I don't think it would be reliable enough. Small odds in favor of you and large variations (due to small market cap) require you to invest only small amounts based on the Kelly criterion, and I feel like the resources needed to carry out these influence campaigns are much more effectively used for other goals like political maneuvers.

Brand value particularly for commodity products is usually just a form of information asymmetry between consumers and suppliers, and creates economic inefficiency since it diverts expenditure from other products that can materially improve lives. It also allows enshittification to happen since it creates inertia (brand loyalty) to switching, and the positive brand image sticks around for longer than the actual good quality products.

Then that's not a donation, just some shenanigans to bypass the law, which regulators presumably understands could happen.

Brand-name clothes is not really a commodity, and there is nothing efficient about destroying inventory (at scale, destroying small returns might be efficient). The brand name is a psychological trick that transforms commodity items into premium products, and supply control (destruction) seeks to gatekeep the brand and maintain that image. It works because the cost of the textiles is a small fraction of their retail price. It wouldn't work for example for things that cost more to produce, like electronics, which is why those are usually sold refurbished.

Supply control usually benefits the producers, despite what it may seem (destroying items). Increasing the supply lowers the relative pricing power of the vendors, and reduces the price an average consumer pays for the same item, even if the retail price for the item technically increases.

I'd say it is good in the long run. If people spent less on clothes, they'd have more to spend on other goods and services or invest in productive endeavors.

As the recipient of that donation, why would I actually destroy it when I can sell it?

Revanced is only distributed as patches, probably to avoid being susceptible to the claims against the original Vanced.

Worth noting that ReVanced has a lot more patches than just YouTube.

For some reason I always preferred having tabs on desktop, so I can having stuff paused to be watched later.

I don't think prediction markets work well for that. It is a market and you can't really prevent anyone else from benefitting from the same victims, which dilutes your earnings.

That's good, but everyone has only a limited amount of social capital to refuse popular things. School teachers, which are essentially agents of the government, often make your children watch Youtube videos, for example.

We can start by forcing sites to treat crawlers equally. Google's main moat is less physical infrastructure or the algorithms, and more that sites allow only Google to scrape and index them.

They can charge money for access or disallow all scrapers, but it should not be allowed to selectively allow only Google.

Interesting theory. I'm inclined to disagree, however. Prediction markets essentially allows people to trade information for money, even the types historically more difficult to trade. There aren't enough people betting on things for deliberate misinformation to become worthwhile, IMO, and most people would stop betting after being in the wrong too often, unlike casinos which always let you win sometimes.

I believe the misinformation is largely by self-interested parties. Politicians as well as influencers trying to push agendas, and the engagement/attention farming for advertising revenue, which are largely indifferent to truth.