Good. Tech companies have acted far too long like the law is something like they can get to next week.
This firm doesn’t care a whit about the impact on users - they are just too cheap to follow the rules.
If your business can’t operate without regulation it shouldn’t operate at all because it clearly relies too heavily on exploiting labour and or consumers
Do you have more of your writing available anywhere? I’m fine-tuning a model to act as someone with uncritical deference to authority, a paternal view of government, and no apparent awareness of what it takes to comply with regulation or operate a real business. Your material could be the perfect training data!
Not just LOL, but I nearly fainted from laughter. Best takedown of illiberal authoritarian bootlickers on the internet today. People must be crazy or broken if they are so brainwashed or misinformed to believe even for a second that illiberalism or government oppression will somehow make their or everyone lives better.
> This firm doesn’t care a whit about the impact on users - they are just too cheap to follow the rules.
I'm old enough to remember when one of great things about the web was the low barrier to entry.
Not every site has a large company with deep pockets behind it. Some of the websites I've run, I've run at a loss because I was interested in the subject and thought it provided real value for other people. Probably the income from these sites was in the hundreds of dollars a year range, the cost in time and effort waaay beyond that.
I don't know the actual compliance costs here - I know the cost of a UK lawyer just to review obligations and liabilities is probably going to be a few hundred quid, if not substantially more. I don't know of many non-professional, or FOSS sites that could afford that.
Your curt dismissal of this huge chunk of the internet saying they shouldn't be operating at all is mind boggling
To be clear, I think a huge chunk of the tech giants also should not be operating! They need to be regulated heavily with algorithic feeds banned, anyone under 18 banned and better compensation for content creators.
The wild west of the internet was largely a mistake and created massive social disruption for the benefit of a tiny few and was caused by regulators being asleep at the switch. It is good they are finally catching up.
I have no idea why we need to require site operators to verify users ages? Just force the mobile phone companies do it. It would be pretty trivial for apple, with a front facing camera, face detection, and then just read everything on the screen. If something bad or offensive is shown, the phone is disabled and a notification is sent to the parents and the police.
The western internet as we knew it is dead. Privacy is dead, we already live in a post-Snowden panopticon. With multiple always-on microphones in every public room and often in private rooms too. HD cameras are everywhere. If you live in any major city, hundreds to thousands of hours of footage, which might contain you, is being uploaded for public view and AI training daily.
There have been other open source deathblow laws passed in the EU like the Cyber Resilience Act and the Product Liability Directive which have been repeatedly dismissed by other commenters on hn. Earlier stuff like the GDPR was dismissed too as only affecting big companies. The arguments in support of these laws have basically been you are small so you don't need to follow them. That seems like lot of disrespect for the EU's legal system but maybe it's well deserved.
It's only a matter of time until ID verification will be mandated even to make a post like this one on sites like hn. Western companies assisted authoritarian prison states in monitoring, censoring and controlling their citizens, when they should have been doing the exact opposite. Now it's really hard to argue that it isn't possible here.
It's run by a startup incubator, and a pretty large chunk of the user population has the notion that they will eventually end up part of the rarefied population of company founders that hit the jackpot and make their fortune.
Of course that affects attitudes here, even if most people on here will never actually be a founder, let alone a highly successful one.
Yes and also their business sounds risky as hell to impressionable children. I'm sure the creators of the Online Safety Act had websites like this in mind. They're doing the UK a favor by blocking, no-one needs these porn AI bots or whatever it is they're pushing.
Colonialism ENDED the genocide that was going on in most of Africa before the Ottoman empire was defeated. A genocide generally referred in older texts as "the islamic slave trade", because islamic economies were entirely dependent on the slave trade for more than a millenium, oh and because it's part of the religion/state that islam was at the time.
Economically it was quite accurate to say that the islamic slave trade WAS islam. As in, everything else was a rounding error. Even now, because the slave trade is still easily 95% of the entire existence of the religion.
For "some" reason people are now trying to rename it "African slave trade". Not at all to get people to focus on the 1% of slaves that went to work in western colonies in the New World (which is what Americans historically called it).
Like the one the aztecs regularly unleashed upon their neighbors? Or any pre-colonial tribe in the Americas or Africa (in this case up until this day really). What did the Romans brought us really?
An excuse like "everyone else was doing it!" only goes as far as making my ancestors "not spectacularly evil", it definitely does not make them "good".
The railways are in the plus column, but would you accept your country being taken over by several different groups of aliens who draw random-seeming lines on the maps that even split up your existing cities between them, each forcing their own language and religious customs on their bit of your land, being really brutal in their suppression of any resistance campaigns, in exchange for a network of teleporter booths?
The implication of this statement is probably supposed to be that it's the west that did that. However, colonialism never conquered Africa. They took over Ottoman/muslim colonies. Muslims, and by that I mean the now dead state that is the religion, conquered 90% of the colonies, and inherited the remaining 10% from the Romans. The only big exception to that is the US.
In America, before the US there were Aztecs and Incas, both of whom were empires that ruled by fear, by regularly massacring large amounts of people.
The primary point is that it sucked, not who did it.
> However, colonialism never conquered Africa.
As I'm a British national, and the British empire was famously the biggest, my ancestors managed to get up in basically everyone's business in the colonial era.
Even aside from all that stuff we nicked and put in museums, and the war crimes the British government has even been doing some official apologising for, it was the British empire that invented the concentration camp for use against… other colonists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_...
My forebears don't get an "it's fine" badge just because the target was, in that case, a different bunch of Europeans from what is now a day-trip away.
> In America, before the US there were Aztecs and Incas, both of whom were empires that ruled by fear, by regularly massacring large amounts of people.
Yes, I know. Everything being awful everywhere before the industrial age doesn't mean what the (in that case Spanish) did was fine, it makes it the equivalent of a drug-gang turf war where nobody holds any of the belligerents in high regard.
I'm not sure how that justifies war. It just means that the outcome of a war can be better than if there never was a war. Obviously both sides in any given war believe that. Ask a few Ukrainians how that works, they can explain.
Yeah. Warring people always say that if their side wins the outcome will be better, of course. Look at Israle/Hamas
I was responding to gp, maybe wrong part of the thread.
<< "Colonialism was great. It literally took continents out of pre history and brought them to the civilized world". If this is not justification for war, I don't know what is.
And how do they know in the absence of colonialism, but just trade, these countries couldn't/wouldn't become advanced? I can equally say colonialism is what has left many of these countries in poverty and border disputes.
I actually think capitalism has merit but you need a strong government on top to ensure that a level playing field is guaranteed and maintained.
I think this partly explains China's relative success over the past few decades. In spite of certain inefficiencies that come from trying to control everything, it seems that China did a better job at providing a more level playing field for their market system (at least internally, within China). I still think it's probably not level enough though as they also have the same basic fiat system. I think they just did a better job as identifying and stomping our rent-seeking from their economy.
Good. I hope its overall era is over soon too. Insane that we allowed crypto to exist in the first place; a massive sink of time and energy just to allow criminals to defraud people easier.
When I was a kid, I had a typewriter. Was even still possible to buy ink ribbons for it in a local stationary store, not that I could afford them on pocket money, but I've not seen ink ribbons in a stationary store since the early 90s.
I think Bitcoin will be the currency of an interplanetary humanity. And I don't even own any bitcoins or think it will continue going up in the next years. But technically, blockchains will be key as store of data in the (distant) future.
Blockchains don't need to be a currency, we've already got git, it's much less computationally intensive.
If you're using the bitcoin consensus approach in an interplanetary era, you quickly end up with using the full output of Dyson swarm just to stop someone else doing the same, not for any real gain over "I trust you to keep this ledger correct because we all know what 'accountants' and 'lawsuits' are".
"Talking about" is relatively easy for all four; but IMO the use of accountants and lawsuits is much more likely than people using Bitcoin and JavaScript.
If we don't have lawsuits, there's no process by which someone's failure to have an accountant could be held against them. If you don't have something accountant-shaped that can examine the real world, then you have no way to audit that your debit of 100 Martian Pesos was balanced with a credit of 100 traditional Martian didgeridoos, no matter if the Martian Peso was a cryptocurrency, a fiat currency, or commodity money consisting of transmuted post-transuranic-island-of-stability-metal. If you don't care about that, you're probably only playing with money and assets anyway and are functionally post-scarcity.
We might be post-scarcity, annihilated, or post-apocalyptic in 100 years, but none of these three would likely keep Bitcoin, and only one JavaScript.
Bitcoin is absolute crap for interplanetary use. Delay to Mars is between 3 and 22 minutes. So at worst you would have 2 blocks in between. Have fun with double spends. Or distributing the mining...
Expand to other solar system and it will get worse still.
Crypto is just messages in a permissionless p2p network. To not “allow” it to exist is the legislature banning what is presently considered protected expression/free speech.
Crypto is speech, not property.
I really don’t think you’d like where that can of worms leads.
It doesn’t even matter if you like cryptocurrencies or not; we all have a vested interest in being able to create p2p networks amongst the whole internet and send any kind of messages/frames within them that we wish.
Similarly savings accounts and loans are just messages that describe agreements between private parties.
So how can we have bank regulation, when everything that a bank does is just speech?
The answer is that the law is interested in the content of communications, and whether the messages are cryptographically peer-to-peer this-or-that is irrelevant. If your crypto messaging is about selling drugs or unregistered securities, it's not much of an excuse that you were doing it peer-to-peer.
The difference is that bank has a CEO that can take your money or loose it by doing risky things with your money.
Bitcoin network doesn't have a CEO. It is what it is and will always be that. Bitcoin network will not decide, at some point, to lend out your bitcoin at 100x leverage. There will never be a run on Bitcoin network because it always has the same amount of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin network is already "regulated" by the code.
Bitcoin regulations are merely governments trying to regain control they had with banks (they can get all the info they want about you, they can order banks to shutdown your account, like Canadian government did).
They’re called virtual currencies for a reason; they don’t actually exist. It’s just a set of consensus rules about who can make which transfers. The transfers themselves are just packets. To use bitcoin is to send packets containing signatures, nothing more.
Practically speaking, they can’t be anything but speech.
What you call it doesn't matter. If you can use it like a currency, it's property. Even if you can't use it like a currency but it's tradable at all, it's property.
That's a very first world opinion. You can find physical crypto-fiat exchange booths all over the developing world. Because usual banking gets complicated when you passport is not first-class.
Having no details about your misadventure I cannot be a judge for the case, I just can say for my need (sending money to family members) it always worked well. Though you definitely need a practical experience (even if you're techie) to get it right. Not sure it would work well for a travel cause you have to measure reputations, and assess concomitant risks which is hard to do when you aren't a part of community, don't speak language, and can't read omens so to say. However, as a counterexample, my colleague who visited Argentina some years ago got scammed at usual exchange, and robbed 10 minutes later (which she believes to be connected events) so maybe having cash is not necessary better in some places where foreigner is a game to hunt.
That is interesting. I do wonder, given all the volatility, if they are really used by the general population there or if they mostly exist to facilitate questionable business activities.
It seems like you missed the elephant in my commentary: there are plenty of "general population" who can't use banking system at least cross-border. So imagine yourself in need to choose between 1) significant risk of frozen transfers, or even not having account at all at a place you are now, and also maybe risk of extortion and corruption at a place where recipients are, and 2) this scary VOLATILITY? Also, in practical terms there are stablecoins which are quite stable, and bitcoin has been mostly growing for years now
I honestly can’t think of reasons to use AI. At work I have to give myself reminders to show my bosses that I used the internal ai tool so I don’t get in shit.
I don’t see the utility, all I see is slop and constant notifications in google.
You can say skill issue but that’s kind of the point; this was all dropped on me by people who don’t understand it themselves. I didn’t ask or want to built the skills to understand ai. Nor did my bosses: they are just following the latest wave. We are the blind leading the blind.
Like crypto ai will prove to be a dead end mistake that only enabled grifters
One recent thing I did was make cute little illustrations for an internal slide deck. I’m not even taking work away from an artist, there was no universe where I would have paid someone to do this, but now every presentation I give can be much more visually engaging than they would have been previously.
The reason your bosses are being obnoxious about making people use the internal AI tool is to push them into thinking about things like this. Perhaps at your company it’s genuinely not useful, but I’ve seen a lot of people say that who I’m pretty confident are wrong.
I've never heard of anyone having that reaction. Obviously hard to know if they're just not telling me, but I kinda doubt there's a large intersection between people who are vehemently anti-AI and people who assume that any clip art they don't recognize is AI.
I’m one of those. I immediately tune out of any presentation that has any sign of ai content because clearly the speaker doesn’t value me as an audience member
Because of their behavior? Violence was one of the main ways actors resolved conflicts in this period. Didn't like a new tax or that the King appointed his cousin or not your cousin Bishop? Revolt! Have a battle, whoever wins the fight gets his way.
Clovis I the would have absolutely used centralizing tools like railways and the telegraph to enforce his rule more uniformly and ensure his dynasty's success. He only reason why he didn't was because he couldn't.
Dark ages monarchs spent all their time trying to stabilize their regime and enforce their will on the society. We know this because we know how much time they spent marching around their areas putting down revolts and fighting off invasions.
> Violence was one of the main ways actors resolved conflicts in this period
Violence or threat of violence are still powerful tools.
> because we know how much time they spent marching around their areas putting down revolts and fighting off invasion
Medieval war was mostly seasonal. Also, war was mostly fought against neighbors or sometimes in the holy land. as far as revolts go, post-enlightenment slave revolts were much more common than revolts in the middle ages, though they're often not well-taught in schools. In today's world, my country is involved in hot and cold conflicts all over the world. I'd claim we're more warlike now because we can be.
OMB got hacked years ago by the Chinese. Access to our systems and data by Xi/Putin is very pre-DOGE. Maybe they made it less secure, say from not very secure to super not very secure. I’d be willing to believe that, but the claimant has to first admit the systems are already open to foreigner influence/domestic spies.
reply