Not sure why you're downvoted. People have literally been using literally both ways for at at least 25 years by my own observational record.
You know, "I could literally eat a horse." in which it is clearly understood that the speaker is not claiming that they could physically fit a horse inside their stomache.
Except in this case e.g. Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon actually did literally piss on the audience, so using the word literally to mean "not literally" is confusing because it's not obviously some exaggeration (and considering the timelines, the original comment may have been referring to a literal event but confusing who did it).
If you wanted to actually empower parents in helping their kids, you'd make sites emit some form of standard as TXT, SRV, /.well-known, whatever end points
Then you'd make sure that the owner of the device has the ability to enable this, factoring in some tags for the category
Then I can use my existing parental controls (including on a linux laptop if I don't give my 13 year old root) to apply or not apply rules
If I don't want social media regardless, then I apply a rule "no scoial media". Or I can apply "1 hour max" per day for the category
If I'm happy with my 16 year old spending half an hour on playboy.com or whatever, then that's fine too -- I'd rather they went somewhere like that then some of the shadier sites
This gives no power to large companies, but helps the parents, who can apply "default" profiles -- hell you can distribute default profiles as part of the onboarding process.
FYI for adult content, there's a standard called RTA-Label that already integrates with all parental controls and is already deployed on all major adult sites.
Yes but isn't that limited to only tagging adult sites? That's great and it works but it only applies to a small piece of the stated problem. It seems to be largely social media that's driving popular support for this latest go round.
RTA is an excellent demonstration that a self categorization system can be expected to work provided it's standardized and service operators make use of it. What's missing then is granularity and a way to coerce the vast majority of sites to adopt whatever gets standardized.
Given the current browser duopoly coercing adoption should prove relatively straightforward. So we just need an RFC document and then to somehow gain public support for it.
Simple, sites without a rating are not viewable if parental controls are enabled. That will be motivation for site publishers to get their ratings in order.
No, the browsers would need to reject the sites unconditionally since no one is going to enable parental controls if it breaks everything. Otherwise I expect the current situation of parental controls not working and thus everyone avoiding them and complaining would continue.
Recall that this is exactly what happened with TLS. When browsers started gating all new features behind TLS being active suddenly all the mainstream sites had it working across the board in record time.
The first step is to get Google and Apple to set a date after which adoption is mandated. Provide an easy out for site operators, such as placing a text file at "/.well-known/content-rating" with "tag:all ages" inside to opt the entire site out rather than sending a header per resource or tagging html elements or whatever.
The second step is to approach legislators with this standard and a now very high compliance rate in hand and suggest that they enact a law requiring that such ratings are accurate for certain specific categories (presumably porn, gambling, social media, and user generated content).
The third step is getting governments to do spot enforcement often enough to prevent the system from falling apart.
Sounds good to me. Why didn't Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and the porn industry do this 15 years ago? Why did they pretend to have no responsibility for the content they were publishing? Why did they think clicking "Yes" on an "I am 18 years of age" popup was sufficient?
TBF porn is the only thing I can recall people really getting up in arms about previously and the major sites for that have been sending the RTA header since forever. Otherwise I think the "I am 18 years of age" fig leaf was just a nod to the law in a world where none of the legislatures had bothered to formalize compliance requirements. Really the internet of 20 let alone 30 years ago was just such a different place. I don't recall any gacha games (let alone targeted at children) or opaque recommendation algorithms that would push extremist content.
Keep in mind that for a long time online retailers in the US weren't even collecting sales tax properly and then for a while there was disagreement about which state the sales tax should go to. It seems like a computer and the network enter the mix and suddenly the IQ of everyone involved mysteriously drops to room temperature.
My impression is that the latest push involves parents wanting to do "something" but not being sure what that "something" ought to be. The legislators in turn are either in league with lobbyists who have a vested interest in online ID for one reason or another or alternatively they merely feel similarly to the parents that "something" ought to be done but they don't really have any good options. It's unfortunate but I don't think it's realistic to expect legislators to go out and have a usable web standard drawn up when one doesn't already exist.
> Why did they think clicking "Yes" on an "I am 18 years of age" popup was sufficient?
Because that is the only acceptable solution and it doesn't violate user privacy. Other than off-by-default parental controls that are optionally enabled.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260215201718/https://www.rtala... seems a bother, nevermind the lack of granularity that RTA has. The competing options seem to have a Christian focus as well, from what I recall. There does not seem to be any good option currently.
"All major adult sites" do not send RTA headers. e.g. last I checked, reddit does not. Nor does it segment adult content onto a separate domain or provide any other way to easily filter.
You can't offer a workable solution to an excuse. Nobody pushing this wants to protect the children, therefore offering a solution that will protect the children is irrelevant.
While the powers pushing this aren't doing it for protecting children, there are many people who want restricting the internet to protect children. This is why it's a good cover instead of an obvious power grab, because parents want to stop their ten year old children from seeing porn or getting addicted to social media, but they don't know much about how to do it, the technology involved or who is pushing it.
You might not want any child control, as many in HN don't, but in general the people do. And if you make parents choose between the current free for all and the government knowing the identity of every user, they will choose the second.
Sure, the government would probably not protect the children even after requiring ID, but by then it would be too late.
Yep, and the social media and other tech companies could have solved this 10 or 15 years ago on their own terms but chose to pretend that it was all just a "parenting" issue and not their responsibility. Now they are facing the heavy and clumsy hand of government regulation.
I'm a parent and will take the second option in a heartbeat.
But it's not because I'm cool with my government "[not] doing it for protecting children" or any other conspiracy theory nonsense.
It's because governments ALREADY have all this information if they want it. Most people freely log in to their favourite services, and corporations will hand over data when asked. There are vast amounts of hacked data available, which any government with a competent intelligence service has a copy of. Then there are all the existing laws and intelligence apparatus that can track people.
Age gates wont help the government find out what porn you watch, or who you message on WhatsApp, they already know if they really wanted. But they will create a social contract that letting your kids loose on social media and unfiltered internet is unacceptable. At the moment bad parents have all the power, drawing the line somewhere and enforcing it will give power back to parents that want to raise their children responsibly.
Raising a generation of kids not addicted to internet brainrot is the real way to make sure democratic governments don't overreach with the data they have.
I have an 11yo. I know a ton of parents. And I don't know a single person - not one - who thinks this is a good idea. And I've asked.
Obviously this is just an anecdote and not a substitute for data. But... is there data on sentiment? I don't think it's actual parents who are pushing for this.
I have a 10yo. I know loads of parents too. I don't think I've ever heard the "freedom" position taken apart from on HN. To non-techies it just seems self evident we should block kids from seeing beheadings and donkey porn. They haven't usually thought much about how that would be achieved and what the knock on effects would be. But they do want it.
Both groups exist. Some want to protect the children, others hop on the bandwagon to ensure that protecting the children comes alongside full mass surveillance, and we do ourselves no good by pretending the first group is the second group. Believe it or not, there are children and we are currently failing to protect them from things we need to protect them from.
There is an unfortunate lack of unity for such things. It would work if governments made it easily understandable how to categorize content, but the vast majority is handled by closed boards of people, so no "case law" exists for the difficult edge cases.
Additionally, some jurisdictions have laws based around religious and cultural values which are not immediately obvious, I'm sure many webmasters would be happy to spend 30 minutes or so writing something for such a framework, but the current subsequent obligation of learning the laws of relevant jurisdictions, the decisions of age rating boards, etc. would blow things out to weeks of research and potentially quite a bit of lawyer money.
> There is an unfortunate lack of unity for such things. It would work if governments made it easily understandable how to categorize content, but the vast majority is handled by closed boards of people, so no "case law" exists for the difficult edge cases.
Who cares if some sites get it wrong? It would still be a better scenario than we have now where people either announce who they are, or they hunt for some other site that doesn't enforce age verification. At least if some sites get it wrong, then they're still better than sites that presently out-right refuse to follow all the different laws of the different lands.
> Additionally, some jurisdictions have laws based around religious and cultural values which are not immediately obvious,
The beauty of the GPs suggestion is that site owns don't need to learn that. They just submit what the site content roughly is, and parents get to chose what they want to expose their children to.
Also we already have a jurisdiction problem here were some countries, or even sub-division of such as US states, are passing law that affect the websites and software of people worldwide.
Because liability is likely to be weird in a lot of jurisdictions. I could see incorrectly tagging content as having bigger ramifications than not tagging content.
How does one know what to tag their content as, if they do not know what tags are used by the other party? A standard where every party makes up their own rules as they go along, doesn't exactly work well.
Nuclear is very expensive per MWh and thus per litre of water generated
Solar on the other hand is very cheap, and you don't need to desalinate 24/7 -- just do it when power is cheapest (which is during the sunny times if you have large amounts of solar, during windy if you have large amounts of wind, etc)
The BBC used to deride Sky for being "never wrong for long", but the race to "break the news" changed that. If the news is about something that happened today it's barely worth looking at.
Personally I get my general news from "The Week" magazine each week, which occupies half an hour on a Saturday morning. It has a selection of articles from across the UK and international press, cut down to give an idea. This week I see ones from The Observer, the Financial Times, The Sunday Times and the Spectator. There's a coverage of america, with input from the NYT, Washington Post, National Review, New Republic, Bulwark and Politico. Elsewhere coverage of Cuba includes stuff from Global and Mail in Toronto, Diaro de Cuba and El Salto in Madrid and 14YMedio in Havana.
The ram that’s important for LLMs is gpu-accessible memory, meaning either systems with unified ram or VRAM, the latter of which is tied to the caliber of GPU one has.
8Gb was the standard for a long time (before Apple went Silicon), because from what I understood, is that SDRAM needs to contantly power cycle the memory bus otherwise the bits will fade, and so by having more RAM, your battery would last a little less... this was around the time when 3 hours charge was unheard of, so every little bit helped.
Probably doesn't matter these days with all-day batterys, but now the demand-supply curve is lopsided.
My job still issues 16GB laptops as standard. You need a business reason to get more. This has been going on since before the price hikes.
I’m a system administrator and I can do my job with no issues at 16GB. Most days 8GB would likely be enough, since I’m just using and abusing other systems anyway.
Java devs at my last job were still running 16GB in 2020. Admittedly that was a while ago. Still not a decade.
Unified memory is soldered to the motherboard and needs to be ordered with the new laptop, for prices that are well above what the equivalent amount of SODIMM would cost.
Fine if work's paying, but for personal devices (that might have been purchased before local models got good), people have what they have.
It doesn't have to be soldered to the motherboard. I've got a Minisforum PC that has unified memory installed via dual SODIMM slots. I put 64 gigs of DDR5 sticks that cost me over $600 and can determine the split between the system and VRAM in the BIOS.
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