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This is pretty cool!

What's holding me back from AI repos and agents isn't running it locally though. Its the lack of granular control. I'm not even sure what I want. I certainly don't want to approve every request, but the idea of large amounts of personal data being accessible, unchecked, to an AI is concerning.

I think perhaps an agent that focuses just on security, that learns about your personal preferences, is what might be needed.


Thanks for taking a look!

Agreed regarding the privacy/security hesitations. Running the models locally with ollama is an option, but of course there's the hardware requirements and limitations of open source models to contend with. ultimately it's a balance between privacy and ease of use, and I'm not sure that there's a good one-size-fits-all for that balance.


is your idea of granular control (roughly) a group of agents in separate containers writing back to their own designated store each sufficient, or more control than that?

I agree with the sentiment of this article.

Sadly, I'm still disagreeing while crypto kiddies are driving past me in lambo's. If its the future of money, yes we'll get there eventually, but like every technology shift, there's a lot of money to be made in the transition, not after. *

* I sold all crypto a few years ago and I'm a happier person :D


Alternatively, there's money to be lost in the transition. The vast majority of "crypto investors" did not walk away from it any richer. Some folks have gotten lucky, but it's just that: their thesis about the future of money was evidently wrong, they just happened to get the timing right. Getting lucky for the wrong reasons is not a good investment strategy.

Meanwhile, the main category of people who have consistently gotten rich off the "crypto revolution" were various scammers and pump-and-dumpers who have since moved on to meme stocks, AI content farming, and so on.

But I wouldn't use crypto as a benchmark because AI has more substance. We can debate if it's going to change the world, but you can build some new types of businesses and services if you have near-perfect natural language comprehension on the cheap.


When you see people making money from something you did not get involved in, just remember: Someone will always be luckier than you, wealthier than you, etc. It doesn't matter. Measure yourself by your own life satisfaction, not by how others are doing.

That is why I agree with the sentiment as well. I use AI a little. Not too much. And I'm as swamped with work as ever because my focus is on legacy stacks, where AI is really not strong.


Others are pointing out that many also lost money, but I think we can say something even stronger, which is that the people that got rich only did so by taking the money of the people who lost money on it. If it's the future of money, you'll be able to buy in at a stable valuation, neither winning nor losing in the transition -- that's kind of a key property of money.

> Sadly, I'm still disagreeing while crypto kiddies are driving past me in lambo's.

I know a few people who got wealthy by being early to crypto. None of them had the correct reasoning at the time: They thought BTC was going to become a common way to pay for things or that “the flippening” was going to see worldwide currency replaced with BTC. They thought they’d be kings in a new economy but instead they’re just moderately wealthy with a large tax bill they’re determined to dodge.

I know far more people who lost money on crypto, though. Some were even briefly crypto-rich but failed to sell before the crash or did things like double down on the altcoin bubble.

The second group had gone quiet about their crypto while the few people in the first group gloat and evangelize (because continued evangelization is necessary to keep their portfolios pumped). This creates an intense survivorship bias where it appears like all the crypto kiddies are wealthy, but a quiet mass of people who played with crypto are most definitely not.


The question I keep coming back to regarding the recent debate around age verification is "Why now?"

I'm 47, and I started using the internet in my early teens through BBS gateways. I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials. Why all of a sudden is this a crisis?

Perhaps I'm missing something?


Missing something? Perhaps.

Pornography is a very convenient pretext. The real target is anonymity and pseudonymity. Both have been abundantly available on the early Internet. Both were and are being gradually squeezed out from it.

Various law enforcement agencies would love to know more, always more. The more the users are required to identify themselves, link their online identity (maybe pseudonymous for other users) to their official offline identity, the easier it is to find and catch criminals. Not only criminals, of course, but even if we assume 0% nefarious intent, and only the desire to catch the evildoers who swindle grandmas out of their life's savings, this still holds.

Operators of big sites also would benefit. Easier to ban disruptive users. Many great ways to turn the precise identity into targeted ads.

The internet has become a very serious, consequential space. More like... the "real world", which was considered separate from the internet in 1990s. Now they are inseparable, so the pressures of the "real world" are equally present offline and online.


Quality comment, this is the answer. Also insightful how the nature of the internet and real world separation has changed with time. This should be obvious but this is the first time I’ve seen it stated explicitly like this.

To add to this, I suspect the data broker industry also has an interest in increasing the legitimacy of the data they sell about anyone they can get their hands on.

incongruent. first you say "pornography is just pretext" then say "it's like real world now". where in "real world" can preteen kids go and see not just porn but people limbs removed and other stuff?

pretending the actual issue doesn't exist will not help you stop laws like this


The pornography is a real issue, but not the real issue.

As many people have noted, a different system could delegate the enforcement to parents. Instead of forcing a web site (or an OS!) to collect identifying information and certify the age, we could demand that a web site would send a header stating the legal age boundary. The user's device then would be demanded to honor it, depending on device's settings. Parental controls should work, and parental controls are already there on most devices. Open-source software would have no trouble implementing parental controls, because they leave the responsibility and the choice with the user. No identity info would leak to third parties.

In a more elaborate case, a state identity provider (something that provides birth certificates, passports, etc) would provide an OAuth-like flow that would certify the age of a bearer of a short-lived token to a site which generated the token, without giving any details. This gives the parties more assurance, and gives the state a bit more visibility, but still mostly preserves the user's privacy.

I don't think that these simple ideas never came to the lawmakers' minds, or to their tech experts' minds. But it's less appealing to them, because it results in less control. Why not push for more disclosure when a chance presents itself?


if you agree that online safety problem exists then suggest better solution. you do it now of course but not in your original comment.

the parents thing doesn't work. it's one thing if parents don't give a shit if their child sees absolutely horrible stuff (in US those parents probably lose custody these days). it's another thing if parents aren't even aware that their child watches it while quiet in the bedroom. which is the problem here.

"we could demand that a web site would send a header stating the legal age boundary" can be interesting. start a petition go talk to your representstive.


> where in "real world" can preteen kids go and see not just porn but people limbs removed and other stuff?

For thirty years now, preteens, whether alone or huddled with peers, have peered at computer screens and sought these things on the World Wide Web. In the 1990s, it was porno tapes the cool kid sneaked from her parents' closet and brought to the slumber party. In the 1980s, it was sticky magazines stolen from the newsstand or an older brother's closet. The technologies that made these things possible is part of the real world.

I can't even buy a sandwich in the "real world" without a computer's involvement in the transaction.


> For thirty years now, preteens, whether alone or huddled with peers

This is so wrong I can't even. I recommend you to look some simple things like percentage of preeten internet users in 1996. For rare ones who had it at home think about how they used it. Even in US which was the first it was probably around 2 hours, not per day PER WEEK. Let alone the rest of the world. and on a bulky machine where it's way easier for parents to know when you are doing it.

and this material was very rare. with less people on internet and without total encryption (that was way pre https/tor/vpn) if a psycho criminal posts a video of doing something terrible he can be traced

> In the 1980s, it was sticky magazines stolen from the newsstand or an older brother's closet

The stuff we're talking about is not the stuff of erotic magazines.


I don't think anyone who still holds up "the dangers of porn" can argue with any credibility anymore. We have a population scale study that lasted 30 years, and millennials turned out fine. Same with violent video games and harsh language music.

What does seem to definitely be having a severe negative impact though is social media.


I wouldn’t mind having some kind of law that restricts any minor from using social media whatsoever. Because I wish the current generation of children to have a somewhat worry-free childhood like I had.

Ok but EVERY generation wants to project its childhood on to the next one and is upset that the new generation is absolutely ruined by modern culture viewing its own history, mostly forgotten, with rose-tinted glasses.

You can find thousands of years old testament to how the children are being destroyed by modern culture, and each new generation thinks THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT. (and people will agree with this and say this time with these concerns is actually different with a list of reasons)


isn't Gen Z the first generation that's scoring worse on all kinds of tests than their parents did?

seems like this time it may actually be different. and peer reviewed.


Meta likes this stuff because (a) it's a barrier to entry to new social networks and (b) it heads off the under 16 bans which have happened in other countries.

It's also valuable verifiable data for advertisers, in that it verifies real people are being served your ads, and it's going to the desired age range/appropriate audience

People often cloak their power grabs behind a move to control some vice. It was just a bunch of us nerds on BBSs back in the day. Now everyone is online. The stakes are completely different.

> "Why now?"

Because they worked on it for decades, and it's finally showing results.

> I've seen every age of the Internet, and there's always been widely available pornographic materials.

Just because something bad happened in the past, we should stay away from fixing it? Just because you didn't (probably) suffer as much as others, we should continue looking away? And that's leaving out that the world on all levels and corners today has become significant worse than in your youth.

> Why all of a sudden is this a crisis?

It's not all of a sudden. The calls' haven been around for a decade and longer, but research has become better over the years, so it's harder to ignore them. And now there is also AI, which significant speeds up the spreading of fake news, bot messages, sexualized deep fakes, and other very problematic content.


I would suggest removing your artificial filter limiting your thinking to porn. During the days of BBS type sites, the monetization of personal information was not a thing. Forcing a user to be identifiable in a government mandated manner means the data gathered about you becomes more valuable because it can be pinned to you, not an account you've made, but to you. The government likes the same result if not for the same monetary reasoning, especially this government. Knowing who you are, what you've said, what you read, watch, listen, as well as where you are/have been will all be valuable in different forms of value.

Any reasoning after that is just fluff to get people not looking at it critically to accept it.


Have you questioned whether you might have been better off without seeing ISIS decapitation videos when you were a teenager (you might be too old for that though)? Or maybe that you have something that makes you more immune to this stuff?

I think that I'm biased to think "it shouldn't be a crisis" because I saw that stuff as a kid and turned out ok, it's a prime example of survivor bias, maybe someone who saw that stuff didn't turn out that well. Also one thing I've been wondering I'm not sure if that's the beginning of my everlong cynicism. If it is, then I might have been better off without being exposed to that material that early in my life.


Nearly everyone I know that saw this stuff turned out just fine

We do not need to turn society into a police state because we're afraid the next generation might not be able to handle what we handled fine for the most part

Edge cases should not dictate the removal of our freedom & rights


These bills are specifically exempting platforms that distributed the ISIS videos (like meta), and including platforms that did not.

apt-get install isis-beheading-vids doesn't work on any Linux distribution I've seen, and it's not like Microsoft or Apple were preloading them on laptops.

These bills have nothing to do with online safety. They exist purely to establish a police state (that will currently be run by a convicted felon with child abusers as deputies -- look at what ICE has been doing to the kids they round up, especially the pregnant ones).


"bills trying to fix it are bad" != "the problem doesn't exist"

if you agree that online safety problem exists then suggest better solution. if you disagree then keep on living in a fantasy world


Pretty sure Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, etc. did worse things to people than anything any of us saw on the internet. So, should we censor history books?

I think you underestimate what people can see on the internet

And history books present this in different context. They don't show a literal video of this execution and talk about it with a different goal in mind. Like if you get a drug in clean room for necessary medical purpose vs inject yourself dirty needles under the bridge because you like it, different things


> Have you questioned whether you might have been better off without seeing ISIS decapitation videos when you were a teenager (you might be too old for that though)?

See, I have, and I think I am actually a better person for it. Videos like these show how humans are really just apes and can easily fall into doing heinous things. It helped harden my view that religion is a net negative for the world, made me a bit more careful, especially in where I choose to travel, and has given me a wider worldview.

No one is rick-rolling with Isis decapitation videos, you go to those sites, and you know what you are getting into. One of the wonders of the early internet was rotten.com, and I am very sad its gone.

How exactly is seeing what human beings are capable of going to harm anyone? It certainly isn't so "damaging" that it needs to be hidden from anyone.


Do you understand how much you are talking only out of your experience? You aren't even considering that people will react differently to seeing that stuff, or that people might not find cynicism in the human nature (or realism as you frame it) valuable, and would much rather want to see the beauty, as naive as that may be.

It might not be harmful on an objectively quantifiable measure, but it will have an effect on people and what that effect is depends on the person.


I'm the same age as you, started when I was maybe 15 on BBSes. The porn was certainly a lot harder to come by, still images that took a while to download, had to do it when family was out of sight on the family computer and clean up history after. Kids have personal devices and can go down a rabbit hole of content in their room. It seems fairly different. Age ranges are different too, 10 year olds have phones and have maybe been using an iPad their whole life.

But even then, I think if adults knew what we were up to, maybe they would have lobbied for stuff then too.

For my 10 year old, we don't allow youtube or any other algorithm doomscrolling feed. And no voice chat in online gaming. We plan on waiting until 13 for a phone, or behind-closed-doors internet, and we use parental controls.

I'm not presenting this as an argument for age verification, I think it's a naive solution that comes with major drawbacks and won't work anyway.

But the landscape is very different and I think we should try to understand where parents who support this are coming from, because lobbying from Meta or whatever isn't the only issue.

There are parents who have been making choices for their young kids and have to start letting go at some point as the kids age, and maybe, at whatever point parents stop monitoring, they would like the kids to not be fully in the deep end. I think we should acknowledge that and explain why age verification isn't a solution, rather than pretend the world is the same and pretend don't have any legitimate concerns by saying "well we turned out okay".

(edit: reworked the tone in response to feedback)


> at whatever point parents stop monitoring, they would like the kids to not be fully in the deep end

Parents want to stop monitoring their kids, but still want their kids' experiences to be catered to their ideals, so the rest of society must now bend towards what you want for your kids specifically?

What about parents who want a different set of guardrails for their kids - more limited or less limited than you? What about people who aren't kids - does their privacy or freedom not matter, just because you don't want to handle it yourselves anymore?

That sounds to me (a non-parent) like a very selfish and naive worldview. I'm assuming from your tone that you are in support of this, so would you explain to me why you think its not?


You assume from my tone I'm in support of it when I literally said I'm not presenting any such argument?

I agree with everything you said.

I just think "we turned out fine" is always a garbage argument, and worse, fails to understand what drives people to want stuff like this.

I think it's better to acknowledge the real issues parents have, and then explain why age verification is an extremely naive solution that won't solve the problems and comes with a host of other problems.


Apologies for the misunderstanding, your post read to me like you supported this type of gating, just not age verification in its current state.

I think the solution has to start and end before the internet is even involved in the equation, anything less is harm by shifting the burden.


No problem, I updated my post to make it clearer in response.

It's "Now" only because of a confluence of factors - namely, $2B spent on convincing lawmakers to do this now, because Meta doesn't wanna be fined $52B again. It's nothing to do with porn. The lawmakers passing this are passing it because "protecting the children" is always going to get them votes (even if it doesn't actually protect the children)

The value of data increases year on year, even old data, but old data is worth much less than new. But for hyperscalers we've cost the threshold, now any data at all is worth more than storage space, and the profits are too much to ignore.

It's not just targeted advertising, though you can open youtube kids/instagram/tiktok and see plenty of that and age brackets happen to perfectly align with leaked metas' advertising brackets. (5-10, 10-12) (group A), 13-15 (group B), 16-17 (group C), 18-24, 24-30.

I think it's largely driven by the increasing computing power


It has nothing to do with porn and everything to do with making anonymous use of the internet (and thus anonymous mass publishing) illegal and impossible.

This is better framed as something like "know your actor." The goal is to have everything attributable to a natural person. Nobody wants that, though, so we have say that porn isn't for kids. (Now, there's a lot of disagreement about that, but that's another matter.)

More studies are being done on the effects of social media. Social media execs have been brought in front of congress multiple times. The US tried to ban tiktok because it showed our military actions in a negative light to millions of teens.

its because we hired a generation of the greatest minds to build habit forming and addictive products. So now we're seeing signs of how bad that is for children's mental health prior to their ability to consent to that.

Blocking this is the responsibility of a parent. Spend some time to configure parental controls etc.

Pushing to turn society into a police state because parents are too tired/lazy/tech-illiterate is simply not the solution


This is akin to blaming the consumer who doesn't recycle their plastic, when in fact plastic is inherently un-recyclable and needs to be regulated at a federal level. Too bad the lobbying tricks of the plastic industry effectively shifted the blame.

> Blocking this is the responsibility of a parent. Spend some time to configure parental controls etc.

sure but the bar is low for a reason. On top of that, we're discriminating against people born to bad parents by leaving them vulnerable, arguably furthering inequality. I don't think anything is necessarily out of scope in terms of the solution, what matters is identifying the issue (i.e. the intentionally addictive properties of these platforms) and trying to reduce harm.


Edge cases where people are born to bad parents are not a reason to give up our freedom and rights

I wonder if it's because of election interference. Foreign countries bot farms basically have free reign to assault the minds of your people 24/7 online, idk how you stop that outside of identity verification systems

Locking down the entire chain of trust.

Try to start an ISP and/or become a public Certificate Authority.You will quickly run into steep requirement (admin and financial). To buy IP address space, get peering partners for traffic transit, hosting dns, hosting email (good luck getting mail delivered to the big providers without having your own users verified via mobile number). Try to build a mobile app, or phone or runtime - all the key signing, binary signing involved, the entire security model from hardware/firmware, boot, memory access, runtime safety and on and on. Then there are the intelligence agencies and various countries surveillance laws, information laws.

If you add it all together, we are already monitored 100%. They want to linked and prove the monitored device is linked a certain human beyond a doubt. Email, Mobile, Full names are not enough, they want your biometrics too. They want you serial numbers of devices and mac addresses of networked devices and SIM cards. They want it all.They want your children to have devices with camera, mic and gps trackers in. Your kids will be part of kompromat before they reach adulthood and some of them will be blackmailed by government agents and other bad actors throughout life. Some kids will be trafficked with the help of all these tech solutions, because they know exactly where your kids are at every moment.

Add home assistants, smart tv's with cameras, toys with cameras, outdoor cameras, shopping mall cameras everywhere, in-vehicle cameras and mics. Bluetooth beacons everywhere.

Add it all up and ask yourself, is this truly about child safety? Not at all. I'd argue they would be more exposed. If they wanted children safer, they'd recommend parents and schools to 100% remove kids from the internet or devices with public internet access. Why does a 10 year old need to know how to join a teams meeting and being comfortable on a video call?

Not to mention the access to weird porn and gore sites that WILL traumatize a young mind.

Then contemplate what all this data will be used for in the hands of extremists, nazi's, dictators, the effects on free speech & journalism, the propaganda machines reach on you and your family.

The internet is 10000% cooked and no longer open. It's better to disconnect from it at this point.


> Some kids will be trafficked with the help of all these tech solutions, because they know exactly where your kids are at every moment.

What the hell are you talking about? They already know where my kids are! At school which is funded by government.


Just talked to a long-time friend laughing about the state of things and how we used to have unfettered access to horrific gore photos at 14. Don't ask me what the appeal was, I have no idea, but it was possible.

This is outlined in Project 2025 (which I have not read).

As I understand it, the age verification laws are part of a three pronged plan to eliminate privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of expression online.

The goals being to expand current police abuses to include LGBTQ++, reporters, democrats, non-whites, non-christians, demonstrators, etc.

It all is predictable and makes perfect sense if you assume the goal is to hold control over the white house in 2029 while being even less popular than they currently are.


> This is outlined in Project 2025 (which I have not read).

Great sentence.

Aside from making me completely doubt everything you're stating, I don't understand why people just take it as a given that Project 2025 is something the current administration gives two shits about.

Is war in Iran in Project 2025?


> I don't understand why people just take it as a given that Project 2025 is something the current administration gives two shits about.

Because if you use project 2025 as a scorecard, the current administration is hitting all the salient points very quickly. With a score that high, inferring that the administration does in fact give two shits about it seems reasonable.


I noticed this scorecard doesn't show things that are done that _aren't_ in project 2025 and things that are directly in opposition. There's no "Did the opposite" status, just "Not started", "In progress", and "Completed".

Furthermore, looking through the list of objectives, the "completed" objectives are all fairly middle of the road conservative points, it's no surprise that many of those are marked as completed. The one's that are making headlines are mostly found in the "Not Started" sections. https://www.project2025.observer/en?sort=status-asc

It's not surprising that a conservative think tank and a conservative administration are aligned on a quite a few things but there are plenty of things in this list of objectives that the current administration has either not done or said anything regarding or has actively worked against.

As an exercise, go through all 320 objectives and see how many _you_ agree with. Plenty of them are milquetoast positions. A chunk of them are also just "continue enforcing existing laws", sinister wording for bog standard practices or broad/vague enough that every administration could probably call it completed.

In short, it's a padded list.



Because almost every action of this admin is almost a direct translation from project 2025.

Also, this administration has said they are not following project 2025. That means they are definitely following project 2025.


Rescheduling marijuana and invading Iran are conspicuously missing.

You can ignore anything in the category of immigration enforcement, DEI or gender issues in Project 2025 because Trump has been going on about that stuff long before project 2025 was ever published.

There's also a bunch of "End the Fed" type of libertarian stuff that Trump, showing himself to be a proponent, not opponent, of big government is never going to do.


As Gov you can use it to request for "real names" on the internet?

> Perhaps I'm missing something?

maybe since minors can't enter into a contract they can't agree to TOS and therefore their content is ineligible to be used as LLM training material? just guessing.


They seek monopoly. Startups can’t afford these barriers and can’t convince users to trust them with the safety and value of the verification process without being an established brand.

Did any groups recently lose control of a narrative?

Are people in that group powerful, influential and wealthy?

Would that group benefit from being able to use state power against individuals who just won't stop shining light on injustice?


"Now" is when this level and depth of mass identification and surveilance has become technologically feasible, financially valuable, and politically possible.

The political planets have aligned in many nations for private industry to lobby for this power, sating their own goals as advertisers and the state's goals as authoritarians. This is an open conspiracy between every tech giant and every government to perpetually identify every action that every person ever makes online for the sakes of advertising, propagandizing, surveiling, persecuting, and imprisoning people.

It is not a coincidence that this is occurring in all western nations at the same time; these economies are incredibly large and active, and these governments have been under attack from the far-right for decades.


An unfortunate side effect of Epstein mania is that people (particularly legislators) are more receptive than ever to the "think of the children!" strawman. This approach is highly effective right now, and it might never work again in Zuckerberg's lifetime.

America needs another Zappa.


My observation of Epstein "mania" is that politicians are revealing themselves to not particularly care about children being sexualized.

The push for age verification seems to stem from conservative states trying to appear to care about children through symbolic gestures while cutting other funding and protections for children.


Conservative states? California passed this bill first! And it's on the docket in Colorado! This is weapons-grade dark money bullshit, not a blue-or-red problem.

It's a coordinated psyop to enforce mass surveillance and control. The question we should ask ourselves is "Who are they?". Their agenda is clear already.

It all makes a lot more sense when you find out they want to declare anything lgbtq related as pornographic.

The right has figured out that they can keep queer kids (especially trans kids) in the closet if they don't let them learn what their "difference" actually is. It's "don't say gay" applied to the internet.


SLA’s usually just give you a small credit for the exact period of the incident, which is arymetric to the impact. We always have to negotiate for termination rights for failing to meet SLA standards but, in reality, we never exercise them.

Reality is that in an incident, everyone is focused on fixing issue, not updating status pages; automated checks fail or have false positives often too. :/


Yep, every SLA I've ever seen only offers credit. The idea that providers are incentivized to fudge uptime % due to SLAs makes no sense to me. Reputation and marketing maybe, but not SLAs.

The compensation is peanuts. $137 off a $10,000 bill for 10 hours of downtime, or 98.68% uptime in a month, is well within the profit margins.


Im much more concerned with customer sites being down which indicates are not impacted. They are.. :/


I've been following this report for many years, but Backblaze, as a backup service (traditionally), has very different IO patterns than many users. They originally started with consumer drives, which we found to be far too unreliable. In my experience, the BER and write cycles have a dramatic impact on overall drive performance. The MTBF declines sharply as write cycles increase, both as a percentage of IO and overall IO.

Backblaze changed IO patterns with B2, but that would be the key data for me to make this more useful: failure rate as a percentage of bytes read/written, etc.


This is an interesting topic, but the ads overlaying the content make this very hard to read :(

* Please don't suggest I install an Ad blocker.


OK, have your {dad|fifth grader|IT manager} install an ad blocker.


Ok, I suggest that you install the "Stoutner, privacy browser", which treats seeing text, as the default, with the ability to allow other content as optional, though certain sites that are still hand coded, show, as they always have....adds and all.


What ads? Install an ad blocker.


Firefox Reader View is really great. Worth giving a try if you use Firefox.


Sorry, but adblock is a genuine quality of life hack for everyone online. Since you don't want to install anything, how about working at the DNS level and/or hosts level? https://adguard-dns.io/en/welcome.html will change your mind. https://github.com/Ultimate-Hosts-Blacklist is another option for doing it in the hosts file.


Install an Ad blocker. I'd recommend uBlockOrigin on Firefox, or Firefox for mobile.

I mean just in general it makes the web less awful. Webpages are so much easier on the eyes without all the crap they try to stuff in there.

And it can prevent malware, especially for those less tech-inclined.

And it means you use less data/bandwidth, since the blocker prevents the request from ever being made in the first place.

If you want to support a site, just buy a subscription or donate to them or something.


id never do it, but you could install an ad blocker


In my experience with OFCOM, Child Safety is just the gateway to a vague list bullet points including “terrorism” and “hateful” content (vaguely defined); what could go wrong??


I don’t understand all the FSD “disdain” in these comments. FSD 13+ on HW4 is amazing. I’ve basically stopped driving and it’s a marvel of technology.

It’s hard for me to understand how everyone doesn't geek out about it all the time.


One ride in a Waymo is enough to make Tesla's tech seem uninteresting. It's like showing off your LaserDisc player in 1999.


It has been a weird trend on HN for a while now. Some Tesla articles are nearly ignored, and others just get filled with trolls.

It is fairly obvious that the loudest have little experience with the product.


> I’ve basically stopped driving

This is why - because people like you are killing other people due to technologically-inspired negligence.


These types of legal shenanigans, sadly, usually work; Politicians just keep attempting to pass the same provisions in different forms with slightly different language over a period of years until they slip, whatever it is, through.


Our countries are too big. The only way for the public to police this stuff is with small polities like the Scandinavian countries, where there isn’t too much going on.


> The only way for the public to police this stuff is with small polities like the Scandinavian countries, where there isn’t too much going on

Are you sure you aren’t proxying something else for size? Plenty of local politics in America, for example, is plenty despotic.


I think local politics varies between incredibly moral/functional and unbelievably corrupt/incompetent, depending on location (same for startups or any other group).

Larger groups are more consistent, they all have “bureaucratic” problems. One of these problems is too much happening and not enough (moral and competent) oversight*. Hence text sneaked into government bills, funds embezzled from big companies, etc.

* Ironically as other commenters point out, this text isn’t avoiding discovery, because the bill is public and there are enough concerned citizens to provide the necessary oversight. A better example is government contracts, if they were published and voted on like bills I suspect contractors would be way better (except they’d be more political unless we solve that…)


> government contracts, if they were published and voted on like bills I suspect contractors would be way better

I'd guess the opposite. As evidence I present CEO pay, which went up with more transparency.

I like the idea of making public contracts searchable. But absent controls it will just lead to the partisan poisoning and context-free excerpting that characterises our low-brow political discourse.


I’d say size is a necessary but not sufficient criterion. The county Annapolis sits in has about half a million people, and it seems like it’s possible for the Karens to keep abreast of everything that’s going on. It helps we have a local paper.


The past attempts to enact these laws have been brought to light and defeated. The current attempt has been brought to light which is evidenced by this article. Doesn’t this undermine the idea that our countries are too large for the public to police this behavior?


> Our countries are too big. The only way for the public to police this stuff is with small polities like the Scandinavian countries, where there isn’t too much going on.

In armed conflict, having a large polity can pay off — big time — while having a small one can be fatal. To name just a few examples: Belgium 1914 and 1940; (the Scandanavian) Norway and Denmark 1940; Tibet 1950; Kuwait 1990; and Chechnya 1999-2000.


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