Hizonner

It turns out that there are some government jobs in which it is necessary to know what the fuck you are doing.

Taking away "social media" didn't work? We'll take away VPNs!

Taking away VPNs didn't work? We'll take away ALL THE COMPUTERS!

This is the path of the fanatic.

Listen to yourself. You are a fanatic.

What are you going to ban after that?

> dopamine desensitization

So ignorant pop pseudo-neuroscience. Got it.

> It's not fair to say "banning doesnt work you should just not give your children phones", but then force you to send your children to schools that give them ipads and other distractions.

Books can also be distractions. Ask me how I know. And I notice that you're just silently shifting back and forth between "social media" (ever notice how there's no single agreed-upon definition of that in the world?) and "just anything you can do on an iPad".

> in many schools EVERY child is on social media

Yes, because the world at large uses social media for some things. And for that matter uses things other than social media, things you or your coalition want to deprive children of, for other things. What you are effectively asking is to stick everybody who's not officially an adult in a curated sandbox that will never match the richness of the rest of society. That is unfair, unreasonable, and basically a guaranteed way to fail to prepare them for actual adulthood.

Normal people do not serve coffee anywhere close to that hot. Sorry to burst your bubble.

> I'm always surprised how ambiguous the writing is for this kind of stuff.

That's because--

(a) The actual legislators vaguely realize that they're too lazy and stupid to get anything right in detail, so they delegate to the regulatory apparatus.

(b) Neither the legislators nor the regulators are ever quite sure what they can politically get away with actually demanding, or how fast they can politically get away with moving, so they want both the ability to grab anything that looks like they can hold it, and the ability to deny that they ever meant to ask for anything that's blowing back too hard on them.

(c) Both the legislators and the regulators want to be able to threaten various actors with draconian actions that are at least possibly authorized under that kind of vague language, in order to get concessions that they are not authorized to demand (and that would be too hot politically to give them authorization to demand).

Ah, but you see, the alarms from the device I am building are most important, because somebody might sue me if I can't shift responsibility onto the user.

You didn't have a reasonable expectation that it would, or even might, do that.

I guess you could say that you didn't have a reasonable expectation that a bot could accept a license, but you're on a lot shakier ground there...

... only because you'd have no evidence of it. From a legal point of view, the question is what would come down if the judge were (somehow) convinced that it actually happened that way. Actually if a "perfect" judge were so convinced.

Probably a real judge would want to say something like "Why are all of you bozos in my courtroom wasting public money with some two-bit shrinkwrap bullshit? I was good at surfing. I could have gone pro. I hate my life..."

Actually, no, because you didn't intentionally accept the terms, and you had no reason to expect that your cat would jump on there in exactly that way.

On the other hand, if you take a laser and intentionally induce the cat to push the key, then you are bound.

> If licenses are valid in any way (the argument is they get you out of the copyright infringement caused by copying the software from disk to memory) then it's your job to go find the license to software you use and make sure you agree to it; the little popup is just a nice way to make your aware of the terms.

The way you set up the scenario, the user has no reason to even know that they're using this new version with this new license. An update has happened without their knowledge. So far as they know, they're running the old software under the old license.

You could make an equally good argument that whoever wrote the software installed software on the user's computer without the user's permission. If it's the user's fault that a cat might jump on the keyboard, why isn't it equally the software provider's fault?

... but the reality is that, taking your description at face value, nobody has done anything. The user had no expectation or intention of installing the software or accepting the new license, and the software provider had no expectation or intention of installing it without user permission, and they were both actually fairly reasonable in their expectations. Unfortunately shit happens.

The person who chose to run it (and tell it what to do) is responsible for its actions. If you don't want to be responsible for something nondeterministic software does, then don't let nondeterministic software do that thing.

The "reasonable default" is to force the user to actually make the choice, probably after forcing the user to prove they understand the implications.

> It is a tool capable of pushing a human towards terrible actions, and there are documented cases of it doing this.

Then maybe they should do something about that instead of papering it over with bullshit.

Because people actually want alcohol, whereas advertising is generally something they're stuck with.

Nice job of sidestepping the "fundamental question" of whether that can be done and what damage it would do. You do not get to answer the question as you posed it in a vacuum.

It's not a "robustness issue". Nobody has proposed anything that works at all.

But to answer your "fundamental question", no. Age gating is dumb. Giving parents total control is also dumb.

Why for those under 16 in particular? It has no value for anybody at any age, and has apparently driven tons of adults insane.

But the right answer is still to ban advertising. And I don't mean just to those under 16.

If you can't publish a complete, detailed, specific description of what you're alleging, with names, dates, quotes, and whatever, then you publish absolutely nothing. Publishing vague and unanswerable accusations is scumbag behavior.

> I don't know if the fact that it fully slipped into the absurd or the fact that it probably still worked on people is sadder.

The thing is that that one plays on propaganda that people have already been conditioned to accept.

Very probably this person's father believes that the Democrats (a) control the state-operated voter registration system, and (b) manipulate it to their advantage. He believes that because he's been sent that message through a vast number of channels for many years. He would think it was absolutely in character for his registered party to be changed, and would probably think that would somehow affect how his vote was actually counted.

It's no more absurd than the idea that busloads of illegal aliens are showing up to vote "somewhere". Or whatever other idiotic lies they've been telling forever.

You can still be location-tracked with a dumb phone. Yes, even if the phone has no GPS. Any communication with the network gives away your location to the "right" people.

Um, what "ideological goals"? "My friends and I get to do anything we want and fuck everybody else" isn't much of an ideology. Ideology means "abstract principles".

Wait, so it's important to be "familiar" to the 96 percent of users who don't use your software?

A "diode" is not an air gap. If there is any flow in either direction, you don't have an air gap. This isn't hard to understand.

> Germany is increasingly authoritarian in order to keep heterodox parties out

... and those parties would be even more authoritarian if they got in. Which they might in part because of the reaction. It's possible to get fucked from both ends...

Not to mention the number of random individuals, with enough access, who might want to sabotage them in those circumstances. And fuck knows what the Trump administration decides to bomb. And the general fog of war. And how delicate everything is.

10 years ago this would have been a big deal, because the US (or any country) can always change "forms".

Actually that's why you shouldn't create databases like that to begin with.

I read several subreddits and see nearly no images, nearly no rage bait (probably less than on Hacker News, in fact), and exactly no porn. My daily Reddit experience is so close to Hacker News that I've been known to forget which one I'm on.

Reddit still has the capacity to show you what you're actually looking for. It still lets you find content by interest, rather than by personalities. It still keeps replies together, still lets you order by time easily, and doesn't stick too much random crap in the middle (none if you use a decent ad blocker). It handles long form content well and doesn't try to force everything to be a sound bite that you have to click on to see more. It's still convenient to use it that way, and most users probably do use it that way.

Compare to, say, Youtube, which fight you ever step of the way if you try not to be drowned in a disordered flood of some combination of what a computer guesses you might want and what it's most profitable for the site for you to see (including what will keep you on the site), with your only control being which "influencers" you uprank by "subscribing" to them.

Yes, "Open Source" is newer than "Free Software". The phrases was deliberately coined, yes in the 1990s, to cover different (and mostly broader) ground... because there was a desire for a clear distinction between them. Which there still is.

The OSD came out within months of the phrase "open source" first being used, and the phrase was coined as part of the same process of discussion that produced the OSD. It's not a natural phrase and does not have an obvious "simple and plain meaning". It's a term of art.

Um, no. Copyright puts specific restrictions on what you can do with work. Those restrictions are described by certain words. The question is whether the existing restrictions cover training AI. That's a matter of interpretation, but once an interpretation is accepted, it is understood as what copyright always meant.

Training AI is probably not a copyright violation because it never was one to begin with.

To break the site. But you're right that a lot fewer people will probably want to break it than to scrape it, and that stuff like CAPTCHAs is usually more about the "scraping" case. So basically a mistake on my part.