Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is why it’s important to be able to run models locally. Which also might explain the strategy behind buying all of the memory that is or will exist for at least a year out. Maybe we’ll eventually see AI safety be used to prevent people from running local models.
+1 for local models. It also teaches users about how much energy they are using. One's perspective on 24/7 chatbots and agentic operating systems changes when you feel the heat coming from a rack of gpus. (Spring is nearly here and my excuse about my rig also heating my house is about to end. Soon I will be paying extra to run my a/c as my rig pumps out a steady 1000w under load.)
Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
361–370 of 486 posts
Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
#362It's irksome that these laws and bills in multiple countries are trying to put limits on the general purpose computer. It's the wrong solution and arguably put forward in bad faith. If you want access control, the appropriate point for regulation is with ISPs and cellular providers, and the appropriate mode of regulation is requiring these companies to provide choice and education for families, and awareness of liabi…
If my kid takes their tablet to grandma and grandpas I want the preferences and signals to carry forward, even when connected to a network at household that is nominally only adults.
These technologies don't need to be bullet proof to be effective and they don't need to send more information than "treat all requests from device as being from under 8/13/18." The ills these age verification efforts are trying to address (and they are real problems) are from excessive, not casual or incidental use. Yes, there will be many kids that get around any reasonable control, but just making it less convenient will reduce harm.
I have various content controls on at my house. I'm the admin, I can turn them off whenever I want to. I almost never do, because 1) the block reminds me I should probably shouldn't be going to whatever site I'm going to and 2) for the most part, my experience is better with the "restricted" search engines/youtube/social media.
Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're pushing for an API at the system level, where they can query the age Such an API can then be extended to provide location data to "help the police find bad guys", track purchase histories to "prevent fraud"; all the stuff that Apple and Google blocked fb from sniffing from user devices It's circumvention of these privacy protections with added vengeance since now Google and Apple will be sitting with the cost…
>Such an API can then be extended to provide location data to "help the police find bad guys", track purchase histories to "prevent fraud"; all the stuff that Apple and Google blocked fb from sniffing from user devices /s? In case this is serious, why do they need an age API to ask for a location backdoor API?
You start with the age verification because "think of the children" is an easy sell, then a year from now, there'll suddenly be a massive worry about criminals using their phones for "crime-stuff", so we need to track where these people are - there's then already a system in-place for easily adding such a functionality
A year after that it'll be online fraud that is apparently rampant
My reason for this conclusion is that there's no good reason that age verification should live at the OS layer. It is technically cleaner and simpler to have it as an external service - just look at the amount of issues it's causing for Linux distributions
FB are not dumb - they know this hurts Linux distributions, but they're an ad business and they need PII to sell those ads
Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alright, so does that mean we don't need KYC for gun purchases or bank accounts either? Of course you're probably going to say something about how guns and bank accounts are crucial components to crime, in which case the same holds for AI in the mexican telecoms hack.
Just yesterday I thought about the right middle ground for KYC when buying guns. The issue with centrally registering guns is than when you country is taken over by hostile forces (whether an invading army or a democratically elected abuser who turns it into a dictatorship), they know who has the guns and can force those people to surrender them (politely at first, authoritarians always use a salami slicing technique…
Occasionally, gun owners are THE hostile force buying guns explicifely to bully and threaten. But that is about it, really.
Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just yesterday I thought about the right middle ground for KYC when buying guns. The issue with centrally registering guns is than when you country is taken over by hostile forces (whether an invading army or a democratically elected abuser who turns it into a dictatorship), they know who has the guns and can force those people to surrender them (politely at first, authoritarians always use a salami slicing technique…
The arguments for background checks generally have to be split into two separate classes of people. The first is the mentally ill. Intuitively it seems desirable to say that someone undergoing treatment for e.g. depression shouldn't buy a gun. The problem here is the massive perverse incentive. If you're pretty depressed but you're not inclined to forfeit your ability to buy firearms, you now have a significant incen…
Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their real goals are even worse than that. Some of these groups have admitted they're also about suppressing LGBT+ content. As the Heritage Foundation admitted: > Keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids. No child should be conditioned to think that permanently damaging their healthy bodies to try to become something they can never be is even remotely a good idea. https://arstechnica.com/tech-polic…
>they're also about suppressing LGBT+ content >> Keeping trans content away [...] Isn't it a stretch to round off "trans content" to "LGBT+ content"? I mean, from a pure logical point of view the statement is correct, because "trans content" is a subset of "LGBT+ content", and therefore "suppressing LGBT+ content" is technically correct, but it's at least misleading. The left's version of this would be something like…
Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what would those values and priorities be? Because it doesn't seem to me that they align with what they actually do. For example, it seems to me there is a whole lot of worry around megacorporations, often related to capitalism and the inequalities it brings. In that context, if you don't place privacy as a priority, how are you not either stupid or ignorant? Is my premise just wrong?
You can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be targeting children. The age verification bills I've read have steep penalties for retaining information, so that seems fine since that's literally more protection than you get in person. It's really more just concluding that those corporations should be liable for their behavior. It also has nothing to do with "t…
The best way (and only way) to prevent retaining information is to not share them in the first place.
> You can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be targeting children.
There are other method to achieve this without mandatory identification. You can force these content to be served with an HTTP header providing their legal minimum age of consultation or type of content, and blocking them browser side. Governments could maintain filter lists for different age bracket and release them to everyone, allowing easy compliance on the device parental control settings.
Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
#368The goal has always been identification. And the goal of identification is control.
Never be fooled by the 'easy to evade' part. That is always just a first step to get you to care less to oppose the introduction. Once in place, the enforcement and compliance mechanisms rapidly change to the real system.
Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
#369I was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to have a child in the future, they won't go through that. The Brazilian government passed a law requiring age verification for every site categorized as 16+. It can't be self-declared, so companies usually resort to facial scans and ID verification. I DO NOT want photos of our Brazilian childre…
> I was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to have a child in the future, they won't go through that. I've heard this a few times, but what was so bad? And, sorry to break it you, reality has some bad bits to it - do you think being ignorant of these is useful, or that it just sets you up for a bigger fall? Why do you think removing in…
Oftentimes the answer is "nobody". There's just nobody you can rely on to get the level of care you require. There are lots of arguments like Bowling Alone for how the breakdown of community has contributed to this separate issue.
In my view, by constructing and supporting legislation like this, people are implicitly admitting that parents, teachers, schools, communities, and all the rest are failing at their job of keeping moderation local and raising the next generation.
But the thing is, unfortunately this is a true statement in too many cases, including mine. My parents failed to parent me well enough, and my counselors were either instrumental in my own trauma or failed to address my issues soon enough, and as such I developed a sex addiction in adolescence fueled by persistent ongoing stress from my upbringing that I continue to seek treatment for to this day. Could content moderation laws have cured my parents' narcissism? Nope. Could they have prevented me from needing to act out to relieve the stress of my early relational trauma? Nope. Could they have helped match me with more competent therapists? Nope.
Could they have caused me to go to rehab for alcohol abuse instead of porn? Maybe. For all his statements I disagree with, I subscribe to Gabor Mate's view that traumatized individuals are compelled to be addicted to something. At that point, there are a lot of things to become addicted to other than the ones you can content moderate, given the (false) assumption that it's possible moderate enough of it.
Pornography was necessary but not sufficient for me to have it that bad coming out of childhood. Early exposure to it was only incidental. My upbringing was far more significant a cause in this. But unlike which websites I was allowed to visit as a child, a 100% chance of having emotionally involved parents isn't something you can legislate into existence.
What I feel isn't being talked about enough in this discussion is that this implicit realization that the world just sucks sometimes leads to justification that someone else needs to step in to protect children's fragile minds if the formerly trusted institutions aren't. The big option left is the platforms and systems hosting the tech themselves so they're targeted instead.
My opinion? If your parents aren't able to raise you to be free of significant trauma spawning "hungry ghosts" that you will need to turn to your unfettered internet access to feed, whether TikTok or LiveLeak or elsewhere, lest you are bombarded by stress every waking moment... then the situation was hopeless to begin with. You can't fix that problem with laws. You should have just had better parents, as awful as that sounds. And because of nothing more than bad luck, you're just going to have to unpack that problem with the healthcare system for years/decades, because there's not much else we know of that can meaningfully address childhood trauma that severe.
Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
#370It's irksome that these laws and bills in multiple countries are trying to put limits on the general purpose computer. It's the wrong solution and arguably put forward in bad faith. If you want access control, the appropriate point for regulation is with ISPs and cellular providers, and the appropriate mode of regulation is requiring these companies to provide choice and education for families, and awareness of liabi…
Largely agree with this, though I'll throw in that the OS should provide a signal as well. I know for sure that iOS and Windows both have family modes that work pretty well, I suspect Android does as well. If my kid takes their tablet to grandma and grandpas I want the preferences and signals to carry forward, even when connected to a network at household that is nominally only adults. These technologies don't need t…