The only metric that really matters is 'profit per amount invested'. This is very difficult to quickly evaluate, and therefore we resolve to use simplified metrics such as cost per unit tokens.
The point at which the metrics become meaningless is when others become aware of them, and begin to optimise for them. Lines per code is is not a bad insight for development activity, only when the developers are not aware of the metric. Price per 1M tokens became meaningless when LLM providers started to optimise for it. It seems to be that Sonnet 5 is optimised to score well on AA intelligence whilst seemingly having a lower price per 1M tokens.
I think generally we are in an AI bubble, and it will at some point pop. The numbers simply don't make sense. I would gamble heavily on local cost per task to survive the LLM winter. Given that hardware is pretty much a fixed overhead, you probably want to optimise for task per kW - that's where I'm betting.
> With Openprinter, you are free to choose between standard sheets or a roll of versatile paper.
A few other comments have concentrated on the printer head and ink cartridge, but the roll vs sheets interests me. Manipulating sheets of paper is actually quite a difficult problem to solve - and there is only a demonstration of paper placement. Loading page after page is actually really not easy at all. There is no example of it printing.
I see they got a nomination for a design award [1], which in my personal experience has been a negative signal for successful projects. On the same page they mention that they also mention that they don't even know how much this will cost yet:
> We know this is your most frequently asked question! Final pricing depends on a moving puzzle of production volumes, BoM costs, industrialization expenses, regulatory certifications, and final engineering developments.
On the crowd funding page it mentions for parts [2]:
> Main board: Raspberry Pi Zero W
> Cartridge board: STM32 MCU
Not a specific MCU variant, and the specifics of the Pi variant (i.e. RAM) are not mentioned. I would expect these parts would be locked in by now. I have a feeling that this is not quite as ready as made out - I think there is still R&D going on.
> I agree with the rest but Pi Zero W is a specific machine with 512 MB RAM:
I thought they came in different variants - my meat-based LLM must have hallucinated it.
> It's also the one everyone can buy online for $19, not Pi Zero 2 W (always out of stock)
I get the impression that they don't actively manufacture Pi Zero W anymore and it's all old stock. Rapid for example say they have an availability of 761 (at time of writing) [1], but are those all within Rapid's control, or what is reported at Raspberry Pi's remaining stock? If you sell 1k printer units, can you put a Pi Zero W in all of them?
Compute modules are probably a bit more reliable and there is some capability with other modules, specifically the DDR2 form factor ones [2] (which is my favorite form factor). For example, ClockWork sold their own compatible compute modules [3].
An ESP32 is way cheaper and has Wifi and BLe as well. I updated a label printer with an ESP32-S3 to add wifi[1] and it has plenty performance. It is even available with dual-band wifi 6[2]. Most processing is done outside the printer on the sending party anyway.
> When children are very young, parents can set strict boundaries. But as kids move into their teens, parents also have an obligation to loosen them. Teenagers need spaces where they can act independently, make decisions, and talk to others — where they can learn to navigate the world without a parent looking over their shoulder.
You are still responsible. If you allow your child more freedoms, you are still responsible if something bad happens. Your choice to loosen your parenting shouldn't become everybody else's problem. Some parents for example allow children to try a small quantity of alcohol - if your child is suddenly found drunk, they shouldn't ban alcohol for sale everywhere.
I would go the other way, if it's found as a parent that your child is drinking, smoking, etc, then this carries punishments for the parents. I think it should also be punished if they are found accessing online services targeted at adults.
> The digital version is the same idea, with cryptography. An authorized issuer verifies your age once and issues a signed credential:
Sounds great, but there is a clear agenda for digital IDs that 'they' are trying to shoehorn in with this "protect the kids" thing. They tried rolling it out digital IDs in the UK in 2006 [1].
As I said the other day, what really makes me suspicious is that most Western countries suddenly have the same idea at the same time. This isn't just some random politician wanting to protect children, this is an international concerted joint effort to roll out a form of mass censorship.
> So instead of fighting a system that is built to preserve privacy, we should be fighting to put the right checks in place — the ones that guarantee the implementation actually honors it.
The objective is the system itself. Once there is a control in place to stop you accessing these services/systems, changing the exact unlocking procedure is trivial and can be done gradually. We'll all just be frogs in slowly boiling pots.
I only shutdown when absolutely necessary, i.e. the system becomes unstable and crashes. Otherwise all of my machines have 100% uptime. This is for a few reasons:
1. Some tools take time to get setup in the way that they were originally setup. I mentally want everything to remain where I left it. I'm usually working on 5+ projects at a time, it's already enough mental tax to have to context switch, let alone to have to go find all the resources I need to be productive again.
2. I'm forced to use Ubuntu, and it is constantly updating stuff and making it crash. Every time I reboot it's a gamble as to whether something I previously used works again properly. Maybe 1 in 100 boots, the entire system doesn't come back properly.
> While most people blame massive demand from AI companies, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra says price pressure from certain customers over the past few years has also significantly contributed to the shortage.
This is some next level gaslighting. AI companies significantly increased the demand and have deeper pockets than most consumers. He who bids most gets the product.
> Mehrotra also said the memory shortage could last into 2027 and beyond because fabrication plants take years to build, and the next generation of memory is even more complex to manufacture. Micron is now investing up to $200 billion in manufacturing and R&D, including new memory fabs in Boise, Idaho, and Syracuse, New York.
When the AI bubble pops, and supply significantly outpaces demand, we'll then see them close tonnes of fabs.
I don’t think it’ll necessarily pop. The excess supply could even induce additional demands in not just LLM or AI but in other verticals. The margins of hyperscalers and infra providers might thin out, but with all that surplus in hardware, they can find new uses. For example, developers rent their own GPU node for cheap capable of running frontier open weight models instead of running local models. Computers and consoles will be cheaper again and more people will want to buy them. Non-LLM related simulations could benefit from excess hardware.
Too many people seem to believe that the AI bubble popping means something like "the total volume of the activity will precipitously drop and whole centers will be abandoned forever".
I don't believe that. I was an adult when the dot-com bubble popped. What happened then was that a lot of unsound businesses went under, and the healthier players (like Amazon) expanded into the resulting void. Ultimately, the relentless march of digital technology didn't even slow down back then, although the inflow of risk capital definitely did. But the existing resources were mostly taken over by someone else.
If/when the current bubble bursts, it will be similar. All that infrastructure will be resold and re-rented to healthier players. By now, machine learning has reached a level of usability/maturity which is genuinely useful and the economy at large won't abandon it any more than it abandoned e-mail or WWW back then.
I'm not sure why you were downvoted, your point is well made.
> Too many people seem to believe that the AI bubble popping means something like "the total volume of the activity will precipitously drop and whole centers will be abandoned forever".
I think that many of them will fail. We have several data centers being built nearby to me, where the UK has some of the highest energy prices. I don't know how AI companies can make it make economic sense, let alone any normally operating company (like a Cloud service provider).
> I don't believe that. I was an adult when the dot-com bubble popped. What happened then was that a lot of unsound businesses went under, and the healthier players (like Amazon) expanded into the resulting void. Ultimately, the relentless march of digital technology didn't even slow down back then, although the inflow of risk capital definitely did. But the existing resources were mostly taken over by someone else.
I think the difference between this and the dot-com crash is enormous. Every part of our economy is now entangled in this. A significant part of the US's GDP is based on the idea that Nvidia can keep expanding their market cap past several Western nations. Your pension likely has large buy-ins on the AI hype. Everybody at every level is very exposed to this.
> If/when the current bubble bursts, it will be similar. All that infrastructure will be resold and re-rented to healthier players. By now, machine learning has reached a level of usability/maturity which is genuinely useful and the economy at large won't abandon it any more than it abandoned e-mail or WWW back then.
I have my doubts that anybody will be liquid enough to buy what remains at reasonable prices. And the impact of that is obvious, why buy RAM from Micron when LLM Corp are selling it for 50% of retail value?
> With just 32 MiB of embedded pSRAM memory and 16 MiB of flash, and 128 KiB ROM storage, the specs may sound meagre – although in the current AI climate, generous – but this is an embedded device not a full-blown PC hiding in an aroma diffuser1.
It somewhat reminds me of the PineCube, which had 128MB DDR3. Once the Linux tax was paid it was basically unusable.
> Factory shipped firmware is open-source and provides Wyoming Satellite, compatible with assistence platforms such as Home Assistant.
They are at least supposed to be able to show it working with some factory software [1]. I would have just liked to have seen some edge compute capability.
I think page 4 is a little disingenuous, I'm pretty sure you could pick lots of windows and show the mag 7 deviating negatively, but then later trends positive. I believe this whole thing will pop, but I'm not quite convinced it is just yet.
Page 8 for Oracle's free cash flow trending negative is really quite impactful. The Bloomberg AI bubble diagram [1] shows how this could really blow up. If Oracle falls they could take the whole market with them. We're just waiting on the mag 7 or any closely linked companies to fail to raise investment.
Page 16 really outlines how insane these evaluations are. I think most countries see it, hence aggressive selloffs of US bonds [2]. But everybody is just too insanely heavily exposed to it all now, it's going to wipe out everything. It's going to be a very awful time when heavily debt strapped countries can't issue debt anymore.
I think what we're going to see is some insane moves to keep these companies afloat longer in some desperate attempt to delay the pop, which will just make a bigger bubble. I could see Nvidia for example issuing bonds in excess of $100bn soon if the market has appetite for it [3].
Anybody else think it is weird that suddenly all Western countries suddenly want to lockdown the internet to "protect the children"? There is surely an international special interest group lobbying for this?
Its so good Meta is sponsoring a bill that removes necessary accountability on their side by pushing responsibility to a third party, while at the same time getting accurate headcounts for the ad platform /s
What does Meta get out of enacting mass surveillance of the entire Western world (not even for their personal benefit)? That they can avoid spending 6 months implementing ID checks like porn sites have done?
Also can I see an example of those ads? Google isn’t surfacing anything relevant
Meta reads the writing on the wall, and is committing to the position that age verification is inevitable and will come down eventually no matter what.
Meta, understanding that it will likely be the poster child for social media, knows that the laws will be likely written to make Meta enforce age verification on their platforms. This is expensive and ridden with liability traps, lawsuits, and government investigations.
SO
To stem the tide of this before it hits their shores, Meta is actively pushing hard to get age verification legislation in place on the OS level.
This would put Google, Apple, and Microsoft in the hot seat, and Meta can carry on while blaming them when kids get through cracks.
Meta is simply playing a strategy game to make everything shittier for everyone else (everyone uses an OS) in order to protect themselves (not everyone uses Meta).
> Meta is simply playing a strategy game to make everything shittier for everyone else (everyone uses an OS) in order to protect themselves (not everyone uses Meta).
Which other platforms? Age verification affects everyone equally. Any alternative platform that caters to young people that grows large enough will get the ban hammer, unless somehow someone manages to run a Facebook alternative out of Russia for people (kids?) to flock to.
I don't think it's so much about the cost of doing age verification themselves, it's about who has liability for letting kids see stuff they're not supposed to have access to. Facebook would love to be able to point at operating system companies or device manufacturers and say it's their fault for letting little Timmy through the adult gate, it wasn't Facebook's mistake.
This article[1] gives some examples, but annoyingly, no relevant pictures.
> Denmark’s digital affairs minister criticized Meta for an advertising campaign promoting regulations on age checks for social media in an interview with POLITICO.
In Australia, the government has certified OAuth2 Identity Providers which act as a broker between social media sites and a provider that can verify your age, such as a bank. This allows age to be verified by a provider, with the social media provider having no access to your identity. If the social media companies chose to support this, they would be complying with the legislation. It's not the government forcing you to identify yourself.
This gives the identity brokers full insight into what sites you are visiting. Worse yet, it consolidates the information in one, easily leaned-on place: If I provide an ID to 3 non-Australian companies, sure, those companies know who I am, but the government or other companies would need to extract that information from each one. With an OAuth scheme, all that information is in one convenient place for the surveillance freaks.
They're brokering the negotiation, they're not actually the identity provider. The broker has no knowledge of your actual identity. So in this case, the identity provider (such as your bank) knows that you've been referred by the broker and that you wish to provide your verified age and only that age. The social media company knows that you've chosen to use the specific broker to verify your age, but not who the actual identity provider is. The broker knows that a request with your metadata (IP addr, HTTP headers, etc.) has been initiated between a specific social media site and a specific identity provider, but they don't have access to your actual identity.
Nobody in the negotiation has a complete picture. To correlate it all together, you would need logs from all 3. And at least in the Australian case, due to our data retention laws, if you've got logs from the social media provider, then you can already associate the user with a specific identity by requesting the information from the ISP which they legally must retain for 2 years, so it's really not necessary.
All this concern about social media privacy is a little ridiculous IMO. If you're using social media then you've already compromised your identity. If somebody wants to find out who you are, they already can. They don't need a verified identity, and social media companies seem to me more than willing to cooperate with governments. Law enforcement has been using this type of correlating data for years to establish identity in CSAM investigations.
It should be written into law that they (the intermediary identity brokers) cannot sell or share any information with data brokers. They should be an independent organization funded by the government, but without its funding tied to yearly renewals (otherwise they would need to curry favor on a yearly manner to whomever is in power).
I'd love to see a way for people to revoke/replace their personal info, kinda like rotating passwords or changing their names - but for street address, birthday, government ID numbers, etc.
Penalties (of any scale) are insufficient to ensure absolute security.
the effort is being driven by a handful of tech and social media companies who have suddenly realized they cannot close the pandoras box of AI.
without a meaningful headcount of real users, advertisers will begin to push back on cost or even reduce and eliminate spending on social media altogether.
by proactively identifying real humans, you prevent the collapse of major social media outlets. by tracking their age and location directly, you restore that which AI took away from advertisers in the first place.
age verification makes sure surveillance capitalism continues to function.
I hadn't heard this take before but I find it very compelling. The supply of raw materials for their product pipeline has become contaminated and they need to weed out the adulterant.
No shady agenda about killing public discourse is necessary if you view the push for identify verification in that light. (That doesn't mean it won't kill public discourse, but that's an unintended consequence.)
So now there is a market for verified identities. Good job making the numbers go up.
Besides, major social media platforms can just generate ”verified” profiles to fit a demographic. There is no way for advertisers to verify the audiences are genuine. Even CTR is meaningless unless conversion is tracked. This means Meta et al. will soon be actually buying/scalping advertised products and offloading them onto a secondary market.
Is is an excuse for some, sure. But we will fail at pushing back if we ignore that there are a meaningful number of concerned parents who support solutions like this because they have become aware of the danger that social media presents. For many of them, self-attestation of age at the OS account level is likely sufficient, not to mention much simpler to implement and use.
But others are working hard to shift the narrative away from age attestation towards age verification or even identity verification. Government officials (on both the right and left) want to be able to police speech based on what is acceptable to those who are currently in power. Companies want to verify humans for advertising and training purposes. And some privacy advocates intentionally conflate age attestation (like California AB 1043) with age verification because it is an easier strawman to attack.
To be sure, social media is a problem for our children. No doubt about it. But the solution is to take screens from the children, not set up the foundation of a police state.
Yes, but do you have any specifics? No one seems to have any specifics. I don't mean "plausible explanations of what the government might wish to to" -- I mean "specific actors pushing specific agendas."
Too many people expressing themselves on the internet with nothing that can be done against them...
From a government perspective, it is a gold mine to know who's on the internet. For advertisers it is another goldmine - you can target at will without having to figure out first some demographics. An probably there are some angles I don't yet see, but the fact that this is a concentrated effort across the world make my spidey sense tingle.
I agree with this especially as these laws specifically still allow kids to carry smartphones and use them away from parents watchful eye. There is no protection here. Get the kids off of the internet, there is nothing good for them there.
Now as I've thought this through some, I could see where selected networking could be made kid friendly, you know, like a top level dns where you need to prove yourself to be underage or heavily vetted adult with id verification, and this entire tld could be made kid friendly. I don't doubt that most of today's dns infrastructure is probably not up to the job, but a very tight and heavily vetted registry for .kids for example (or maybe better as kids.<country> as laws vary) would solve all of this. Make a subset of the internet kid safe and serve the kids that.
The fact that all these proposed laws still give kids general tcp/ip access at the physical level means we do conclude exactly what my parent commenter says, its not really about the kids, its about the free and unfettered flow of information that must be stopped. In the US, its getting close to illegal to disseminate information but once factual information does indeed become criminal in nature, you need to catch the perps and thus the IDs attached to packets of fact carrying information.
Suspicious? Maybe. Benjamin Netanyahuha repeatedly voiced concerns Israel is becoming increasingly unpopular amoung the youth because of social media.
His words: “the most important purchase going on right now (Tiktok)” alleging its control could be “consequential.” [1]
When kids have alternative news your pointless religious wars or fake democratic freedom wars cannot be fought. [2]
[1] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in September "We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged. And the most important ones are on social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok. Number one. Number one.". Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti‑Defamation League, warned last year: “TikTok, if you will, is the 24/7 news channel of so many of our young people, and it’s like Al‑Jazeera on steroids. It’s amplifying and intensifying the antisemitism and the anti‑Zionism with no repercussions.”
[2] "There’s an eighth front," he said, describing a struggle "for the hearts and minds of people, especially young people in the West, and for me especially in the United States.
Attestation of age should suffice; no one in a building somewhere needs to verify my age. If I tell you to treat me like a minor, you do it. Operating systems and browsers can work together to send this as a header. If you're a concerned parent: set your children's ages in their device accounts.
Done. This alternative solves the whole problem and it's been brought up a million times, but it doesn't matter, because this isn't about protecting children or anything about ages. It's about locking down anonymity, and money for a few interests who want to be the verifiers and craft a future where they hold the keys.
I don't agree with age verification, but there isn't anywhere 'set your children's ages in their device accounts' that limits their access to inappropriate content and social media.
You can set age in Google Accounts, but they can access pretty much anything when they reach age 13 (which is about the age a lot of these things start to become a real problem) and as a parent you don't have any way to limit that. They don't even need to ask to install new phone apps.
Children also use computers as well as phones and you don't want to stop them using a web browser! You also obviously can't supervise them every moment they are online even if you wanted to.
I have a hard time calling it a technological advancement, that's what it was when we had bloggers and forums some 20 years ago. Until we all collectively agree that kids should not have smartphones and iPads until they're maybe 17, or come up with a solution where they do have them but will only be able to use them for Maps, Books, Word/Excel, the Chrome Dino game, Tetris, and obviously messaging/calling with parents - without being the weird ones in the classroom. Until then, it's one ugly experiment which got completely out of hands.
Agreed. Many parents I've spoken to want operating systems to provide a standard set of age and/or content flags that app stores and websites are required to respect.
But various groups are deliberately conflating that desire for self-attested flags with verification: Politicians who want to police speech, companies who want to advertise to verified humans, and privacy advocates who want an easier strawman to attack.
There is nuance here, especially when it comes to schools. And it certainly depends on what country/jurisdiction we're talking about, in terms of actual legal duties of parents.
The school admins and teachers act in loco parentis when the child is in their custody, on their property etc. So, schools are often tasked with making difficult parentage decisions for children, and sometimes before the parents themselves can be looped in.
A notable tension today exists with gender identity, and whether schools should be compelled to always share the student's secrets with parents, or if the schools have a solemn duty to try and protect children's confidentiality and safety in this regard.
Another tension exists with medical care in hospitals. Once a child is admitted to the hospital, do the parents still have 100% control over life-saving treatments? Can the parents withdraw ordinary life-sustaining care? Can the hospital tell the parents when the child is "brain dead" or in a PVS, and can the parents go find a second opinion?
The problem is that not all parents are "concerned parents" and children dont deserve to be taken advantage of by trillion dollar corporations for the crime of having bad parents.
That's the classic question of when the state should step in to correct bad parenting, and when it should leave well enough alone. I'm sympathetic to the idea that this is one of the "step in" times, but I think the negatives for doing so seem far too costly.
At any rate, with age verification, un-concerned parent will likely just want their kid to shut up, and will verify using their own details to give the kid the (adult) access they want. So I don't think that changes much here.
> That's the classic question of when the state should step in to correct bad parenting, and when it should leave well enough alone
Well, no, this is the slightly different classic question of whether, in order to prevent (or, more realistically, on the pretext of preventing) bad parenting, the state should impose a universal totalotarian papers-please approach to basic life activities which requires everyone to prove identity to refute the assumption that they are a child so that it may impose its own (also bad, because totally one-size-fits-all and corcumstance blind) parenting on every child, without regard to the imposition on the liberty of every adult necessary to do so.
Stepping in to correct bad parenting happens when there is a system to identify bad parenting requiring correction and intervene only where such is identified, not when you are imposing a universal regime on everyone on the justification that without it, some will act as bad parents. While both are approaches frequently proposed, they are different and should be distinguished.
Forcing literally everyone else on the internet to give up privacy. No kids ever use my devices (there are no kids in my household), but in order to protect the non-existent children who theoretically would use my devices, I'd be forced to share information I don't want to and blindly trust that the process is done in a way that magically doesn't increase the ability to track me across websites.
That’s an extremely small negative. We’ve had nearly zero privacy for all of human history. A lockable door in your own home was an enormous revolution. There was a brief period where you could do super secretive things in your own home in America because it was the culture to move out the millisecond you can in order to live on your own, and roommates are viewed as an unfortunate obstacle.
Now that the 70-ish year experiment is over, we’re simply reverting to the way we’ve been since time immemorial.
> We’ve had nearly zero privacy for all of human history. A lockable door in your own home was an enormous revolution. There was a brief period where you could do super secretive things in your own home in America because it was the culture to move out the millisecond you can in order to live on your own, and roommates are viewed as an unfortunate obstacle.
The timeline you present is backwards because you misunderstand privacy as a binary. For most of human history we were extremely private to almost everybody in the world, and that's only changed relatively recently. There's a huge difference between my family or close neighbors knowing what I'm doing because of physical proximity and having to broadcast information about myself in order to take part in the way society has evolved to expect for mundane services.
- at a minimum, your id will be stored on random servers where it can be stolen
- at a medium, you will have annoying and intrusive identity checks required to use many common websites
- at a high medium, you will not be able to use a non trusted computer and identity stack: get on a windows, apple, or google device and use their identity services in their browsers, or else you cannot use the internet
- at a maximum, all activity you and everyone takes online will be monitored and faithfully tied to your or their verified identity. This total loss of privacy will result in a total loss of freedom of speech and assembly online.
That last point is the direct aim of the people driving these laws.
You should look into Paul Krugman’s research on nudges, and how he won a Nobel prize showing that extremely small changes can have significantly beneficial effects across an entire citizenry.
You’re the person saying that we shouldn’t be default people to contributing to their retirement because people may choose not to. It’s not about perfectly capturing every possible person - you’re running a country, not a concentration camp.
Our environment contains harms. Vehicles are several tonnes traveling 60+ mph, they make guns look safe. The calculation is a risk-reward one.
The question we have to ask ourselves is whether these "protect the children" laws are worth the internet freedoms they are about to erode. I would argue not.
1. It is not the state's responsibility to raise your children. They should ensure that safety is available, they should have some ability to deal with clear cases of abuse - but otherwise you're on your own. Anybody who thinks they want a nanny state just has to imagine the worst possible government abusing this power.
2. On the basis of providing safety, it would be enough for example for mobile phone OSes to provide parent restrictions (as they currently do). Kids can't afford to buy phones, so it's the parents in almost all cases giving them unfiltered access. If you really really want to ensure that all children have filtered access on phones, just spot check kid's phones and confiscate them if they do not have the locks enabled.
It seems insane to me that so many parents believe they have zero responsibility for their children's access to the internet, despite being the source of that access. I'm sorry, parents need to step up.
I’m glad you think parents need to step up. They aren’t. Stop pretending that the solution is “people should just stop doing this thing I dislike” because it will literally never work in any situation where you’ve got even an ounce of compassion.
there are plenty of alternatives if we're willing to shift these costs and responsibility to ISPs, which could separate the internet into two networks, one for children and the other for the rest of us. This is technically just as feasible, and probably cheaper than requiring every website to process (and probably retain) personally identifiable information.. significantly safer too.
But that wouldn't come with baked in surveillance, so "what else can you do" sounds a bit unnerving.
> if we're willing to shift these costs and responsibility to ISPs, which could separate the internet into two networks, one for children and the other for the rest of us. This is technically just as feasible, and probably cheaper than requiring every website to process
It really wouldn't be.
Do that at OSI layer 3, every routed packet would have to have an "was this sent by a kid's device" flag.
Higher levels aren't the ISP's role. Lower levels, you'd need duplicate hardware specifically for kids, which couldn't connect to the adult's internet.
In the real world, we're still arguing about something that was already embarrassingly slow in its roll-out during my degree, and I graduated 20 years ago: IPv6.
If sparking such interests is your goal, I'd pick hardware that's ancient and chunky, easy to see what bits it has and pull them out, put new ones in. Nothing newer than 1999.
this can be done purely with software: a browser with a vpn that cannot be changed without parental consent, which only connects to a network designated for children. The vpn provider could then limit access. High school computer labs already do something similar.
We don't need to compromise here, this already exists and works pretty well.
First, no. A lot of things supposedly kid-safe have turned out not to be.
Also, further up chain, I was replying to:
> if we're willing to shift these costs and responsibility to ISPs, which could separate the internet into two networks, one for children and the other for the rest of us. This is technically just as feasible, and probably cheaper than requiring every website to process
What you suggest is not that.
Also also, what you suggest puts the hard problem (configuring software correctly) in the hands of normal people.
Software configuration is second nature to us nerds, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows how to install pi-hole and one or two VPNs: https://xkcd.com/2501/
> First, no. A lot of things supposedly kid-safe have turned out not to be.
I'm not making a comment with respect to the actual safety these systems offer, just that alternatives exist, which would not all require modified hardware.
> what you suggest puts the hard problem (configuring software correctly) in the hands of normal people.
Pre bundled software, specifically browsers, exist. Colleges use them all the time to prevent cheating, e.g. the Lockdown Browser. Those don't require the student to configure anything, they just download the application and login.
I had an idea the other day that children could have some kind of jewellery that they can't remove like a curfew device. Probably impractical but at least it matches - children=limited rights and need protection. Once of age, no need, come of age, can remove.
Children already have less rights. Like voting rights missing, the right to buy alcohol (at least here in Germany), not allowed to drive a car, Forced to go to school, not allowed to watch quite a lot of movies - just to name a few, but also special protections. As they can't be held responsible below the age of 14 (so not court cases and prison time for kids <14). Just as one example.
So we already treat kids quite differently from adults. And tht is - imho - fine. Because kids are not just "small grown ups", they are just growing up.
I just do not think, that KYC/age verification is the right way to go - or even feasible in how it is being approached. I am for denying Meta, TikTok and the others the opportunity to exploit kids. But I would rather much have them regulated in a way that just forbidds them their predatory ways overall, then to give them even more data in the form of verified idetities and the knowledge that this account is within a specific age range ad also a "real human being", making that data even more valuable for advertisers.
There is quite a difference between say having to hold a driver's license when driving or having to show the cashier your ID when buying beer, and having something attached to your body, for years, for the crime of simply having been born.
I abhore the idea of having something attached to ones body. I wanted to show, that we already have systems in place that work and do not need such a horrible intrusive way of marking children.
Yes! I was just thinking that - what if they become conditioned.. still I think it's worth considering, as a thought experiment in light of what seems to be happening - you get the same chains when you come of age instead, although they are virtual....
If you're concerned with the fact that the government might have misaligned incentives to use a system beyond the originally given intent, I think the actual approaches that are in danger of being implemented should probably be something you focus on more than something that one person on an internet forum casually suggested
well, I agree with this, however... if you make it soo bad that it seems that adulthood will be a joy, maybe it will reduce the crash as the responsibilities start coming in? The restrictions that would ensure should be pretty transparent along the lines of well you can't do that because you're a kid, right?
Oh good, there have never been studies coordinated to come out to influence public opinion based on shoddy science before; just ask the tobacco industry
No, in this scenario I'm defending the idea that sometimes "a lot of studies" that come out "kinda at the same time" aren't necessarily due to robust science but can be pushed by a specific agenda. If you actually cared to include the specific factor that you cited as a rationale for regulation, you'd get this:
A bunch of studies: “CIGARETTES ARE FINE!”
Tobacco industry: "We don't need to regulate that"
A bunch of studies: "SOCIAL MEDIA IS DANGEROUS"
Government: "We need to regulate that"
Never mind that there's widespread scientific consensus on plenty of things that we're actively dropping the ball on (e.g. human causes of climate change) that nobody seems to feel the need to rush on as much as this.
> I know what point you were trying to make, but I’m pointing out that your argument works against you much better than it works for you.
Sure, if you go out of your way to try to ignore pretty much everything about the conversation up to that point and half of what I said.
> The last point you make is just lame whataboutism.
The entire point I'm trying to make is that the priorities of the people in power reflect what they actually care about. You're disregarding a plausible explanation for why things are playing out the way they are by dismissing each individual point I make against it individually rather than addressing the combination of factors that make it so concerning.
It's honestly hard to tell if you actually do understanding my point like you're claiming to. If you were confident that I was wrong, I don't understand why you're straw-manning my argument. If you think I'm spinning conspiratorial bullshit, then I'm not sure why you're taking the time to argue against it poorly.
The internet was never a danger to children’s mental health until social media engagement algorithms. The real solution is to ban any and all engagement algorithms that are designed to get people addicted.
Age checks, aka identity checks, are just another blatant attempt to siphon more personal data by linking your real identity to all of your web activity
> The internet was never a danger to children’s mental health until social media engagement algorithms.
I suspect that depends on subtle phrasing.
If for the sake of argument I presuppose that film classification ratings are necessary to protect children’s mental health, then the un-filtered contents of shock sites and porn sites will have had an impact even in the early years of the internet.
However, the early years of the internet simply had a much smaller proportion of kids online to experience this.
I don't think the distinction matters that much. Remember ogrish? I was already an adult when that gore came out and I was terrified. I can still picture the throat gasping for air as he was being sliced alive.
No*, however the point is valid: the internet overall is indeed unfiltered far beyond what is allowed in even the highest cinematic ratings.
* I avoided such things, however I do know the low end of what they can be, and had in mind 2girls1cup which I understand to be criminal "extreme porn" by UK standards, though have never actually seen it.
Yes, especially back then. But I don't think age-gating is useful for gore. Even if I had dementia I'd be horrified. Just with the benefit of not being able to remember it.
This is conspiracism-adjacent and therefore unhelpful IMO. Perhaps people (and therefore politicians) simply believe that it is more feasible to implement end-user ID checks than somehow to put the genie of two decades of social media back in the bottle. I agree that this is not necessarily true but the failure of imagination seems very plausible.
Its reasonable to agree a problem exists and that we don't yet have a solution worth implementing.
Until there's a solution that actually addresses the problem without creating more, we should just try to make sure more people also know the problem exists and try to help equip parents to deal with it as best they can for now.
Can you give some examples of such studies? The ones I've seen are all pseudo-scientific or provide very low grade evidence, often nothing more than simple correlations.
The default value assigned to a social study from academia should be zero these days, so there merely being a lot of them doesn't mean anything. You really need some very high quality evidence to justify this kind of huge change.
I am really starting to think that the Very Smart People (pejorative) holding power think that they can just copy the Chinese mass surveillance and social control model without changing anything else about the economic or cultural models of the U.S. and Europe, and that's going to somehow allow us to compete with them. I'm sure there will be massive exceptions for anyone wealthy and connected, so the panopticon is just a way to whip and threaten the common folk. That's also why it probably won't work. In a way it just reeks of desperation and reaching straight for the most authoritarian approach.
No joke our politicians subject us to something stupid, and then travel around telling their foreign peers how amazing and genius they are for doing so. They help write the legislation for other countries. Of course they later return and have to deal with the results of their stupidity, but its already been sold.
I don't think people should be down voting this without at least providing some context.
I know Aus and NZ are quite authoritarian when it comes to this stuff - I have seen it directly for myself. I was at the Christchurch Call public engagement meeting [1] when they were planning some of these things.
Politics works that way sometimes. It could be a fad. It could be the culmination of years of the intelligentsia, political, and corporate benefactors finding this to be the right time to move forward.
There has been a lot of propaganda since the mid teens targeting the social and psychological impacts of social media. It is certainly plausible that some group or the aforementioned entities had a big part of this. Regulatory capture is a real thing that makes companies or breaks companies.
This is not the first time media consumption has been labeled and targeted in a negative way and it will not be the last. We as a society have to adapt to changing landscapes.
We shouldn't burn books. We shouldn't ban dungeons and dragons. Video games do not make people in general homicidal. History is repeating itself.
Anecdotally, I have not ran into a single person who has suggested we need to age-gate social media. It is on the politicians mind, but not the lay-person, as far as I can tell.
Everyone who isn't a dangerous creepy loser, as a rule. We generally call that "society."
Change isn't easy. Any particular individual won't necessarily agree with every change when they first see it. But justice and accountability aren't up to the individual - they're up to society. Our duty is only to be decent people and carry that progress forward.
Your response made me realize the book burning analogy was not appropriate. What I meant to allude to was the historical mentions of people reading all day and not playing outside. Mass production of books led to a cultural change that I have seen reports of it being perceived as anti-social. I admit I had a beer or two before making that comment. I don't understand people's negative reaction to new media. It has been happening for a long time. I repeat. History is repeating itself.
Feels more like a joint effort given the way the world is going with AI. Likely, everyone who has access to the internet will require a passport to authenticate and access all websites, including AI bots. That way, any illegitimate activity from AI bots can be traced back to individuals.
Yeah, I have no idea what a good solution is that solves what is coming when malicious actors start flooding the web with agents at hyperscale, because that is certainly going to come.
I'm really hoping smart people can figure out a good middleground before the government does something stupid. Because right now, their two cannons are either:
- Ban open-weight/open-source models and self-hosted LLMs
- Require internet passports to access any website and have everything recorded and monitored for signs of abuse that can be tied back to an individual and enforced in real life
What does a good middle-ground look like? I can't think of one. Neither of these outcomes is good and neither of them are enforceable. You ban something for law abiding citizens and only criminals will use it, and if you restrict everything behind internet passports then the criminals will just use the millions of stolen identities they already have access to.
Maybe biometrics that generate short-lived tokens that only the government can tie back to an individual? Like a "biometric session". Still though, you can kiss freedoms goodbye. It's no surprise Sam Altman started Orb so long ago, he obviously saw this one coming.
> You ban something for law abiding citizens and only criminals will use it
Combine it with harsh enough punishments and few criminals will be willing to risk it. That's how we deal with other crimes that are "hard to enforce" already.
And remember, the optimum amount of crime is not zero. Both because the cost of getting it to zero is too high to bear and because sometimes the morally correct thing to do is to break the rules-as-written.
It's also not the responsibilities of internet users to provide a way for websites to verify that comments are human. If they want to make that a part of their commenting process that's a choice they can make without requiring legislation.
I'm not sure that verifying a human identity for comments is even that useful as there are already plenty of people comfortably with putting their own name on slop.
Why is it weird? Social media has existed for around the same amount of time for all western countries, and people have noticed the harm at around the same time everywhere.
Why do you require some special interest? Ordinary people are seeing the harm and demanding help. Tech companies did themselves no favors by locking down phones and accounts to the point that it's impossible for parents to police and/or check their kids phones.
So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it?
I've yet to meet an ordinary person who supports any of this, though they might agree if vaguely prompted about it without detail. They certainly aren't lobbying their politicians about it. This is top down, not bottom up.
> So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it?
I'm a parent. Nobody has been blocked from parenting by tech companies.
A majority of the parents I know are extremely concerned about the internet and social media and want tech companies to provide them with better parental controls. True, no one I know has lobbied for age verification specifically, but given how much politicians and tech companies want it, it's unsurprising that they're working hard redirect this parental concern towards their preferred solutions.
We are in different circles, because everyone in my circle is desperate for a solution to unrestricted phone use by kids.
> I'm a parent. Nobody has been blocked from parenting by tech companies.
What age? Because they absolutely have. Wait till your kid has instragram and snapchat and WhatsApp and they can talk to random adults, or get bullied and you have no way to know. Wait till they lock their phone, and you have no way to check it. Wait till they get addicted to content that basically blocks them from doing any part of normal life and all they want to do all day is sit and watch a phone.
It's really bad out there. This is the first generation to test as less intelligent than their parents. Read some of the articles on how kids are cheating with AI, and it's not just that AI is available, I think the kids simply can't do the work, and that's because they spend most of their time on the phone.
This doesn't bode well for the future, and something to restrict kids from phone is desperately needed. What it should look like, I'm not sure. I don't care about proving a specific ID for anything, just an age range is enough: Either your above 18, or what's your age when under 18, nothing more is needed.
> Because they absolutely have. Wait till your kid has instragram and snapchat and WhatsApp and they can talk to random adults
Why would they be allowed or even able to download Snapchat or WhatsApp if this is a concern?
> Wait till they lock their phone, and you have no way to check it.
OK, then their phone is taken away.
This is totally bizarre to me. You're talking about a world where parents have totally given up parenting already. There's nothing tech companies are going to be able to do to help.
Your kid also will have to deal with all of that as an adult so prepare them to deal with it instead of sheltering them. Either trust the kid to make their own decisions because you have prepared them or only give the kid the device under the agreement that it can be inspected and take it away if the agreement is broken. It's also perfectly possible to enforce device time limits without any technical means. If the kids school undermines your values regarding tech use then find a better school. None of this requires an age verification panopticon. None of this even requires support from the device vendors for parental controls. All it requires is a backbone and, yes, effort.
> Tech companies did themselves no favors by locking down phones and accounts to the point that it's impossible for parents to police and/or check their kids phones.
How is it impossible? Worst case, parents can make the kids unlock the device and take it away if the kid does not comply. Not that such extreme measures should ever be needed if there aren't significant pre-existing parenting failures.
And at some age the parent's job should be to make sure the kid can act responsibly on its own rather than micromanaging every possible danger.
>people have noticed the harm at around the same time
the harm being us proles being able to communicate and organize. they don't give a fuck about kids, algorithmic feeds, or Russian/Chinese/other villains of the week disseminating propaganda to other bots in Facebook comments. they care exclusively about regaining some degree of control over the flow of information.
consider this: how many people in Europe would be against the ongoing replacement migration if it was still 1999 and 95% of people were still getting news exclusively from the TV and papers, where most incidents of cultural enrichment would never ever be mentioned? and on the other end of the spectrum, consider this: would the BLM protests of 2020 have the same scale and impact if there was no medium for people to spread the video and organize?
TLDR: Arab spring good, American/European spring bad.
Protect them from what? The known associates of trafficking associated with Maxwel & Epstein have not been fully exposed or prosecuted, instead their names are hidden. Nothing is happening. This is an attempt to force identity in all things. It should be stopped.
> There is surely an international special interest group lobbying for this?
yea, you know who they are, I know who they are and we all knoww what they are tryin to hide. but anyone who spells it out will get downvoted to hell here.
Maybe this is about time. It’s pretty clear that the internet as such is not and never has been for children.
But the way it is done is weird for sure.
But how do you do it in a way that it isn’t a burden on the parents or peer pressure the issue that breaks the intent?
Or is your point that the internet should be used by children?
If so how do you propose restricting the harmful content?
From my point of view we are in the digital Middle Ages. We do not yet understand if this global connection is actually being good or bad in the long run. The only thing that starts to crystallize is that it isn’t great for children. Specifically social media, especially especially people gaining access to children on troves to spread ideology.
So how to solve it. And „I don’t like the current approach“ without having a better idea is not a solution.
> But how do you do it in a way that it isn’t a burden on the parents
You make it a burden on the parents, like all parenting always has been.
In my opinion, US culture losing sight of this is part of why our country is spinning down the drain. Combining Ipad kids with "what do you mean my child is failing? Isn't it your job to fix that?" I suspect has lead to a populace that can't think for themselves.
Being willing to give up your online anonymity to be surveiled online and not only beliving it's not a problem, but really thinking it's to protect children is another result of this.
>But how do you do it in a way that it isn’t a burden on the parents
Why should we aim to do that ? Who give internet-enables device to their children? In most cases, who give pay for their internet access?
> So how to solve it. And „I don’t like the current approach“ without having a better idea is not a solution.
Defining the problem, and if it exist altogether should be a good start. I'm not even sure the problem is defined, even less it need a solution so badly that we should kill everyone privacy for it.
I don't think it's a given that this can't be partly or mostly policed by parents if they were provided good tools to do so.
As it is all of the parental controls on all devices, apps, and services are extremely lackluster.
So I'd argue legally required, granular, parental controls and empowering parents would be a much better start to resolving this issue compared to blatant government privacy overreach.
Nonsense. They've already passed so many laws giving parents easy-to-use tools to manage their kids internet access, and other laws that make unlocking internet access for children that aren't yours just as illegal as buying them alcohol.
It was only after all of that failed, with no measurable effect, that our governments, reluctantly and as a last resort, proposed these privacy-destroying measures. And even then, they respected their citizens' rejection of these proposals [1].
I mean I didn't actually check that this is how it went, but with all the lecturing about "democracy" from our rulers, surely that's how they went about it, right?
I could accept that there shouldn’t be content for children on the internet, at all, to make this an easy sell.
Parents will not solve this. They would need to first care and then to be as tech savvy as the people in this forum. And then all the content would need to be attributed correctly. If if if, and here we are
You're engaging with the wrong argument. "Think of the children" is meant to confuse and diffuse discourse around what is happening. The argument which actually reflects the true intention of your politicians and lobbyists with respect to this issue is an argument of free access to information by anyone, including children.
I was raised in am extremely oppressive and abusive religious household. I would not be who I am today if I didn't have access to opinions outside of those shoved down my throat. I couldn't even listen to radio stations that weren't corporate soft rock or Christian music.
The internet was the only free space I had. Without it, I would certainly have killed myself as a child, rather than continue to submit to violent physical and religious abuse.
If we would stop blindly reacting with short-term thinking to each issue in turn that Corpgov presents us, and actually think deeply about what kind of future we'd like to build for those after us, it becomes radically clear that both the problem and solution as presented to us are actually detrimental in the long term.
I don’t disagree with what you are saying but it isn’t a solution to the problem. And the problem is about the children.
Without trying to offend you, but you are arguing this as: we don’t need to regulate alcohol or drugs because experiences, for everyone, will be better in the end…
> I don’t disagree with what you are saying but it isn’t a solution to the problem. And the problem is about the children.
You may have skipped over the part in my comment where I pointed out that this "problem" is ostensible at best, and is literally, intentionally presented in a way for you and others to remain engaged with that problem, talking loudly about it while others are trying to actually discuss the real problem being buried underneath:
Our corporate neoliberal authoritarian fascist governments are closing in fast to secure the surveillance state and consolidate their power through an unprecedented level of State control over our lives.
Again, "The children" is not the problem. That is literally the trojan horse being delivered to you through a type of propaganda which has already been well-documented.
> you are arguing this as: we don’t need to regulate alcohol or drugs because experiences, for everyone, will be better in the end…
I never made such an argument, or implied such an argument. What you've done here is present a complete straw man argument instead of critically engaging with the actual argument I've just made, which is that you're falling for corporate and government propaganda and taking up space serving their goals, instead of trying to serve the goals of your own society; and that's the twisted part, you think that you're doing exactly that by entertaining and fueling the "Think of the children" argument.
But in order to not be a sucker, you have to harness that desire to do the right thing and peel back the layers of deception. Fighting the right fight. And not misconstruing valid arguments by saying, "Oh well you just don't want anything to be regulated at all, do you! You want kids to be able to freely access heroin?"
Which, ignoring the fact that ~100 years ago you could go buy a heroin tincture at the pharmacy for your children, this is just a false dichotomy. The options are not between "require children (And adults! That's the point!) to show ID before freely accessing information" and "let the kids shoot up heroin".
The point at which the metrics become meaningless is when others become aware of them, and begin to optimise for them. Lines per code is is not a bad insight for development activity, only when the developers are not aware of the metric. Price per 1M tokens became meaningless when LLM providers started to optimise for it. It seems to be that Sonnet 5 is optimised to score well on AA intelligence whilst seemingly having a lower price per 1M tokens.
I think generally we are in an AI bubble, and it will at some point pop. The numbers simply don't make sense. I would gamble heavily on local cost per task to survive the LLM winter. Given that hardware is pretty much a fixed overhead, you probably want to optimise for task per kW - that's where I'm betting.