I know what you’re trying to say. That Proton IS Windows at some level. And so MS gets some credit for that. But they don’t.
A lot of actual work went into Proton and into making games work therein.
MS is a slow, lumbering, monoculture that has lacked innovation and creativity for a very long time. I don’t see how freezing APIs or keeping old APIs around (mostly through versioned DLL hell) as some grand accomplishment.
A lot of work went into Proton, yes. But the work was to get Proton working. Not individual games. So MS should get all of the credit that Quake still runs today, and Proton should get all the credit to get Windows app to run under Linux.
Guess at some point in the future it will come out who bankrolled all this because multiple countries in Europe and America don’t just roll something like this out in 8 months organically without someone paying off politicians to push it
Governments are also getting more conservative recently with regards to domestic surveillance & social freedoms. In this regard, it's not anyone new, it's just the usual suspects: the same people who fund conservative media, the prison industrial complex, etc.
This seems like an attempt to leverage something widely regarded as reasonable (stop kids from accessing pornographic content without parental oversight) as the camel's nose through the tent to establish widespread identity tracking on the internet.
I get the sentiment, but just denouncing that the given reason is a facade is not sufficient.
It creates a divide between people that are looking for a solution to a problem, and people that disregard the problem completely. If you just ignore the actual problem and cynically call it a front for something else, you are just going to be ignored in the actual conversation. The problem is real and it needs a solution, suggest something better or be forced to stay out of the conversation.
For example, if there's a lot of car accidents, and we suggest a speed limit, you might say that it's actually a way for cops and cities to control the population, and make everything slow, and increase city income by charging fines. But the problem still exists despite your cynicism, unless you suggest another solution for the problem, you won't be able to keep your precious speed freedom. Because of course reducing car fatalities is more important than the freedom to go super fast, that's not really under discussion.
So I get it, but you have to include the time frame that this is happening. Its more than just a solution to a problem. This particular idea of age-gating just happens to be pushed forward during the worst time in history for internet freedoms. Freedoms are being attacked on multiple fronts. I look at this more like them introducing license plate cameras to stop crime, or real estate apps that use algorithms to help land lords and renters to get better pricing. Except these corporations that sell this tech are promoting and utilizing the features of this tech to make sure it gets abused. You can see this with the license plate readers, its giving police more control than they need, and for the real estate companies that are pushing algorithmic pricing for rents, they are spending time contacting landlords and asking them what they are charging for rent so they can artificially inflate the market.
This issue is way more nuanced then you are making it. There is no legislation, or anyone enforcing laws to reign in the abuses and therefor the tech is being abused, and will continue to be abused with no end it sight. If you want laws and mechanisms to protect children, first have something in-place that protects people from the abuse that these corporations are encouraging. Until that happens, I do not support any of these initiatives. Its the wrong time for them.
traffic control and real estate pricing collusions are unrelated topics. I don't know that this is the worst moment for freedoms, I think you would be well served to look into other periods of history
Those are two examples of tech being abused. It's very relevant to the topic because this tech is also likely to be abused. I think this statement you made is trying to misdirect from the world we are living in right now.
It’s too soon and too coordinated. If it were organic but underhand as you suggest the timeline would be 15 years, seeing it hit the goal elsewhere and copying not 8 months.
The fight for this kind of legislature has been ongoing for many years as part of a broader program that seeks to shape the kinds of information that can be stored, consumed, and propagated on the Internet. Age verification is only one branch of the fight, but an important one to the many who support government control: it is an inroad that allows governments to say they have a stake in who sees what.
I think it's possible that there are secretive efforts to destroy permissionless access to the internet, but my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time.
A somewhat analogous situation is how landlords raise rents in sync with each other, not because they're intentionally colluding to fix prices, but because nowadays it's easy to see average rental prices in neighborhoods, and the natural strategy is to set your rental prices based on that.
> my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time.
Reminds me of a little piece about PR firms and how many ideas are not really an organic zeitgeist but are actively manufactured by monied interests: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Written in '05 and still very poignant. I'd love to see a follow-up of this article updated for how it's changed 20 years later. Seems like the scale and decentralization has changed the most.
Do you think the main force is misplaced good intentions (which I assume is what drives Ashton Kutcher) or more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public?
Kutcher wrote a letter of support for his friend Danny Masterson who was convicted raping multiple women so if he is truly concerned about abuse of women it doesn't seem to apply when it involves people he knows doing it. When this came to light his defense was that he didn't think anyone but the judge was going to see the letter.
Those are heavily co-mingled. Policing and intelligence agencies in particular view themselves as having good intentions which look like harm from the outside.
I don't think anyone is that naive to not see the negative implications of the things they are proposing, or helping develop. They might feign ignorance, and excuse themselves with "following orders" but the majority know it's not right in principle.
I tend to follow information in this space, and could talk about it endlessly (though it would still have minimal effect in the end).
From the things I'm seeing right now, in my mind, all this clampdown on privacy is to have better control of the message and discussion in order to preserve the corrupt status quo. To give one example, many leaks and reports initially come in anonymous due to fear of repercussion from those in power. My country (Romania) changed the legislation a couple of years back to prevent people from reporting corruption anonymously (in a highly corrupt state). Maybe that's why Trump said he loves Romanians, recently, he'd like to do that at home as well.
> more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public
Until recently I wasn't the type of person that would entertain the idea of a shadowy organization that tries to puppetmaster the world. Though with the recent Epstein emails release that in black and white stated about Slovakia's 2018 government "the government will fall this week - as planned" (day prior to mass protests that lead to it falling), makes you wonder about the backroom politics of the western world, and why we need more transparency there, and less control from them.
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And of course, any change that is put behind a "think of the children" message, should raise everybody's eyebrows to the max.
Just imagine a capable individual just like yourself, but with such a rotting core that they see the same devious plans you and I do, but lack the backbone/principles and moral/ethical fiber to prevent them from pursuing those ideas. Instead, they full endorse and selfishly benefit from them at the expense of others. With our large population, this individual, and many such like them are guaranteed to exist at all levels of the socio-economic ladder. Solipsism is the root of corruption continuing to sprout.
Off-topic, but actually a number of landlords raise prices in sync with each other because they use price-setting services like RealPage that intentionally try to maximize rents across multiple landlords. They just settled a lawsuit over this: https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-realpage-settlement-r...
In the last couple years we've seen the internet version of "Vietnam war being televised made it unpopular at home".
After Vietnam, it was easier for journalists to embed with the terrorist groups than it was to embed with US forces, as the US learned that people seeing how the sausage is made immediately cuts the support for said sausage making.
Massive political weight was thrown behind getting control of TikTok because of the sheer amount of reporting from Gaza. Politicians are still trying to tell people that they're essentially wrong for forming their views on actual images of violence they're seeing.
The world at large was shown the brutality against the people of Gaza, and the plot was lost at home.
If the "enemies" aren't shown, it's easy to go along with "good guys" and "bad guys", but when you see 100s of children missing limbs, mourning their family members, and begging on to not be killed over the course of a few months, suddenly the fairy tale that allows some countries to brutalize others falls apart.
It has nothing to do with age gating, and everything to do with tracking. While there may be some funding going on behind the scenes, governments love tracking on its own merits.
It would be excellent to know who is pushing this and through what means. There is some unprecedented alignment across borders to restrict access and rights.
Do social movements _always_ have people at the top pulling the strings? Is it _never_ the case that even when you can identify thought leaders, the movement itself is organic and broadly supported?
Everything that these laws are supposedly regulating has always been there and we have an entire generation now that grew up with it. Everyone was fine just like video games were fine, movies were fine, racy books were fine, and the printing press was fine.
The Internet comments make it seem like lazy parents but it's very convenient that the solution is to ID every single person on the Internet. Facebook pushed this hard with their real name policy and then had to back off because people complained about trans people being forced to use their old names. They've been successfully demonized so now it's time to push as hard as they can. It's probably not just Facebook but it's obviously not organic.
I think it's "organic" from the big tech companies looking to pull up the ladder behind them. These laws are straight up regulatory capture to make it much harder to start new Internet businesses, while forcing their users to divulge even more personal info.
Google has been bugging me with Android popups for years "please add your birthday to help Google comply with the law". Obtaining that bit of my information isn't something they need to do - it's something they want to do because every bit of personal information they scrape out of me makes their adtech surveillance database joins that much more accurate.
Today an email purportedly from Google said I will need to send age verification on my 20yo account, or they'll stop targeting me for advertisements and showing me inappropriate material. This sounds like an excellent deal for me, not going to bother determining if its a phishing attempt.
This seems strictly wrong. People talk online. People get their ideas online, and share their ideas online. Internet comments _alone_ are not a social movement, but they certainly do frequently represent social movements.
Musk in his tit for tat with Trump recently revealed huge numbers of the Internet comments supporting MAGA were foreign plants. He didn't reveal which accounts were bots though. All these comments supporting censorship appear mostly on platforms that would love to ID every person on their platform.
Internet comments do not represent anything anymore that doesn't manifest in the actual world. They are excellent at having a few influence the many
I agree with you, and probably more than it sounds. But I think the point you make is still too strong a case. ie, even if the online comments are ~90% foreign influence it doesn't also follow that everything is astroturfing or that real people do not discuss issues online.
To your point though, maybe we can no longer reliably tell the difference, and so it'd be better to adopt your view as a rule of thumb.
Concern over accessibility of internet pornography is absolutely a social movement. I don't necessarily agree with some of what is being pushed, but there's a large constituency here.
Yes, and that thing is chiefly corporate social media. Which could be fixed literally overnight by parents, over a few weeks by school district policy, and over a few months with sites publishing metadata to aid client side blocking. Phones, the primary independent computing device for kids, are already locked down to the point that an owner has to jump through many (detectable and auditable) hoops to install arbitrary software.
None of this requires some draconian regime where it becomes sites' own responsibilities to obtain and verify their users meatspace identities.
> The SESTA-FOSTA law is a combination of two bills: the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act; and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. It passed Congress in March, and President Donald Trump signed it into law in April.
> ...
> The biggest companies say they can manage the risks. Match Group—owner of Match.com, Tinder, Ok Cupid and Plenty of Fish—says any potential legal issues give “huge advantages” to those with enough size to comply. “We are able to have a big legal team, a big customer care team,” Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg said.
The Christian right has been pushing for this forever. They finally acquired enough political and cultural purchase to get this measure pushed over the line.
This strikes me as almost conspiratorial thinking, and it's reflected in the article. At one point they say KOSA is unpopular but.. it isn't? These laws (KOSA, OSA) enjoy broad, bipartisan popularity and politicians are jumping on the bandwagon because they want votes. It really is as simple as that.
There's absolutely no way to counter this, or at least to round off the censorship power-grab this is allowing, if we don't admit to ourselves that people have become suspicious of the tech sector (us) and are reaching to clip our wings - starting with access to their kids.
The laws are only moderately popular in the abstract, but when you show people the reality and the future implications then popularity drops. The key is educating people about the dangers of this type of legislation, including dangers to privacy and authoritarian control over information. In the US especially both major parties hate each other with a passion; this animosity can be leveraged with proper framing.
What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have ever expressed interest in this?
If the politicians keep voting for things their constituents don't (and in these cases actively push back against so hard that the politician are forced to withdraw the push) that seems like strong evidence that politicians are doing something with an external incentive...
Politicians having bad incentives (e.g. campaign donations) isn't conspiracy thinking, it's a documented reality. Hell, we even had a supreme court judge taking a present from somebody who's case he was ACTIVELY OVERSEEING.
So far as I know there's nothing confounding here - people from across the political spectrum just seem to think it's a good idea to introduce age checks and to restrict children from accessing adult content.
That's a powerpoint of somebody really trying to push an agenda and has nothing to do with age verification. The 88% support is for "social media platforms to protect minors from online harms, such as the promotion of eating disorders, suicide, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation."
I'm sure social media could say with 99% accuracy whether somebody is a minor already just based on advertising data and if a law prevented facebook from showing diet pill ads to a kid that has absolutely zero with some sort of government tracking bullshit.
The fact that you are citing 3 studies without even reading them apparently really makes me suspicious of your motivation here.
I'm disappointed that you call my motivations into question instead of engaging me in good faith. It's not possible to solve a problem without being honest about the pertinent facts, and I think you (and the person I responded to) are engaging in denialism.
My experiences are all in the UK but everything I've read and everyone I've spoken to (outside of tech circles) reinforces my belief that this is popular. If you disagree then fine but I don't think you can find any polling to support that.
If you can then be my guest - I genuinely would like to see it. I'm not happy with my conclusions.
Well either you didn't read what you cited, in which case you sort of owe us an apology and need to back off your claim.
Or you did read it in which case you'd realize it has nothing to do with people wanting government age verification, and then you also need to back off your claim and owe us an apology.
CUDA is not hard to replicate, but the network effects make it very hard to break trough with new product. Just like with everything when network effeft applies.
LLM there generates fake analysis for cynically simulated compliance. The reality is that it was told to run commands and just made a mistake. Dude guilt trips the AI by asking about permission.
> The reality is that it was told to run commands and just made a mistake.
The mistake is that the user gave an LLM access to the rmdir command on a drive with important data on it and either didn't look at the rmdir command before it was executed to see what it would do, or did look at it and didn't understand what it was going to do.
Most dramatic stories on Reddit should be taken with a pinch of salt at least... LLM deleting a drive and the user just calmly asking it about that - maybe a lot more.
Don’t worry, as of about 6 weeks ago when they changed the system prompt Claude will make sure every folder has way more than 3 .md files seen as it often writes 2 or more per task so if you don’t clean them up…
I wonder if it's because I have instructions for Claude to add comment blocks with explanations of behavior, etc that it can self reference in future. I guess that is filling the role that these .md files would.
Yep, definetly this, They should have creds for open weigths, and bein transparent of it not being open source though. Pepole should stop being this confused when the messaging is pretty clear.
Something funny about this statement considering what Proton is.
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