shirro

There is a medical recommendation for ages 9-25 in my country though the public funded mass vaccination program is for 12-13 as the most effective age.

The thought that a 9yo would need protection from STDs is very upsetting which I would guess makes it a talking point. It is better to mass vaccinate at whatever age is publicly acceptable than not at all so I would concede that to critics.

Anyone exposed to sexual activity at such an age is clearly a victim of abuse. Penalising victims of abuse, whether it be forcing them to attempt to carry a baby to term, against medical advice, or forcing them to deal with the consequences of STDs is a very peculiar and nasty attitude. When societies start justifying denial of care and treatment along lines of class, politics, age, race, religion, gender or perceptions of "morality" there's a bigger problem.

It doesn't matter so much if the LLMs are better or worse for learning things. I tend to think much worse in the long term. The problem is the reduction in choice. Soon we won't have web search. No user generated content. No genuine personal interaction. No blogs. No personal computer industry. No tech book publishers. Its all going to be LLM generated content owned by a small group of people. It sucks. I am in the opt out group wondering what exactly will be left to opt out into.

My understanding is that auditory hallucinations are more common in schizophrenia which makes this more of a WTF.

Aphantasiac here so this raises an obvious question. Cursory search suggests visual hallucinations due to drugs or schizophrenia are reported. Conscious and involuntary visualisation seem to be somewhat independent.

With all respect to Christoffer and Bjarne and many others who are much smarter and more experience than me who have said similar things I am far from convinced. Their languages are not memory safe and they either are not doing bounds checking or proving it unnecessary. If iteration is causing underflow or overflow then perhaps the problem isn't signed or unsigned indexes.

I don't recall similar arguments being made for Pascal or ADA.

Look around at the state of our C++ and C software and all the CVEs I think we probably shouldn't care about unsigned or signed loop indexes and move on before regulatory pressure forces us. Please language designers, give us some interesting alternatives to Rust.

People shouldn't have to justify not putting up with bullshit. It is a sensible default.

I haven't seen a stove top kettle since the 1970s. And they were an old design then. I have never seen one in a shop either. A typical electric kettle has the handle at the back and spout at the front. There isn't really anyway to come into contact with steam in normal use. They are cheap, safe and fast.

I think it is very clear from the way all US allies have reacted to various provocations that we are taking a long term view. That is the reason we are still spying on our domestic populations for the US despite our reservations about the current executive and their actions.

The problem for all 5 eyes (or 9 or 14) is that our co-operation dates back to the cold war and the institutions and thinking have not caught up to current geo-political and technical changes. If anything we are accelerating our co-operation at a time when many voters are seriously questioning the future of the US alliance.

I wish some of our leaders would be more forthcoming about the amount of foreign pressure their governments are under. We talk about the negative influence on social media and politics of countries we are not allied with often but there is an astonishing silence when it comes to the biggest player. There is a very real threat to local values and democracy.

It is getting more difficult to research now. Increasingly I just grab the source code locally and don't bother with the browser. Every search returns pages of wordy AI generated docs. At best they restate the code. At worse they read like badly written brochures. I am avoiding any project that doesn't have a long history. Large, feature packed projects that appeared out of nowhere on github with a single commit with no history or users are essentially stolen code that has been machine translated to obscure the original authors works.

I hate becoming the old person shaking their fist at the sky but the AI bros have just gone too far. I don't know why there isn't a bigger political and social movement against them. I would sign up in an instant to see their companies and practices regulated out of existence.

We are a playful species. People enjoy play. If we didn't have to work for a living but still enjoyed food security that is all most of us would do. But we are also a very exploitative species, some more than others. Companies have made billions of dollars on top of Fabrice Bellard's works, qemu, ffmpeg etc.

These companies don't have any imagination. Their management has no vision. They could not create anything new and wonderful if they tried. People like Fabrice do and we are all richer for it. If your asking about the practical use you are likely in the exploitative mindset which is understandable on HN. The hacker/geek mindset enjoys this for what it is.

There are so many advantages to turning off and disconnecting these days. Avoiding TOS is just a small part.

There are too many demands on our attention and our wallets and most of us aren't getting more money or time. I cancelled all the family's streaming services in 2025. Everyone adapted. It turns out a lot of things we are told we need, we really don't. People lived without them as recently as a few years ago. A lot of the novelty of mobile, streaming, social media and weird tech nobody needs has worn off and the value has been eroded. There are so many better things to do and experience and you don't need to hand over your privacy or sign your soul away.

In 30 years the only sort of novel idea anyone has come up with for making money out of tech that has got any real traction is harvesting people's data. Web search - data harvesting. Social media - data harvesting. LLM as a service - data harvesting. Is that because the same money people keep betting on the same sorts of ideas from the same sort of graduates from the same cultural background?

There was crypto coins but pyramid schemes have been around forever.

Why would anyone with a shred of awareness want to subscribe to any LLM service. Particularly a foreign one where that data could potentially end up in the hands of business competitors, political enemies, extortionists or others. That goes for all of the cloud really. Like WTF people. Why do you do this?

The only thing that will save OpenAI is a miracle. The deals only prolong the pain. Just end it already. Nobody wants their products. We want affordable RAM and SSD.

Over investment in AI data centers is having a huge negative impact all over the economy. Other sectors are missing out on investment limiting their growth and stalling the economy.

Companies have reduced staff prematurely on the promise of productivity improvements that have not occurred and lost customers to terrible customer service and declining product quality.

Many hardware launches are going to be delayed or not meet expectations which really is the tip of the iceberg.

The US/SK memory cartel understandably sold out for a massive short term windfall but they their long term decisions to limit supply have created a huge opportunity for China. I wouldn't be surprised if this will go down in the history books as the start of the exit for US/SK from the industry and the start of Chinese dominance.

The smart phone industry is likely to respond with an increasingly hostile anti-consumer approach as they try and lock customers into the cabins of the sinking ship. I expect cheap and cheerful Chinese budget phones aren't going anywhere.

I am happy for ram, cpu and storage to stall. I want a more robust and open phone which can take a fall and be updated long after the vendor loses interest. I expect to uninstall most of my apps rather than install new ones as I increasingly disconnect from an ever more distracting and worthless medium. I have cancelled nearly every subscription service in the last 12 months. And I have been deleting a lot of free accounts and apps. Its like doing a big cleanup. Surprisingly rewarding.

HN has felt like more than 50% AI industry promoting blog spam of little interest to me as a reader for some time. I am setting a budget of ten, no make it five, more posts here. Then I am out for good. Account deletion and no looking back.

The algorithm has been given a job todo. First priority on any platform is engagement and a well functioning, complete human being is not going to be engaged by rage bait and hate. They are rare, precious jewels. The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a grudge, feel left out. It is relentless and escalates until their brains cook. Algorithmic social media is a massive social harm. The people who are in deep likely need years of deprogramming and therapy to recover which they will never get.

These platforms need to be shut down and people with a conscience need to stop using them, regardless of their own positive experiences, to deny them the power of network effects and their impact on the vulnerable.

Yeah, we are into professional wrestling territory I think. People willingly suspend their disbelief to enjoy the spectacle.

Using a fake identity and hiding behind a language model to avoid responsibility doesn't cut it. We are responsible for our actions including those committed by our tools.

If people want to hide behind a language model or a fantasy animated avatar online for trivial purposes that is their free expression - though arguably using words and images created by others isn't really self expression at all. It is very reasonable for projects to require human authorship (perhaps tool assisted), human accountability and human civility

When they are full I wonder what the final solution will be?

I won't be chasing an increasingly shitty online experience. I imported chromecasts before they were ever released here and had them connected via vpn to a US vps before services like Netflix went global. The pricing and content were really good value back then. Increasingly the relationship with big companies feels abusive. We are moving more towards self hosting, using physical media and changing lifestyle. Disconnecting isn't so bad.

Fully agree. I have no issues with the social media laws as they don't impact my family at all except for YouTube. Accounts under Family Link control should have been allowed as they are overseen by an 18+ parent.

Youtube should have voluntarily removed shorts and the front page or made them available as a parental control to appease the regulator. When I wrote to the minister they used YouTube's addictive algorithms as justification for including them as social media which I do agree with.

We had curated kids logins with age restrictions, subscriptions, and ad free under premium and also youtube music with individual playlists they used for instrument practice etc. We had to shift music platform. I know we can replicate a lot of this with special apps and browser extensions but this was a single cross platform solution that was working for responsible parents. To be fair it is partly YouTube's fault for prioritizing Shorts and watch time over quality.

Australia does not have a bill of rights. Our freedoms are guaranteed by our participation in the electoral process which is very high. This government governs with a large majority and the social media legislation is broadly popular with parents and older people.

The law of unintended consequences will apply. The legislation has been written in such a way that there is some flexibility in the application and there are some safeguards but its not directly addressing some of the biggest social harms. It's primary purpose (despite the conspiracies) seems to be populism and being seen to do do something for the kiddies.

The much bigger social problem is gambling which is out of control here. The second, related problem, is the use of techniques and studies by the gambling industry in games and social media to increase engagement which is what is messing with peoples heads. The government does not dare to touch the gambling industry or stop algorithmic placement of content. This would cause immense damage to company profits and create lobbying pressure.

So far from my experience this has been kind of low impact for adult users with existing accounts. Social media companies obviously have extremely good demographic data on their existing users as targeted marketing and influence is their core business.

Unfortunately this legislation hasn't addressed any of my real concerns with social media (it's the algorithms and engagement farming) and it is creating new problems.

Like Pascal's wager that absurdity is an appeal to stupidity. I expect the people running these companies are more interested in a different type of wager. One where they risk the future of the company to pump shares and make a quick profit.

Insane decision. This whole bubble is irrational.

This is a question of priorities. Identify a problem, decide to fix it, then execute. It isn't about the particular solutions. Australia's gun control would not translate to a country like the USA and perhaps neither would its health care. First decide to put a person on the moon. Then execute. Only one country did that. It isn't that they can't solve problems like school shootings or affordable healthcare. There is no real will to do so. Not sure why exactly. It is a very strange place that defies expectations of how a developed country would behave.

That would be weird and uncomfortable traveling with a kid. Is it geographic or is this madness taking over the world? Seems like something that would get a place destroyed in reviews and lose them business.

Probably requires something that is almost there then a sponsor(s) to throw in developers or funding to get the rest of the way. On the EDA side CERN did a lot to lift Kicad to the point of being a credible alternative that could breakthrough like Blender. Both those projects are over 30 years old and for a lot of that time were dismissed as too difficult to use or lacking in features. FreeCAD is only 23 years old. I don't know what the code base is like but if a large org put a couple of good devs into it for a few years who knows.

It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now.

Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve got interested its probably going to have to wait for a government/ngo/scientific. Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back.

Making money and complying with the law. They are obligated to do both. In many countries laws are still enforced.

Protecting their app store revenues from competition exposes them to scrutiny from competition regulators and might be counter productive.

Many governments are moving towards requiring tech companies to enforce verification of users and limit access to some types of software and services or impose conditions requiring software to limit certain features such as end to end encryption. Some prominent people in big tech believe very strongly in a surveillance state and we are seeing a lot of buy in across the political spectrum, possibly due to industry lobbying efforts. Allowing people to install unapproved software limits the effectiveness of surveillance technologies and the revenues of those selling them. If legal compliance risks are pushing this then it is a job for voters, not Google to fix.

It could have been. The platform got taken over by a very different culture and has tended to serve different purposes.

The web solves problems that are almost impossible to properly solve with a terminal, particularly with rendering of more complicated languages and display and interaction with sophisticated visualisations.

Pushing the terminal further while maintaining compatibility, performance and avoiding a terminal war with incompatible protocols is going to be a struggle.

Yep. Years ago I got sick of listening to people who don't believe in climate change and emission reductions due to tribalism crowing about the solar pv on their holiday house and their incredibly low electricity bills while cost of living keeps going up for lower income families. Everywhere you look anything good is twisted into a wealth transfer. If you are left behind you are never catching up now. Between the housing market and everything else the myth of a classless society has been completely obliterated in a generation.