So don’t allow accounts with ages set below the limit like they already do for under 13s. Why does this translate to every other site wanting my government ID or a scan of my face?
Just this past 12 months both my drivers license and passport have been involved in data breaches and there are no penalties or recompense for the companies at fault, so my patience for providing ID is near zero.
> So don’t allow accounts with ages set below the limit like they already do for under 13s. Why does this translate to every other site wanting my government ID or a scan of my face?
Because self inputed age fields don't work. People just lie to access what they want.
You have to understand that the goal here is not token compliance but actually limiting teenagers exposure to something we now know to be highly addictive and damaging to mental health.
Clearly, the market is not able to self restrict and will exploit every opportunities given to it. It's only logical to take stronger restriction. That's basically bringing regulations on social media on the same track as tobacco and alcohol.
Ok, let's assume for today that age gating is the thing to to.
Requiring ID is not entirely the right approach here I think. You're forcing people to reveal PII for limited gain, and building systems you can't knock down later.
The EU is working on a zero knowledge proof system for exactly this purpose, but it doesn't quite seem to be ready for prime time yet.
The restricting law is mostly concerned with the age gating, not the how.
You can expect another law or directive to explain how it has to be done. In the EU, GDPR does apply so you can be sure that poorly storing ID copies for this purpose will not fly.
But, I think it's clearly what ID is for and a legitimate use case for electronic ID. ID is the tool the state uses to give you a way to prove you are who you pretend to be.
I think there's something a bit funny in worrying about giving a copy of your IDs to companies who already know everything about you from your full social graph to your political leanings and interests.
> I think there's something a bit funny in worrying about giving a copy of your IDs to companies who already know everything about you from your full social graph to your political leanings and interests.
I believe it's because the governments (which are far more powerful than any "corporation", because they have the de facto monopoly of violence: Microsoft can sue you, but the government can just jail you) can then pressure said companies if there's something that is not liked, with all consequences that come from there.
There's no need to bring conspiracy theories in, FTR. The power of the government must be always limited and bound by strong chains, and this goes in the opposite direction.
> I believe it's because the governments (which are far more powerful than any "corporation", because they have the de facto monopoly of violence: Microsoft can sue you, but the government can just jail you) can then pressure said companies if there's something that is not liked, with all consequences that come from there.
But the idea that giving your ID changes anything is a fiction. These platforms already require you to provide your phone numbers or an email. They have your location. They already know who you are and they can already be pressured by the government for all that. They don't even need to be pressured actually. They willfully share a ton of information as has been shown time and time again. The ID that you can somehow get plausible deniability regarding the association between your social media profile and identity is a complete myth.
> There's no need to bring conspiracy theories in, FTR. The power of the government must be always limited and bound by strong chains, and this goes in the opposite direction.
I don't think a theorical, overblown and mostly fictitious increase in risks trumps the very real need to limit the armful impact of these actors. It makes for ok-ish lobbying but that's pretty much it.
This approach is just fine for the industry: delegate the problem to the lowest, shadiest bidder. After all, privacy breaches aren't their problem. If governments want an ID system they should provide one.
We have gone from the industry clamouring that what's being done now is not possible and spending millions of lobbying money against it, to such laws spreading like wildfire.
The next step is the (inevitable) mess up because implementations won't be foolproof, followed by yet more millions of lobbying money being spent to amplify the effect of these mess ups.
Eventually we will come to a new normal. It will take time. But the hope is that the cat is out of the bag and we don't come back to a model that we know hurts children and pretend it's just how it is.
> You have to understand that the goal here is not token compliance but actually limiting teenagers exposure to something we now know to be highly addictive and damaging to mental health.
If this would have been the case, proper parental controls would have been in place everywhere.
Instead, parental controls are only used to maximize profits.
The tension between freedom and public health is obviously very real. That's why liberal democracies generally rely on public debate and expert opinions to decide what should be controlled and what should be widely available.
Turns out, the expert opinions on social media is not very good and very much in favour of a ban for minors. Also turns out that the public is apparently in support of the ban.
but no parent lets their kid play with either land mines or crack cocaine do they? cos the dangers are real. if the dangers were real, YOU wouldnt be on it would you?
Just like porn, its so dangerous kids just CANNOT be shown it, yet fine for adults obviously. that is not the same for crack cocaine and land mines (ie real dangers)
Good luck with that. On Android or Windows Google or Microsoft has control on what you can run with parental controls. (I don't know if on Apples iOS parental controls work as expected).
I’m very interested to watch (not as much to experience…) what this will do to economies like Australia where the middle class and up are driving a shockingly large percentage of actual spending in the economy. If the historically wealthy white-collar classes ceased to be able to afford their mortgages and rent, stopped buying discretionary items, and stopped eating out, I think the economy as a whole would just stop.
If I was one of these pseudo-oligarchy members, I would be a lot more worried about a large percent of the population becoming disaffected and angry.
Thats just… weird? Why would you want to use somebody else’s fridge? Like I get its a few hundred dollars but they last decades. The Samsung fridge I still have was the very first appliance I ever purchased when I moved out at 18. Added to the fact that basically no free-standing appliances are included with rentals here, other than clothes dryers which I also hate and swap for my own.
We just bought a new fridge yesterday. We lugged our old one around between 5 different properties - 20 years old, still going strong.
The big problem is that fridges are not a standard size, and hence the spaces in kitchens are not a standard size. So there's a good chance when you move it won't fit (ours only worked because it's so small - which also made moving it not too onerous). It's a much better result for everyone if the apartment/house has a fridge that perfectly fits the space.
Also:
>Why would you want to use somebody else’s fridge?
This is a weird question. You're ok with using "someone else's" apartment, someone else's toilet even. But you draw the line at a fridge?
I've not rented in LA county, but everywhere I've rented and the three houses I've bought all came with a fridge. They're large and awkward to move, and they typically last a long time. Why would I want to move one?
Might be nice to have a new one with no one else's mess, but they do clean up pretty fully when you take out all the shelves.
Why would you ever want the hassle of moving a refrigerator around if you’re only going to be somewhere for a couple of years? Not to mention the potential damage to the apartment you can accidentally cause by moving such a large appliance around.
>Thats just… weird? Why would you want to use somebody else’s fridge? Like I get its a few hundred dollars but they last decades.
Citation needed on the longevity of new/fancy refrigerators past warranty. Heard too many horror stories. Even our basic LG had a recall on the compressor that we thankfully weren't affected by (yet) and has an issue with the gaskets not sealing very well all the time.
Alas, it's one of the few models that will fit into our tight space and still give us enough space (it has the handles built into the door, rather than sticking out another ~2 inches).
My experience with eSIM has so far been quite negative. I’ve upgraded phone twice since being forced to use one by my carrier and it’s been a pain both times. The initial setup of scanning a QR code was nice, why is every subsequent SIM change a 10 step dance in an app (or worse a support call) rather than one phone showing the QR and the other scanning it?
Once this phone needs updating, I’ll be swapping carrier to one that has regular SIM cards.
This reads like more overworked salaried employees mentally justifying spending their own time on work. Once you start setting the expectation that you’ll spend your own time doing work that couldn’t be finished during the week, that’s what your employer is going to expect. And may also expect of your colleagues. I’m sure they’ll appreciate that…
Personally, I log off at 5pm friday and don’t think about anything work related until after at least one coffee somewhere in the vicinity of 9am the next monday.
Rather than improving testing for fallible accessibility assists, why not leverage AI to eliminate the need for them? An agent on your device can interpret the same page a sighted or otherwise unimpaired person would giving you as a disabled user the same experience they would have. Why would that not be preferable? It also puts you in control of how you want that agent to interpret pages.
I'm optimistic that modern AI will lead to future improvements in accessibility tech, but for the moment I want to meet existing screenreader users where they are and ensure the products I build are as widely accessible as possible.
It adds loads of latency for one. If you watch someone who is a competent screen reader user you'll notice they have the speech rate set very high, to you it'll be hard to understand anything. Adding an LLM in the middle of this will add, at least, hundreds of milliseconds of latency to interactions.
The golden rule of LLMs is that they can make mistakes and you need to check their work. You're describing a situation where the intended user cannot check the LLM output for mistakes. That violates a safety constraint and is not a good use case for LLMs.
I, myself, as a singular blind person, would absolutely love this. But we ain't there yet. On-device AI isn't finetuned for this, and neither Apple nor Google have shown indications of working on this in release software, so I'm sure we're a good 3 years away from the first version of this.
While not a complete rebuttal, allow me the following. I manage a team of 4 scrum masters each with 5-6 engineers. We provide services via a user interface we'll call the console, as would be fairly familiar to any B2B or B2C service provider. The backends of this portal are split up by functional area, so we have a compute management service providing CRUD apis for dealing with our compute offerings, a storage service for CRUD on our storage offerings, a network service for interacting with networks etc. all sharing a single, albeit sharded, underlying data store.
My teams pick up a piece of work, check out the code, run the equivalent of docker compose up, and build their feature. They commit to git, merge to dev, then to main, and it runs through a pipeline to deploy. We do this multiple times a day. Doing that with a large monolith that combines all these endpoints into one app wouldn't be hard, but it adds no benefits, and the overhead that now we have 4 teams frequently working on the same code and needing to rebase and pull in change, rather than driving simple atomic changes. Each service gets packaged as a container and deployed to ECS fargate, on a couple of EC2 instances that are realistically a bit oversubscribed if all the containers suddenly got hammered, but 90% of the time they don't, so its incredibly cost effective.
When I see the frequent discussions around microservices, I always want to comment that if you have a disfunctional org, no architecture will save you, and if you have a functional org, basically any architecture is fine, but for my cases, I find that miniservices if you will, domain driven and sharing a persistence layer, is often a good way to go for a couple of small teams.
> we have 4 teams frequently working on the same code and needing to rebase and pull in change, rather than driving simple atomic changes.
You have to pull in changes either way. Either there are contract changes between teams or there aren't. If there aren't, you don't need to rebase just do squash and merge. If there are, then you're going to either find out about the changes now or you're going to find out about them in production when your container starts throwing errors.
Just as I’m sure producers would love Australia to stop labelling produce for use of hormones and pesticides. But in both cases, there is a consumer interest in buying high quality products free of polluting elements, and in many cases, supporting actual humans doing work.
He seems to be intentionally missing the point of most of the complaints in order to direct away from his core area. The many legitimate criticisms of windows poor user experience lately will eventually drive change, but long will that take?
Not to mention, I can find AI perfectly impressive and still have absolutely no day-to-day use for it… certainly not enough to justify it taking over my operating system experience.
Heck, I Do have day-to-day use for it, and I still don't want it to completely take over how I use and interact with my OS.
Nor do I ever want to have a voice conversation with my computer to where it responds in an uncanny valley voice. If I do want to use voice, it's to give a command. No response needed. "Hey computer, call John" that's it. Do the thing, don't talk back. A glorified voice assistant is all the further it needs to go.
Possibly too little too late. Even my uninterested family and friends are moving over to MacBooks just due to not enjoying windows 11 or not wanting to upgrade hardware to get a minor OS change. Between that and valve looking to move on the casual / console gaming space with the new steam hardware and devs already being split between macs and linux, they’re going to have a hard time coming back if they fumble this for much longer.
Just this past 12 months both my drivers license and passport have been involved in data breaches and there are no penalties or recompense for the companies at fault, so my patience for providing ID is near zero.
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