Eurasian magpies are conscious, but also know themselves in the mirror (the "mirror self-recognition" test).

But yet, something is still missing.

It's a test of perceptual ability, not introspection.

Setting up jellyfin+plex (some devices support one but not the other) and most of the arr suite (radarr, sonarr, prowlarr, tunarr) has really been the best choice I've made this year. I have every TV show or movie I ever want to watch, all my favorites, all the classics. And all in one place. And I made sure to keep it local-first so I still have access at home if we lose internet. Started sharing with family and friends and I get a few requests a week to add content, so its being used.

Just removing the "what streaming service is this show on that im watching?" has been a nice improvement.

"Walmart InHome is a premium service that delivers groceries and essentials directly into a customer's home (fridge/kitchen) or garage, using trained, vetted Walmart associates. As an add-on to Walmart+, it costs an additional $40/year (or $7/month) to provide unlimited, tip-free, and free-delivery-fee service."

Can even do it when you aren't home.

I know you meant as a service provider, but as a avid IRC (and an online game that conventionally alt-tabbed into a irc-like chat window) chatter as a young preteen in the 90s and 00s, I made a lot of online friends that I would not discover what they looked like IRL for decades, some never. People I was gaming with in the 90s, for the first time, I would see what they looked like over FB in a group made for the now-almost-dead game in the 10s. It was like "swordfish - man, where are you now? I don't even know your real name to find ya. shardz - you look exactly like I would picture ya!."

Just some musings.

Since there were no other websites like that back then, it was eventually overrun by non-IRC-users and transformed into what we'd now call a more generic social media platform. Something like the eternal September I guess. People started calling the gallery "IRC" as shorthand, which royally pissed off the original userbase. Fun times.

Then Facebook appeared and everyone moved there.

It's still up, but it's more of a historical relic these days. Not sure who, if anyone, still uses it: https://irc-galleria.net/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC-Galleria

Poland's social media of choice was "Nasza Klasa" (lit. "Our Class"), the American alternative was called "Classmates" as far as I know. It was intended as a service that let you re-unite with your old classmates, designed with the way the Polish school system worked in mind. It was used for far more than that though, and was quite popular among kids who were still at school.

We're still in that era with messaging apps somehow. WHile the local alternatives have mostly died out, the world is now a patchwork of WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram, with islands of iMessage, Line, KakaoTalk and WeChat thrown into the mix. Most countries have basically standardized on one of these, but they can't agree on which one.

As another 90s preteen, sure, but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s, and preteens today easily share footage of themselves to those adult weirdos, which didn't happen in the 90s because mostly limitations of technology.

BUt if you look at tiktok live it's full of preteen girls dancing, and creepy old men donating them money to the point where tiktok live is basically a preteen strip club. We can't ignore these obvious problems just because we grew up with internet in the 90s and turned out alright.

We have to separate kids from adults on the internet somehow even though i distrust age-verifications systems as they basically remove your anonymity but a solution is inevitable even though it will be faulty and unpopular and people will try to bypass it.

If laws need to be made about something it should be to punish those parents who neglect to safeguard their children using the tools already available to them.

If the parental controls currently provided aren’t sufficient then they should be modified to be so - in addition to filtering, they should probably send a header to websites and a flag to apps giving an age/rating.

There isn't any way to achieve the same digitally.

I hope this becomes more widespread / standardized; the precursor for iDIN is iDEAL which is for payments, that's being expanded and rebranded as Wero across Europe at the moment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)), in part to reduce dependency on American payment processors.

Just allowing a service provider to receive a third party attestation that you "allowed" still allows the third party to track what you are doing even if the provider can't. That's still unacceptable from a privacy standpoint, I don't want the government, or agents thereof, knowing all the places I've had to show ID.

Isn't this solvable by allowing you to be the middle man? A service asks you to prove your age, you ask the government for a digital token that proves your age (and the only thing the government knows is that you have asked for a token) and you then deliver that to the service and they only know the government has certified that you are above a certain age.

The service gets a binary answer to their question. The government only knows you have asked for a token. Wouldn't a setup like that solve the issue you're talking about?

I'm personally more interested in the intuition people have when it comes to squaring rejecting age verification online while also accepting it in a multitude of other situations (both online and offline)

In real world scenarios, I can observe them while they handle my ID. And systematic abuse(e.g. some video that gets stored and shows it clearly) would be a violation taken serious

With online providers it's barely news worthy if they abuse the data they get.

I'm not against age verification (at least not strongly), but I'd want it in a 2 party 0 trust way. I.e. one party signs a jwt like thing only containing one bit, the other validates it without ever contacting the issuer about the specific token.

So one knows the identity, one knows the usage But they are never related

I could be wrong but I think this is how the system we have in place in Italy works. And I agree that it's how it should work.

Personally I'm still trying to figure out where my position is when it comes to this whole debate because both camps have obvious pros and cons.

And when then, only when I'm in foreign countries.

Not only is the internet forever, but what is on it grows like a cancer and gets aggregated, sold, bundled, cross-linked with red yarn, multiplied, and multiplexed. Why would you ever want cancer?

It's a false equivalence only if you decide to equate the two. My question wasn't worded that way. I'm curious to know if someone who oppose this type of laws is also for or against other laws that are dealing with similar issues in other contexts.

Also, as I said in another post, there are plenty of places, online, where you have to identify yourself. So this is already happening. But again, I'm personally interested in people's intuitions when it comes to this because I find it fascinating as a subject.

It's weird how radicalized people get about banning books compared to banning the internet.

I don't think asking for age verification is the same as banning something. Which connection do you see between requiring age and free speech?

Second, it's turn-key authoritarianism. E.g. "show me the IDs of everyone who has talked about being gay" or "show me a list of the 10,000 people who are part of <community> that's embarrassing me politically" or "which of my enemies like to watch embarrassing pornography?".

Even if you honestly do delete the data you collect today, it's trivial to flip a switch tomorrow and start keeping everything forever. Training people to accept "papers, please" with this excuse is just boiling the frog. Further, even if you never actually do keep these records long term, the simple fact that you are collecting them has a chilling effect because people understand that the risk is there and they know they are being watched.

Maybe I'm wrong (not reading all the regulations that are coming up) but the scope of these regulations is not to ban speech but rather to prevent people under a certain age to access a narrow subset of the websites that exist on the web. That to me looks like a significant difference.

As for your other two points, I can't really argue against those because they are obviously valid but also very hypothetical and so in that context sure, everything is possible I suppose.

That said something has to be done at some point because it's obvious that these platforms are having profound impact on society as a whole. And I don't care about the kids, I'm talking in general.

Under most of these laws, most websites with user-generated content qualify.

I'd be a lot more fine with it if it was just algorithms designed for addiction (defining that in law is tricky), but AFAIK a simple forum where kids can talk to each other about familial abuse or whatever would also qualify.

I'm currently scrolling through this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_... and it seems to me these are primarily focused on "social media" but missing from these short summaries is how social media is defined which is obviously an important detail.

Seems to me that an "easy" solution would be to implement some sort of size cap this way you could easily leave old school forums out.

It would no be a perfect solution, but it's probably better than including every site with user generated content.

An alternative to playing whac-a-mole with all the innovative bad behavior companies cook up is to address the incentives directly: ads are the primary driving force behind the suck. If we are already on board with restricting speech for the greater good, that's where we should start. Options include (from most to least heavy-handed/effective):

1) Outlaw endorsing a product or service in exchange for compensation. I.e. ban ads altogether.

2) Outlaw unsolicited advertisements, including "bundling" of ads with something the recipient values. I.e. only allow ads in the form of catalogues, trade shows, industry newsletters, yellow pages. Extreme care has to be taken here to ensure only actual opt-in advertisements are allowed and to avoid a GDPR situation where marketers with a rapist mentality can endlessly nag you to opt in or make consent forms confusing/coercive.

3) Outlaw personalized advertising and the collection/use of personal information[1] for any purpose other than what is strictly necessary[2] to deliver the product or service your customer has requested. I.e. GDPR, but without a "consent" loophole.

These options are far from exhaustive and out of the three presented, only the first two are likely to have the effect of killing predatory services that aren't worth paying for.

[1] Any information about an individual or small group of individuals, regardless of whether or not that information is tied to a unique identifier (e.g. an IP address, a user ID, or a session token), and regardless of whether or not you can tie such an identifier to a flesh-and-blood person ("We don't know that 'adf0386jsdl7vcs' is Steve at so-and-so address" is not a valid excuse). Aggregate population-level statistics are usually, but not necessarily, in the clear.

[2] "Our business model is only viable if we do this" does not rise to the level of strictly necessary. "We physically can not deliver your package unless you tell us where to" does, barely.

We know we cannot trust service providers on the internet to take care of our identifying data. We cannot ensure they won't turn that data over to a corrupt government entity.

Therefore, we can not guarantee free speech on these platforms if we have a looming threat of being punished for the speech. Yes these are private entities, but they have also taken advantage of the boom in tech to effectively replace certain infrastructure. If we need smart phones and apps to interact with public services, we should apply the same constitutional rights to those platforms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudonyms_used_in_the...

Are private social media platforms "public services"? And also, you mentioned constitutional rights. Which constitution are we talking about here? These are global scale issues, I don't think we should default on the US constitution.

> We know we cannot trust service providers on the internet to take care of our identifying data.

Nobody needs to trust those. I can, right now, use my government issues ID to identify myself online using a platform that's run by the government itself. And if your rebuttal is that we can't trust the government either then yeah, I don't know what to say.

Because at some point, at a certain level, society is built on at least some level of implicit trust. Without it you can't have a functioning society.

This is somewhat central to being remain anonymous.

Protesters and observers are having their passports cancelled or their TSA precheck revoked due to speech. You cannot trust the government to abide by the first amendment.

Private services sell your data to build a panopticon, then sell that data indirectly to the government.

Therefore, tying your anonymous speech to a legal identity puts one at risk of being punished by the government for protected speech.

Again, this is a global issue. There is no first amendment here where I live. But the issue of the power these platforms have at a global level is a real one and something has to be done in general to deal with that. The problem is what should we do.

This is a stopgap at best, and to be blunt, it's naive. They can go on their friends' phones, or go to a shop and buy a cheap smartphone to circumvent the parental controls. If the internet is locked down, they'll use one of many "free" VPN services, or just go to school / library / a friend's place for unrestricted network access.

Parents can only do so much, realistically. The other parties that need to be involved are the social media companies, ISPs, and most importantly the children themselves. You can't stop them, but they need to be educated. And even if they're educated and know all about the dangers of the internet, they may still seek it out because it's exciting / arousing / etc.

I wish I knew less about this.

Not if the rule includes easy rule circumvention. For example, if you could parent-control lock the camera roll to a white list of apps.

Want to post on social media so your friends would see? No can do, but you can send it to them through chat apps. Want to watch tik-tok? Go ahead. Want to post on tik-tok? It's easier to ask parent to allow it on the list, then circumvent, and then the parent would know that their child has a tik-tok presence, and — if necessary — could help the child by monitoring it.

The current options for parent control are very limited indeed. You can't switch most apps to readonly, even if you are okay with your child reading them — it's posting you are worried about.

But in ideal world there would be better options that would provide more privacy and security for the child, while helping parents restrict options if they fell their child isn't ready to use some of the functions.

So I could explore things but not get into anything naughty.

When I decided to get into software dev I got my own cpu and my own phone once I had a job in dev.

Might seem pretty conservative but it worked, and I'm technical enough now. I wish I would have got into coding earlier but I've done alright so :shrug: Depending on the environment for my kids I'd move the timeline back a little, but not too much. Having too much time and just the unfiltered internet to fill it is too dangerous for young teens.

tl;dw it's quite capable for the money and would could easily get on social media apps/sites.

I would not be here if I didn't get my start in my early teen years.

A smart phone is too disconnected of a device when compared to the desktops we all grew up on. No one is talking about fully banning <18s from the internet (at least no one serious) - it's a discussion about making sure that the way folks <18 use the internet is reasonably safe and that parents can make sure their children aren't being exposed to undue harm. That's quite difficult to do with a fully enabled smart phone.

By 16 I was regularly ignoring my parents to go to bed when I was up coding or gaming and doing dumb script kiddie stuff on IRC.

I had an adult introduce me to Astalavista (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk)

Thinking back to that I was very well aware of the fucked up part of the internet much more so than most adults around me. People did in fact meet up in person with strangers from the internet even back then.

I think it's more important to teach around age 10-14 about the dark side of the internet so that late teens can know how to stay safe. Rather than simply throwing them into the reality of it unprepared as "adults".

Also frankly I don't want to know the search history of a late teen. There's a degree of privacy everyone is entitled to.

It's also important to acknowledge that kids that used the internet weren't everyone in our day and the usage of the internet varied wildly. While now-a-days it's an expectation for everyone to be at least moderately online (often required by academia) and often that their presences are tied to their real names.

It's not the porn or the LiveLeak gore content that would have me worried. It's groomers and other adults with bad intentions. Not something you can easily block and not something this ID check will stop. A groomer will slow burn a social relationship with someone until they are legal adults. That's something you can only teach someone to look out for. And even adults are susceptible to this.

oops forgot to mention, you can check the potential internet customer's id also at the time of purchasing the internet connection or obtaining a wifi login. I hope that I've clarified the similarity here and that there was actually no "Weird jump between voicing my political points online and which beer I prefer"

Secondly the parents need some similar education, either face-to-face education or information material sent home.

It will not prevent everything, but at least we cannot expect kids and parents to know about parental control features, ublock origin type tools or what dangers are out there.

We have to trust parents and kids to protect themselves, but to do that they need knowledge.

Of course some parents and kids don't care or do not understand or want to bypass any filters and protections, but at leaast a more informed society is for the better and a first step.

Yeah but many parents are stupid and want the government to force everyone to wear oven mitts to protect their kids from their poor/lack of parenting. What do you do then?

Remember how since a lot of men died in WW2 so kids were growing up in fatherless homes which led to a rise in juvenile delinquency, and the government and parents instead of admitting fatherless homes are the issue, the "researchers" then blamed it on the violent comic books being the issue, so the government with support from parents introduced the Comics Code Authority regulations.

People and governments are more than happy to offload the blame for societal issues messing up their kids onto external factors: be it comic books, rock music, MTV, shooter videogames, now the internet platforms, etc.

And they didn't even try to hide very much.

Look at the story from darknet diaries, where the interviewee talks about setting up an AOL account with girlie name and instantly getting flooded with messages, 9/10 of them being from pedos.

https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/56/

Don't have any examples myself because I was a spectrum kid at that time, quite oblivious to the idea.

Without some data analysis I honestly don't know. Even before Internet (ex: FidoNet) there was plenty of very bad stuff out there, I don't see any clear reason why the pedos and groomers would have avoided it.

> We have to separate kids from adults on the internet somehow

I think what is much worse than in other mediums is the actual lack of a community that observes. In real life, for many cases, you would have multiple people noticing interactions between kids and adults (sports, schools, parks, shops, etc.), so actions might be taken when/before things get strange. On some of the social networks on the internet it is too much one-to-one communication which avoids any oversight.

So, for me, the idea of "more separation" seems to generate on the long term even more problems, because of lack of (healthy) interactions and a community.

I think it's technically possible to build a privacy-preserving age verification. I also think it should be done by the government, because the government already has this information.

There were not fewer pedos and groomers online in the 90s, you were just lucky to have avoided it.

Nowadays with the number of users of the internet converging slowly to the total populations, the percentages are probably converging as well.

A) The government building an entire logistical supply and warehousing chain across the country for groceries to support food welfare. Cold food, meat, spoilage & waste, a bunch of federal jobs.

or

B) The government gives citizens a bit of money, which they then spend at existing warehouses (with existing logistical supply chains) to buy food. Some existing warehouses will accumulate larger shares of this money, as it has more customers.

The existing warehouses in example B are called grocery stores, like Walmart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQOXdtPBGXI

Seems like the it IS cheaper for the government to do it, odd how much better prices can be when you don't have to worry about making sure the fat cats stay fat.

I live very near a hospital and suspect I branch off their higher-SLA lines so that may be a factor.

Warmer places that don't experience cold much absolutely suffer during a cold spell. Texas (with its independent grid) has been absolutely wrecked every time it gets too cold.

Yeah, you won’t lose power much. That’s prioritized.

I don’t get as many power outages in the winter as I do in the warmer months (in fall it’s not unusual to have some weeks without grid power). I did however get a freak outage before the last round of storms and cold. The overhead lines coming up the mountain to me have wetlands at the bottom, it appears a sudden extreme drop in temperature caused the wires to contract and tilted a pole enough (before ground could refreeze) to disconnect the lines. This is in NJ. JCP&L/firstenergy utility just does a shit job here.

This blows my mind. The last time I lost power was ~2 years ago and it lasted maybe 5 days. I know others in my area were out for longer. I suffered for a few days but ended up going down to Toledo and getting a hotel, thankfully only for one night as it was on the next day.

Outside of that, I can only thing of maybe ~100 hours total my power was out over the last ~5-8 years.

Aside, I do think I'm lucky in some way. I live off a semi-major road (40mph) and like I said earlier, less than 1 mile as the crow flies from a major regional hospital. But still most of my street will lose power and only me and a few neighbors will still have lights on. I always thought I was on some random spoke off the hospital grid but based on the surrounding outages it never made sense. There is a creek nearby to complicate things. One day I'll research/track the lines and see what's really up.

A couple years ago we had a black locust tree split and break the T on the top of telephone pole across street. It didn’t take the power out itself, but the utility felt it was safer to shut it off until the pole was replaced. Took 3 days as they sent the crew from texas to NJ.

My parents place had 2 pole replacements on their driveway, each time in different years it was same guy sent up from Alabama. Each time took days.

This area I just don’t think they prioritize getting power restored quickly, population density too low, most own generators, and we don’t have medical stuff nearby. Better to send workers from regions where pay is lower, that’s my guess. I had to file complaints with BPU last year as they fired the meter readers and estimated the bills for like 7 months before installing smart meters.

You might be thinking of Baotou, Inner Mongolia, China.