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RpFLCL commented on Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption   reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
viraptor · a month ago
Requiring photo IDs is not the only solution. Things don't have to be implemented that way. I can be both for privacy in this case and limits on social media. Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging. Essentially a signed timestamp + random number.

> People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted.

This is BS and not productive. We can do better.

RpFLCL · a month ago
> give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging

Awful idea.

This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication by deciding that you're no longer allowed to verify with these platforms.

"Been protesting the wrong things? Been talking about the wrong war crimes? Been advocating for the wrong LGBT policies? Failed to pay child support? Failed to pay back-taxes? Sorry you're no longer eligible for authenticating with social media services. You're too dangerous."

That is not beyond the pale for the Australian government.

You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part, with absolutely no mechanism to verify that. And it can be changed at any time, in targeted ways, again with no way for you to know.

A better idea would be to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash. An even better idea is to not do any of this and spend the money on a campaign to educate parents and institutions on how to use existing parental controls.

RpFLCL commented on EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google   reddit.com/r/degoogle/s/Y... · Posted by u/cft
GuB-42 · a month ago
> Not porn, video of a protest

Not commenting on ID checks but depending on the protest, some images can be violent and definitely "adult".

I never understood why we go out of our way to "protect" children against seeing naked people, but real people in a pool of blood, nah, no problem. I think that people bloodily fighting each other for causes that I have a hard time understanding even as an adult may not be what we want children to be exposed to without control. Images of violence create a visceral reaction and I don't think it is how we should approach political problems, in the same way that porn may not be the best approach to sex, the same argument for why we don't let children access porn applies to political violence too.

The point I wanted to make is that whatever your opinion is on ID checks to access to adult content, "adult" doesn't and shouldn't just mean "porn".

RpFLCL · a month ago
Well that's kind of exactly my point, really.

Ostensibly these laws are to protect kids from porn, but that isn't really the case. They instantly expand to everything else "adult", and it's very easy to argue that talking about politics, or discussing evidence of war crimes or genocide, or apparently showing a real and current protest, are "adult" conversations.

And with laws like this, people, adults, everyone, lose the ability to participate in those conversations without doxxing themselves. Some of these things are difficult to discuss when you fear retribution.

It's not about the porn. It was never actually about the porn. The porn is just the difficult-to-defend-without-looking-like-a-pervert smokescreen. It's designed to curtail the free flow of information and expression in far more areas. The people behind these laws are liars.

RpFLCL commented on EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google   reddit.com/r/degoogle/s/Y... · Posted by u/cft
0x_rs · a month ago
The war on the free internet is accelerating. Without real push-back to these dystopian laws and consequences for the people proposing and lobbying for them, you'll miss what will ultimately end up being a temporary anomaly of mostly unrestrained free flow of information. It's not an hypothetical scenario or something that will develop down the line, it's happening today, worldwide.
RpFLCL · a month ago
I heard from a friend last night that they were unable to see posts on X about current protests in their country because those were considered "adult" content which can now only be viewed after submitting to an ID check. Not porn, video of a protest.

You're 100% right that it's happening today.

RpFLCL commented on EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google   reddit.com/r/degoogle/s/Y... · Posted by u/cft
aniviacat · a month ago
Does anyone know how this is implemented?

If the proof can not be traced back to your identity, then what stops a person from creating large amounts of proofs and distributing them?

If the proof can be traced back to your identity, then... that would suck.

RpFLCL · a month ago
Even if they can't be traced back to a name/photo identity, it would still be a privacy disaster if you could only make one proof per service.

If a user can only make one then they'll have to use that identity with that service forever. That's a nightmare for privacy. Sometimes people need another account, unknown to their employer/family/friends. People should be able to make multiple accounts without those being tied together through a common "age check" identifier. But, of course, there is no way to prevent those from being distributed.

At some level I believe that's the purpose behind some of this. If someone can only have one proof, then someone can only have one account to speak with. They'll be easier to monitor, easier to identify, easier to silence. That's why I think these types of laws and behaviors should be resisted and protested.

I've mentioned in a previous comment that it's telling that big tech isn't resisting these totally-just-coincidental ID laws coming from western countries. It supercharges their surveillance and tracking abilities, and widens their moats.

Also, porn is a smokescreen. The definition of "adult" content will rapidly expand, and these put the ID issuers in censorious a position of control over people and services. Nothing stops a government attestation server from rejecting a request because someone is blacklisted from "mass communication services" because they're a felon, protestor, LGBT activist, etc... or because a service has fallen out of favor.

RpFLCL commented on Australia is introducing age checks for search engines like Google   abc.net.au/news/2025-07-1... · Posted by u/ahonhn
RpFLCL · 2 months ago
I think it's telling that this is happening via "policies" instead of laws, because almost nobody cares or wants it.

It's also telling that Google and Microsoft aren't in opposition to this new burden, they're giving quiet yet full support. This will *necessarily* entrench the big players through the burden to implement, make it easier to track individuals across different accounts and services, and endanger the privacy and anonymity of all adults in Australia. And I think that's all the goal.

If they cared about protecting kids they'd focus on resources and campaigns to educate parents on using parental controls. Then parents could decide if they care to block these things in their homes. It should be up to them.

The "you can just log out" loophole, that's just boiling the frog slowly. It would be foolish to think that will stay around.

RpFLCL commented on Writing N-body gravity simulations code in Python   alvinng4.github.io/grav_s... · Posted by u/dargscisyhp
the__alchemist · 3 months ago
Next logical optimization: Barnes Hut? Groups source bodies using a recursive tree of cubes. Gives huge speedups with high body counts. FMM is a step after, which also groups target bodies. Much more complicated to implement.
RpFLCL · 3 months ago
That's mentioned on the "Conclusions" page of TFA:

> Large-scale simulation: So far, we have only focused on systems with a few objects. What about large-scale systems with thousands or millions of objects? Turns out it is not so easy because the computation of gravity scales as . Have a look at Barnes-Hut algorithm to see how to speed up the simulation. In fact, we have documentations about it on this website as well. You may try to implement it in some low-level language like C or C++.

RpFLCL commented on The guy who gave a negative review to Battlezone 98 Redux after playing 8k hours   pcgamer.com/games/strateg... · Posted by u/isaacfrond
remram · 10 months ago
This is not an MMO.
RpFLCL · 10 months ago
Sorry, I meant Arena/PvP, the multiplayer parts in general.
RpFLCL commented on The guy who gave a negative review to Battlezone 98 Redux after playing 8k hours   pcgamer.com/games/strateg... · Posted by u/isaacfrond
RpFLCL · 10 months ago
I loved this game growing up as it was one of the few games which ran well on our family computer, despite not having an internet connection to participate in any of the PvP elements. It was probably the most played game of my childhood. I've also logged almost 300 hours in the redux version on steam.

Interestingly, since I didn't have the internet to participate in the MMO elements of the game, my views of it are entirely rooted in the storyline and campaigns. The community is something I haven't experienced. And none of these netcode or pvp bugs or phantom players showed up there.

I love the game. In the single player modes, you can play as the NSDF (US) forces, USSR, (and later as the Chinese forces too) in a sci-fi retelling of the space race where you discover alien relics throughout our solar system and try to piece together where they came from, and more importantly, where they went. And it did this while combining a first-person vehicle combat mode with a top-down RTS system that, in my opinion, worked really well together. And I still take inspiration from it in hobby game projects I work on.

Now that I've grown up as a software developer I've thrown so many hours into writing Lua scripts to build my own missions and AI, and creating custom maps!

RpFLCL commented on Stop saying "just" (2019)   sgringwe.com/2019/10/10/P... · Posted by u/mooreds
RpFLCL · 10 months ago
I'm so happy to see this post. One of my professors back in college mentioned that "just" was a "four letter word" (akin to a cuss word) and that's stuck with me since.

"How long should this take? It's JUST calling an API."

"Why did it take so long to fix that bug? It was JUST a one line change."

"Stripe handles payment stuff, we JUST need to add it in!"

What a devious little word. It just papers over all the complexity!

RpFLCL commented on California could require age verification to visit porn sites   calmatters.org/politics/2... · Posted by u/matrix87
throwaway115 · a year ago
What's the steelman argument for this being a slippery slope? I can't think of one.
RpFLCL · a year ago
I think there's an obvious slippery slope here, and it's visible in how these sorts of age verification requirements are implemented. Specifically, requiring a government ID to access, creating a log of who/what/where/when.

The slippery slope comes from someone then asking the question: "Well, we already require an ID to allow someone to access porn... so can we require it for other things online where people have less desire for privacy? Why shouldn't we require an ID to post to social media, or participate in online video games (especially those violent ones!)"

The slope I see, is once you set up a system for ID verification and require it for a primary thing people want to keep private, it becomes easier to mandate it in other areas where privacy is less demanded.

Concern about that slope would be a nonissue if the laws mandated adult sites tag themselves as "adult content" for trivial filtering at the household network level, instead of establishing and normalizing the ID verification regime.

u/RpFLCL

KarmaCake day657November 14, 2017View Original