I have a kid. All I want is the ability to put a "there's a baby driving" bumper sticker on their devices. And to have pornhub et al steer around them.
I'd suggest that this is actually a pretty common desire from parents. We don't want to collect your IDs. We don't want to install spyware in your webcams. We do want a way to signal there's a kid driving a device.
This article is long on hyperbole and short on facts. I gave up about six paragraphs in, being far more informed about what the author feared about this legislation than its actual content.
Sure, if it would mandate ID harvesting, I'm against it. If it requires biometric verification, no. But if we can just have a way to put bright orange vests on devices that require special treatment... That doesn't feel invasive to me.
I'd prefer to cut all the "think of the children!" charlatans off at the pass. Your kid got traumatized by some crazy hyper porn? Why the heck didn't you flag their device?
In short: you seem to want the Internet to parent your child. I have kids and do not want any of this for them, because all of it is a slippery slope to falling deeper into the surveillance state.
As a parent: do your job and take responsibility for your kids. While it's not trivial this also isn't overly complicated anymore.
If your child needs a helmet to use the internet, as the politicians announcing HR8250 seem to think[1], Apple or whomever is free to offer that as a feature. There is no need for this to be legislated, especially when the legislation does not work in open source environments.
[1] Not hyperbole. They said that. It was an analogy, but one that highlights how ignorant of the technology the authors of these bills are.
I can understand the "baby mode" desire, but as the other reply pointed out, this does not need to be legislated. The big OS companies can easily offer this feature for those that want it.
I'm curious though about all this porn that apparently hides behind a rock on the device and leaps out to corrupt tiny minds when they least suspect it.
Shock websites aside, pornography generally doesn't ambush you. Unless you're a republican giving a presentation and have no idea how that porn got in there.
And, AB1043 specifically exempts websites, so it doesn't protect anyone from the goatse's of the world anyway.
These bills will not do what they purport to do, but they will do a whole lot of bad stuff.
There's already like 17 different parental control solutions out there for every device platform. You can and should use one and don't let your kid go to any website or use any specific app without your approval first.
> We do want a way to signal there's a kid driving a device.
Which is extremely irresponsible. It creates a false sense of security and abandons your child to the whims of strangers. This seems akin to putting a "please don't hurt me" sticker on your child and then letting them roam around downtown unsupervised.
> But if we can just have a way to put bright orange vests on devices that require special treatment
There is software you can already use which will lock the device down and only allow it to go to pre-approved sites. I'm unwilling to give up any of my civil rights for your level of convenience above this.
Yeah this is the way for sure. The OP forgets that young users advertising their age online with an "orange vest" might not be best idea.
There's almost endless choice of legit quality native apps for kids, curated from trusted sources. These alone far exceed healthy screen time if all were downloaded. Or as you say, curated web links in a locked browser.
How much screen time should kids do anyway, it's crazy how much is available before worrying about WWW on top of their games, apps and videos.
I have a kid. Actually two kids. They have their usage controlled by google family. I review weekly their internet usage, screen time is limited to 2 hours/day. They dont have social media. School research and etc, they do at home, in the "main computer" in our dinning room. Youtube too. In the end is our responsibility to educate and protect our kids. I truly dont see a need for such extra controls if the parents aren't interested in enforcing it.
You put your child in the driver’s seat and expect others to make sure it doesn’t make a wrong turn? Did you really have to give it the keys to this hypothetical car instead of, say, LEGO?
Or just don't give your child unfettered access to screens. There is zero reason your child needs x unmonitored hours with YouTube or Netflix or a browser or anything else.
> On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
EDIT: This is a new iteration of an old problem. Even GIGO [1] arguably predates computers and describes a lot of systemic problems. It does seem a lot more difficult to distinguish between a "garbage" or "good" prompt though. Perhaps this problem is just going to keep getting harder.
Going back 35 years to point out a time when protestors were killed is always a strange thing to me. You can go back just a few weeks until you reach a point where the US killed protestors. Then there's stuff like the Black Lives Matter protests where the US government violently suppressed protests and people died/disappeared.
If 1989 is all a country has as a problem, then that's a sign it's doing great.
There are plenty of other more recent examples in this thread.
I was simply replying to the original statement that China doesn't kill protesters in the street. The notion is so risible that in hindsight it may well have been sarcasm or bait.
But, if you wish to expand the scope of this discussion, sure. There are several clear distinctions between the (horrible) events you list and what happened in Tiananmen Square.
The most obvious is that we are free to talk about them now. I submit that the Chinese state's continued censorship of the subject is a sign that (1) the state is still complicit in these crimes and (2) it is not "doing great".
The scale of brutality is also just incomparable. I say this fully agreeing the events you list were terrible. The horrors committed at Tiananmen Square were simply on another level.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you from a park bench in public and hundreds of thousands of clones of me watching you from every street corner in public is, quite frankly, bogus
To paraphrase the quote, quantity has a quality of its own.
Yeah, this feels like another reincarnation of the ancient "who watches the watchmen?" problem [1]. Time and time again we see that the incentives _really really_ matter when facing this problem; subtle changes can produce entirely new problems.
Or we have devices attest user age. On setup, the device has the option to store a root ("guardian"?) email address. Whenever "adult mode" is activated or the root email is changed, a notification must first be sent to the prior root email. That notification may optionally contain a code that must be used to proceed with the relevant action, though the user should be warned of the potential device-crippling consequences.
This setting is stored in a secure enclave and survives factory resets.
I will note that these two systems are not mutually exclusive. There are plenty of ways to "think of the children" that don't trample on everybody's freedom.
I misunderstood then, I’m all in favor of that approach. If mainstream manufacturers include an optional child mode then that doesn’t affect adults. I do think it’s better if the child device simply blocks adult labeled content rather than attesting that the user is a child, just to avoid leaking any information about minors. But it’s still an OK solution.
For this to be a "classic motte and bailey" you will need to point us to instances where _the original poster_ suggested these (the "bailey", which you characterize as "rust eliminates all bugs") things.
It instead appears that you are attributing _other comments_ to the OP. This is not a fair argumentation technique, and could easily be turned against you to make any of your comments into a "classic motte and bailey".
As somebody that "learned" C++ (Borland C++... the aggressively blue memories...) first at a very young age, I heartily agree.
Rust just feels natural now. Possibly because I was exposed to this harsh universe of problems early. Most of the stupid traps that I fell into are clearly marked and easy to avoid.
It's just so easy to write C++ that seems like it works until it doesn't...
> the options are to build more software or to hire fewer engineers.
To be cheeky, there are at least three possibilities you are writing off here: we build _less_ software, we hire _more_ engineers, or things just kinda stay the same.
More on all of these later.
> I am not convinced that software has a growing market
Analysis of market dynamics in response to major technological shocks is reading tea leaves. These are chaotic systems with significant nonlinearities.
The rise of the ATM is a classic example. An obvious but naive predicted result would be fewer employed bank tellers. After all, they're automated _teller_ machines.
However, the opposite happened. ATMs drastically reduced the cost of running a bank branch (which previously required manually counting lots of cash). More branches, fewer tellers per branch... but the net result was _more_ tellers employed thirty years later. [1]
They are, of course, now doing very different things.
Let's now spitball some of those other scenarios above:
- Less "software" gets written. LLMs fundamentally change how people interact with computers. More people just create bespoke programs to do what they want instead of turning to traditional software vendors.
- More engineers get hired. The business of writing software by hand is mostly automated. Engineers shift focus to quality or other newly prioritized business goals, possibly enabled by automating LLMs instead of e.g
traditional end to end tests.
- Things employment and software wise stay mostly the same. If software engineers are still ultimately needed to check the output of these things the net effect could just be they spend a bit less time typing raw code. They might work a bit less; attempts to turn everyone into a "LLM tech lead" that manages multiple concurrent LLMs could go poorly. Engineers might mostly take the efficiency gains for themselves as recovered free-ish (HN / Reddit, for example) time.
Or, let's be real, the technology could just mostly be a bust. The odds of that are not zero.
And finally, let's consider the scenario you dismiss ("more software"). It's entirely possible that making something cheaper drastically increases the demand for it. The bar for "quality software" could dramatically raise due to competition between increasingly llm-enhanced firms.
I won't represent any of these scenarios as _likely_, but they all seem plausible to me. There are too many moving parts in the software economy to make any serious prediction on how this will all pan out.
1. https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2011/06/15/ar...
(while researching this, I noticed a recent twist to this classic story. Teller employment actually _has_ been declining in the 2020s, as has the total number of ATMs. I can't find any research into this, but a likely culprit is yet another technological shock: the rise of mobile banking and payment apps)
I'd suggest that this is actually a pretty common desire from parents. We don't want to collect your IDs. We don't want to install spyware in your webcams. We do want a way to signal there's a kid driving a device.
This article is long on hyperbole and short on facts. I gave up about six paragraphs in, being far more informed about what the author feared about this legislation than its actual content.
Sure, if it would mandate ID harvesting, I'm against it. If it requires biometric verification, no. But if we can just have a way to put bright orange vests on devices that require special treatment... That doesn't feel invasive to me.
I'd prefer to cut all the "think of the children!" charlatans off at the pass. Your kid got traumatized by some crazy hyper porn? Why the heck didn't you flag their device?
reply