I think it's more of a workforce reduction technique in some areas. how much is the issue, and lots of "it depends" but even at a higher up-front cost, LLMs have higher value and less liability. Instead of offshoring/outsourcing for example, you can have the same local devs that were leading/managing the offshore teams manage LLMs instead. Or if you have 10 expensive devs making 200k, just halving that is a million/year. even if that million is spent on tokens (even double or triple that) it might not be that much outside of what they would have been willing to pay for more devs anyways if there was the need, except now they have to deal with less people to manage overall. less lawyers, less hr, less lawsuits, less hiring and promption costs, less insurance premiums. Even if the quality of the work is a whole lot less, they only care about a viable product being shipped, and how much the lower quality affects profit margins.
I'll say this, laws and regulation are sorely needed. all this hate against billionaires, ceos, ai-bros, whatever... might or might not be warranted, but it is fruitless. Redirect this energy to your law makers.
In China for example, they made it illegal to use AI for the sole purpose of replacing human workers. The CEOs aren't bad CEOs, they aren't great either, it depends on the outcome. There are scenarios where entire job roles can be replaced by LLMs, but for complex roles like developers, you always need some human devs still, but likewise, almost always less of them than before. However, although less devs might be needed to do the same work, in some cases LLMs open up possibilities that weren't there before, so more devs babysitting LLMs or working on designing/shipping more features is also a strong possibility.
I mean, companies aren't trying to simply save cost on employees, they also want to maximize profits. Less devs per feature isn't the same as less devs period.
Overall, I'll say that demand creates its own supply. The internet itself killed many job roles and reduced the number of people you needed for many others, but it's not like we have the huge unemployment many were afraid of decades ago, if anything it created lots of more jobs. LLMs simply can't do everything people can, so they're not a drop-in replacement, that alone should mean a lot in terms of supply/demand economics.
Have they never heard of "the boy who cried wolf"?
First of all, age verification is not mass surveillance, it is possible to verify your age without disclosing who you are to the site you're visiting, and without disclosing what site you visited to the government. There are even age verification services (and I do despise them fully, this should be a government provided service!) that use only facial features to determine your age (you can call it surveillance, but not "mass").
See, the thing is, no matter how good your intent is, no matter how noble your cause, if you use lies and half-truths to further your argument or resist change, it only serves to undermine it all. For example "They do not deserve surveillance," is so disingenuous, if a site is required to verify age, the only children whose age might be verified are those who might have been exposed to that harmful content otherwise anyways, they're not being selected for surveillance, no one is trying to spy on children (or could possibly benefit from doing so using this method, since it is so unreliable), but they're framing it as it is so.
This isn't like "DRM" or "the nsa is spying on everyone", and there is a big difference between Signal (how are they involved in all this? is this just opportunistic politicking?) being required to verify peer-to-peer messaging from a porn site or or a live-cam site for sex workers requiring both parties to be age verified (where children do get trafficked!!).
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea, i really hate it but the prevailing positions in areas of the internet like here is so irrational and unreasonable.
You can't flash your private parts at children, you can't take children to a strip club, they're required by law to check IDs (even night clubs are!!). if that same interaction happens on the internet, suddenly no age verification is needed?
Is it because this problem has been left unaddressed for so long that so many are just too used to "the old way of doing things" despite the ever increasing human suffering caused by lack of regulations and laws like this?
I hope legislators grow a pair and stand up to these tech-crusaders who will burn down the world so long as they feel their corner is safe and secure.
Shame on everyone who refuses to have a nuanced discussion on this and instead takes an all-or-nothing position against any sort of legislature that would reduce (not eliminate) the harm being done. To mean, such people are no different than catholics, teachers, administrators, and anyone else in a position to do something about harm against children but turned the other way because their little world would be too shaken otherwise. Hiding behind "mah privacy!!" doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to at least attempt to be nuanced about it, at least propose an actual solution instead of just "I don't what the solution is, but not this" or "parents are at fault, I don't care" or something lazy like that. I wish I didn't know that when it comes to their own interests, wannabe technocrats like these are ingenious in developing tech like homomorphic encryption, differential privacy and zero-knowledge-proofs; this isn't about anyone's privacy or mass surveillance, it's about preservation of the status quo, apathy and faulty slippery-slope fallacy thinking.
> it is possible to verify your age without disclosing who you are to the site you're visiting, and without disclosing what site you visited to the government.
I can't believe people are really okay with a system where you have to show your real face to access websites. Cameras on phones went from a novelty to a government mandate so you can be observed.
There are various other potential methods to verify one's age, all of which are forbidden by OFCOM. Account age, zero-knowledge proofs, key signing, some kind of OAuth thing, physical tokens that require proof of age to buy, etc. The only permitted ones require your to link your real-life identity. This is a huge boon to the intelligence services and law enforcement.
Even among the few permitted verification methods, there are obstacles. Each site usually provides only one verification method at one verification provider. You may have to trust a company you never heard of before. Sometimes the photo fails (maybe their system thinks you don't look old enough) and they ask for ID too, or the photo fails and you are locked out of verification. Some services only allow credit card verification (e.g. Steam), so if you have poor credit you aren't able to even view the store page despite being of age.
What I say is, we don't need any of this. For thirty or so years we had client-side optional Parental Controls, and it worked fine. Many adult sites voluntarily use a <meta name="rating"> tag to ensure sites are correctly identified. The ability of adults to access adult content was not impeded. Parental Controls work better than verification because 1) many sites will not deploy age verification, and 2) it's trivial to overcome photo-based ID by holding your device up to a picture of an adult on a television set.
> There are various other potential methods to verify one's age, all of which are forbidden by OFCOM. Account age, zero-knowledge proofs, key signing, some kind of OAuth thing, physical tokens that require proof of age to buy, etc. The only permitted ones require your to link your real-life identity.
This is just not true. See 4.17 here, for example [1]
> The only permitted ones require your to link your real-life identity. This is a huge boon to the intelligence services and law enforcement.
Then let's talk about THAT!! why is that not the discussion instead of "nah, we'll find a solution some other day, for now, let's not solve anything"??
> Even among the few permitted verification methods,
These laws are still being debated, what's permitted has not been decided, why is Signal not advocating for a privacy friendly alternative. Why are our options lose all privacy to the most horrible people ever who will do us harm versus let the children suffer!
> You may have to trust a company you never heard of before.
Why do I have to? Why can't the government itself issue something as simple as a timestamp CA certificate signature for a secret that expires every few weeks, requiring facial/ID verification directly with the government to generate a new secret? the site only needs to verify that the signature is correct. a signed token you show random sites. and this is the most naive idea i brought up for discussion without things like zkp even considered. Lawmakers aren't being told by the likes of Signal "there is a better way to do this, let's discuss" they're being told "ignore what all the scientists, research, law enforcement, social workers are telling you so we can watch porn in secret".
> For thirty or so years we had client-side optional Parental Controls, and it worked fine.
It absolutley did not work fine! the toll of human suffering is inexcusably abominable! I shudder in confusion between whose head i should rip off or why this damn planet hasn't been burned down to ashes already at the very thought of all that has been perpetrated using this technology. The internet multiplied and empowered many things, chief amongst them is human cruelty and apathy.
> For thirty or so years we had client-side optional Parental Controls, and it worked fine....
Save your breath, even amongst those who genuinely wish to do well, they have employees and user generated content they can't keep up with. There is no excuse for this. Forget about the tiny span in human history that is the past 30 years. How many people died of industrial accident at the begining of the industrial revolution, how many people died because of car accidents before all the car safety and traffic laws were in place. Take that and multiply that by like a billion and that might come close to painting a fair picture of the internet. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. The internet isn't special, it's just a tool, a technology that connects people. Except billions are connected, and now they can abuse and harm each other across national borders , timezones and continents and maximize their profit from it.
HN and tech-world in general is like any other industry that caused massive suffering until it was regulated. I keep making the same simple comparison of a stripper IRL vs live cam porn over the internet, and no one in this thread even wants to attack that simple example that I picked because it isn't overly sensationalized and universally accepted that laws should force strip clubs to check IDs in any country on the planet. I didn't bring up pedos, human trafficking, revenge porn and so much more in between. and that's just the sexual dramatic stuff, not the seemingly harmless stuff that is easier to brush away and dismiss.
People can see your face and make decisions when they interact with you IRL, they can't over the internet. The problem is huge and the fact that the internet has been young and unregulated does not excuse looking the other way.
I can't believe I'm defending politicians' (however ill intended) agendas against HN/tech-world. but here we are. If things progress this route, I would even cheer as everyone (self included) loses any semblance of privacy or democracy because the alternative was these masses keeping looking the other way at human suffering instead of finding sensible middle grounds, especially when the tech is there. This is insane to me! things crypto-bros (both kind!) have been trying to make main stream like zkp and homomorphic encryption and so much more can actually solve a critical fault of the internet, and the choice is to just let people suffer instead of risking a potential slipper slope.
> Bare in mind we aren't banning the internet, just kids on social media.
It's neither. it isn't social media only, there will be various sites that are age restricted, similar to IRL businesses.
> A billion people have died from.... the internet? Youve GOT to explain this one lol how exactly?
I didn't claim 'died', you assumed. I meant sum total of suffering and pain facilitated by it. The internet is just a "road", except it connected everyone. sex, violence, extortion, slavery, you name it. a decent argument could be made that in the past one or two decades alone more slaves were trafficked and traded than in the entire history of the transatlantic trade, except smartphones, wifi and 5G were used to facilitate trade and allow real-time live HD monitoring of the "merchandize" and advertisement to buyers thereof. think of it in terms of graph theory perhaps, edges and nodes and all. just in the past 30 or so years the planet's population doubled and all those "nodes" have the capability to form edges with all other nodes on demand, interact with and in engage in unregulated commerce (cryptocurrency doesn't help either).
> think of it in terms of graph theory perhaps, edges and nodes and all.
So we should ban letters as well because of all the badness they facilitated? Lots of crime has used telephones, we should also ban telephones yes? Because graph theory's etc?
phone sex is already banned without credit card verification or if you sound like a minor for example. and you're being disingenuous as well, clearly this entire thread is not about "correspondence", i clearly said "interact", simply talking to kids IRL doesn't require ID verification either. But when you enter a bar, a night club, a sex store, buy alcohol at a convenience store, etc... or hang out at the play ground people can see your face and judge your age. You can't pretend to be another child at a playground as a grown person and fool everyone. If the actuality of people calling or mailing children to groom them like that was a reality, and tech existed to verify age over phone/mail, then absolutely, can you articulate a reason why that shouldn't be done other than you not wanting to be a tad bit inconvenienced?
Speaking of, do you know how common it was by all sorts of middle parties to listen in on POTS phone calls? or paper mail being intercepted by law enforcement? (not that I support either - just putting into context the history of surveillance and societal acceptance of it).
zero knowledge proofs exist, don't they? also it matters "private from whom, and what". You can make what sites you visit private from the government, and your identity a secret from the site, but the inverse isn't true, the government would know the identity, and the site would obviously know someone visited it.
The problem with this whole thing is the expectation of privacy online for interactions where their IRL equivalents don't have such an expectation. Even if there was no harm being done to anyone, it isn't a rational argument if you subscribe to the ideal of equal treatment under the law.
Zero knowledge proofs exist in theory, but none of these age verification laws that are introduced use them, probably on purpose. I'm certain that every government will want to know what sites everyone visits.
but why does it have to be that way. why not have zkp age verification processes anyways, inconvenience aside, what's the harm. If they refuse to let us use them, they need to explain why. I don't disagree with the malicious intent you're talking about but we can have it so that they have no legitimate excuse to require collection of site visit data. all the emotion and fervor aside, why can't we talk about having this as a standardized process that excludes third parties.
Governments are banking on being able to purchase that site visit data anyways, bypassing their own laws that prohibit them to do surveil, we can require them by means of technology to comply with laws and for the last time resolve the "but the children" argument.
it works if it is time-scoped and full age/id verification is done directly with the government. if you're malicious that way, you can likewise verify your id/face and just give a minor access after verifying anyways. you can get a zkp token that can prevent the site owner and the government from colluding and revealing your activity. zkp is one of many ways to solve this as well.
Of all the topics I’ve had to work with in my career, this one has caused me by far the most frustration. I like to think the hacker community is generally scientifically-minded and open to rational debate, but online discussion of this subject uniquely tends to cause people to hunker down, refuse to engage productively, and resort to name-calling. This might feel righteous, but ultimately leads to own-goals from us.
Firstly, to make one thing clear, it’s _absolutely_ possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. A technology called Privacy Pass exists that separates the roles in the age-verification question. This would make it possible to have a solution where the government can attest to your age without knowing what website you’re trying to visit (e.g. pornography, or an online casino, or just purchasing alcohol online). This is just a matter of fact. I’d recommend reading RFC 9576 for more details on the separation of roles here, it’s a really nice protocol.
There seems to be some misconception that privacy-preserving solutions for age verification aren’t permitted under various legislations. I don’t know where this comes from, but certainly Ofcom _mandates_ the minimisation of unnecessary data collection. This doesn’t mean that suboptimal technologies aren’t in use, but there’s certainly nothing precluding the use of fully privacy-preserving solutions.
We should be pushing for privacy-preserving age verification. It’s easy and convenient to say it’s the job of parents, and label anyone who doesn’t use parental controls as a bad parent, but at the end of the day, a government’s job is to look after its citizens regardless of whether they have good parents. If instead of engaging productively we stonewall the topic based on a vaguely-directed-but-intense distrust of Government, then governments will implement it anyway, and the solutions will be bad. We know this is the case, because it already happens.
I participated in a very productive workshop last year with representatives from government as well as various privacy-conscious companies, including Mozilla. I was pleasantly surprised at how productive we could be when we all worked together on this. We all walked away with a much better understanding of some of the problems, some of the nuances involved, and some possible paths forward.
Sports are artifacts of culture. Although the US does remarkably well in soccer despite soccer not being a mainstay of american culture. The question should be, how come the US does so well in soccer, despite it still being a niche sport (even then mostly for older generations).
Soccer is much more popular with gen-alpha and to an extent gen-z (thank youtube).
A lot of the top national teams have players that play in the premier league or some other european league. The American national team (last i recall, haven't kept up) typically only play in the MLS where even then the foreign players treat it as a last stop before retirement when they do have premier league experience.
iron sharpens iron, competition is what it's all about, year round. I wonder why the premier league didn't expand to the US, Canada and beyond? it has global popularity but with not logistical or technical inhibitions, it still is a europe only (keep in mind, europe is still a bunch of countries, so international) club. There aren't enough matches to make a 1-2 6-8 hour international flights a week that big of a deal (assuming a day of recovery afterwards), and/or matches can be scheduled so that they move to one side of the atlantic after a few weeks and back after a few more instead of lots of back and forth.
I would say the NFL and the NBA dominate US culture, but today, the MLS and NHL are about the same level with younger generations as soccer -- if you include all of soccer as one thing instead of just the MLS.
LLMs mean less devs are needed, not no devs. even after serveral more decades, they'll need steering. I've seen agents stuck chasing one issue, when to me the issue was obvious, but I can see how the model would rule out the obvious easily and move on, but my instinct/experience tells me that's where I need to focus time on. This translates into costly token-waste. Secondly, it isn't simply "quality", the LLM might generate something that's good quality from its perspective, but it simply won't consider things unless it's explicitly told to in excruciating detail, and even then! understanding things from a simian point of view can't be perfected without that simian experience as part of its training. It can come very close but not quite.
Think of it this way, who needs engineering managers, project managers, scrum masters,etc.. if they're employable then surely actual devs that can tell what good architecture is vs bad, good code vs potentially bug code is are also employable.
But the number of devs needed, that demand will obviously decline dramatically. At the same time though, there are other careers that require programming and software dev as part of your skill set. Simply integrating LLM-enabled solutions into real world workflows is a new area that's very young and immature.
Let's not act like we're suddenly in some sort of post-scarcity utopia where all problems are solved by LLMs, where tech can solve problems, there is demand for those who can use technology to do so. However, I see a lot of people attacking the technology and resisting change a lot, and to those I suggest they look up every single technological revolution and see about the fate of such people.
anecdotal evidence doesn't mean much here, but it's been night and day for me. yes, much much more isolated but my mental health is 100x better. Even my phsyical health has improved in many ways, i'm eating better, resting more, getting medical checkups, etc... I can't overstate how amazing it has been for me. The only dread is the few times I do have to work in the office!!
Every degradation in health (physical) I've had, I can trace it to a day at the office. I didn't know it was affecting me so badly, because back in the day, what else was the alternative? a bad day at work was the cause of so much, even things like starting drinking again, smoking again, not getting enough sleep, actual chronic disease,etc...
And guess what else, I don't spend so much of my time wearing myself out commuting, but at the same time I am now interacting with more people (although not as much) on average than before.
WFH seems like a "new" thing humans are doing, and now shoddy science like this is trying to confirmation-bias their way into pleasing their benefactors. however, consider how rural people lived historically. Not a whole lot of "commuting" to the farm. You don't interact with people outside of your household unless you went to market in the nearby town. Working indoors and being sedentary is new, but not working from home (think: farm, tradesman's shop at their house, etc..).
What is extremely unnatural is clobbering random people in an "open area" "office". even in as recently as the 90s, when you worked from the office, you had an actual office to work out of!!
Not being able to filter interactions, and spending so much of your time commuting and recovering from tiring IRL interactions and a day at the office that you make no friends or associations outside of work: that's what has already caused the loneliness epidemic before covid or wfh became a thing.
These ghouls revel in that, it stokes their ego to see underling looking busy.
I swear, there has to be some sort of reckoning coming, things can't be sustained with this sort of prevalent malice by those in power (this minor topic is just one straw on the camel's back).
Coerced association and socialization is worse than loneliness. People literally kill themselves because of workplace bullying. Those bullies really don't like it when you're not there in person to manipulate and torment.
I would REALLY love it if there was a study on this instead, why are so many people angels WFH but demons in person? is it "monkey brain" mechanics and instincts kicking in that don't when you're remote?
This is one reason it's hard to trust science, they start of with a bias and confirm it, but make it look like it was objective. You'd need decades of research to even come near a conclusion on something like this. "suggests" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there, but the general public, policy makers, executives, hr, etc.. will read "it's a fact", and I suspect whoever funded this knew exactly what they're doing.
this is flawed in a way, they're presupposing social contact is always positive or healthy? It is biased because it isn't looking at the mental health state of individuals prior to remote work, as well as post RTO.
dumb question, with LLMs being so prolific now, why is this sort of a thing.. a thing? Why not us an agent to maintain code people use, but humans don't have time to keep up with? or at least, are agents being used in FOSS software widely for such ends, at least to reduce the burden and cheapen the cost of delivering quality FOSS experience?
Yeah, cloud agents come with nice things like being able to filter content, implement guardrails like preventing PII or prompt injection from taking place. even if they sucked, at least liability wise you're set. I don't know how someone could even come close to this capability by doing it on their own. If anyone does, please share what tools, platforms and projects you're using.
How is that the answer when even parents don't have the right tools for this. are parents supposed to surveil their kids 24/7 and monitor their internet traffic?
Why is the internet special, do you also believe physical stores shouldn't check for ID for cigarettes and alcohol, because the solution is better parenting?
The internet has explicitly R-18 chats. Random IRC channels are not nightclubs. I am moving the goal posts back, if you touch them again we're escorting you off of the field.
in real life people can see you and determine your age at a rough estimate and be able to tell if you're an adult or not. Do you support having to turn on your webcam and show your face in real time then, to talk to strangers on the internet? many age verification sites are doing just that.
I get that you don't, all I'm trying to do (and failing) is have a discussion, apply critical thinking and be able to articulate a position. I'm neither fully opposed to it, nor fully in support of it. I'm always seeking nuance. I've found out lazy reductionism is the cause of much suffering and loss in the world, I can be bothered with the tedious nuance, especially for a topic I know a thing or two about in my own view.
Unfortunately karma systems on sites like this are not conducive to such a discussion. I want to challenge your opposition to the age verification regime, so that I can be better informed, and you will stand on a more firm ground, articulating your views with solid arguments instead of "i don't like it".
Oh, okay. Well in that case then the answer is no, I don't support any of this.
Of course I'm happy to talk about my positions but there is little nuance to my position tbh: I remain entirely unconvinced by the justification for proposed measures and believe that the entire discussion even happening is essentially a framing error. We're all talking about what should be done about this. About what, specifically? And, well, why now?
I grew up on the Internet. I've had essentially unfettered and unmonitored access to it since I was maybe 11 or 12. Me and my cohort of classmates often talked about sites like Rotten or Motherless at the lunch table, and certainly age inappropriate content like on Newgrounds and Lord help us, Ebaum's World.
Now okay, things have changed. (I'm still quite online for better or worse, so please don't get the idea that I don't see that the modern internet has different child safety concerns than the one I grew up on.) But somehow, the rhetoric is exactly the same as always. It's the same damn thing. No matter how the times change, it's the same "protect the children against the evils of sex and pornography!"
Uh huh. I realize not everyone has a universal shared experience, but from my point of view, the problem with kids and inappropriate content isn't just a story of negligent platforms. It is the story of 1. Hormonally unstable kids going through puberty who will often stop at nothing, 2. Platforms that are more or less indifferent and will do whatever gets them money, and 3. People who take on the immense responsibility that parenthood entails then expect the whole of society to take care of them.
I don't know what to tell people, I get that this is a terribly uncomfortable fact, but the number one reason why adolescents get involved with porn and sex is because they explicitly are seeking it out and want to be. It is nothing to do with the porn industries or lack of Internet regulation, it's their goddamn bodies.
It's absolutely true that I had access to content far more disturbing in all metrics than the old playboys under the mattress of yesteryear. I am not claiming this is ideal or that it should be the case. I'm just saying that it happened and the generation that was there is here right now, and we're fine.
But maybe social media is just simply too much. It puts kids at too much risk and they can't handle it. I think we're selling a lot of adolescents very short here without at least giving them a chance to have a bit of freedom, but fine. Let's fix this.
How? It's simple. When you are a kid, the first computer and phone or whatever kids get these days, is given to you by a parent. What we can do is make decent parental controls. We don't even need strong identity verification. We just need to be able to provide a way for apps and sites to voluntarily block children.
This sounds eerily similar to California AB 1043, and it is. I think that California AB 1043 is also bad for many reasons. Firstly, I know this is going to be expanded in many uncomfortable directions; it doesn't take a genius to make basic extrapolations. Secondly, I feel it is poorly written and confusing; what's an app store? Why does the law require all apps to request and store the age bracket information? What is an app? Does GNU sed now need to, by law, request the age bracket information from systemd and store it somewhere? And no, it isn't acceptable to just try to "do what they mean", it's a badly written bill. We shouldn't accept badly written legislation, but apparently in the past couple years or so the situation that had been ongoing for the past 3 decades or so with the Internet suddenly became extremely urgent to fix Right Now (in a couple of years) so we had to rush out shitty legislation that makes no sense.
So while I would love to just have sensible parental controls, nobody is actually really trying to enshrine this into law. It seems like they're mostly concerned about lobbying to push the responsibility elsewhere.
So we won't even just get sensible parental controls. We'll get weird parental control like legislation, having to send a live stream of our faces to sketchy companies who pinky swear to not leak it by accident, enter our credit card information into sites that definitely won't get breached, and scan our goddamn government IDs to access basic chat functionality that we already use today, in some cases. Because we can't get a handle on how to stop the 20% of people in the first 20% of their lives from accessing inappropriate content on devices and internet connections that WE FUCKING GAVE THEM! Before we've even attempted to quantify how harmful unfettered Internet access is to adolescents, or hell, how Helpful it is. (It sure was helpful for one of my friends who was gay and could access resources on the internet when his conservative parents were unhelpful. I suppose everyone is allowed to raise their kids how they like, but I can see the duality of how it's also not always the case that the parents know best.)
To say that I think this is all beyond farcical is a massive understatement. So I do apologize for maybe seeming a bit dismissive about this issue, but personally I already know it's coming from the wrong place and I don't like engaging with things that I know are coming from the wrong place. I'm not saying you or anyone in particular actually has bad intent by any means, just that I don't believe this entire movement at all.
> We're all talking about what should be done about this. About what, specifically? And, well, why now?
There is a seemingly endless lists of victims to crimes happening online. Not only that studies that are coming out in recent years are showing lots and lots of adverse effects against children that grew up with unfiltered access to the modern internet. The internet you grew up in as you probably know is long gone, the iPhone-era internet, with tiktok, instagram, youtube,etc.. is a whole other ballgame. Not only that, people depend on it a lot more, it is not a whole lot different than any other real-life infrastructure, except it was built without any planning around how it impacts those that it affects. When you open a business you need a permit, when you accept or reject customers in a real world business there are laws, even when you simply have a gathering in a public park, above a certain number of people you need a permit. All these laws originated as a result of people getting harmed.
Why? To be frank there are lots of whys. The big-tech companies like Meta and OpenAI are using this valid concern and narrative, so that they can swoop in, save the day and then do some really nasty evil crap (not just profiteering). and like so much else these days, these ghouls win because people like HNers can't be bothered with critical thinking, they're allowed to get away with what they do because the alternative those who can actually solve this present is preservation of the status-quo (I can rant a lot about how this is also how the downfall of America is being orchestrated, but that's a distraction).
> I grew up on the Internet.
That internet is gone, dead, a thing of history. Your experience is invalid. Take some time to see how r/Teachers in subreddit is observing the change in kids these days. The internet you grew up in was young, it was not widely adapted at a global scale, you didn't rely on ebaum's world to function day to day but you'd be hard-pressed to even get vital medical care these days without a smartphone on hand, logging into random sites and installing random apps. Even with porn, it was one thing over a slow connection with not a whole lot of awareness, you have kids even under 12 watching porn on smartphones.
Take a step back and think about this, someone who is unable to consent to sexual activity is partaking in one, and the people that are particpants on the other side of the sexual experience are adults who can consent. Sex is used because it's a lazy of making an argument, but the point remains, it doesn't matter what your anecdotal experience is, many for example say they were fine having sex with their hot teacher in highschool, but we send such teachers to decades in prison for grooming and sexual abuse of a minor. It is the simple fact that society has decided consent is required for certain activities, and age of consent has been established. The means of the interaction is irrelevant, non-consensual participation of certain activities is illegal, and laws must mean something and must be enforced equally.
> Hormonally unstable kids going through puberty who will often stop at nothing
That is irrelevant. If we can stop one kid from interacting with a pedophile or having life-long psychological issues, it's a win. and honestly results are irrelevant here, the means is not a way to justify the ends. the means here exist because it's the law, society has decided it's wrong. If you think kids should watch porn, that's a different story and it would be same as agreeing they should be sleeping with adult prostitutes or get into strip clubs. The internet doesn't change what's happening. Watching a naked stripper in person and watching that same woman do the same thing on a screen are not different types of non-consensual sexual activities.
Your argument about "they'll just want it more" is not correct either. The same argument has been tried with alcohol and cigarettes. Right now the alcohol industry is suffering because Gen-Z don't want to drink, same with smoking. All the efforts to curb those are paying off. Gen-Z are much more prudish and seek out social conservatism because they're seeing the penalty of this reckless disregard to the harms being done to a person's mind.
It used to be boomers and older generations would say "look at me, i grew up being beaten near-death and I turned out ok" too, anecdotal experience doesn't make things right.
> California AB 1043
I don't know much about it, but restricting social media and internet access to kids is happening globally, and for a good reason too.
Just consider one thing in this discussion: it isn't about being a prude, but about actual harm, actual suffering, actual abuse that's happening.
> So while I would love to just have sensible parental controls, nobody is actually really trying to enshrine this into law. It seems like they're mostly concerned about lobbying to push the responsibility elsewhere.
Parents have a responsibility, but so does every member of society. You have a responsiblity to not hand over a child a gun, poison, alcohol, keys to your vehicle,etc.. when you interact with others you are responsible for your part of that interaction. You don't get to flash your private parts at children, and you don't get to do that same thing through a screen either. Being over the internet, again, does not change what's happening. Things being terrible since the dawn of the internet because laws not catching up to tech, doesn't make those terrible things acceptable.
> So I do apologize for maybe seeming a bit dismissive about this issue, but personally I already know it's coming from the wrong place
I don't disagree that this is coming from the wrong place, at least in the US. But the only reason we're talking about it is because the problem it is solving is very real and extremely pressing. It has widespread societal support. As I keep mentioning on HN, there are privacy preserving ways that don't involve 3rd parties or the government tracking what sites you visit. But we're not having that discussion, we're letting Meta and Elon musk solve the problem and destroy what little is left of the good side of the internet. Law makers are not being presented with alternatives. I demand my lawmakers solve this problem one way or the other! it is not ok, if I can stop one vicitm of sex trafficking, one victim of pedos, one person from forming an unhealthy sexual mindset and runing their lives (see all the "looksmaxing" people now for example), it's worth it. I wish I won't have go give up my privacy and what little I cherish about the internet, but I am fine doing only work on a computer and going back to the pre-internet way of doing things if that is the price. But there is no need for that, there is a way everyone arguing in good-faith wins. We can pay anonymously with crypto, and authenticate with fido2/yubikey just fine, homomorphic encryption exists, EMV payment cards already implement a challenge-response authentication, the tech is there to solve this and a whole lot of other things but we're letting Meta solve it with a 3rd party id verification system that involves passports and id cards, and facial recognition, and surveillance instead.
> Because we can't get a handle on how to stop the 20% of people in the first 20% of their lives from accessing inappropriate content on devices and internet connections that WE FUCKING GAVE THEM! Before we've even attempted to quantify how harmful unfettered Internet access is to adolescents, or hell, how Helpful it is.
Harmful content, not merely inappropriate. You can't reasonably prevent access to an internet connected device. To say that parents should do something but not anyone else silly, both parties have a responsibility. if someone interacts with you, you are responsible for how you respond. And it isn't only children, same applies with those that are mentally incapacitated (we just use "but the kids" because it's easier to make the same point). The problem is there, your response being "we shouldn't solve it" is only letting those with bad intentions solve it in a way that benefits their evil intent.
Lastly, don't believe in any movement, the whole idea that you have to be for or against a thing wholesale is severe epidemic. Things get worse and worse because of it. Democracy is dying because of this as well. Find the courage and endurance to keep asking critical questions, keep debating, keep convincing your peers of not just this but so many other topics. Either we are governed by those who appeal to our emotions, or by those who appeal to our reason.
But parents should be penalized/inconvenienced if they can't control their children, not the store/website.
In some states, bounty hunters can find violators of various laws and bring them to the state in exchange for money. Allowing bountry hunters to be on the lookout for underagers trying to enter stores and report them could be a profitable endeavor for both the bounty hunters and the state, providing a market-based incentive to protecting children.
Stores/websites should only be penalized if they are specifically targeting and inviting children to enter.
Certainly there are some types of stores that are very safe for children to enter. So, the exception should be structured like this: "Stores that only sell these items mean that parents will not be fined if children enter it unaccompanied." Additional conditions could be attached, e.g. "a safe store shall verify the ID of anyone purchasing alcohol." And maybe other benefits can be attached to being a "safe" store, like tax incentives, etc. If the store violates that condition, then it should pay a fine or lose any other benefits of being considered a "safe" store. But a business should have a right not to be a "safe store" and the duty to prevent children from entering those should 100% fall on the parents.
But in real life, if you sell cigarettes to a 5 year old, you'll probably go to prison.
Isn't a reasonable approach to the internet, to have a protocol by which individuals can prove they have a state issued identity that proves they are above a certain age, and nothing more than that to the website? That way the website doesn't need to check anything other than presence of a cryptographic identifier and validate it. And parents as you noted are responsible, but only to make sure their state issued cryptographic secrets can't be used by their children. it could be as simple as having an NFC capable state issued IDs that can do a challenge-response with the browser/os. We already sort of do this with EMV payment cards. Websites have to validate a payment card is authentic by asking for the CVV code for example.
Oh I understand the tech is there to provide zero knowledge proofs, etc. But honestly don't really agree it's a reasonable approach to the Internet. I shouldn't need something issued by the state merely to visit a website.
you mean you don't want to? why not? are you just too used to status quo that's benefiting you right now? It's not like I'm excited about it either, I'm just not finding any reasons other than simply not liking it. We didn't need a proof of identity to access the internet before because 1) No one was interested enough to demand it because it's lack of widespread dependency like today 2) The tech to prove that didn't exist in a way that could be deployed universally until roughly a decade ago 3) Even gen-z didn't really grow up on the internet, not like gen-alpha who are the true beta-testers of growing up on the modern internet, and study after study is damning against the unfettered access of it.
To me you and others' prevailing argument is similar to "well I don't want to go out of my way to setup HTTPS, I shouldn't need to pay a damn CA to host a blog", letsencrypt solved that and people were still saying they shouldn't have to do that, except the risks here are much more dire, impacting an entire generation of humans in severe ways.
In a way, the internet is a victim of its own success. Finally, it can be used to do just about anything you did in person, including work and learn remotely. But also a whole lot of other things. I was commenting in a sibling comment thread earlier how watching a striper at a strip-club, and watching that same stripper on a free live-cam porn site on a screen are the same bi-lateral sexual activity that society has decided should be between consenting adults. You don't have to prove your ID when you visit a random store, just like with a random site, but a porn site requiring your ID is the same as a strip club requiring your ID. I don't like it same as you, but at the same time, logically I can't argue against the same laws and norms of a country being enforced consistently. We live in a world with terrible people, and so long as ID requirements for IRL are the same as online, it makes sense. it makes a whole lot more sense than expecting social media companies to actually reliably police all content in real time, and if I can have a simple, secure and privacy preserving way of doing it, I'd prefer that over showing my face, my ID,etc.. to random third parties.
> study after study is damning against the unfettered access of it.
No child is accessing the Internet without something a parent allowed them (or a different child) to have.
Bad parents are the root of most of societal ills. This is an example of the "terrible people" you mention. Societies need to take a serious look at that. You can require all the privacy-preserving ID checks you want and completely hollow out all rights in the name of children, but you're still going to have the root causes that create bad parents who harm their children through neglect and abuse. ID checks won't stop bad parents from being bad parents.
I don't know what you're adding to conversations about this other than "it won't be so bad if done the right way, so just accept it."
> so you're saying kids with bad parents deserve to suffer?
I don't see how. Help me understand. Explain how kids with bad parents are suffering because parents might get fined or other legal action if they don't prevent their children from doing things they shouldn't with property the parents give them.
> By your logic, a strip club has no obligation to keep children out because that's the parents' job
It really is the parent's job. I don't have a problem with local regulations saying certain businesses can't attract minors, but unless people in the business are going up to children and saying "hey why don't you come here" or there is some other type of enticement, the far more important question is why you're letting your children go to or near a strip club.
> I'm adding the discussion of an actual solution
Hard disagree. All your preceding posts in this thread could be validly summarized "it won't be so bad if done the right way, so just accept it" and each post is simply increasing the amount of "think of the children" histronics. Looking at your other posts, I see heuristics of agenda pushing, such as posts consisteing of walls of text and repetition of key points. I won't engage this thread anymore as I don't believe you are discussing in good faith. Peace.
"think of the children" has been effective because there is merit in it, you can't just dismiss things because someone says "think of the children"!! are you really saying that there is no harm coming to minors? are you really saying that your politics supersedes all else, even this? how are you different then from those who exclude pedos in office/clergy/positions of power? just because this is your ideology doesn't change who is being harmed.
It's unfortunate you abandoned this discussion, but I understand. I'll defend my position nevertheless.
> It really is the parent's job.
Parents have a responsibility, but children are not property or machines that someone is responsible for that way. They are part of society, and society as a whole is responsible for protecting them. That includes protecting them from their own parents, as well as anyone else. There are entire suites of laws, courts and services established around this very principle. It doesn't even matter whose job it is, what matters is harm being reduced.
Your argument seems to be "a well, too bad, shouldn't be my problem, why should i be inconvenienced because someone's weird offspring is harmed"...sorry , I think you need to find another society without minors in it.
Honestly though, shame on you and everyone else on this thread! may the entire internet burn down before a single child's harm is justified for its continuance.
May this entire civilization burn if it continues to defend pedos and harm to the most innocent and defenseless. But I'm hopeful that reasonable voices win, and if they don't, I'd rather be inconvenienced and have this nice little status quo that's been around for only a few decades disrupted.
I'll say this, laws and regulation are sorely needed. all this hate against billionaires, ceos, ai-bros, whatever... might or might not be warranted, but it is fruitless. Redirect this energy to your law makers.
In China for example, they made it illegal to use AI for the sole purpose of replacing human workers. The CEOs aren't bad CEOs, they aren't great either, it depends on the outcome. There are scenarios where entire job roles can be replaced by LLMs, but for complex roles like developers, you always need some human devs still, but likewise, almost always less of them than before. However, although less devs might be needed to do the same work, in some cases LLMs open up possibilities that weren't there before, so more devs babysitting LLMs or working on designing/shipping more features is also a strong possibility.
I mean, companies aren't trying to simply save cost on employees, they also want to maximize profits. Less devs per feature isn't the same as less devs period.
Overall, I'll say that demand creates its own supply. The internet itself killed many job roles and reduced the number of people you needed for many others, but it's not like we have the huge unemployment many were afraid of decades ago, if anything it created lots of more jobs. LLMs simply can't do everything people can, so they're not a drop-in replacement, that alone should mean a lot in terms of supply/demand economics.
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