bradley13

It's much more than parents' groups. This is coming "top down". For example, here in Switzerland the government decided E-IDs would be a great idea. The population killed the proposal the first time, with a referendum. So the government tried again, and we failed to kill it the second time.

This is happening simultaneously in many Western countries. It is clearly somehow coordinated. You don't need a tinfoil hat to see the conspiracy.

Equally clearly, this is a first step to requiring identity, and ultimately government approval for your activities in the internet.

Somehow, we really must reign in the political class, before we truly land in a dystopia.

"For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS."

I don't think so. Most people just want to get to their websites or email. They don't care about the OS, and may not even know what an OS is.

The problem is that they may just click "yes" on any popups, to make them go away - which is probably what Microsoft wants. "Yes" track me, "yes" show me ads, etc.

For your average user, Xubuntu or Mint are both great choices: simple, understandable desktops, and otherwise they stay out of the way. I set up Xubuntu for my elderly BIL a few months ago. He's a smart guy, but completely non-technical. One support call since, otherwise he has reported no problems.

Credit cards as a while use a security model from...what, the 1970s? Sure, they've patched by adding the 3-digit CVC, but really? A huge industry can't do better than that? Honestly, it's pathetic...

Exactly this. I want to be able to ask the questions above, but this is nearly impossible in most forums.

Question a clickbait "we're all gonna die" prediction, and you are immediately branded as a "denier", and no further discourse is possible.

Growing corn for fuel only makes sense due to government subsidies, achieved through lobbying. Otherwise, it is a stupid and wasteful idea.

This is true, practical quantum computing is always "just a couple of years away".

At the same time, moving to more secure encryption really isn't difficult. How many times have algorithms been deprecated over the past 20 or so years? It's time to do it again.

Let's just make sure that the NSA hasn't worked in any backdoors. At latest since Snowdon, anything they work on is suspect.

Mass agriculture and pesticides.

Pretty clearly not. It would seem that beta amyloids correlate with Alzheimer's, but do not cause it.

The problem us "consensus science". You could get funding to research beta amyloids, but not to research any competing hypotheses.

It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.

"our strongest set of safeguards to date"

How much capability is lost, by hobbling models with a zillion protections against idiots?

Every prompt gets evaluated, to ensure you are not a hacker, you are not suicidal, you are not a racist, you are not...

Maybe just...leave that all off? I know, I know, individual responsibility no longer exists, but I can dream.

Ok, what am I missing? exe.dev says: "$20/month for your VMs One price, no surprises. You get 2 CPUs, 8 GB of RAM, and 25 GB of disk".

Fine, their UI is different, but I don't see any real difference from other providers.

Your comment is way off-base. If you publish a paper, the expression is copyrighted, but your algorithm is not protected at all. If you want to protect the algorithm, you need a patent. Then, the person "making billions" needs to pay you a license fee.

However, even then:

- An algorithm is not patentable. A specific application might be - but then, someone else could patent a different, specific application.

- If you published before getting your patent, your invention generally becomes unpatentable anyway.

However, we were discussing copyright. Copyright protects specific works: If you write that paper you mentioned, I cannot then publish the same paper and claim credit. If you paint a picture, I cannot sell copies of that picture. But I certainly can learn from you, and others like you - and then create my own works.

The fact that AI is more efficient at this? So what? That does not in any way affect the principle.

If you put stuff on the internet, people (and machines) can see it. How do you think human artists learn? By looking at other people's artwork. AI can do exactly the same thing.

As for code: All of my code is open source. I don't care if people (or machines) learn from it. In fact, as a teacher, I sincerely hope that they do!

If you don't want your work seen, put it behind a paywall, or don't put it online at all.

The US forced stuff like this - and much more - on other countries, with FATCA.

Just one example: Foreign banks must report all financial activities of Americans to the US. An American official wad asked in an interview if the US would then report financial activities of non-Americans to their home tax authorities. The answer was "lol, no, that would be too much effort".

I am having a moment of Schadenfreude...

This. It's like the exaggerated safety instructions everywhere: "do not lean ladder on high voltage wires". Only worse: because you can choose to ignore such instructions when they don't apply, but Claude cannot.

In the best case, wrapping users in cotton wool is annoying. In the worst case, it limits the usefulness of the tool.

Byte was an amazing magazine in it's heyday.

FWIW, the German magazine ct from Heise is a good modern replacement.

Maybe I'm missing the point of this article? Writing a simple compiler is not difficult. It's not something for beginners, but towards the end of a serious CS degree program it is absolutely do-able. Parsing, transforming into some lower-level representation, even optimizations - it's all fun really not that difficult. I still have my copy of the "Dragon Book", which is where I originally learned about this stuff.

In fact, inventing new programming languages and writing compilers for them used to be so much of a trend that people created YACC (Yet Another Compiler Compiler) to make it easier.

If you avoid games that demand kernel-level access, gaming on Linux works just fine.

Honestly, I don't trust game producers enough to grant then kernel access. Do you? Really?

Whenever I look at a web project, it starts with "npm install" and literally dozens of libraries get downloaded.

The project authors probably don't even know what libraries their project requires, because many of them are transitive dependencies. There is zero chance that they have checked those libraries for supply chain attacks.

Camel. Nose. Tent.

For the moment, governments claim to want only she verification "for the children". Let's be honest: governments like the UK and Germany (to name two) are prosecuting people for posting unwanted opinions, or - heaver forfend - for insulting politicians.

To pursue those prosecutions they need identities. Age verification is the first step towards requiring your real identity in social media.

So they're still getting a million impressions s month, and that's not interesting Anyway, putting something up on Instagram and then also on X - that's pretty low effort, no? Weird decision...

Also: 1500 posts per year, so around 4 per day - a bit much. There just aren't four important topics to talk about each and every day. Honestly, I wouldn't subscribe to that either. Maybe that's part of why their numbers are going down...

I guess I'm a dabbler - I have too many hobbies, none of which I take very seriously. Brewing, dry stone walls, math puzzles, etc.

That said, if you're looking for something meaningful, consider doing something with kids. Technical or not, it doesn't matter. Could be anything from volunteering at a local sports club to teaching part-time at a trade school.

Consider false positives. Then consider that - once this technology is installed - it will be very easy to add other kinds of hashes.

Add in the age verification. To make that reliable will require ID. Which can then easily be extended to provide more information than just age.

Camel. Nose. Tent.

Very mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, yes, soldiers should uphold high standards. On the other hand, war is horrible, things happen, and nothing is blach-and-white.

And on the gripping hand: Years after the fact, with zero evidence, relying solely on malleable human memory - is that really a basis for criminal prosecution?

Parking in my town can now only be paid via smartphone. Yes, almost everyone has one, but: there are still people who do not.

It's for the children!

BS. It's for control and censorship and data harvesting.

Meta alone spend $2 billion lobbying for age-restriction laws, which they tried to hide by pumping it through third parties. We don't know how much the other tech giants spent.

With phone numbers, you can move from one carrier to another, while retaining your number. This helps with competition.

We need the same for email.

Sure, it may not work with the ancillary services, but keeping your email address would solve a lot of issues.

Only half?

I've played exclusively on Linux for a couple of years now. Sometimes, very rarely, you have to select a specific Proton version for a game. Otherwise, it just works.

Back in the dark ages of high school, our chess coach specialized in this. We would study openings and strategy. Then he would come up with totally off-the-eall moves. And win, of course, because we had no clue how to respond.