Okay. Let's say everything you said was true. Why is it acceptable for white men to say, "hey, I'm being discriminated against, I would like to oppress everyone else so I can feel better" instead of what historically oppressed minorities do which is advocate for the better of their demographic even in the face of opposition.
This difference in action is why I think that people have a hard time having empathy. These said to be white men are not pushing for bettering themselves by making an equal environment, they are pushing to better themselves by knocking everyone else down. We can't say that others would do the same in their shoes because they didn't.
Because the response they are receiving when they 'advocate for the better of their demographic (and the type of response that is turning them sour/disillusioned) is:
"Let's say everything you said was true" - iteria (needlessly implying it's a lie/not happening)
"someone is providing an easy scapegoat for their own problems" - tayo42 (implying what they are experience/feeling isn't real/valid. This takes some temporary bullshit that they are feeling and ends up ossifying it into ugliness/a horrible position/a shit worldview, and drives them into horrible online communities designed to take advantage of this all and feeding them into the trash right pipeline).
I'm not justifying it, I hate that I'm losing my boy into it, but I can only push so much without it pushing him harder into 'one side doesn't validate my feelings so I'm going the other way'. I think a little empathy from his peers would have gone a long way. Instead he was ostracized by his peers when he moved back home because he went through a crappy situations that seriously impacted his life and wanted someone to share a little empathy with him, because he was a white male asking for that empathy.
I can have a lot of empathy for someone who had explicit promises broken but apart from this sounding like a completely made up story it has no bearing on his skin color or sex. People are taken advantage of all the time and promises, even contracts are broken all the time. Your 'son' has taken the route of victimization rather than taking the high road. Getting screwed over is one thing, turning that in to bigotry is quite another. Like even if you were screwed over BY bigots its not a reason to become one.
Wow, glad you can tell I'm a liar based on absolutely nothing.
People can have down/shitty bits without just throwing them away/writing them off as irredeemable. Especially when they are frustrated over a specific event. Frustration that normally we try and help them leave behind. But for some reason in this situation 1. It's not true/didn't happen and 2. My son is trash for caring about it. I'm not around this stuff much, I don't do social media, I don't watch TV, and I live remote, but I'm getting a better sense of how my son went such the wrong direction over this.
Nowhere did I justify anything. I complained I want my son back and I refuse to write him off. Maybe check your lack of compassion, quickness to judge, willingness to write people off, and reading comprehension.
You first say "sounds like a made up story" and then you go on to assert that "it has no bearing on his skin color or sex"
Where are you even coming from with that?
The Op said directly "Once it was all successfully running the promise was broken and he was passed up because he was a white male (this was explicitly the reason"
The problem with that idea is that you need evangelists. It's not something that Nintendo will feel now, but I have successfully converted 6 families into PC gaming with my kid. I caught them at kindergarten and now they are in Valve's garden. My sister's family and her circle is all Playstation. Her kids have never touched Nintendo.
Sure there are people who don't care, but those people don't bring people into the fold. It's a slow erosion. It's how Microsoft is losing ground to Chromebooks and Macs. People who don't know aren't hearing that they need a windows machine as much. They hear they need a Mac for security/ease of use or all they need is a Chromebook because they just surf the web anyway.
Microsoft of course will be fine because they have business on lock, but they used to have consumers as well.
I graduated into a bad market and I took a shitty job 5 states away with low pay. I was basically a warm body while I waited out the clock on being considered a recent grad. I'm so lucky I had 3 internships so I could fake being an experienced junior and truly start my career.
A lot of my peers were too good for those kinds of jobs and while they started their careers at the same time, they didn't make industry and collect paychecks while they did it, so I think I made the correct choice about how to spend those 18months.
I'm frome trade family and I've seen the opposite. The ones who actually stay in the trade and don't step onto management of some sort are broken down in old age. It looks fine at 40, but by 50 you see the impact and by 60 the difference is alarming. Of course you maintain physical fitness by virtue of what they do, but the amount of injuries they acclimate is also worth considering, especially since an office worker can just get a better chair and run on occasion to mitigate risk. Not so for trade jobs. You normally must stop doing the trade and manage those who do it to maintain your health.
I wonder about that. I ponder what Amazon's book selling sector (and really the whole part where it sells things) would look like without the money printing machine of AWS. If Amazon didn't have that would they really be able to do what they do and burn the industry down.
I don't disagree that bookstores are probably not that profitable, but I do think that Amazon is taking all the oxygen out of the room and not necessarily by being better, but have having a dragon hoard of cash that probably wasn't generated by selling books.
You don't even need such fancy examples. There are plenty of codebases where people are working with code that is over a decade old and has several paradigms all intermixed with a lot of tribal knowledge that isn't documented in code or wiki. That is where AI sucks. It will not be able to make meaningfully change in that environment.
There is also the frontend and tnpse code bases don't need to be very old at all before AI falls down. NPM packages and clashing styles in a codebase and AI has been not very helpful to me at all.
Generally speaking, which AI is a fine enhancement to autocomplete, I haven't seen it be able to do anything more serious in a mature codebase. The moment business rules and tech debt sneak in in any capacity, AI becomes so unreliable that it's faster to just write it yourself. If I can't trust the AI to automatically generate a list of exports in an index.ts file. What can I trust it for?
When is the last time you tried using LLMs against a large, old, crufty undocumented codebase?
Things have changed a lot in the past six weeks.
Gemini 2.5 Pro accepts a million tokens and can "reason" with them, which means you can feed it hundreds of thousands of lines of code and it has a surprisingly good chance of figuring things out.
OpenAI released their first million token models with the GPT 4.1 series.
OpenAI o3 and o4-mini are both very strong reasoning code models with 200,000 token input limits.
These models are all new within the last six weeks. They're very, very good at working with large amounts of crufty undocumented code.
Ultimately LLMs don’t really understand what the code does at runtime. Sure, just parsing out the codebase can help make a good guess but in some cases it’s hard to trust LLMs with changes because the consequences are unknown in complex codebases that have weird warts nobody documented.
Maybe in a generation or two codebases will become more uniform and predictible if fewer humans do it by hand. Same with self driving cars, if there were no human drivers out there the problem would become trivial to conquer.
That's a lot less true today than it was six weeks ago. The "reasoning" models are spookily good at answering questions about how code runs, and identifying the source of bugs.
They still make mistakes, and yeah they're still (mostly) next token predicting machines under the hood, but if your mental model is
"they can't actually predict through how some code will execute" you may need to update that.
So does being vegetarian or vegan. So does being not the dominant culture in any aspect of life. That's a decision for parents to make and honestly "they'll be left out" is such a crap parenting take. Especially since it's a bunch of parents together who don't want their kid to have access thinking this together. If they actually talked to each each or just made a stand so people could see, we wouldn't even have this so called social cost.
I'm seeing this as a parent in real time. I'm actually changing my kid's friend's parent behaviors by simply being like, "Cool. But my kid isn't/is going to do that" I don't know when parenting happened by social committee, but I don't believe in it.
> I don't know when parenting happened by social committee, but I don't believe in it.
It's always been the case. We've just become so individualistic, at least in some western cultures, that we rail against it. There's even an old saying "It takes a village to raise a child".
Your points only make sense in the absence of bad and/neglectful parents. For many decades it was required to prove age in order to consume porn. Porn on the internet ought to have the same requirement. I don’t know the best way to implement it but since the industry isn’t trying to find a solution then government should impose one.
Then the government should come up with a good way to prove age that does not negatively impact privacy. It shouldn't be possible for "who is viewing what porn (or other thing)" to be accidentally leaked; because it should be possible to not store the "who" part.
Such a proof does not exist. It is already the case that your porn viewing habits can be leaked. It’s just that at present the one storing the information is not the government.
Then create one, or something much better than is being demanded, first; before demanding companies use it.
If a porn company has to collect all the information about me (name, address, age, etc) and keep it in their database then, if they get hacked, then all that information, connected to what I viewed, is available to the hackers.
If the porn company has an ID that it assigns each person, and it reaches out to some government agency to say "is this person of age" (without their internal ID), then stores "yes/no" with the ID; then hacking cannot (or is much less likely to be able to) connect "what account has viewed what" with "what human being is attached to the account".
Effectively, by making the porn site need to collect and maintain personal information, privacy is made less safe. If the government is going to demand proof of age, then the government is on the hook for supplying a reasonable way to check it.
Years ago Google released anonymized browsing data to researchers. The researchers were able to determine who did the searches. I imagine a state actor can already determine almost everyone’s online activity.
There's definitely some critical information missing there. I don't think you could individually identify me if all you had to go on was the text and timestamp of the searches I made within the past 24 hours. At least yesterday I didn't even look up any local businesses on maps.
State actor and porn site operator are two very different things. Pointing to the former in this context reads like a non sequitur to me.
I believe most websites keep track of viewing history and ip addresses of where that history comes from. I believe if the government wanted to determine what your internet history is they could do so with a great deal of accuracy. As such I think the complaint that requiring proof of age would be a privacy nightmare is not relevant.
We already live in an age of relatively little privacy.
A targeted investigation by the government is not the same as dragnet surveillance is not the same as sharing the equivalent of my driver's license with some random site operator who can potentially turn around and sell that data (or just inadvertently leak it). The complaint is relevant because the proposed measure would make the status quo significantly worse than it currently is. That applies regardless of how bad it already is at present.
The government could fairly easily gain access to the contents of a security deposit box. That doesn't justify a policy requiring proactively declaring their contents to the authorities.
And all of that is before we even get to the essential question - would the proposed measure actually accomplish the officially stated goal?
So after a protracted back and forth your reasoning comes down to the following. The government is already engaging in dragnet surveillance. Somehow this automagically unmasks VPN usage (global dragnet (as opposed to targeted) traffic correlation on that scale would be a seriously impressive feat) in addition to any other privacy measures a typical individual might take. Therefore we should be okay with a system that enables the government to see you registering with various websites, or alternatively with a system that reveals various personal information to said website operator, or alternatively both simultaneously.
Or to summarize, the situation is already organically bad so everyone should be okay if we enact laws that artificially make it even worse in new ways.
To be blunt your reasoning seems entirely specious to me.
It’s not ok to allow easy access to hardcore pornography by minors. There is already virtually no privacy in these matters in the sense that Google and others already track us so the argument against age verification on privacy grounds is weak. As with most things there are tradeoffs and there is no perfect solution. I favor age verification being the law. You don’t.
The choice between you and others keeping the belief that your porn viewing habits are completely anonymous vs. allowing minors unfettered access to hardcore pornography I choose the latter as the more important issue.
> It’s not ok to allow easy access to hardcore pornography by minors.
I don't believe anyone here suggested that it was.
> Google and others already track us
This is not related to the discussion at hand. I already explained to you. Google does not track me on non-google sites. My state government does not track my browsing history. Neither does the federal government.
> the argument against age verification on privacy grounds is weak
You are responding with nonsense and ignoring the information I provided.
> As with most things there are tradeoffs and there is no perfect solution.
An empty platitude. The thing you are arguing for fundamentally does not work to accomplish the stated goal, although it is quite likely to accomplish other unstated goals. The "tradeoff" is a systematic loss of privacy that is likely to weaken civil liberties in the long run.
> keeping the belief that your porn viewing habits are completely anonymous vs. allowing minors unfettered access
Yet another misrepresentation. At this point I have to assume that your behavior is intentional. I'm left with the impression that you are an ideologically motivated actor who is fully aware that you don't have a leg to stand on but is attempting to sway the perception of an unseen audience anyhow.
The actual choice presented here is between a "solution" that openly invites government overreach without actually solving the stated problem versus the current status quo or possibly some alternative approach. Honestly I've yet to be convinced of the issue with the current status quo. Parental controls exist. Whitelists exist. Why can't we expect parents to do their jobs by parenting?
The mainstream social networks don't permit nudity. If you really have so little faith in your own child's judgment then whitelist Facebook, Wikipedia, and a few others and call it a day. Although I do have to wonder. Assuming they're a teenager, why do you have so little faith in their cognitive abilities?
In the end I'm reasonably certain that unfettered access to social networks is far worse for development than unfettered access to hardcore pornography. C'est la vie.
The fact that there are already many threats to our privacy is not a reason to not push back on new threats. Rather, it's a reason to push back harder, and then try to fix the existing threats, too.
That's just not possible in practice. There's lots of people who enjoy publishing their sex, not commercially. There's no place under a single jurisdiction that can be filtered or required to prove age. Any social network will contain groups of people using it to distribute porn. When common ones are closed, dedicated ones are created.
I don’t understand what you are saying. The government can force providers to make their users prove their age. And people can violate the law and try to avoid this.
I can believe this as a human who fasts. I just don't eat every other day. I've fasted for multiple days. You would amazed at how much the scale doesn't move. I can lose zero weight after 36 hours of nothing but water entering me. The body is less CICO and more a system trying to maintain homeostasis as much as possible and pulling ever lever it can.
Yes, eventually eating every other day I did lose weight, but we're talking a steady glide of 1-2lbs a week nothing as severe as people would expect a severely overweight person who only ate half the week to lose.
You can do both. I'm not sure why people have this as an either or thing. My kid (6) plays outside after school and watches youtube or whatever on her tablet. I don't consider it much different than when I did the same and came home to play videogames. I have greatly restricted youtube because I do think it's a blight on my kid's mind, but she has other apps like PBS and hell even good ol' digital junk food silver surfer. Everything in moderation.
In the 1990s, there wasn't a free TV channel for children in Britain. At the right time of day there might be two choices, later only one, then nothing.
It was not unusual not to want to watch what was available, and have to do something else.
I think this is a huge difference compared to modern video media.
This difference in action is why I think that people have a hard time having empathy. These said to be white men are not pushing for bettering themselves by making an equal environment, they are pushing to better themselves by knocking everyone else down. We can't say that others would do the same in their shoes because they didn't.