> My stance is that if somebody is a minor, his/her/their parents/tutors/legal guardian are responsible for what they can/cannot do online, and that the mechanism to enforce that is parental control on devices.
Imho there is a place for regulation in that, actually. Devices that parents are managing as child devices could include an OS API and browser HTTP header for "hey is this a child?" These devices are functionally adminned by the parent so the owner of the device is still in control, just not the user.
Just like the cookie thing - these things should all be HTTP headers.
"This site is requesting your something, do you want to send it?
Y/N [X] remember my choice."
Do that for GPS, browser fingerprint, off-domain tracking cookies (not the stupid cookie banner), adulthood information, etc.
It would be perfectly reasonable for the EU to legislate that. "OS and browsers are required to offer an API to expose age verification status of the client, and the device is required to let an administrative user set it, and provide instructions to parents on how to lock down a device such that their child user's device will be marked as a child without the ability for the child to change it".
Either way, though, I'm far more worried about children being radicalized online by political extremists than I am about them occasionally seeing a penis. And a lot of radicalizing content is not considered "adult".
I don’t know what tool they used, but it was very likely not an LLM. They probably have some database of drivers’ licenses and they ran a similarity search against the surveillance footage. This poor lady happened to be the top match.
Even if it also output a score, that score depends on how the model was trained. And the cops might ignore it anyways.
Except in "Brazil" it was a mechanical error in a deterministic machine caused by an invasive outside actor. It would be reasonable to trust that the autotypewriter/printer would faithfully output the correct text.
Modern AI seems incapable of any respectable amount of accuracy or precision. Trusting that to destroy somebody's life is even more farcical than the oppressive police in "Brazil".
It's not about the article, its' about the flotilla of comments in this thread with unfounded layman "theories" about dietary changes that are the root cause rising colon cancer rates.
I lean toward "people got better at not dying from everything else." It's plausible to me that it just enabled existing factors to unfold on the time scales they unfold on for more people.
My handy heuristic for headlines like this: Is it a scary new trend that means something or did other factors suppressing its natural emergence decline? Or is it a matter of observation?
A recent real-world example was the detection of two different objects entering the solar system. The naive speculation was "they came on the same plane, so they must be alien!" But the reality is more mundane: the new detection method that found them, while flexible, started by looking at that plane. So of course both objects it detected were on that plane.
>I lean toward "people got better at not dying from everything else."
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem the be the case here, and the article goes into this. Deaths due to colorectal cancer under 50 simply used to be incredibly uncommon. Younger people were simply not screened for it. The rise is not solely relative to other forms of death, but in absolute terms has increased.
There could still be another factor other than lifestyle or chemicals in the food, the dominant opinions as of posting. Point (which I realize I forgot to make) is we don't know and latching on to pet theories, even really smart ones, has never done anyone any good in general, but especially when it comes to health.
>as we don't know and latching on to pet theories, even really smart ones, has never done anyone any good in general
I'd agree that really smart and plausible theories can turn out to be incorrect. But, I'm not sure I'd necessarily agree that plausible guesses aren't doing anyone any good. So long as theory is otherwise healthy (eg: eat vegetables and exercise regularly) then they might be doing some accidental good, and if they turn out to be correct, give people a bit of a head start.
There's a difference between informed speculation and uninformed speculation and most of the opinions so far fall into uninformed speculation where the writer implicitly blames those suffering for poor diet and lifestyle choices.
In addition a lot of the speculation assumes something specific to the US where this is a trend in multiple countries, predominantly high income ones[0][1], but this speculation that it might be 'chemicals' is fairly dull to read and adds nothing. Why this cohort specifically? What commonalities are there between countries with an observed increase? If it's diet why would it only impact the younger cohort?
They were explaining US politics, not Middle East politics. Whether or not you see a first-world project to liberate Iran as legitimate, fundamentally the Trump government is too mercurial to see it through.
While the Bush-era invasion of Iraq was indefensible (if it was defensible they wouldn't have needed to push the WMD lie to justify it) and their initial projections were as ridiculously optimistic as the Trump government's, the Bush crew were clearly ideologically committed to the project and willing to see it through to the end.
Trump's people are not. This is "move fast and break things" and "strong opinions weakly held" in geopolitical form.
It's frustrating how we're still fighting over this stuff when 99% of documents and spreadsheets (the data, not the formulas) could be zipped html except if not that spreadsheet editors and document editors don't have a standardized subset of html to support.
That sounds rather bad idea. HTML is really not designed for proper data storage. It can display something, but I don't think it is right tool for the job. Just because html can present something like tables doesn't mean it is right tool for tabular data.
I don't mean HTML+CSS, I mean just HTML, as a middle-step between CSV and full spreadsheet file.
HTML with only the table tags allowed get you a document that you can
1) View in a browser,
2) Has table headers and the ability to define column widths and combine cells
But you can leave presentation up to the viewer.
Same principle as Markdown, but markdown tables are bad.
This is like saying that HTML is "just" ASCII/UTF-8 text. Lots of formats are based on XML, but they're not compatible with each other and their schema require complicated parsers.
Imho there is a place for regulation in that, actually. Devices that parents are managing as child devices could include an OS API and browser HTTP header for "hey is this a child?" These devices are functionally adminned by the parent so the owner of the device is still in control, just not the user.
Just like the cookie thing - these things should all be HTTP headers.
"This site is requesting your something, do you want to send it?
Y/N [X] remember my choice."
Do that for GPS, browser fingerprint, off-domain tracking cookies (not the stupid cookie banner), adulthood information, etc.
It would be perfectly reasonable for the EU to legislate that. "OS and browsers are required to offer an API to expose age verification status of the client, and the device is required to let an administrative user set it, and provide instructions to parents on how to lock down a device such that their child user's device will be marked as a child without the ability for the child to change it".
Either way, though, I'm far more worried about children being radicalized online by political extremists than I am about them occasionally seeing a penis. And a lot of radicalizing content is not considered "adult".
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