All of this would be easier if we just called Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and all the others by a more correct name: “Sales-acceleration platforms” and it's mode of operation is "inducing emotional instability in consumers".
“Sales-acceleration platforms” should be regulated to protect consumers, no? Also, why do children need to be on “Sales-acceleration platforms”?
I remember watching old American educational videos for teens from something like the 50s (on YT). They talk A LOT about how to be likable and how much work one has to put into being accepted and included. The tone is very much "if you want friends and not be excluded (and being excluded is your own moral failing) you need to work on it".
I feel people have forgotten that. Having friends isn't easy. You do actually need to put in the effort - everyone needs to put in the effort, not just "the extrovert" that "adopts" you. And not just effort, it takes *SKILLS* that you need to actively develop and maintain.
So now we have generations where no one really thought us the skills or instilled the value of "it's a YOU problem". Everyone is just waiting for someone else to do the hard work. Even more stupidly, people might be lonely, but they are also very picky and if the person isn't exactly what they are feeling at the moment they flake/don't engage. And then they are surprised they don't have a surplus of friends when they need them.
So how do we resolve this? By telling people it's their our damn problem and fault. And no, I'm not saying ignore it on a societal level, I'm saying that the public policy to fix this is to start educating people that social engagement requires effort and skills. Maybe take those old American movies as inspiration (naturally remove all the sexist and racist bullshit).
Yeah, the hardest part is understanding the requirements. But it then still takes hours and hours and hours to actually build the damn thing.
Except that now it still takes me the same time to understand the requirements ... and then the coding takes 1/2 or 1/3 of the time. The coding also always takes 1/3 of the effort so I leave my job less burned out.
Context: web app development agency.
I really don't understand this "if it does not replace me 100% it's not making me more productive" mentality. Yeah, it's not a perfect replacement for a senior developer ... but it is like putting the senior developer on a bike and pretending that it's not making them go any faster because they are still using their legs.
This obsession with "everything must be commercialized" is really killing creativity.
Now if the author was commercializing other peoples reviews, sure, it's potentially(!) unethical.
But scraping a website for reviews that are publicly(!) posted, training a recommendation LLM and then sharing it, for free, seems ... exactly the ideal use case for this technology.
In countries that have it. In Slovenia we have no such legal entity and so starting a business requires, at the very least, ~400€/month for a single proprietorship (unless you are already employed elsewhere already, then it's <100€) or even more for an LLC-type company (since it requires one fully employed person at a level above minimal wage).
Didn't we go through this before with PGP-encrypted emails? 90+% of users are not technically competent enough to even understand, in the vaguest of terms, what you are saying. Even fewer have the time, ability and resources to do so.
Long ago this was an issue. Now with Thunderbird people can trivially PGP encrypt the body of their emails. With IRC this is done with OTR e.g. irssi-otr. I've manage to get lawyers and family members to use PGP so it can't be that hard.
Ask a teenager what a folder is. There's a good chance they'll not know what you are talking about. They can use apps and that's about it. Thunderbird? Good luck with that.
I hear you. It's about incentives. Any time a teenager can learn a method to get around content restrictions will will become a tool in their toolbox. They might reach for the Discord tool by default but when that is compromised such as recent events and governments start looking into all the DM's and voice-to-text transcripts they may reach for that old tool to prove they can not be censored or monitored. I would not expect teenagers to use it otherwise.
> First, Chat Control refers to a proposition in the EU, which has not been accepted at this point. So no, it's not Chat Control.
The EU proposition of Chat Control is the proposition to make it mandatory. Facebook has already been performing it voluntarily (as I've discovered today).
> The problem I see is that you disagree with how Meta handles Messenger, but still use it. Chat Control or not, there is no law preventing Meta from reading your messages for moderation.
Meta isn't just some random company who's decisions don't have wide and far reaching societal effects.
Moderation of private 1v1 chats only make sense in case of harassment - i.e. when one side complains. In all other cases, except with a courts decree based on legitimate suspicion of wrongdoing, it's absurd.
> Meta isn't just some random company who's decisions don't have wide and far reaching societal effects.
So what? There is no law saying that messages should always be e2ee, period. If you want such a law, you need to convince politicians to think about it. But that is orthogonal to Chat Control.
It is technically impossible for a large platform to implement E2EE without having a way to target one person to bypass it. True E2EE will always have to be a program external to the chat platform that handles keys out of band like OTR.
Legally it will never truly happen. Any platform saying they have E2EE is outright lying. Lavabit was an example of what happens when a large platform makes lawful intercept impossible. People keep telling me that Proton and Signal are E2EE and I will always offer them a tropical island for sale on the dark side of the moon, heavily discounted. Moxie of all people should know better.
> It is technically impossible for a large platform to implement E2EE without having a way to target one person to bypass it.
You'd have to explain what you mean here. If you mean that it's impossible to have encryption that is resistant to someone putting a gun on your face and asking for the password, then... well duh.
If someone or something else is managing keys for you, even the javascript in your client, then it can be altered by the server just for you. It's really just that simple. If you are creating and managing key trusts outside of the application then they can not tamper with them or add their own keys.
Open source chat and open source AI just mean that the code you are looking at does not have an obvious back door. That has no bearing on run-time use and monkey-patching. As for Signal not being E2EE I already explained. I don't play the contrarian game so you will have to do your own research.
> As for Signal not being E2EE I already explained.
Either you have not, or it was wrong. It's not clear because there were a bunch of mixed up things (JavaScript has nothing to do with Signal, so I assume you were talking about the Proton web pages, and I would agree there).
> I don't play the contrarian game so you will have to do your own research.
That's not how it works: you say Signal is not E2EE, you prove it. I am convinced that it is, so from my point of view, you don't understand how it works. The only way I can help you understand is if you explain what you believe is wrong there. Google won't tell me that.
As someone who's part of a startup (hrpotentials.com) trying to bring truly scientifically valid psychological testing into HR processes .... yeah. We've been at it for almost 7 years, and we're finally at a point where we can say we have something that actually makes scientific sense - and we're not inventing anything new, just commercializing the science! It only took an electrical engineer (not me) with a strong grasp of statistics working for years with a competent professor of psychology to separate the wheat from the chaff. There's some good science there it's just ... not used much.
How are you going to get around Griggs v. Duke Power Co.? AFAIK, personality tests have not (yet) been given the regulatory eye, but testing cognitive ability has.
“Sales-acceleration platforms” should be regulated to protect consumers, no? Also, why do children need to be on “Sales-acceleration platforms”?