It's interesting Lean is taking off in software engineering. Prior to the advent of LLMs & agents, Lean had almost zero use in software and was mostly focused on mathematics, with Isabelle and Rocq leading the way here. In fact, I asked Kevin Buzzard and others in the Lean community, and they simply shrugged.
The exception was [1], a Lean-based text heavily inspired by Concrete Semantics [2], a cornerstone of Isabelle literature. The latter is, in essence, Winskel's classic semantics book [3], a standard textbook in programming language theory, with all proofs mechanically checked.
More broadly, I'm wondering whether dependent types are the right abstraction or too powerful and heavy for humans to review and make sure specifications are aligned with intent. I've been working on automation for this for more than a year, and I've found refinement types sufficient and much easier to review.
Not just TDD. Amazon, for instance, is heading towards something between TDD and lightweight formal methods.
They are embracing property-based specifications and testing à la Haskell's QuickCheck: https://kiro.dev
Then, already in formal methods territory, refinement types (e.g. Dafny, Liquid Haskell) are great and less complex than dependent types (e.g. Lean, Agda).
Setting aside that model means something different now … MDD never really worked because the tooling never really dealt with intent. You would get so far with your specifications (models) but the semantic rigidity of the tooling mean that at some point your solution would have to part way. LLM is the missing piece that finally makes this approach viable where the intent can be inferred dynamically and this guides the
implementation specifics. Arguably the purpose of TDD/BDD was to shore up the gaps in communicating intent, and people came to understand that was its purpose, whereas the key intent in the original XP setting was to capture and preserve “known good” operation and guard against regression (in XP mindset, perhaps fatefully clear intent was assumed)
I'm completely baffled why anyone still engages with the "official" framing around this. Obviously, it's not for protecting children. Obviously, it's a technocratic trojan horse for increasing surveillance capabilities on digital systems. This is so cynically anti-democratic that they obfuscate the real purpose, don't even bother to make it plausible, and everyone is left talking about how "awful it is" that it's already legislated.
I swear to God, if someone replies to this talking about how we need to protect the children I'm going to start requiring "age verification" from commenters, and I'll do a little background check to find out w̵h̵e̵r̵e̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵y̵ ̵l̵i̵v̵e̵ if they're over 18.
It's because none of the stuff you say is obvious is actually obvious. You might be totally right about all of it (my own view is that regardless of what the intention is, this stuff will inevitably be misused), but it needs to be demonstrated that you are. The word obvious has a different meaning.
This is a pretty common phenomenon in politics, where people have a political view that is obvious to them, but other people actually disagree with that view. This is one way that political discussions go off the rails, because if you think your own views are obvious, you quickly start thinking that people have some ulterior motive for debating that "obvious" view. But the reality is often just that they just have a genuine difference of perspective, that the thing that is obvious to you is just not obvious to them.
Most of the AI facial recognition cameras in the USA are from Flock and use small solar panels to keep the system battery charged. I've noticed that when I run small computers off small batteries and small solar panels even a bit of bird poop on the panel eventually causes the computer to run out of power. Bird poop, or bird poop simulants (like milk powder, black pepper, corn starch, water, wey powder) are non-destructive to solar panels or anyone's property. Sure would be cool if the birds would start helping.
> If this goes through, I wouldn't be surprised if facial recognition ends up being the "solution" to the problems this creates.
The end goal is for every IP address to be associated with a physical person and an ID card number. Which is where we'll end up after they'll unsuccessfully try to ban VPNs that are used to bypass age-verification checks.
Because it's not at all obvious. The vast majority of people posting on Hacker News in 2026 probably had extreme exposure to the internet early in life and turned out alright. So they're probably not as concerned about children being exposed to adult content.
But clearly people in other cultures have a huge problem with it. Don't fall victim to survivorship bias + echo chamber.
There's not another obvious solution to the problem, it's debated in every thread. (no laptop + homeschool is not a real option for 99% of people)
> There's not another obvious solution to the problem
The problem with this solution is it's far too overly broad while also not working well. It leaves out the most important parts from the legislation while specifying universal compliance.
What the law should have been is "Operating systems intended to be used by minors should have this age verification specification implemented" with a nice documentation of that specification and how it should work. As written, you'll basically end up with the potential that every single OS ends up with it's own age verification system, which defeats the entire point of these laws in the first place.
Saying "all operating systems" puts us in this complicated and dumb position where now an embedded OS needs to worry about age verification of it's user.
That doesn't really with with the voting. AB 1043 passed 58-0 in the Cali state assembly which is mostly normal democrats. Those people aren't thinking ha ha ha our evil plans are working. They are thinking let protect kids. I'm skeptical of your obviouslys.
Communists were also not thinking "hahaha how evil we are, let's do GULAGs!" they wanted happiness for everyone, but look where it went.
The thing is - it always goes there.
> There's a lot of well intentioned people writing these laws and pushing for them.
No, there absolutely are not. There are Meta et al and their international lobbyists, pushing copy-paste bills. Anyone pearl clutching for the kids is an idiot, or is paid off.
If it makes you feel better to turn people who disagree with you into cartoon villains, then more power to you. But you'll lose the debate because you will only engage in strawman arguments. There are real arguments in favor of this that should not be dismissed, but should be embraced and we should explain why those arguments are weaker than ours.
I feel extremely strongly that this is a Trojan horse that will expand surveillance and control by governments and giant corporations, and ultimately be used to lock us out of our own devices. I think many people supporting this are well-meaning but extremely naive. Meta is not naive of course, they expect to come out on the top of this as a giant corporation. But there are millions upon millions of people who do support this that are not going to come out on top. Those are also the people we need to convince. We're not going to change meta's mind, but we might be able to change others minds.
>No, the people in power do not have our interest in mind and anyone believing otherwise is an enemy, and I don't find them cartoonish at all, I find this all very very serious and terrifying, I will not comply.
Do your elected representatives support such legislation?
If the answer is "yes," and you live in a place that has free and fair elections, that's on you for not electing folks who will actually represent you.
Sure, feel free to blame the people you voted for. But since you and your neighbors elected those folks, it's hard to see how it's only the fault of those you elected.
That's not to say there aren't other forces/special interests trying to tilt things in their favor, but the solution is electing people who will have your (collective) "interest in mind," not blaming those you had a hand in electing.
In a representative democracy, the voters are the government. We decide who will represent us. If you don't like those that do, look in a mirror.
> I believe the standard nomenclature is "useful idiots".
I don't. This snark really lets you downplay them and willingly ignore people who are concerned about a real problem. And then you'll act surprised when they get traction and you've been laughing the whole time.
I think there is a solution, and it's to prevent companies from offering social features to children. Full stop. No age verification, just make it a "ban on sight" thing.
What is the point of the mass surveillance in the first place? Control. Over what? Over human futures. Who will be hit worst by the mass surveillance regime? Those growing up under it.
For starters, an independent self-education will become impossible. Millions more young people would be forced to choose between becoming fluent in whatever maddening proprietary nonsenses their schools are paid to teach them - or ostracism and starvation. They would never know the validity that disintermediated computation lends to one's interior thought process. Many more people would grow into the world of ubiquitous multilevel gaslighting instead of the world of free thought. And that would be those children's life now.
Here's a bit of a doomsday scenario, you can pepper with it your dialogues with people thinking of the children too hard, and you may find their reactions enlightening.
As enmeshed as personal computing and mass media already are with personal life, it can take an organized e***s-minded outfit scant generations to literally devolve your children into a servile underclass. Simply by making access to computation a tightly controlled privilege, and using that to amplify social inequality. (While their own kids get to play out the fantasies dreamt up for them by the colonial laureates of yore, i.e. be immortal trillionaire wizard aristocrats who can work "magic" because they get to learn actual sciences and not just some ever-changing APIs to them. Which would probably fall apart in a few generations making a huge mess of things, potentially permanently bringing down the global supply chain by mass incompetence - but how could they care?)
This is a global legislative assault against the greatest novel liberty humanity has gained from technology for generations: the Internet is literally a means for anyone to project their disembodied thoughts at a distance! Whatever force is even capable of attacking that, it would not be playing for chump change. Nor is it likely to be the unimaginative sort of entity (unless, perhaps, these laws are part of an AGI bootstrapping itself throughout society?) which is why I'm being only slightly anxious about spitballing concrete patterns of defeat in view of it.
And even if we do not end up on the branch of reality where social inequality gets written into the genome and the bloody e***ists win - forcing minors to identify themselves online is sure to facilitate the global cultural conveyor belt that winds through Willy Wonka's Consent Factory Island and beyond.
Plenty of "think of the children" arguments either way if that's how they're playing it. It's a reflexive, non-rational argument, from the same firmware update as "your mom is sacred" (i.e. good luck being child or partner of abuser who had kids to become untouchable). So yeah, do think of the children. Think of their futures. You cowards.
Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
Spoken as someone who probably hasn't used iOS/Mac parental controls. It is a hot buggy mess that randomly blocks whitelisted applications as well. We use it, but it is a constant pain. Also a lot of applications only work half, e.g., TV apps blocking off all content rather than only content that is not age-appropriate.
By the way, we were initially firm believers of not using parental controls at all, by limiting time and teaching kids about how to use devices in a healthy way. But a lot of apps (e.g. Roblox, YouTube Shorts) are made to be as addictive as crack, making it very hard for a still not fully developed brain to deal with it.
That said, I absolutely dislike the current lobby for age verification because the goal of Meta et al. seems to be to be to absolve themselves of any responsibility by moving verification to devices and to put up regulatory walls to make it more difficult for potential competitors to enter the market. It is regulatory capture.
The addiction economy is hard to deal with for anyone - regardless of age. So, I agree this is definitely not a solved problem, but from what I see the only viable way forward is actually to do pretty drastic things like not own a smartphone.
You can remove most objectionable elements with uBlock filters. Also dedicated browser extensions exist to deal with the biggest offenders.
If you're willing to use alternatives and do without the services entirely then simply DNS blocking a handful of big names on your LAN immediately resolves the majority of the issue.
Access to educational material, communicating with friends and family, fun.
There huge benefits to being able to look things up, download books, talk to friends and family even if they live on another continent, playing chess or D & D online.
I think social media is net harmful (to adults too) but devices, games etc. are not bad per se.
I agree. I know my kids and can judge what is right for them better than rigid age rules. My point is that there are benefits to balance against the harms.
Why do people let tweens wander a mall unattended when there are things like brewery/restaurants inside? Because it's illegal to serve them alcohol and as a social convention you know they won't.
Society works a lot better when we make the few bad actors that are out to exploit children stop, and instead expect everyone to look out for them/generally behave in prosocial ways. Things stop working when we say "why wouldn't you assume everyone around you is out to harm your kids and act accordingly?"
We can just say "actually you're not allowed to put gambling in a game targeting 7 year olds".
How many kids do you have? What software do you use for this continuous monitoring? How do you balance spending 18 hours a day continuously monitoring your children, with also working full-time and being a human yourself? Please elaborate on your personal system because I think you could help out a lot of people.
I am strongly against this age verification, I think this is an absolutely, catastrophically terrible idea. However, I'm also a parent who has been in the trenches. This is a damn hard problem, and we will lose our access to computing and a relatively free internet if we just sit back and say that it's on parents and parents are stupid if they don't know how to solve this problem.
Is it, though? The trajectory right now is to remove the choice of parenthood. If some people in power have their way, it will not only be illegal to end a pregnancy, it will also be illegal to prevent it to start with. If a male and female have sex (and I doubt a sufficient number of people will give up having hetero sex), the result will often be a child, and there will be no safe, legal choice in the matter.
I certainly want people to have easy access to contraception and abortion. However, I also think that it's still a choice. I never said it was a good one (I agree, you'd be hard pressed to stop folks from having sex)
tbf, when most of those posting here were children, access to smartphones/tablets with unrestricted internet connection wasn't a problem
but i do remember my parents actually raising me pretty hands-on, taking care of me not watching stuff I shouldn't be watching which of course existed and was easily available
Access to smartphones/tablets with unrestricted internet connection is only a problem today when parents give their children access to smartphones/tablets with unrestricted internet connections.
Cell phones and tablets don't spontaneously appear whenever a child wants one. Parents have the ability to hand devices over to children when they have time to watch them while they use it and remove those devices from them when they don't.
> Parents have the ability to hand devices over to children when they have time to watch them while they use it and remove those devices from them when they don't.
Sure, if we assume the kids are kept in a locked box at all times, I suppose.
What about when they go to school and use internet devices there? Some of them are even issuing personal laptops. Or they hang out with their friends or go to the library or visit a pc cafe (a bit rare in america, but still...)
Even beyond that, exactly how often are you monitoring what they do at home? Are you watching over their shoulder every hour they have access to an internet device?
Like, kids have been smoking/drinking/having sex/etc while their parents are ignorant for 100s of years, what makes you think parents are suddenly going to be able to supervise all internet access?
When I was a child we didn't even have wifi of any kind and I still did things like sneak down to the family desktop after my parents went to sleep and "surf the web".
None of this is to say that we should created nanny-net that controls the entire internet in the hopes of protecting children, but there's a lot of room between that and doing literally nothing.
I'm reminded of fairly recent efforts to strongly discourage people smoking in movies/tv and banning actual advertising and how effective that was at decreasing the population of smokers, at least until vaping came along.
The point is sometimes we can identify seemingly small areas that will make a large impact and take action there.
Btw, it doesn't need to be actively coordinated for this to happen.
Building architectural styles used to be per city and now buildings look roughly the same worldwide. Style is dependent on the year built not the location.
Because every architect is "reading the same magazine" worldwide now that the internet exists, rather than debating in their own city.
Similar monoculture of global thought is happening in all fields.
> Similar monoculture of global thought is happening in all fields.
Thereby removing yet more interesting things to see in the world through the spread of hyper-optimized inoffensive blandness. In the same way that restaurants are slowly turning into the same set of grey boxes with little of note distinguishing each.
Well obviously? It's literally being broadcast in the news when diplomats talk to each other. What do you think they are talking about if not policy discussions?
So it seems normal that a bunch of politicians, in the current climate, got together and decided that the weakest form of age verification imaginable absolutely had to get passed everywhere?
I'm not saying there's definitely no coordination, but nobody had to get together to decide that 2026 was the year for 90s fashion to make a comeback. Human society is very prone to fads in all areas.
I like the idea of your reply. This is what I'll add; Politics, religion and nation states, in a sense, are in some kind of shift. Politics: many nations with a lot of money and arms are engaging in world threatening actions. Religion: The three major ones, with no disrespect to the other ones, are warping into something that is spinning away from their original writings (of course, in some ways this is good, example: stoning.). Nation States: destruction on a massive scale-Syria, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan...Is Iran next?
Perhaps instead of taking some responsibility for their actions, nations are going to further restrict their populations?
It's almost like a well-monied or well-connected lobbyist is pushing this heavily. Multiple contenders out there as to who it could be. But regardless of who the originator is, the push can be kneecapped. Imagine jurisdictions that have an opposite push - one that criminalizes use of age verification software such as mandating providing government ID or facial scans. It can be done!
Especially the moment you move outside of America. Tech has always been comparatively more attuned to US mores and voter sentiment.
Everywhere else, I only see frustration and people trying to find someone who knows someone at a tech firm to get help.
The backlash against Tech firms is a force of nature at this point. Voters are currently unwilling to listen to appeals to reduce government overreach. Governments are trending towards authoritarianism globally, and are more than happy to give voters what they want, while also getting more leverage over tech.
The simpler explanation is that we live in a world that is more connected than ever so politicians, campaigners and the rest can get policy ideas almost instantly. There is no grand conspiracy, just a smaller world.
Yeah, it's not like there's a literal james bond supervillain who writes books about this stuff and brags about how half of parliament is in his pocket.
TLDR: The macro forces are more than sufficient for this situation to occur.
HN-goers are largely unaware of the scope of the Techlash globally. Voters want tech firms to be more responsive to their needs.
Governments are beyond frustrated with tech, and every nation is trending towards authoritarianism.
So Governments are more than happy to appear responsive to voter needs, while also gaining a new source of leverage on tech.
I don’t know the lobbying teams directly, but I know many civil society and online safety folk.
Currently, most of those orgs are excluded from conversations and funding. Tech firms have also been cutting down on their safety teams, especially since the current US admin came to power.
———-
If this is actually to be addressed, “enshittification” needs to stop being a thing. Tech used to be known for excellent products, but currently its seen as untrustworthy and most likely to break the law with impunity, and to nickel and dime users.
Did you read it? It does neither of those things. It establishes that Meta is fighting to amend these regulatory bills to push onus onto operating systems and Discord isn’t named once in the OP.
From rfk: “Rep. Kim Carver (R-Bossier City), the sponsor of Louisiana's HB-570, publicly confirmed that a Meta lobbyist brought the legislative language directly to her. “
That’s more than fighting to amend. I’m not sure where I got the discord connection but I thought it was from that link. I’ve read a few things on this subject recently so I may have mixed up two different sources.
Obviously Discord is related. I can simultaneously support age constraints and also *not want my child’s 18th birthday leaked under any circumstances*.
> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
This is absolutely not true.
Here in the UK schools are swarming with ipads and shit like that. They're given to primary school children because they're "more engaging". Children are supposed to practice their reading and even handwriting[1] on ipads. Naturally they're on youtube instead. It's really bad. As far as I can tell, private schools are even worse. Currently the only way that I know to escape this is homeschooling.
Saying "it's a solved problem" is incredibly dismissive to parents who do everything right in their homes, but then send their children to school and schools exposed their children in this way.
Saying that phrase in such a definitive manner caters to the interests of the companies who push these shit onto schools. Please stop saying it, it's harmful.
[1] leaving this reference here because I'm certain that people without school aged children won't believe this is actually true:
https://www.letterjoin.co.uk/
There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.
That's the parents.
The expectation that "Parenting" is now outsourced to Teachers, to the Government, to anyone else. People seem to expect they just have a kid, and somehow magically they'll grow up to be a perfect person without any work from themselves. So there's over-reach, there's pressure on making "unworkable" soutions, because the people they're trying to force "solving" the problem aren't the people in the best position to do so.
Your comment seems working from that very same assumption.
Yes, all the "technical" part of content filtering etc. is very much a solved problem. The issue is that's not a "zero effort" solution - they still need to be enabled and managed. And I'm not sure that's a "technical" problem than can be solved.
There's huge pressure on teachers etc. to "solve" these sort of problems - just go to any PTA meeting and there's a lot of loud voices asking for stuff like the laws the original post is highlighting. And politicians listen to the loud voices, and feel they have to be "seen" doing something. Even if that "something" is impossible, unworkable, and fundamentally harmful.
> The expectation that "Parenting" is now outsourced to Teachers, to the Government, to anyone else. People seem to expect they just have a kid, and somehow magically they'll grow up to be a perfect person without any work from themselves. So there's over-reach, there's pressure on making "unworkable" soutions, because the people they're trying to force "solving" the problem aren't the people in the best position to do so.
Yeah, because the parents' time is now dedicated to their employers. When parenting wasn't outsourced, families typically had a parent at home doing it full time.
Don't blame the parents and ignore the story of reduced family capacity.
> Yeah, because the parent's time is now dedicated to their employers. When parenting wasn't outsourced, families typically had a parent at home doing it.
This seems to imply that the problem is that we started letting women work, but I suspect the actual problem is back to restrictive zoning again.
If you let people actually build housing, and then some people have two incomes, they use the extra money to build a big new house or drive newer cars etc. If you instead inhibit new construction, the people with two incomes outbid the families with one income for the artificially constrained housing stock, and then every family needs two incomes and like flipping a switch you go from "women are empowered by allowing them to work" to "women are oppressed by requiring them to work".
I don't think just building more housing is sufficient. That might decrease the cost of living somewhat, but probably not enough to remove the need for a second income.
I think ideally most families should be able to survive on the income of one parent, regardless of which parent that is. But I'm not sure how to get there, although I think the problem is closely tied to wealth inequality.
I also think in a better world, it would be practical for both parents to work, but work fewer hours, each working 20 hours a week. But in the US at least that generally isn't practical because most such jobs don't provide health insurance or retirement plans, and are typically very low paying jobs.
>I don't think just building more housing is sufficient. That might decrease the cost of living somewhat, but probably not enough to remove the need for a second income.
While shadowy special interest groups and large corporations are able to write text directly into the laws of anglophone countries, The People can't even talk about one instance without fragmenting into a trillion pieces covering topics such as the affordability of housing.
This is the thing where bad proposals are easier to come up with than good ones. If you want to actually fix it you need to identify the root cause, come up with a viable, efficient, effective means of addressing it, and then get it enacted.
If all you want to do is pass a bad law, all you have to do is pay money.
I don't disagree with you about affordability of housing. I just don't think that that by itself is sufficient to solve the problem of households needing two incomes.
The left wing constantly says “we started letting women work”. Women have worked for thousands of years. The phenomenon of manipulating women into believing working for a corporation is some kind of “higher calling” is relatively new, and it’s been a disaster for the family unit.
One is that people tell women it's good to work for a corporation, some of them believe that to be true and choose to do it, the others retain and exercise the option to do something else.
The other is that we set up an artificial scarcity treadmill so that if some families have two incomes, they outbid the ones that don't on life necessities and then women have to take a job at a corporation in order to be able to afford to live indoors even if that's not what they would otherwise choose to do.
I disagree. You simply increase the supply of labour by double digit percentage points. Thinking this will not affect the price, all else being equal, is magical thinking.
You're ignoring the other side of the ledger. If the supply of labor increases, but then those people get paid money, then they spend it and create additional demand for labor.
How do you suppose a country with 100 million people can have the same standard of living, if not higher, than a country with 10 million people despite having ten times the supply of labor? Or for that matter that large populous cities can have higher paying jobs than small towns?
> The left wing constantly says “we started letting women work”.
I’ve literally never seen anyone on the left (and rarely even the liberal capitalist center-right) say that. I’ve seen people on the hard right, when complaining, use that framing, though.
And, look, here its part of a complaint glorifying the defects of the capitalist-patriarchal family and whining that more equal treatment of women in the economic sphere hurt the “family unit” rather than recognizing that capitalism wrecks the family unit and greater equality for women just reduces the particular systematic of oppression of women within the capitalist-patriarchal system, but neither cures nor causes the damage to the family unit that comes from capitalism.
You’re of course free to pretend to be unaware of embarrassing left wing rhetoric. But the idea that capitalism hurt the family unit doesn’t really square with reality. The first order of Marxism is the explicit destruction of the family unit in favor of “chosen family” and the state.
> The expectation that "Parenting" is now outsourced to Teachers, to the Government, to anyone else. People seem to expect they just have a kid, and somehow magically they'll grow up to be a perfect person without any work from themselves. So there's over-reach, there's pressure on making "unworkable" soutions, because the people they're trying to force "solving" the problem aren't the people in the best position to do so.
NOT giving children addictive devices isn't not outsourcing parenting, it's basic social responsibility. Like not giving them cigarettes. I find it encourating that most other commenters understand this.
> There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.
False, and this betrays that you have no experience with what you're talking out.
In theory „There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.“
In practice, most schools lack anyone with enough technical literacy to lock down the device. So they just hand out unlocked cheap android tablets with all the stock spyware and advertisement pre-installed.
They don't "hand out" anything really - probably the closest thing is government programmes to fund laptops/tablets for low income families, but not a single school locally "gives out" tablets to kids. But they're all just "normal retail" devices.
They have some things used in lessons, but they're all given out at the beginning of the lesson, then gathered at the end.
You could argue that it's a problem they they assume home access to such things anyway - especially in later years - as things like online 'homework' is the norm.
Again, this is not true. Some public schools do buy ipads and licenses and do hand them out and some times they're unlocked. You COULD do a basic google search and learn about the topic on the news, you're you don't actually care to learn, you're just spreading noise.
Again my experience with local schools doesn't match that, though I'd acknowledge that local authority can cause a lot of differences. And I'm talking about state schools - not public schools. Remember that means a very different thing in the UK, and might suggest your own distance from the claims you seem to be making.
And googling only seems to find examples of the low income programmes. I struggle to find a single instance when devices are handed out to kids and not keep at school and only used in specific tasks - like the old trolley of laptops was a few years ago.
Or breathless reactionary commentary without any actual examples of course.
Parents don't have the right tools to minimize harm to their kids online. The parental controls offered by Apple and Google were intentionally designed to be full of holes.
“There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.”
They try, but kids are smart and there are holes in the tools to lock things down. You would not believe the inventive workarounds that kids find to circumvent content filters. It’s a losing battle to lock everything.
You're talking about a solved problem and a few comments down there's a bunch of people in this very comment thread losing their minds about Linux devs working on implementing parental controls.
>>> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
>This is absolutely not true.Here in the UK schools are swarming with ipads and shit like that. They're given to primary school children because they're "more engaging". Children are supposed to practice their reading and even handwriting on ipads. Naturally they're on youtube instead. It's really bad.
And how does that refute what the parent said? Those school ipads could also have YouTube locked or restricted to a whitelist of channels.
The schools could also simply not distribute tablets or laptops to students. The technology has not produced noticeably better readers, thinkers, or writers compared to the days when students read actual books and wrote on paper.
> Those school ipads could also have YouTube locked or restricted to a whitelist of channels.
There's so much wrong here.
A) there's ways around that stuff that any child can figure out.
B) schools aren't in fact obligated to enable those, and some don't.
C) who decides on what channels are allowed? The school does. But teachers are basically people off the street that did some basic training and (from my experience) have zero critical thinking. This are not the best and brightest.
D) big tech will tell you "this is age appropriate" and the only thing that means is that you probably won't see porn. Anything else, including gambling ads on youtube, you do see.
You see, you're trying to discuss the specifics which in this case is a losing approach if your goal is to protect your chidlren from being victimized by the attention economy. The reason is that those benefiting from the attention economy have more lawyers and more engineers to deploy than any individual parent.
>A) there's ways around that stuff that any child can figure out.
No, there are not for hardware locked devices with the proper controls (what apps, websites, etc to allow).
>B) schools aren't in fact obligated to enable those, and some don't.
The technical problem is solved, if they don't want to implement the solution that's on them.
>C) who decides on what channels are allowed? The school does. But teachers are basically people off the street that did some basic training and (from my experience) have zero critical thinking. This are not the best and brightest.
Again, irrelevant. A common policy can be created (e.g. by ministry of education experts) and shared with schools.
> > B) schools aren't in fact obligated to enable those, and some don't.
> The technical problem is solved, if they don't want to implement the solution that's on them.
Just to be clear - do you not understand that a parent might be parenting, but some times their children is in care of a school? Your focus on "a technical solution exists" is missing the real issue here, and it's not a technical one.
>but some times their children is in care of a school?
And not only that but some of those times are dinner break, on a school campus with a thousand other kids and barely any supervision. Even if phones are banned, it's easy to hide one and for a child to be showing their friends unhinged stuff they found on 4chan.
And some of those times are on a bus carrying at least 50 kids when they're 'supervised' only by a driver ... and so on.
But you know, I find it frustrating that the people we're talking to clearly have no experience with the subject but they come in here and state with confidence they're opinion on something which is for them a hypothetical. They don't know what's going on.
I mean, we all saw the occasional heinous stuff, goatse, lemon party, etc, that doesn't ruin you. I don't think preventing them from ever seeing anything disturbing is a realistic goal. It's more an issue when kids are allowed to be fully addicted on an ongoing basis instead of spending their time doing things that help them grow. I think keeping them from spending all their free time on youtube or in Roblox is more the goal.
This, it's the stupid addictive games like Roblox and social media like YouTube. Circling back to schools (not-UK), here even teachers let them play Roblox sometimes in primary school on school hardware. The problem as a parent is that you cannot get upset and fight about everything, you need to pick your battles. This is made worse that you are most likely a minority, most parents will say/think a little Roblox or Tik Tok at school is harmless fun.
IMO the problem is twofold: first, younger kid's brains are not developed enough to deal with games and social media that are intentionally made to be addictive. Heck, even a lot of adults have issues limiting their time. Addictive games and social media should just be forbidden under 16 years. Currently our government has only issued a recommendation, which does nada. Second, teachers and parents need to be educated better. Many have no idea that these addictive apps are an issue or just don't fully realize the damage they do.
I'm talking about both parents and schools: the technical solution exists. If parents/schools don't want to implement it, that's on them.
This answers your objection A and B. C is also a non-probem with a trivial fix, as I showed.
What we're discussing is whether age verification is needed. Based on the existence of other, perfectly fine solutions, it's not. "But schools don't bother implementing those other solutions" is not a counter-argument to this discussion.
I'm not sure why I need to debate against obvious illogical positions, but here we go:
> Well that's not much of a solution is it now? More like an attempt that we all can see will fail.
Some entities not wanting to implement a perfectly fine technical solution is not the same as "that's not a solution". If schools not bothering is your issue, just like the state can mandate a "age verification", it can also mandate schools add such parental control locks to the devices they give to kids.
>Harm reduction is not the same as a solution.
It absolutely is, and that's what any solution will be anyway.
There's no perfect solution short of throwing kids in some kind of restricted area without access to any devices. And even in prison prisoners get ahold of startphones.
Age verification can be beaten even more easily, getting access from some older kid for example, borrowing or buying verified accounts, getting an older/hacked OS that doesn't check, and countless other holes.
The difference is that the parent controls case directly affects the device the kids have, let's the parents set the policy based on their beliefs and the child's mental maturity (not authoritarian one-size-fits-all approach), and doesn't add OS mandated id and age tracking to everybody regardless if they're kids or not.
Only in mathematics or in some rigid aspie conception of the term "solution". But we're not debating about solutions in cartoon land.
If real-world solution implied "perfect" there would be no debate regarding better and worse solutions concerning their results - which is what social and political and team and inter-personal and even ...spousal debates are all about.
And that's about merely inherent issues, before we even come to how a proposed solution interplays with other things (e.g. mandatory age verification vs privacy, or policing vs personal freedom, or censorship vs innovation and authoritarianism).
In real life practical solutions always have tradeoffs and weak spots, but can nonetheless make the problem much smaller as to effectively be irrelevant or at an acceptable level.
But it is an argument against age restrictions since you could just as easily pass a law that instead required schools to enable various filters. You could even require mainstream devices from major manufacturers to support certain filtering standards. And you could require websites to send self categorization headers.
There is no valid argument for why ID checks are necessary if the goal is simply to get filtering implemented in places such as schools.
If instead the goal is to entirely prohibit all children from using social networks regardless of parental consent then it makes sense. It also makes sense if the goal is actually to violate privacy or something similarly sinister.
But this thread is discussing the technical solution and how many jurisdictions are pretending there’s no technical solutions just so they can pass surveillance legislation?
Exactly. We've completely lost (actually never had it) any social responsibility on the part of the social media/tech companies. Before we had the internet and all these apps and devices, parents looked after what their kids did but could also pretty much rely on other businesses to not do things like sell their kids cigarettes or pornography, let them in to R-rated movies, or expose them to other age-inappropriate stuff. Did it happen? Yes here and there but it wasn't easy for most kids.
Parents just want to be able to designate a device as belonging to a child---one setting---and have that respected. Not to have to dig into the settings of every account, service, app, and website and figure out how to set it in age-restricted mode (if that's even possible).
The tech companies have made this way too difficult and now they are facing the consequences of their shameful neglect by having to deal with all these new laws (which they will probably ignore, with no consequences, but we'll see).
It's understandable that parents are upset, but tech companies are not the ones harmed by these laws. When we've outlawed privacy, it will be the public who suffers.
> Parents just want to be able to designate a device as belonging to a child---one setting---and have that respected.
The problem here is, what does that actually do?
If you say the device is for kids, can the kids then see content related to firearms? What if the parents are Republicans and don't want that censored for their kids? Also, what does it even mean? Does a YouTube video on firearm safety get blocked because it contains firearms? Should "kids" be able to view sex education content?
If nobody agrees what should be blocked then the reason they don't have a setting is that nobody knows how to implement it.
Checking what the school is exposing the children to is part of parenting, if enough parents demand parental controls on the iPad you'd get that. Also it sounds insane that any school is given children iPads, if anything the studies show worse outcomes with iPads
> Checking what the school is exposing the children to is part of parenting, if enough parents demand parental controls on the iPad you'd get that.
Yes, but often times enough parents DONT demand that.
Most parents think "ipads are a good thing children need to learn tech in order to have good jobs". Other parents think "ipads aren't good but if I complain I'll be that annoying parent that no one likes". Only a minority is vocal.
When people say "parental controls" they obviously don't literally mean "parental controls controlled by PARENTS", they mean "parental controls controlled by parents AND OTHER guardians such as teachers and schools".
If the school can't be bothered to lock down their ipads, why not make a law that schools must lock down the ipads, rather than push this out to everyone universally?
It seems like another shoddy excuse of a panicked panopticon to me. Feel free to try to convince us otherwise.
But this is ridiculous. The problem was created by the state (which ultimately runs the schools), and now the state wants to impose additional rules on a bunch of totally unrelated adults to (probably fail to) solve their self-imposed problem.
Since schooling closer to home obviously solves this problem, and a host of many other problems, and doesn't introduce any real problems (bad schools don't save kids from bad parents, which seems to be a rebuttal to home-based education, it would seem to me the answer is obvious:
Return to a single income household economy and bring education closer to the home, if not outright in the home.
That the schools are unable to implement the technical solutions for parental control tells you about the schools, not about the technology.
And that parents rather have everyone's actions on the internet surveilled because they can't coordinate with their schools tells you about the parents.
100% agree with you. I'm not arguing for regulating websites. In my scenario the schools are the actual problem. (EDIT: Actually, Meta and such companies are the actual problem, but in our world nobody expects that they have anybody's best interests in mind. But schools should.)
I was strictly only responding to the phrase "this is a solved problem you just have to parent".
LoL scapegoat found. Actually not a bad idea. "Your child must not bring any digital end device, that is, in fact or in principle capable to connect to the internet, and display graphical content in any form other than text. Needs for telecommunication do not constitute a claim for exemption. Parents who want their child to be able to make calls from a mobile phone, may supply their child with what's colloquially called a "dumbphone" ,i.e. a phone that is not capable of the aforementioned technical features. Breaches justify the exclusion of your chid from participation in class for the day, or in cases of repeated violations of this policy, of up to one week. The parent agrees to have the full responsibility for the care and supervision of their child upon short notice. Resulting financial losses that might follow in the aftermath of such a transferral of guardianship back to the parents on short notice from thus necessitated time commitments for them are their responsibility alone and cannot constitute claims against the school. The responsibility to catch up on thus missed lessons lies with the pupil alone and does not constitute the privilege to be excused from examinations.
In my country, state schools strictly forbid students from bringing devices to school. This rule was actually introduced because of the haves/have-nots issue here, because many kids are too poor to afford devices. The schools themselves don't provide devices because it would be prohibitively expensive due to the large student population. Most private schools don't allow devices either.
I volunteer at a makerspace, twice already adults came to seek help "bricking" their smartphone, so it can only be used when a certain RFID token is present, the problem is there exist commercial solutions aimed at companies and institutions, where the employee can't disengage the lock, and then theres commercial (and open source) solutions aimed at individuals, but these can always be easily disengaged and bypassed.
I agree that children's elders (parents, teachers, ...) should be able to control the available apps and platforms, but only for a reasonably short period (so that kids don't grow up in censorship right until they are adult, it should be continuously relaxed until the kids are in control of their own impulses, so whatever mechanism is used, it should gradually relax willy nilly the opinions of the elders or the state).
This brings up the next problem: what if parents mutually disagree? and what if teachers mutually disagree? and what if parents and teachers disagree? So there should be some kind of jurisdiction awareness in the parental control system: when at mothers place, mothers rules, when at fathers place, fathers rules, when in this or that teachers class their rules, as that would be the technological agnostic position (regardless if the old ways were good or bad, thats what technological non-interference would suggest).
But even if all parents, all teachers agreed on the parental control settings for a child, they can't really do it effectively since they are placed at the whims of big tech, with clear visible conflicts of interest like advertising, engagement, etc.
To solve that government should mandate a simple secure way for the smartphone to accept a user generated cryptographic public key, upon proving ownership so that they can sign their own root, first non-ROM (actual silicon ROM, not firmware images) op-codes chosen by the user. Then they can install any open source parental control software they want.
Its the surveillance state refusing to give the populace the keys to their own smartphone, and then deciding to "solve" the resultant inability for effective and community controlled parental control mechanisms by degrading privacy for all.
"we have to reign in your privacy, because we refuse to give you the ability to sign your own bootloaders, for freedom and safety of course"
every time we have people complain about how expensive "bricking" software and effective parental control software are (the commercial solutions aimed at companies and institutions, which have special arrangements with smartphone industry), we should direct them to a petition to force an actual right to compute by mandating computers INCLUDING smartphones allow the end-user to sign their bootloaders with a self-generated key of their choice.
Then the problems will disappear overnight, and solutions for this problem will come in a form like all the big beautiful free and open source software, and it will work, and it will be sane.
I estimate we have two to three years in the English-speaking world to organize an effective lobby for the rights of the common man before changes to the speech environment and habitual methods of communication make it impossible. There's less than a year before the wave of lock-downs reaches normal internet users through announced policies like the Android software installation ban and through the growing effectiveness of algorithmic "Joy of TikTok"-style discussion selection, and one to two years after that before we run out of other avenues. The latter timeline could be too optimistic if the completion of the TPM-to-cloudflare chain of permission for desktop environments (steps had been made in the past but failed after public pushback) comes without a lot of advance notice. Don't forget - after each new constraint on the public, the next counter-reaction will be smaller, and the next change will be bigger or sooner.
Like overnight a while ago, normal everyday websites are suddenly inaccessible (yes I have JS on, no it won't work.) Sometimes only the first page loads.
Can't complain to CF either, because that too is walled off by their non-functional robot detector.
This serves as a two-way filter for me. Any website I'm not allowed to access is not worth accessing. I'll take my attention and business to where I'm wanted instead.
And the groundwork was laid by very well connected think-of-the-children evangelicals, transphobes and sex-work-phobes over years. Never forget this. Meta just added nitromethane fuel to a raging fire.
It's quite frightening when we see Oracle leveraging government contracts for hosting government data about the population on Oracle's infrastructure while Oracle infrastructure is used by the government to run AI, possibly on government's hosted data about the population funneling the money to build a media empire that includes CNN.
Personally I do not believe this is a solved problem. Technically maybe, in practice not at all.
It is quite a job juggling the controls of the different companies. Microsoft even has two, one for Xbox one for windows.
And then your child turns 13 and your only option is to take away the devices entirely.
Another thing already discussed is school provided hardware. I know the schools try, but it is usually one person against 300+ students trying to figure out how to game/hack the system. Eg there's no reasonable way where you can expect one person to maintain a YouTube channel whitelist.
I do agree that we might be solving this issue the wrong way, but there is a definitely a problem here.
“Yeah, so basically the current prevailing sch[*]zo internet theory is that Al nerds have destroyed the internet and created infinite spam.
The advertisement goons are now incapable of determining who is a bot and who is an actual human. The advertisement goons no longer want to pay as much to social media networks.
Social media networks, in full blown panic of losing potential revenue, decided to lobby governments saying
"we gotta protect the kids! ID everyone to protect the kids from pedophiles!".
The social media networks know this doesn't really protect kids. But, it does two things (and a third accidentally).
1. They now can identify who is human and who is Al slop machine, or enough to appease the advertisement goons
2. Advertising to children is a general no-no from politicians, or something, so with ID verification they can say with confidence they're not advertising to children because it's been ID verification. Basically, they can weed out the children and focus on advertising to adults
3. The feds can now tell who is human and who is Al slop. This inadvertently helps them with tracking people and serving fresh daily dumps of propaganda, or whatever they want to do.
It's a win-win-win for advertisers, social media networks, the government, and any business which does data collections.
It fucks over everyone else.
Chat, I'm not going to lie to you. This is an extremely good conspiracy sch[*]zo theory and 1 unironically believe it.”
That _sounds_ somewhat plausible but it means those social media management is completely anemic to everything if true. We just all know that getting verified is how AI spammers get to do spamming. Or post unwanted yet kosher contents. Everything unwanted can be made legal though not everything desired can be made legal.
Zuck wanting to build a centerpiece for his lair made out of resin fused copies of driver's licenses would sound more plausible.
In this case I think the schizos may be right. It makes complete sense. And $2b is peanuts to Meta, on par with the amount they’d authorize their lobbying department to spend over the course of a few years. I’m not surprised at all.
Might want to explore “Agenda 2030”. I don’t know for certain if it applies to this specific issue. But it does hint at a coordinated effort to build a completely new framework for managing the human species through technology.
They don't like what happened to their PR for what they did in gaza and they want to get ahead of the curve and stop us from seeing what they are going to do in IRAN without their SPIN.
Its a poison pull to lay down the infrastructure for controlling narrative on the internet
> Something remarkable and unsettling is how the age verification debate has popped up almost simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU.
Not really. Everyone wanted this for a decade or longer. They just waited for someone taking the first step, checking the reactions, to see how it will work out.
> With the same logical fallacies.
Same knowledge often leads to similar conclusions.
> Controlling what children do online is a solved problem: Parenting and parental control applications.
Do you have any relevant experience with this "solution"?
Not sure when exactly that happen but decade years ago or so, people were sharing this spoofed infographic in which the Internet was a cable tv-like service where you'd pick big media sites you'd subscribe to, IPTV/streaming, optional secondary sites - all of this curated and safe, free of any dangers. No lewd content whatsoever.
And honestly, I can't get rid of the feeling that this is where we're heading into. These are last years of the wild Internet and its next iteration will be passive and probably in 99% generated corporate safe slop.
It reaches far out, not just the West. China remains relatively immune. S. Korea and Japan immune to some degree. Russia, unfortunately, is not immune at all.
Everything appear to be illegal in China, but also everything illegal appear to come from there. Their chemotherapy dose table is calculated for diluted compounds. Coupling their law text to regular universal enforcement is just a suicide.
> Something remarkable and unsettling is how the age verification debate has popped up almost simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU.
nothing strange about that. You have higher interests in control of the (national) governments in several countries, planning things at once. This is what you see as a result. It certainly did not involve democracy.
Because the effects on our children is popping up simultaneously. Because globalization. Because every teenager is influenced by the likes of Andrew Tate and series like Adolescence. Either directly or indirectly.
This is what we wanted. We wanted a connected world. Be careful what you wish for.
That dude gives off such slimy vibes. Not like he’s evil. More like he’s unqualified to be in the position he’s found himself in. His presentations on talk shows gives me the impression he knows just enough about the topic of digital effects on society to throw together a book. The he lets people raise him up to the microphone and speaks for the sake of speaking. Hardly an expert, not an operator.
Compare to people who have the means to build, modify, and test the systems they talk about. Maybe no one can be this kind of an expert in the field of sociology. But if that’s the case do not present yourself as confident. Answer most questions with “I don’t know”. Refuse praise. Exude humility.
If you were familiar with his background you wouldn't be writing this comment, which makes what you wrote a bit awkwardly ironic.
Short of it: 30-ish year career as a psychology professor and researcher focused on morality and emotions. If you follow the track of his popular science books, The Anxious Generation (on smartphone use in teens) is very much a sequel to The Coddling of the American Mind, which itself is something of a sequel to The Righteous Mind, and so on. There's a very clear linearity and progression to his works.
I am familiar with his other books. And it’s clear he has an established career. I just don’t think he should try to present such simplified narratives. “Coddling of the American Mind” is what first put him on my radar and set off alarm bells.
At I said this might just be a field where normal expectations of expertise can’t be met. But that doesn’t mean you can rescale and match the confidence of other fields.
He’s putting himself in a position similar to politicians running for office.
yes and his work is fairly sympathetic to the reactionary centrist and right agendas -
not to mention that the anxious generation is supported by a thin veneer of the most wildly cherry-picked data they could get, and they ignored just about any alternative explanation aside from their predetermined conclusion.
I'm fairly cynical about touch screen devices and kids, and won't be letting mine near any until they're old enough (whenever that is) but haidt's own charts don't support his conclusions in that book.
The actual reason teen mental health diagnoses started increasing so much?? An obamacare-related screening and reporting requirement change for pediatrics.
To be clear, I don't agree with these laws and think they are very much the wrong way to try to solve the problem.
But it is not a solved problem. From what I've seen parental control software is generally pretty terrible. But this age verification stuff isn't really helpful.
It's a solved problem with a slightly flawed implementation on the end devices.
You seem to be arguing that introducing the whole new class of legal frameworks, technical requirements and privacy scandals(1)(2) is somewhat better than fixing the end user software flaws.
With every law we allowed in the name of child safety, we enabled the real goal, control. They barely have to even mention children in the new laws beyond "we have to legally cover ourselves against all the other child safety laws already in place."
The reality is that nobody is willing to do anything to stop this.
The people responsible will keep pushing for these schemes until they suffer direct personal consequences for doing so, that's the only way to ever make this stop.
It is Larry Ellison doing. He has been lobbying and trying to push the US and UK towards it for the last 20 plus years with plans on controlling the database and infrastructure behind it.
If you wanna surveil your children, surveil your own fucking children. You have no say in other people's lives.
Now, as for solutions, it's also simple but unpopular. People shouldn't be so rich they have transnational power. All this is happening because we let a tiny group of mostly anti-social people get so much money the only way they can spend it is this kind of BS.
It’s not a solved problem at all. Your take is very libertarian, which I personally sympathize with, but if we’re being honest it doesn’t align with reality.
The truth is, there are a lot of bad parents that are, for various reasons, unable to perform these parental duties.
We’ve always restricted children from accessing certain things without relying solely on their parent’s abilities or discretion.
I’m strongly in favour in giving parents as much control as possible. That doesn’t negate the fact that the vast majority of children, for example, currently have completely unrestricted access to hardcore pornography.
Shrugging it off, proclaiming it’s a parental responsibility, doesn’t solve the real world problem.
Previous to the internet we didn’t allow free unrestricted distribution of pornography to children. We stepped in as a society and said, no actually if you’re selling that… fine, but you need to verify the age of the customer.
Those parents were kids in their youth. Their kids may become parents someday.
This is the mechanism that allows for a recovery process to occur naturally.
Politicians have a limited duty cycle which entices them to act like the world is on fire. It's not. The real problems (deforestation, poverty, corruption to name a few) are mostly invisible to them.
There's a lobbying group called 5rights that has designed and promoted the UK OSA, AU OSA, California KOSA, Federal KOSA, and more. This isn't some conspiracy. They take proudly take credit for these bills on their website, and in news coverage you'll see their same couple media personalities over and over: https://5rightsfoundation.com/our-work/
So, firstly, before I dive into your comment; about the topic above, this is the result of a terrible headline gone wrong in a single state in the US. The language never required any changes to Linux, or Windows, or any other operating system, for that matter.
Someone read the text, and made a clickbaity headline, and it went viral. then, another state made a similar bill, and it went viral again.Age verification isn't coming to Linux any time soon, and no, you aren't breaking any laws by either developing for, and/or using Linux if you are a U.S. citizen. It is literally illegal to pass a law like that thanks to the constitution. Outside the U.S.? well depending on the country, you likely experienced something better or worse, Regardless...
It is pretty remarkable that it [age verification] has popped up in multiple countries at once. It is almost as though a certain few billionaires are interested in suppressing speech.I wonder who those folks might be? ;)
The folks trying to shut down the masses via stuff like this should probably read some history, because that never works out...like ever. Doing the same thing over and over again won't make it work. It won't work this time either.
> 1798.501. (a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
> (1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
[And some other stuff]. A simple reading says operating systems need to ask the age of the accout holder during account setup. It says the purpose is to provide a signal to a covered app store, but it does not exempt operating systems without a covered app store.
To me, the biggest issue is that it seems to think of computers as something you use while being near and having only one user at a time accessing, where computers you use might be far away and have thousands of people accessing them per day with hundreds of concurrent users and tens of thousands of accounts.
If you don't intentionally allow accounts access to any app stores, do you still need to collect the data ? It says to collect it, and that's the purpose but it doesn't say if you're not permitting that purpose you don't have to collect it
That an issue to you, I, personally, love the idea of submitting my ID to McDonald's kiosk before ordering.
Maybe that would finally push them to make kiosks that run entirely without OS. I expect a big enough Rube Goldberg machine could do the task if not as efficiently, then at least in a more entertaining way.
I think, if there's no account setup, there's no need to request an age/birthday signal. Although if there's am app store and no account setup, you might have trouble.
Correct. For the life of me I cannot see how this can ever work in practice.
For such a scheme to work all users would have to be physically and electronically locked out from accessing any feature of a computer that would alter its function.
This has to be sheer madness. Every general computing device from small embedded controllers, to Raspberry Pis to the most powerful desktop computers would have more in common with electricity meters and their embossed lead anti-tampering seals than present-day computers. Can you imagine the utter chaos of the state conducting regular anti-tampering audits of every state-registered PC? And what about the millions of legacy PCs that could not be adapted?
Moreover, using such a computer would be more akin to using an automatic teller machine with its strictly controlled and limited functions, the notion of "general computing" as we now know it would cease to exist.
The only practical solution is to make parents responsible—that is to ensure their kids do not have unfettered/unmanaged access to computers. Responsibility could be extended to all adults, anyone deliberately providing unsupervised/unfettered computer access to minors could be charged with child abuse.
If parents aren't prepared to extend their parental responsibilities to also include computing devices, phones, social media and such then the state could impose penalties. Of course, for that to work society would have to agree as it now does over outlawing the physical punishing of children (not that long ago that wasn't the case).
No doubt arriving at a society-wide consensus would take time but it's doable. Societal views do change, for example, when I was a kid we got the cane for misbehaving, caning kids is now outlawed often with heavy penalties.
Finally, I also find your point about the age verification debate popping up simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU as very troubling. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but evidence suggests there are many lobbyists acting behind the scenes of whom we are unaware (same goes with the encryption debate).
It's this sort of hidden subterfuge that's undermining and pulling our democracies apart. Little wonder that these days many citizens have little faith in institutions and those whose governance they're under.
People discuss policies all the time, and take inspiration from jurisdictions where those policies /appear/ to be implemented and "working"
The idea that there is an age requirement (for certain content) has been around for a very long time (Facebook, for example has a no under 13s rule in their T&Cs, many porn sites have a 18 years or older declaration before allowing access, and so on)
Australia has recently implemented law(s) that take the next step forward, and the other countries in the world that have been wanting something similar are seeing that, seeing that there haven't blowback from corporations or voters that makes the idea of the law unpalatable, and thinking that they too can implement laws that work in similar ways.
If you actually pay attention to global politics you will see that this sort of behaviour occurs fairly regularly (look, for example, and the legalisationg of homosexual marriage, there was a law legalising it in the Netherlands in 2001, then Belgium did similar in 2003... and so on as more countries saw that their own voters were amenable to the idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_same-sex_marri...)
edit: There's no grand conspiracy at play
Another example is the cannabis use laws, cannabis was heavily criminalised in the 70s, there was pressure from the USA for other countries to follow suit.
BUT from the early 2010s several states of the USA legalised recreational use - this has also bought the debate back to the fore for many countries, with reassessments and changes occuring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis_by_U.S._j...
Eh, it really isn’t that surprising. “Activists” in any country are quick to capitalize on a news cycle. You also missed AU. If you squint you would realize that they are all English speaking (or use English as a common exchange language)
> how the age verification debate has popped up almost simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU
It's because of a mix of Barroness Kidron's lobbying [0] and companies trying to meet legislators halfway [1] due to latent legislative anger due to disinformation incidents that arose during the 2016 election, January 6th, January 8th in Brazil, the New Caledonia unrest, and a couple others.
Civil and digital libertarianism is not a mainstream view outside of a subset of techies.
Sadly, building and deploy a truly private and OSS authentication service was not on the radar in the early 2010s - that would have staved off the current iteration.
I don't think this is a left- or right-wing issue: Australia was one of the first to ban kids from social media, and Australia is not right-wing by any measure. Canada is hardly right-wing, but age verification is bill S-210 in their parliament.
What you're seeing is a coordinated push by transnational interests; Meta's name has come up in discussions of the funding behind this push. At the very lest, verifying age also verifies that a person is real and not a bot, so advertising firms like Meta will benefit from verification. That's not right-wing or left-wing but rather the influence of business over the political, and neither wing of the spectrum is immune to corruption.
Agreed, it clearly isn't a matter of left vs right. It's about liberal vs illiberal values. Unfortunately for all of us, liberty is falling out of favor.
> Separate from this policy debate I think you’ll find Australia is a country where the right frequently wins actual majorities of the vote.
Isn't that basically every democratic country?
We can't judge how "right" or "left" the political culture of a country is by how frequently the right or left win office, because in the long-run they tend to win office roughly equally often just about everywhere.
A better way of judging this question, is how the policies of their main left/right parties compare to those of their counterparts in comparable countries
>I don't think this is a left- or right-wing issue: Australia was one of the first to ban kids from social media, and Australia is not right-wing by any measure. Canada is hardly right-wing, but age verification is bill S-210 in their parliament.
I'd classify both as very corporate friendly, far centrist, which is just as good as "right wing". Nothing about actually empowering the masses, and even less so the working class, only elite pseudo prograssive talking points.
In Europe Chat Control was pushed by the left-wing Danish government (Social Democrats). And I am still pissed that Trump went with his Greenland nonsense so everyone rallied around the Danes, when in reality the important news is that Mette Frederiksen and her party seem to have vested interest in establishing mass surveillance across the EU bloc.
There's 2 axes on the political spectrum. Economic and Social axes. Liberal and Conservative is one dimension (Economic) and Authoritarian and Libertarian is another dimension (Social).
In the US both the Democratic Party (Liberal) and Republican Party (Conservatives) are considered Authoritarian on this 2 dimensional graph.
Milei claims to be a Conservative Libertarian so, in theory, he should be opposed to this. We'll see what he actually does.
Words don't mean anything any more. Libertarianism used to be a fringe of anarchism, yet it has devolved into a chimera of its own, especially when looking at American-style libertarianism that is very much pro-State.
> Something remarkable and unsettling is how the age verification debate has popped up almost simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU.
The nearly unique tune sang worldwide around Covid-19 was quite something too and I think this should be examined for it gives us information as to how they operate.
As I've spent time in several countries, I took the habit to read the main newspapers' headlines of those various countries (in three different languages). I'll typically read headlines from major newspaper from France/Belgium/Luxembourg/Spain and the big ol' USA. When you do that, you realize how weirdly "synchronized" everything is. Not just the debate on age control.
Some countries resist but nearly every media repeats the same thing, everywhere.
And the sad thing is: most people here on HN (but certainly not me) kept repeating like parrots the same lies and half-truths the media were pushing everywhere.
These lies and half-truth are now exposed in the official report by Congress on the origins of Sars-Cov-2 (link below).
A few of us knew something was not right but every time we'd point it out it was to be met with downvotes. One investigative journalist pointed, very early on, that Peter Daszak was implicated and that this whole thing smelled of a lab leak. For the record: Peter Daszak has now been debarred. He's basically the "expert" who explained the virus couldn't possibly be a lab leak while... Being funded to do research on gain-of-function bat viruses.
Here's the report and it's not "nice" to those who believed and repeated the media lies:
- The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
- Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
- Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
I think that if we want to understand how the US/UK/EU and others all work together to lie to people, to scheme to advance their dirty pawns, we should look at the worst psyop in history (SARS-Cov-2 / Covid-19) and how it was handled. At what turned to be true, at what where lies, at what they fully know where lies and yet where presented at truths, etc.
And that's only the lie about the virus. Don't get me started on that fast-tracked "vaccine" I got in my arms and which I now deeply regret. For all we know in a few years we'll also learn about the lies and half-truth around those various vaccines.
> With the same logical fallacies.
I think books could be filled with those logical fallacies we read about Covid. Including those we read in comments here on HN. I stand my case and it's here: FINAL REPORT: COVID Select Concludes 2-Year Investigation, Issues 500+ Page Final Report on Lessons Learned and the Path Forward [1]
> Pretty telling about how transnational lobbies and their interests work.
Yup I think so. And to me the SARS-Cov-2 / Covid-19 is a very interesting example of that and what happened should be studied more to understand how a select group people is scheming behind the scenes.
There's a middle ground shockingly and I do think it's roughly why this all came up at once.
"Just parent" isn't easy in an age of large numbers of families having to both work and kids having a computer in their hands at all times.
The "please don't say you're 18 if you aren't" standard has NEVER applied for anything else flagged as adult. If you sell products or allow services to a minor without doing proper checks YOU are responsible as the company if it's found to negligent, to the point you can lose your license.
The thing is, you also don't fucking store every single ID you've ever looked at because that's insane, or if you do, you do it for very short periods of time. If a kid gets a fake ID, fine, that's on the kid so long as the company is doing their best.
It's why an "adult mode" local cred on the machine is probably reasonable? If the kid gets a fake cred, fine, that's on the parents, but at least sites can automatically look for the cred and if not provided just bounce.
As it is ALL the onus is on the family, and there's a fuckload of preying on children (especially economically) that's not supposed to be remotely legal that we've just kicked open the doors to because its "hard" to solve.
I know this wasn't your point (and I agree with you here), but I heard the exact same thing, word for word, when the Catholic priest was just breaking.
“Tell parents to parent” is a nice slogan, but it means nothing in practice. Some parents won’t have the ability to police their kids, some won’t care, etc.
What do you actually think it means to “tell parents to parent”? Be concrete. Do you think there should be legal consequences for people who let their kids on social media? Or just some kind of public service PR campaign?
Anyway, why shouldn’t this apply to everything else? Should we repeal the laws against selling tobacco or alcohol to minors, or against an adult having sex with them? Why not just “tell parents to parent” ?
because parents get to vote same as you, and it looks like they are winning. there are many problems in the libertarian utopia that could be dumped on individuals ("if you don't like it, don't leave your house") but equally unfortunately many prefer a socialist utopia with lots of social and financial controls
I don’t think any parents as constituents had anything to do with these laws.
If voter priorities influence legislature so much, where is our healthcare reform that the obvious majority of people have been demanding for decades?
Many parliaments and legislative bodies throughout the western world continually ignore their constituents’ demands because lobbying bodies with real money get their priorities addressed first.
Other people’s kids aren’t your problem until they grow up and form a deeply unfit electorate and their country, representing less than 5% of the world population, makes an absolute mess of everything. Then they become everyone’s problem.
Today's electorate is unfit. Is it also because they had TikTok when they were children? Or are they unfit because they consumed fake-news and QAnon-like content as adults?
If it's the latter, how is age verification supposed to help here exactly?
Since you are asking me to give away my privacy under this promise, I'm interested in the details.
Sorry, I clearly misunderstood you, I thought you were defending those laws.
I am aware that uneducated children will become everyone's problem sooner or later, but my argument is that, at the end of the day, in practice, like it or not, this is mostly in control of the parents. The root cause is that parents fail to provide education, modals, and preparation for being a balanced and responsible person that can control its own impulses, and now these same parents want to externalize their responsibilities to malicious Governments, at the expense of everyone's rights.
Giving away privacy for just patching one of the symptoms is a ridiculous ask, especially in this political environment, and especially when it could be tackled in different ways that don't imply losing privacy.
In my opinion, people will be unfit and uneducated in the future no matter what we do, and they will choose malicious leaders, and having privacy in that future will be better than not having it.
> I don't care about other people's children getting groomed.
These other people’s children will be your own children’s bullies tomorrow and narcissistic bosses and politicians or similar gang members the day after.
Fact is, we need to find solutions against child abuse in any shape or form that work given the circumstances and decision making of other people around us. We do not exist in isolation. I don’t think age verification in any way contributes positively to this problem space, and I don’t even think online grooming is near any top spot on the list of child abuse vectors that need addressing, but that doesn’t mean that the problem and our contribution to it (like looking away and doing nothing) should be denied as a whole.
I don’t think software downloads, even downloads of software we might find objectionable, can be considered to be something that is engaging in “grooming.”
That’s simply not what that word means.
If your child takes interest in something you don’t like that they found online, they weren’t inherently groomed by anyone into liking it.
Well, this mandatory age input won't help with that, either. The parental controls are a much more powerful version. So I guess you're in favor of more strict version of this, and hope that we'll slippery-slope our way to it eventually? How do you propose to do that without ending internet anonymity for everyone?
Taking for granted that is really the purpose, how does age verification solve this problem? Adults won't have any trouble accessing online spaces meant for kids under these laws. And then why does porn get mixed up in this, it's not exactly a place where kids "hang out."
I'm not really convinced that age verification is the solution to that, nor am I convinced that is sufficiently significant to be a problem that requires legislation, nor that legislation is the best means of addressing it if it were a problem. There are necessarily always risks to growing up. A legislator cannot regulate those risks out of existence. Parents are the only ones with the personal knowledge and responsibility to manage those risks.
Interesting,are either of those two orgs you linked pushing the age verification policies that the article is rallying against? I would assume so since you posted them here, but it's unclear from the links Wikipedia pages you linked.
I doubt they're pushing it; but if we're seeing roughly simultaneous introduction of similar laws in many countries then those organisations are probably organising the forums where the lobbying is being done.
Neither of these two groups you mention hold any meaningful power anywhere, and have zero links with the issue of age verification: your comment is pure disinformation.
it worked with p(l)andemics, why it wouldn't with online verification? they always come with some noble reason how to force something down the population throat and majority still falls for it
heck I don't see everyone boycotting and embarging US/Israel for their aggression against Iran, because they came up with good story once again, cough...Iraq WMD...cough
These laws don't violate the privacy of every computer user. They say that a parent shall be able to mark a child's account as being under 18, and apps shall respect that.
Assuming apps for which this is relevant respect users and specifically children in this day and age sounds naive. It's another free datapoint to collect, in the best case for targeted ads.
This is literally about making parental control applications work better. Nothing in the law requires a child setting up their own system to set their real age. It just lets a parent creating a limited account for a child.
In the US, cheap ThinkPads like E14 sometimes sell for a bit less when you factor in all typical discounts. They are good machines that run Linux well and can be repaired.
In EU, and I imagine other markets, there's nothing remotely close. I hope this puts some pressure on Lenovo and the rest of manufacturers to be more competitive.
In the EU it costs $200 more so it's more like a low to mid range laptop.
I have a feeling these are aimed at the same sector as the Framework 12, school provided laptops for kids meant to be bought in bulk by institutions. But there they're competing against $150 Chromebooks and neither is even close.
In the EU, you don't need to buy an extended warranty, since existing consumer protection laws require the sort of extended repair coverage Americans have to pay extra for.
Taxes are also included in the EU price, but not the US price.
The lack of reflection indicated by "US prices are so much cheaper! Why are our electronics so expensive?" vs "What do you mean, you can't take it back to the store where you got it for an on-the-spot replacement a year and a half after purchase if it breaks?" has amused me for quite some time. Not that both come from the same person, but don't they ever talk to each other?
Yes but be aware this only goes where Apple is the actual seller. If you buy it in another shop you only have Apple warranty for one year and the shop has to sort out the second one. So buying from Apple directly is better.
I always wondered why nobody's ever tried to reach me about an extended warranty despite it being such a meme. I guess that's why, pretty fucked up ngl.
The Macbook Neo is highly repairable too [1]. Not _quite_ as repairable as some Thinkpads with a 10/10 score, but still pretty respectable at a 6/10 with easily replaceable batteries and stuff.
RAM has no bearing on repairability? And yes, sure stuff is soldered to the motherboard, but everything is basically modular outside of it, you can replace every big part pretty easily, and no glue, even for the battery
The RAM being soldered is a hit against repair ability, you can't expand it or if the ram has issues you can't replace it, you will just be forced to throw out the entire machine. What else is modular here anyways? Can I swap out the CPU, the screen, the keyboard, ports...anything?
Why are the Thinkpads getting 10/10 when the math coprocessor can’t be replaced and the N2 cache is inside the CPU as well?
We culturally decide what parts can or cannot be replaced. Apple solders their RAM on the CPU for performance reasons. It’s coming to PCs at some point, if they ever decide to compete on performance ever again.
> Apple solders their RAM on the CPU for performance reasons. It’s coming to PCs at some point, if they ever decide to compete on performance ever again.
Are you assuming that the PCs do not compete with Macs for performance? People built Hackintoshes that are more powerful than the highest spec Mac Pro - and for cheaper, too
On laptops, which is something between 80-90% of the market for computers, you'd be hard pressed to find a laptop that's competitive with Apple. Can you find a laptop chip that's as good as the M5 Max? Or the M3 Max for that matter.
Laptop PCs are starting to lag behind Apple, just like the fastest Android phones have a hard time competing with three year old iPhones.
Of course on the desktop, you can just pump more power into a disappointing x86 chip to eke out better perf but that market is marginal and Apple basically ignores it. Laptops might not be a problem for you specifically but this situation, where a company has advantages but is inadequate for the needs of the market, is how so many chip manufacturers just disappeared in the 90s.
> Can you find a laptop chip that's as good as the M5 Max? Or the M3 Max for that matter.
Most people, including me, do not need the most powerful chip. Most of what 99% of laptop users do does not require the SOTA. The only task for a laptop that I have that requires more compute is gaming. My 3 year old laptop still performs much better in games compared to the M5 Max, according to benchmarks for the games that I play, not to mention the compatibility advantages
> Of course on the desktop, you can just pump more power into a disappointing x86 chip to eke out better perf but that market is marginal and Apple basically ignores it
Apple has desktop computers for sale, they do not ignore the market. The latest Mac Mini is actually a great value for the money, especially for businesses
Soldering RAM isn't for compact size or cost or to keep you from upgrading, it's for speed. Soldered RAM can be physically closer with a faster bus than removable RAM.
Yeah, I got downvoted but the people arguing against have no idea of the speeds of the standards. LPCAMM2 offers the same exact speeds as LPDDR5x. It is dumb as a consumer to just accept soldering as an excuse from tech companies.
Neo's RAM is Package on Package, it is literally soldered on top of the A18.
In fact, Neo's Mainboard is in the same ballpark as a Desktop RAM DIMM, which means replacing the whole Mainboard is in the same as replacing the RAM on a Desktop from an environmental perspective.
For instance, under Yann's direction Meta FAIR produced the ESM protein sequence model, which is less hyped than AlphaFold, but has been incredibly influential. They achieved great performance without using multiple alignments as an input/inductive bias. This is incredibly important for large classes of proteins where multiple alignments are pretty much noise.
In the UK, lots of jobs tend to be filled in via recruiters, and they are quite helpful.
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