altacc (u/altacc) - Readit News

altacc commented on Online Safety Act – shutdowns and site blocks blocked.org.uk/osa-blocks... · Posted by u/azalemeth

awaisrauf · 15 days ago

Why are people so bothered with govt requiring a single photo for some websites when private companies already have all the data of almost all humanity?

altacc · 15 days ago

There are many reasons that you could research with a quick search but simply put, it breaks the anonymity of web use and has huge implications for intentional and unintentional surveillance and data misuse. What is asked for here is much more and much more strongly linked to an individual than the data you refer to.

It requires everyone to upload either ID and/or high quality photos & videos of themselves to a random company. Not just one company one whomever a website chooses for age verification, which can include doing it themselves. This creates multiple massive treasure troves of IDs that will attract hacking attempts (for example the Tea app breach). It creates opportunity for blackmail from this data (for example the Ashley Madison breach but much worse). For those age verification services that require a photo/video, that creates a resource for deep fakes. Plus any 15 year old boy worthy of their digital device will be able to get around age verification using fake id/photos or a VPN, whilst a less savvy adult trying to access information about quitting drinking or drug abuse will face a barrier.

And this is for ANY website that has a very broad range of content that the OSA mandates age verification for. It's easier for a website to err on the side of caution and just block the UK. That especially includes websites that have zero reporting back to Meta/Google/etc... for usual marketing profiling. If anything it pushes more people into the limited, monitored and advertising driven Meta/Google web.

altacc commented on It's Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Stagflation paulkrugman.substack.com/... · Posted by u/rbanffy

altacc · 20 days ago

The post mentions the AI boom boosting the numbers. From Fortune[1]: "Analyst estimates from Renaissance Macro Research indicate that so far in 2025, the dollar value contributed to GDP growth by AI data center expenditure surpassed the total impact from all U.S. consumer spending"

That is worrying as that spending is constrained to a small sector that concentrates and solidifies a lot of wealth with diluted "trickle down" effects. If/when the AI industry corrects there will be a significant impact on the US economy & stock market, which I think will have a bigger negative effect on the "person in the street" than any possible positive effect from the current high spending on AI technology.

[1] https://fortune.com/2025/08/06/data-center-artificial-intell...

altacc commented on It's Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Stagflation paulkrugman.substack.com/... · Posted by u/rbanffy

philipallstar · 20 days ago

> The war on immigrants is also inflationary

On illegal immigrants. The US has the most immigrants[0] and is bringing in about a million a year more through legal routes.

[0] https://worldostats.com/country-stats/immigration-and-emigra...

altacc · 20 days ago

The graph presented in the article, and I assume the conclusions from it, is all foreign born workforce, regardless of legality, visa or citizenship status.

altacc commented on Programmers aren’t so humble anymore, maybe because nobody codes in Perl wired.com/story/programme... · Posted by u/Timothee

altacc · a month ago

> But perhaps the lesson of Perl is timeless. It asks us to be less precious—and more human—when it comes to programming languages and their design. Only then might we be able to bridge the gap between us and the machines.

I'm not clear which way the author thinks this works but having started coding in the 90s I feel that with Perl you had to try to understand the quirks of language and the language didn't try to reach out to programmers to make things easy. Whereas other coding languages aim to be intuitive, with clearer syntax, more logical naming and frameworks to obscure complexity, which to my mind is a better way to bridge the gap between us and "the machines".

altacc commented on FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores axios.com/2025/06/23/fico... · Posted by u/cebert

LeafItAlone · 2 months ago

Where are you now? And what is the system like there?

From my extremely naive understanding, obtaining credit and low rates is, in general, much easier in the US than other places. So it makes sense to me that it has “artificial” tools to help determine risk. How do other countries handle this and provide the availability that can be found in the US?

altacc · 2 months ago

In some countries a credit score is a mysterious value calculated by a private company based on patterns of consumerism and money usage that greatly affects your life. You must earn the score through engaging with other private companies, to the company's profit. This is why in the US & UK people get credit cards early, to improve their score whilst trying to avoid the debt trap.

In Scandinavian countries there are registries of your income (from the tax authority), your debts (including buy now pay later which are technically flexible loans) and any bad debts you have that have gone to debt collection. No history of previous balances, repayments, how long you've had a credit card, etc... Companies use this to come up with a score, either themselves or a company like Bisnode will do it for them. So basically it's a simpler calculation based mainly on current situation than history.

altacc commented on FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores axios.com/2025/06/23/fico... · Posted by u/cebert

thomascountz · 2 months ago

What struck me about credit scores is that, from the outside, it seems so obviously ripe for corruption and predation. But growing up, it just felt that it was the way things had to be; how could it possibly be different?

altacc · 2 months ago

> how could it possibly be different?

This is the aim of every culture & political system: to remove the ability to even consider that other ways of doing things are possible and that other countries doing things differently are terribly flawed compared to the paradise you live in.

altacc commented on DNA floating in the air tracks wildlife, viruses, even drugs sciencedaily.com/releases... · Posted by u/karlperera

altacc · 2 months ago

I find it amazing that in my lifetime we've gone from "it'll take 13 years to sequence the human genome" to "we can vacuum up some DNA from the air and identify it in time for dinner".

altacc commented on Dull Men’s Club theguardian.com/society/2... · Posted by u/herbertl

AlecSchueler · 2 months ago

Except this one is gendered, so somewhat more exclusive?

altacc · 2 months ago

I don't think it's exclusive. There is no gate keeping and there seems to be a high ratio of female post creators and commentators. Reddit is 60/40 male dominated, so is also skewered towards male content.

Personally I see the name as more a jokey play on the stereotype of boring middle aged men who find such things interesting.

altacc commented on Dull Men’s Club theguardian.com/society/2... · Posted by u/herbertl

ecshafer · 2 months ago

The Dull Men's Club group of facebook is actually oddly interesting. I would classify it more as a group who point out the very small oddities of every day life that are not very interesting. There is a post where someone saw two geese with 42 bay geese, another where the rental company fixed a door with a piece of pool noodle. Its more like a "huh that's kind of weird I guess" group.

altacc · 2 months ago

It's the facebook version of r/mildlyinteresting on Reddit, which is also very popular. I think it's because this is the kind of thing that fills our days: small oddities and observations that spark our brain but aren't exceptional.

altacc commented on Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan smithsonianmag.com/smart-... · Posted by u/CoopaTroopa

Huxley1 · 2 months ago

I always thought large-scale farming like this only happened under big state systems. But it looks like these communities were able to build something pretty big without that kind of centralized power.

It’s also kind of amazing that the fields stayed preserved for a thousand years. Makes me wonder if we’re still underestimating how advanced some of these early farming cultures were.

altacc · 2 months ago

When foreign cultures were discovered by Europeans the default thinking was to assume they were savages without culture, complex society or technology. That has echoed throughout time and still affects our view of history today. The true savages were the Europeans that preferred to subjugate or kill any non-European population they encountered.

It is only recently that TV & films from the US stopped portraying the stereotypical American Indians as only vaguely more than natural fauna. Until recently US history hardly seems to acknowledge the existence of pre-Colombian towns and cities across the southern states, some with tens of thousands of inhabitants. It didn't fit the European settler narrative that they were taming the wild and when native Americans are mentioned it has been incredibly whitewashed and edited.