I actually love that it doesn't do this, because the sites that do are a headache (and sometimes entirely unusable) if using a VPN.
And since you can bookmark it with your location setting, automatic IP location could only make the first visit marginally faster for non-VPN users, anyway
toxoplasmosis doesn't actually do that to mice. It makes them less scared, but iirc, not even so much that they don't flee.
it's one of those studies that got blown up into a worldwide news story sensation even though the actual paper didn't say what headlines claimed it did. I don't know if it was ever proven replicable or not, either.
why are so many people so comfortable making this assumption, based on writing style or a checklist of supposed tells or notoriously unreliable detectors, and making kneejerk accusations like they can do no harm and are already settled fact? It's one thing to feel suspicious or disregard the article yourself, but being so incautious about making public accusations without solid evidence is another.
At best, you've identified LLM use. At worst, you've insulted a human writer. Either way, you've derailed the conversation away from the topic at hand.
"So buzz off" (whether a direcy quote or not) seems like a sign they accept the consequence of some people buzzing off.
If they didn't do this, they'd have to accept the consequences of those people not buzzing off, or potentially a different segment of people buzzing off.
Doing nothing isn't an apolitical option either. That's a choice too.
That's disregarding that the people in power routinely make it as difficult as possible to have a choice. If you buy the cheapest foods, maybe it's because you want to eat and pay rent, and spending any more than that would render you homeless. Becoming homeless will not save the poor in another country, even if your purchases to avoid becoming homeless would have contributed a vanishingly tiny, indirect amount to their plight.
I agree that everything is political, and it's good to make choices as ethically as you can, but sometimes it simply isn't possible to be perfect. You can't even know about all the problems without studying them like a full time job. Ain't got time for that. Gotta eat.
The "agonize over every purchase and vote with your dollar" paradigm gives the most votes to billionaires.
Should people think about ethics when buying stuff: yes.
Does failing to recycle a bottle properly, or buying a cheap chocolate bar that may have involved underpaid or even slave labor somewhere in its supply chain, mean someone is evil? Nope.
I wish people would spend less time agonizing or moralizing over what individuals do (even though an individual is easier to influence quickly) and more time going after the broken systems, stupid laws, and malignant CEOs that actually lie at the root of the problems.
Yeah. It's like everybody's forgetting that github also bans things, such as certain projects that receive DMCA takedown requests.
And github pushing its LLM garbage into Visual Studio. If banning crypto or LLM's is political, so too must be pushing them on people who don't want them and very loudly object.
It's only 'political' when someone is trying to divert from the actual, specific subject of a discussion. It's a thought-stopping tactic, not actual substantive criticism.
I'd rather companies actually care (or even just care about seeming to care) about ethics, rather than only caring what makes the line go up the fastest, yes.
A company that treats ethics as optional, or that thinks "it's a business" excuses every imaginable sin, is one that will happily screw you and me over too.
Also, in the long term, making climate change worse is a catastrophically bad decision for absolutely everybody. Companies just have to look past the ends of their own noses to see the immediate, quick payout of not giving a fuck about it is like accepting payment to dig their own graves.
Also, this is probably, in part, about all the cryto scams everywhere. Companies don't like legal trouble.
Anyway, anybody who's sane backs up their source code. If a company burns you, and it's not a monopoly, you leave it. It's not a problem.
ublock origin (not to be confused with the lite version) can also do this, and is more flexible. But it's easy to miss this functionality because you have to know about and read some documentation to learn how to turn ublock's "medium" mode on and how the controls work.
Yes. LineageOS, GrapheneOS, Arch, Sailfish, various other open distros, Windows Phone, and a surprising number of random proprietary options (these are sometimes based on Android, and have some social media apps, but can't run regular Android apps that weren't specifically designed or altered for it) including for modern dumbphones. There are always more over time, too.
There's also old versions of iOS and Android. We don't want to end up in a situation where people are locked into one of only two vendors and can be forced to keep buying the newest model to use an ID app that only supports the most recent software. That'd be even worse for the environment than the current disposable smartphone culture.
Everything to do with the age verification push is corrupt and stupid to begin with. There isn't even a legitimate cause behind all this for forcing ANY app, even if it didn't also force people to buy a specific, expensive, privacy-invading American product.
I've seen that a lot more often lately because of AI botnets. Supposedly the bots come (or appear to) from some countries more than others, and sometimes websites are just banning a whole country because the load from bots is so bad they it outweighs a small number of real human visits.
Could also be an "instead of implementing legally mandated ID verification, we will simply block all traffic from any country that requires it" thing.
Neither Anthropic nor anyone in the Trump administration can hold a candle to kabuki theatre.
(I know that's not what you meant, but still! Art, the LLM and the Trump admin cannot.)
Anyway yeah this is beyond absurd of them to fuss about this. Oh no, the thieves that stole from checks notes basically everbody have been robbed of the stolen goods and nooow they care about copyright, huh, how shocking. I'm sure they'll settle all their court cases with artists and admit fault now, right? ...right?
The rest of it sure does read like "content", yep. There's no substance. It's short. And then there's another book ad.
It reads like someone used an LLM to cough up an article as an excuse to show the book ads. Though I don't actually think it's LLM-generated, mostly just because of the unnecessary ALL-CAPS in the middle, and the overuse of bold, italics, and underlining throughout.
You can copy a shared link and use the browser url bar to open it in a private window, or delete the extra crap at the end of the url (anything after the ? in a lot of cases).
Granted, that doesn't help for the service you're using to communicate with people (phone provider, real time chat service, email provider, whatever) and/or store your contacts. Especially if you're talking to someone who, say, hasn't turned all the creepy Gemini stuff off in their Google account and it's scanning all their emails and learning the names and emails of everyone they talk to.
Or any app that has location permission and can detect that you're in the same place as someone else.
I'd think they can probably figure it out by time too, after enough shared videos. Like, see that when x account opens a video, then y account also opens that same video within such-and-such an amount of time, or vice versa.
I think they want discount codes from "sign up to our mailing list!" emails. If it's in the promotions tab, they probably never have to look at it otherwise or get bugged with notifications, but they could still have it there to check when they happen to be making a purchase anyway.
Depending on the email program, you have to open them to unsubscribe, too. But maybe your stats tool would discount opens immediately followed by unsubscribes?
That is definitely a difficult battle to fight, but why do you think kids can't bypass these government-level restrictions just as easily as they can your own? Especially since governments are usually slow to respond to whatever method of bypassing it is used, if they respond at all (especially once it's no longer the topic of the minute).
People can bypass these restrictions with video game character creation tools, with generative AI, with a VPN (something that's very hard to ban in practice because corporations rely on them, and of which some are free), with copy-pasting random ID photos from the internet, with borrowing a parent's or teacher's or other adult's ID, with using a website scraping alternative (some of which can be self-hosted, or hosted by one child for many others) instead of the website itself, and so on. Heck, they can use websites hosted in Russia (or other countries), like a lot of pirates do.
And whatever the easy bypass method ends up being, they'll all end up knowing it, because they go to school and talk to each other, and because they'll always have at least some access to some parts of the internet no matter what.
Meanwhile, these age verifications laws are labeling all the children (who don't bypass it) as children, and that information WILL be leaked, inevitably, as it already has been (from Discord, for example - a service that shamelessly retains and processes every message it hosts, even after the user 'deletes' it).
When ID info is leaked, it leaks the child's age, their real name, and (often) their real address, their phone number, and their appearance. A surprising amount of information might be deducible from any selfie or video that was required. And in combination with an app's other data (or other data about them that has been included in databases and/or leaked and/or shared on the internet previously and which can be matched to them based on email or phone number or username or browser cookies or IP address or etc), it can leak their interests, hobbies, hopes and fears (discussed with friends), favorite hangout spots, the name and location of the school they go to, their regular routines or travel schedules, etc - anything at all that they might have discussed via the app, or whatever might be concluded just by their proximity to their friends (e.g. maybe they don't directly know that a kid lives in X location or plays Y video game, but if every day they talk to a bunch of other kids who definitely live in X location and play Y video game, then they probably live in X location and play Y video game too).
When all that data is leaked, all that data is now available to predators. And it's very, very hard to remove it from the internet after it's out there.
That data, even just from a single leak, could make it so easy for someone to target a specific child, contact them, tailor their lies to seem as trustworthy and likable to the child as possible, anonymously harass them online, threaten them, stalk them, or attempt to persuade them that yes, he does know their parents, and they definitely sent him to pick them up from school.
To me, all these laws seem realistically likely to do is unintentionally but significantly endanger the children they claim to protect. I don't see how it can be anything but a devil's bargain, even if we only "think of the children" and disregard other concerns.
At the least, it should have been proven to be more effective than regular parental controls before even being considered as an option, but so far, it doesn't seem to be so at all. And if there's little to no additional benefit, or we're not sure if there's a benefit or not, or if it's shown to be less effective, then why ever choose it over the regular parental controls that don't carry this huge additional risk?
As to enforcing age limits otherwise, well. I confess I don't think there is any way children won't just find a way around. I think the best defense is just educating children about how to navigate the internet and its potential threats, making sure the children don't see their parents as distrusting of them or oppositional (so that they feel comfortable enough to go to their parents for help or reassurance if there's a problem, instead of hiding the problem because they don't want to be yelled at for being on the internet or such-and-such website at all), and - an element I think a lot of parents miss - making sure they have a lot of appealing options for things to do or ways to socialize outside of the internet. If you occupy their time by indulging their non-internet-focused hobbies and interests (and maybe engaging in them with them, to spend time with them), or letting them visit friends in person, then that's time they're not on the internet and likely don't even want to be. I think that this is the option that best sets up the kid to continue having a healthy relationship with the internet after they turn 18 and are even more out of your control.
That said, as far as device parental controls go: instead of focusing on phone-level controls, I recommend using your router's network-level parental controls, as well as the phone line controls for whatever company you get your data form (if they have a regular smartphone, as opposed to a more limited one, which do exist as an option). For your own wifi network, you can even set it up to use a whitelist of devices so that your kid can't even connect to it from a non-approved device. That doesn't stop them from potentially still sometimes accessing the internet using a friend's phone, but it'd cut down on how the amount time they have that access, and do so more effectively than government age restrictions. And in any case, you also can't always stop them from looking at a dirty magazine that they find at a friend's house, or from reading a hateful tract that someone hands them on the sidewalk, or from watching a terrible channel broadcast on a TV in a diner. But you can potentially influence how they handle it when they encounter these kinds of things.
And since you can bookmark it with your location setting, automatic IP location could only make the first visit marginally faster for non-VPN users, anyway