Yeah, I think I'm just going to buy some old Lada from some local Russian or Ukrainian guy. I know that they're not the most reliable cars, but at least anyone can make aftermarket parts for them — and they're easy to repair as well.
I might buy an EV someday if someone makes one which: Does not connect to the internet, is user-serviceable, it's possible to create aftermarket parts for without reverse engineering firmware, uses Na-ion batteries, is not ridiculously overpriced, is preferably made in Europe/North America/Japan, and is not extremely ugly like 9/10 cars released in 2025 (VW ID Buzz... eww). I'm not getting anywhere close to this DRM-ridden driving IoT-device crap. Clippy says no.
I don't think any western car manufacturer will ever want to deal with the potential liability issues when it comes to having users screw around in a high voltage electric drive system. This is not like a normal 12V car battery that will not even hurt you if you directly touch the poles with your hands. These EV batteries contain more than enough juice to zap you out of existence if you don't have relevant training.
Important to note: Their anonymous solution is reported to be temporary until their digital ID system is released[1], which does not offer that same anonymity, but rather functions as a server-side OpenID-based authentication system.[2] While you can share only your age with an online service, it still creates an authorization token, which appears to remain persistent until manually removed by the user in the eID app. This would give the host of that authentication system (EU and/or governments) the ability to see which services you have shared data with, as well as a token linked to your account/session at that service. There is also no guarantee that removing an authorization will actually delete all that data in a non-recoverable way from the authentication system's servers.
It's not a left-right divide. Privacy advocates are a combination of the general right-wing + the anti-establishment left-wing. The people supporting this are establishment career politicians, who are left-wing as well (e.g. ylva johansson), though different from the anti-establishment left-wing (e.g. pirate party).
Anyone who tries to make this a left-right issue must stop, because that's how we lose.
It's more a thing like "boomers who can't install stuff in their phones themselves (except for suspicious apps apparently) vs people who actually understand privacy with the normies on the side"
> I don't think anyone has demonstrated any actual harms from porn
That's disingenuous and false. It's pretty common knowledge that pornography is not representative of real relationships, and because it's not actually emotionally satisfying, it takes regular consumers down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme, vile and obscure content. Take a guess what that does to a developing teenager, essentially being educated by pornography. Not to say that it's not harmful to adults too, because it is.
But yes, government control, censorship and centralization of the internet is not the solution. Mandatory ID checks will not protect any kids, it will destroy the free and open internet.
That's a weird spin on it. Young people are curious. They watch weird porn out of curiosity, the same way they watch gore. Hiding it isn't going to do them any favours. They'll get it from sketchier places instead. I know the generation before mine often went to trashy hookers way underage, with group collected money, to lose their V card, for example.
Where I'm from, it's a pretty common saying that sex is for prestige and a wank is for joy. Of course, a relationship doesn't primarily consist of your stepsister getting stuck in the dryer, running a 10-man train on your loved one, or whatever else. Even kids aren't that stupid.
It can lead to issues with your thing not being attracted to people you don't find attractive, since you're not desperate, but the opposite is, in my opinion, worse. Many good men and women have fallen for dogshit relationships with mediocre sex out of fear of no sex(ual outlet).
> government control, censorship and centralization of the internet is not the solution
Why? Porn in magazine or movie form used to be age-restricted. Assume for a moment that was the correct, or at least a reasonable and permissible policy.
Why should it suddenly not be the appropriate policy, only because it's on the internet? Why do you say that laws do not or should not apply when you sprinkle a bit of "internet" over it?
It reminds me of the crypto-bro argument that, don't know, money laundering and tax evasion and offering securities without appropriate disclosure is illegal and tightly regulated, but if you do it with "blockchain", then it is perfectly fine. What sort of mindset is that?
Its the mindset of neckbeards who don't realize its not the 1990’s anymore, that the landscape has changed significantly and people cannot protect themselves let alone their children from it.
Implementation obviously matters and it is indeed a delicate situation, but that does not negate the need for solutions.
> It's pretty common knowledge that pornography is not representative of real relationships, and because it's not actually emotionally satisfying, it takes regular consumers down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme, vile and obscure content.
That's not common knowledge or true. Most of the population watches porn. Where's the harm?
> pornography is not representative of real relationships
No shit. Next you'll be telling me that Batman isn't representative of real billionaires.
Love it when you make a statement that porn isnt harmful without referencing any studies, and then demand studies for people to prove it is harmful.
You are the one who made the original claim that its not harmful, the burden of proof is on you.
Their side isn't the one trying to ban things. If you want to ban something you have to prove it's harmful. If you don't want to ban something you just have to call out that the other side has to prove it's harmful before they can ban it. It's like how you don't have to prove your innocence against a criminal conviction, merely provoke reasonable doubt (in theory).
"In talking to the subjects, researchers discovered that high exposure to pornography videos apparently resulted in lower responsivity and an increased need for more extreme, specialized or “k+++y” material to become aroused."[1]
This effect can be clearly seen in that pornography websites promote this extreme, vile and obscure content, such as incest, exhibitionism, and even depictions of non-consensual interaction and physical abuse.[2] Obviously, these matters have no place in a healthy relationship, and it's pretty basic psychology that regular consumption of this content causes the normalization of such practices, especially in impressionable teenagers whom do not yet have legitimate experience in healthy, normal relationships.
A majority of adults watches pornography.[3] And we're dealing with a massive loneliness epidemic under younger generations, together with a significant rise in "hook-up culture" over forming serious relationships. Coincidence?
Regarding [1], the study itself mentions that stopping watching porn reverses the effect. In layman's terms: watch enough of it and the novelty wears off, but the sexual drive returns. Hardly a harm, it's what happens with every human activity.
[2] makes the big logic jump of assuming that someone who watches kinky porn fails to separate between fantasy and reality. It is the same line of reasoning as the disproven "videogames cause violence" paradigm and it is pushed by the same sort of people (personal hypothesis: they might be projecting). This could ironically point to a problem limited to at least some individuals failing to differentiate the two, but studies find that at the population level, a higher availability of porn correlates with lower rates of sexual assault. My personal reading is that it provides a safe outlet for sexual frustration and moderate desensitization reduces the chance that someone will, so to speak, get aroused over an exposed ankle.
On [3]... you're linking to a single data point, not a series nor a correlation; additionally, even if the correlation actually existed held, people's propension to form stable relationships is a preference, not a harm. It is also not related to minors, and it is not something that the state has any business sanctioning, much less with incarceration.
Featuring, and promoting, are different things. There's a big difference between Lolita and CSAM, or between Damals war es Friedrich and Mein Kampf.
But, I care about reality, not moral outrage about taboo violations*, so I'd only advocate "do something about [2]" if I believed [2] actually did contribute to a real problem. Combatting ineffective promotion is not on my priorities list. As far as I can tell, [2] is a real problem: though I'm always open to new evidence. (And when people like me take over the world, and it turns out our interventions don't make the problem go away, I like to think I'd have the integrity to reconsider my views in light of that evidence.)
*: That's not to say I don't feel outrage about taboo violations. Some taboos exist for a reason, even if that reason is not immediately obvious. (Of course, some need discarding with prejudice, but Chesterton's Fence applies.)
Passkeys are the pinnacle of bad UX. It just works, until the user tries to switch devices, accounts or platforms. The slogan of passkeys should be something like "I don't have a password, it usually just works, but now I changed X and it doesn't work anymore". Even worse is hardware-based 2FA built into smartphones (also FIDO), as you lose your phone in a lake and now you can't access anything anymore.
The way to go is an encrypted password manager + strong unique random passwords + TOTP 2FA. It's human-readable. Yes, that makes it susceptible to phishing, but it also provides very critical UX that makes it universal and simple.
Apple’s works fine, including when I’m logging on to my windows machine. Opening the camera app is a little annoying, but I don’t have to do it frequently. 1Password works well too and it runs on everything. There’s open source options, but I can’t attest to their UX.
That's fine, but Chrome has 67% market share, and the majority of people will pick the default option for passkeys if prompted. For passkeys to replace passwords it's got to be seamless and easily recoverable without compromising security.
> the majority of people will pick the default option for passkeys if prompted
Especially since Google doesn’t allow you to change your personal default which is what convinced me to go and switch all my accounts off of Google SSO
So we need to make a new open standard, and then somehow prevent Google from implementing it? Too badly they implemented TOTP too. I’m not sure what you’re proposing here.
Did you see a proposal? I'm merely pointing out that there's disasterously poor UX lurking in the #1 platform that users may encounter passkeys in. It's not ready to send out to normies without more work on it.
TLDR: Author of an open-source project has a crashout over other people using LLMs for coding, believes that AI will replace all developers, and decides to preemptively give up on software engineering entirely because of that.
IMO anyone who understands AI at a technical level will understand that this won't happen. No matter how many parameters, training and compute you throw at it, putting AI in direct charge of anything that's critical and not entirely predictable is going to backfire. Though, based on response from this author, it should be apparent that his response comes from a place of emotion, misunderstanding, and likely conformism to dogmatic anti-AI rhetoric of the same nature, rather than actual reason and logic.
It is a matter of time. 5 years no problem. In 10 years some devs will be replaced. In 15 years, i don't think that "pure" developer jobs will exist in the most companies.
It would take a lot of effort for Mastercard/Visa to stop physical retailers from selling Steam gift cards. Beyond gift cards, there's also systems such as PaySafeCard, which lets you pay with cash at a physical store and spend it online at any merchant who accepts it using a code.
And for crypto they can just accept Monero. Steam accepted Bitcoin years ago, but stopped due to high fees and network congestion. Monero fixes that + makes it private like cash, and has been the de facto cryptocurrency for years now.[1]
Google is killing Manifest V2, and AFAIK all downstream Chromium-based browsers (Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, etc) will eventually be affected. That should say enough about why having multiple browser engines is a good thing.
That opinion still stands. But I believe that we should regulate children's access to the internet, and not the internet's access to children. As the prior does not affect adults and their free, open and private internet, while the latter absolutely does.
I believe that there should be a standard, open framework for parental control at the OS level, where parents can see a timeline of actions, and need to whitelist every new action (any new content or contact within any app). The regulation should be that children are only allowed to use such devices. Social media would then be limited to the parent-approved circles only. A minor's TikTok homepage would likely be limited to IRL friends plus some parent-approved creators, and that's exactly how it should be.
Why do you need regulation for any of that? Devices with parental controls exist already. Special browsers with parental controls exist, just for kids. Do you think Jane Smith, L3 civil servant, will do a great job of taking over product management for the entire software industry despite having a BA in English Lit and having never heard of JIRA?
There's no need for any regulations here and never was. It was always a power grab by governments and now the people who trusted the state are making surprised pikachu faces. "We didn't mean like this", they cry, whilst studiously ignoring all the people who predicted exactly this outcome.
Because most parents are oblivious to the danger, and are not taking action on their own. Meanwhile the unrestricted internet can be just as dangerous to a child's development as alcohol or drugs, if not more.
The regulation should just specify a few standards that parental controls must meet, such as the standard that every new action in any app must first be approved by a parent, and it should regulate that minors may not use or have possession of unrestricted internet devices. The actual development of that technology, and the frameworks to integrate apps with them, should definitely be up to private companies and open-source projects.
Yeah or maybe most parents don't care because they think you're wrong? Many people with young kids now grew up with the internet as kids themselves. They remember their parents going through the exact same moral panic about the internet in the mid 90s, they remember using it anyway with no restrictions whatsoever ... and they remember they grew up just fine.
When I was a kid I was logging in every night, talking to random strangers online, I even met up with a few as the years passed. Everything was fine. If you were right that it's as bad for a child's development as drink and drugs I should have ended up a burned out husk. Not only did I not, none of my friends did either and they all also had unrestricted access to the internet.
Regulations aren't the answer. They hardly ever are. Half of HN's content these days is just people being faced with the negative consequences of regulations they themselves supported and then doing a No True Socialistman meme: "good regulations haven't been tried yet!"
We can likely agree on a lot. Overregulation is bad, I don't want the government or large corporate monopolies to have more control. I also grew up with the internet and am very familiar with it, much more so than the average person. That's exactly why I'm arguing for simple regulation which gives more control and visibility to parents, and parents alone.
For example: Teenagers playing Counter Strike is most often fine. Teenagers accessing Counter Strike skin gambling websites is not. I'd say that almost all parents would agree with that, yet it still constantly happens because parents have no visibility, no way of preventing it, and most likely do not even know that their son or daughter may be lured into gambling by playing the game.
An easy solution is to limit their access to the device. If they can only use the devices in your living room when you are sitting next to them you keep full control.
Admitedly at some point they are reaching teenage years and they should have a right to privacy so even having access to a timeline of actions seems like a no go to me. The same way they can wander off in the street on their own, write private letters to people or have private calls with friends.
Definitely. I remember the era of the living room desktop PC, and that was a pretty easy and effective solution. But the primary benefit of parents giving smartphones to their kids these days is the ability to stay in contact while away from each other.
For teenagers, yeah I agree that message content and such should not be shared with the parent. The level of detail in the timeline should be configurable at the discretion of the parent. At the same time, it's also probably the most important period to shield them from harmful online content.
Kids don't really need a personal smartphone until they reach at least secondary school which put them quickly unto the early teens years.
During a transition period between 11 and 13 I applied a simple solution: smartphone stay in a drawer at home unless some communication with people is important for school work, parental control disallowed install of apps, data plan was limited to the bare minimum.
My eldest daughter is nearing 15 and now parental control has been off for a year. I can see she is not installing every dumb app possible she has a bit more liberty but screen hours is still caped and the smartphone stays out of the bedroom during the night. This is probably a rule that will sty for a while as she is sharing her bedroom with her smaller sister.
Again, rules will gradually relax with time. Key is to allows them to reach autonomy. Being divorced with the shared custody, with different rules in each household made it a bit more complicated, for example my EX didn't wanted to follow my rule of no screen time during at least a 2h time window every day where all devices are off or in a drawer, including for adults living in the household. So far I think she and her sister understand that it is OK feeling frustrated/limited and not being considered cool at school. Also that being cool at their age only gets you so far and most popular kids in my teenage years where those that ended up the worse at adulthood: early pregnancy, early addiction issues, most didn't get so far into studies and didn't have the luxury to be in a situation where they can steer their own path professionally, at least not at the extent I could. Having the example of 2 different houses, with their own mother having her own struggles help as well as sad as it can be.
Honestly sounds like you handled it very well. Starting with strong parental controls, then gradually decreasing it as they become more mature and understanding of the dangers is definitely the best way to provide online safety, without being overly restrictive or invasive. The important part being that they can learn what's normal from the real world before going into the digital world.
I just wish that this was the standard for every child. So many of them are handed completely unrestricted tablets and smartphones from a very young age these days.
I personally see the LLM as a (considerably better) alternative to StackOverflow. I ask it questions, and it immediately has answers for my exact questions. Most often I then write my own code based on the answer. Sometimes I have the LLM generate functions that I can use in my code, but I always make sure to fully understand how it works before copy-pasting it into my codebase.
But sometimes I wonder if pushing a +400.000 lines PR to an open-source project in a programming language that I don't understand is more beneficial to my career than being honest and quality-driven. In the same way that YoE takes precedence over actual skill in hiring at most companies.
Unlike stack overflow, if it doesn’t know the answer it’ll just confidently spit out some nonsense and you might fall for it or waste a lot of time figuring out that it’s clueless.
You might get the same in Stack Overflow too, but more likely I’ve found either no response or, or someone pretty competent actually does come out of the woodworks.
I might buy an EV someday if someone makes one which: Does not connect to the internet, is user-serviceable, it's possible to create aftermarket parts for without reverse engineering firmware, uses Na-ion batteries, is not ridiculously overpriced, is preferably made in Europe/North America/Japan, and is not extremely ugly like 9/10 cars released in 2025 (VW ID Buzz... eww). I'm not getting anywhere close to this DRM-ridden driving IoT-device crap. Clippy says no.