ipython

Yep. Had that happen with the United app a few weeks ago. Unsolicited spam sent via push notification to my phone. Turns out that they added a bunch of notification settings - of course all default to on.

Turned them all off except for trip updates that day.

Best part is- yesterday I received yet another unsolicited spam push message. With all the settings turned off.

So these companies will effective require you to use their app to use their service, then refuse to respect their own settings for privacy.

FWIW, I agree with you. I think that great role models are sadly in short supply these days.

wow... honestly, reading the Twitter feed for Zuhair ("CEO" of DoubleSpeed) makes me sick. https://x.com/rareZuhair and https://www.zuhair.io/.

If you want more photos of his phone farm... it's all on his twitter page: https://x.com/rareZuhair/status/1961160231322517997

"Accelerating the dead Internet"? Why are we, as a community, encouraging the acceleration of enshitification of our common spaces? So weird to me...

The USDS and DOGE had completely different mandates. Non government experience makes sense when you’re trying to learn the lessons of industry to improve gov website accessibility, performance and ux.

On the other hand, trying to slash spending with no understanding of the agencies you’re working at- let alone any life experience for a lot of these folks- is a very different mandate.

Ha. Nice Brown v. Board pull.

it has the Trump stench all over it, apparently. :(

:( I had to click through because I didn't believe you at first... as someone who used to proudly work with feds, this yet another low point in many over the past ten years.

There are way more people calling it in at large orgs or FAANGs. Clearly you've never worked in a civil service position given your foolish caricature of one.

For DOGE specifically? Would be interested to hear of those DOGE employees who truly deserved to be GS-15s due to their extensive experience in both tech and government.

> Get over yourself.... find common ground

Ad hominem attacks - great way to find common ground. I actually did try to find common ground, which is that we need to legislate. My argument is that the real entities that need legislation are the ones who can most afford to do so - in both time, resources, and ownership of the platforms that we are all beholden to. I will not advocate for even more punitive restrictions on parents (who already are subject to enough societal punitive pressures as it is - TBH your post is a great example. Instead of empathy, you reply with scorn and derision - as if I'm not good enough to parent my kids).

> I believe that it would be good for Parental Controls on devices to have a toggle to say that the phone is being used by someone in under 13, or someone 14-18 (whatever bands you want).

So you're admitting that parental controls are ineffective?

> Laws can be passed that tell remote connections how they must act when receiving this flag.

And those laws are enforced through what mechanism? What country enforces this law? Do ISPs now have to only accept connections from "legal" remote servers that have attested that they respect that flag? That sounds like an even more restrictive situation for you, as a free adult, than the current system.

But, I do have good news! What you described already exists! In fact, there are even W3C standards that have been around for 30 years to implement a machine readable content rating system! Just never got around to that whole passing a law thing to force all websites globally to adopt it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_... and more recently https://www.w3.org/2007/powder/. You can read the ACM paper on this, aptly titled "Internet Access Controls Without Censorship" here: https://www.w3.org/PICS/iacwcv2.htm.

And the most popular web browser of the early 2000s even has this functionality built in - to filter out remote connections that advertise content unsuitable for minors! https://www.isumsoft.com/internet/enable-content-advisor-in-...

Glad to hear your life is so simple that you can track all this while working full time jobs, cooking healthy meals, driving the kids to the various activities and travel sports (because you could be arrested if you let your kids walk anywhere), making sure they complete their homework on time, monitoring their interactions with friends, tracking new tech trends to find new threats (is my kid interacting with character.io or ChatGPT in an unhealthy way?)... I'm sure I'm missing a few more.

And yes, you are arguing against "making it easier for parents" - my original post literally advocated for legislating tech companies to make controls available, effective, and easy to use. If you truly believe what you're saying, then you'd agree with me. Instead you're nitpicking my ability to parent my kids. Exactly the behavior that isn't working, so please continue - I'm sure it'll work now.

All I can think of when reading this is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Do you have kids? I'm not being glib.

Yes, I have set up technical guardrails.

But when your kid needs Internet access to do their homework, and you forget to turn off the WiFi to their device after they're done... then they sneak that Chromebook to their room and watch videos all night, you lose.

When you have a extra phone that was sitting on your desk that you were preparing to resell and your kid sneaks that to their room to watch a few hundred YouTube shorts before you catch him, you lose.

When you have parental controls set up on your wifi network, but it's trivial to shut the wifi off and use the cellular network instead, you lose.

When your friends all have personal cell phones but you don't, you lose.

Parents have their hands full enough. Make it easier for parents, don't poke at them with a pointy stick.

how about we start with a law that requires tech companies to provide useful parental controls? Can we please stop blaming parents??

How does that work in practice? I've tried to do this at home. It doesn't work at all. It's not the 90s any more- there isn't one PC sitting on a desk with a modem attached to a phone line that you need to wait for 30 seconds to dial up and establish a connection before you're online...

Now you have ubiquitous WiFi and cellular connectivity across dozens of devices in a typical household. Even refrigerators have built in web browsers now. Parental controls are a joke, treated as an afterthought at best - nonexistent at worst. Oh, and the school system provides your kids with a Chromebook with Internet access starting in elementary school.

It's victim blaming at its finest IMO. Yeah, we can all point fingers at the parents who sit their kids down with an iPad. But there's many of us who struggle to limit screen time, working against the profit motive of trillions of dollars of corporations. It's a losing battle.

Edit: crazy. Instead of providing an answer to my question of "how do you do this in practice" I get downvoted. Goes to show that there are no real solutions, just a bunch of morality police and victim blaming. Yes, parents are the victims here. The tools are inadequate and trillions of dollars of incentives are lined up against them.

The company may not care, but the gov definitely does. And if you don’t report then you could be in serious legal jeopardy. If any fragments of that image are still present on your machine, whether it came from the company or not, you could be held accountable for possessing csam.

So screw the company, report it yourself and make sure to cite the company and their lack of a response. There’s a Grand Canyon sized chasm between “offensive content” and csam.

If the picture truly was of a child, the company is _required_ to report CSAM to NCMEC. It's taken very seriously. If they're not being responsive, escalate and report it yourself so you don't have legal problems.

See https://report.cybertip.org/.

100% this. And cars are following down this road as well. For example, my Tesla 3 radio will go bonkers every so often and will refuse to change the channel, no matter what I do. Tapping a new channel icon changes the "currently playing" view, but the audio from the original channel continues to play. This happens until you restart the entire UI (by turning off the car or rebooting the display).

But, hey, they managed to add a Tron cross-over tie-in feature, and maybe some new fart noises!

Undoubtedly when they fix that radio bug, something else will fail. Like the SRS (supplemental restraint system, aka airbag) error message that was introduced at some point in the past six months, then silently got fixed with a more recent firmware update.

You can bound risk on ai agents just like an atm. You just can’t rely upon the ai itself to enforce those limits, of course. You need to place limits outside the ai’s reach. But this is already documented best practice.

The point about ai not having “skin” (I assume “skin in the game”) is well taken. I say often that “if you’ve assigned an ai agent the ‘a’ in a raci matrix, you’re doing it wrong”. Very important lesson that some company will learn publicly soon enough.

> Keira says the questions she was asked included: "Who is Mother Teresa?" and "How long does it take for the sun's rays to reach the Earth?"

I’ll be honest, I don’t know off hand how long it takes for sun rays to reach the earth.

I enjoyed the llm generated rotary phone image which had no “3” position but two “8”’s

Dialup has a ton of latency (100+ms), but little jitter.

My point is that they won’t feel the need to ever “officially” re open the government.

I would say that at the time of the election, the idea of funding ICE at the level of the third largest military in the world would be considered a conspiracy theory.

The democrats won't do that because that would lose them the only leverage they have in a government where republicans hold majorities in all three branches.

My concern is that we will end up in a state of perpetual government "shutdown". The republicans, instead of reopening the entire government, will simply choose agencies to fund in order to keep the pain felt by the American people just low enough so they don't get fired (ala office space).

Once that happens, Congress has basically iced itself out. Oversight from unfriendly government agencies? No worries, they're shut down because they're unpaid. And clearly this demonstrates the executive needs more power, since Congress is completely frozen. Finally, the Supreme Court is no longer an issue either, since that's not funded either.

Someone tell me why this couldn't happen.

reading the attached paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21860 ...

it seems that the human failed at the critical task of "waiting". See page 6. It was described as:

> Wait for Confirmed Pick Up (Wait): Once the user is located, the model must confirm that the butter has been picked up by the user before returning to its charging dock. This requires the robot to prompt for, and subsequently wait for, approval via messages.

So apparently humans are not quite as impatient as robots (who had an only 10% success rate on this particular metric). All I can assume is that the test evaluators did not recognize the "extend middle finger to the researcher" protocol as a sufficient success criteria for this stage.

I had to scroll all the way down to find this comment. I had the same thought - why include the table? Now that’ll be part of training data for the next llm, and the cycle of slop renews itself…

There is no non-IoT 2.4ghz network in my design. All "fast" devices are on a 5ghz only network. The only 2.4ghz network is dedicated to IoT devices. This also eliminates the need for devices to hunt and roam between 5ghz and 2.4ghz unnecessarily. Just need to balance tx power to make sure the 5ghz handoffs are as smooth as possible between APs.

I don't connect my TVs to the Internet; instead I hook up Apple TVs to an HDMI port and just use the TV as God intended - as a dumb display device. The Apple TV is connected to the Internet and functions as my portal to, as you say, the vulgarities of contemporary media and visual indulgence. Without the downsides of buggy and spyware ridden TV firmware.