HN user
Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
I suspect it's because people of our generation (I'm assuming) grew up with similar experiences to ours and had kids, and want to protect them. To be fair it's worse now than when we were growing up; I can't imagine how awful it must be to grow up in the age of social media.
Anyone in tech and tech-adjacent industries knows the difference and that we shouldn't be calling LLMs AI.
Are we reading the same Hacker News comments sections?
I think that's a silly argument, but even if we accept it at face value 1) VPN usage is difficult to detect and 2) bad actors are still going to use VPNs. This line of thinking removes privacy from good actors while doing nothing to address security concerns from bad actors.
The majority of comments seem to think this is not a big deal. Not surprising from this crowd, but disconcerting nonetheless.
Where does this line of thinking end? What couldn't be construed as part of the software?
"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
It's just a domain name. The Onion taking it over does virtually nothing to impact Alex Jone's reach.
Not to mention Alex Jones is still up and running elsewhere spreading his nonsense and hawking his merch. So it's a cute gag, I guess, and gets the Sandy Hook families some money, but doesn't really change the status quo.
“The goal for the families we represent has always been to prevent Alex Jones from being able to cause harm at scale, the way he did against them,” said Chris Mattei, the lawyer who argued the Connecticut families’ case in court. The deal with The Onion promises “to significantly degrade his power to do that.”
But the deal doesn't do that. Alex Jones has other websites where he's spewing his nonsense and hawking his merch. Maybe it feels good to get his major brand name, but it is largely inconsequential in limiting his reach.
Maybe it's just me but I don't see much humor in this. His brand and assets may have been liquidated, but he's still doing his show and it remains popular. The only people who really won in this saga are, as usual, the lawyers.
You should look into what's actually happening in other countries before blaming it on "the U.S. nanny state". The rest of the Anglosphere makes the United States look like a Libertarian utopia. I live in the United Kingdom, and brother - this is who they are. I assume Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are similar. There are real problems re: "think of the children" in the United States, but if you think "the U.S. nanny state" is bad then you have no fucking clue how bad things could be.
No. There are significant numbers of real people who genuinely support this type of thing. Dismissing it as "bots" or a "false narrative" leads to complacency that allows this stuff to pass unchallenged.
Name: PETER BRIGHT
Register Number: 76309-054
Age: 45
Race: White
Sex: Male
Release Date: 08/11/2028
Located At: FCI Elkton
The problem is that this is too tedious for most people. There's a reason centralization is popular.
I meant that it's not a solution for users looking to avoid similar intrusions. When alternative platforms get big enough they'll be faced with the same legislative burdens. Of course there are decentralized options, but one of the primary attractions of these centralized services is that everyone's on there.
The frustration aimed at Discord et al is largely misplaced. I'm sure these companies don't mind gathering extra data about their users, but the primary impetus for age verification is government legislation. Moving to alternative platforms is not a long term solution because it's attacking the problem from the wrong direction.
Neither does the average politician, so where exactly is the impetus for changing the law going to come from?
I'm not sure there'd be much of a difference because the British people are broadly speaking a rather paternalistic society.
While I agree with this in spirit, here in the UK both major parties along with the public at large generally support these types of laws.
The idea that AI is anything less than paradigm shifting, or even revolutionary is weird to me.
Actual AI? Sure. The LLM slop we currently refer to as AI? lol, lmao even
Office products are bastardized with copilot buttons everywhere.
They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD.
Unfortunately they went along with it initially but at least they came to their senses in the end: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586
The justification is money. Microsoft doesn't make any money off of offline accounts.
I think it's rather that OSA actually visibly affects people in their day-to-day lives whereas other laws don't. I constantly hit age verification pages on Reddit and Twitter and I don't use either for porn. I'm fundamentally against giving Reddit or Twitter or a 3rd party processor my ID just to view content someone somewhere deemed potentially harmful to minors. At least Twitter is done on a post-by-post basis; on Reddit entire subreddits are gated behind age verification.
That's a fair point, but you have to take into consideration the relevant laws and countries. You also need to take into consideration what it means to "operate" in a country.
Signing an online petition isn't better than doing nothing and is arguably worse.
I don't think pathologizing an entire nation is a statement of objective fact. Regardless, upon reflection I feel my initial comment was unduly harsh. I think it would be more accurate to say that British society as a whole is very much in favor of the nanny state.
The makeup of a court is temporary. Maybe your court is "safe" today; that won't necessarily still be the case tomorrow.
Well, I offered my observations and a few people agreed with me to varying degrees. You asserted I'm wrong, ignorant, and stupid. Perhaps that is true; it is not, however, an argument.
It's disturbing to me that so much of this type of legislation originates with the "Conservatives", and the only viable alternative in Labour thinks this type of legislation doesn't go far enough. I guess at least things will be interesting with Farage in Number 10.