I miss deep technical dives on hw, folks just shillmaxn now.
Readit NewsjollymonATX commented on California's Digital Age Assurance Act, and FOSS runxiyu.org/comp/ab1043/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
A lot of people people contributing to FOSS are volunteers. The calculus of working on stuff for free involves an assumption that your worst-case outcome is you make $0. This act's punitive fines change the worst-case outcome to somewhere around -$9999999 or more.
If you work on any programming project at all in any capacity:
- Are you confident your work doesn't fall afoul of this?
- Are you confident they won't decide to come after you anyway for insane political, bureaucratic or "seeing-like-a-state" dysfunctions?
- Are you willing to bet millions of dollars in potential fines that your answers to the previous two questions are correct?
Exactly and thankfully at least a few ppl get it! The risks of these sized fines, even 1 of them, is more than most OSS projects could cover.
jollymonATX commented on California's Digital Age Assurance Act, and FOSS runxiyu.org/comp/ab1043/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
Counterpoint to peeps on this thread:
* This approach is the _most consistent_ with retaining anonymity on the internet, while actually helping parents with their issues. If any age-relevant gatekeeping needs to be made on the internet at all, this is the one I find acceptable.
* this is because the act very specifically does NOT require age _verification_ ie using third-parties to verify whether the claimed age is correct. Rather, it is piggybacking on the baked-in assumption, that parents will set up the device for their kids, indicating on first install what the age/DoB is, then handing over the device -a setting which can, presumably, only be modified with parental consent
* yes, there are edge cases, esp in OSS, and yes, it would be nice to iron those out -but the risk = probability x impact calculus on this is very very low.
* If retaining anonymity on the internet is of value to you, don't let the perfect be the enemy of good enough.
Impact calculus? Really?? OSS Maintainers do not have enough bs to deal with and now need to balance utter financial ruin to the state? No. Highly unserious take.
jollymonATX commented on If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit? github.com/mandel-macaque... · Posted by u/mandel_x
How verbose a history is even plausible to store and recall in modern git? This could add decent pressure on those mechanisms and the usability, for humans at least, would be taxing to consume.
jollymonATX commented on Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge time.com/7380854/exclusiv... · Posted by u/cwwc
Claude ethics maxxers cope thread
jollymonATX commented on TerabyteDeals – Compare storage prices by $/TB terabytedeals.com... · Posted by u/vektor888
I filtered for ssd only, minimum 2tb, top 5 prices are wrong or the product is not available on Amazon US
These sites all suffer from the same defect, amazon pa-api pricing is NOT consistent in any region with the carted values an end user will be shown. This is a well known thing if you have worked with that api before and you are essentially just dropping the authors 24 hr amz cookie for them to earn off all other sales. Not to say thats bad, but the value add from a price comparison site like this is minimal to the end user as you will very likely not get that shown price.
jollymonATX commented on My 2026 Open Social Web Predictions timothychambers.net/2025/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
> why should they not be able to choose "not for training uses" even if they put it up publically?
I'm having trouble even parsing that question; "Publically" means that you put yourself out there, no? It sounds to me like that Barbra Streisand thing of building an ostentatious mansion and expecting no one to post photos of it.
I suppose you could try to publish things behind some sort of EULA, but that's expressly not public.
If you are having trouble understanding, just ask. Of course I'm talking about a websites terms of use.
jollymonATX commented on Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI windowslatest.com/2025/12... · Posted by u/zdw
That it got to this point is hilarious
jollymonATX commented on My 2026 Open Social Web Predictions timothychambers.net/2025/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
If you are putting something out for free for anyone to see and link and copy, why is LLM training on it a problem? How’s that different from someone archiving it in their RSS reader or it being archived by any number of archive sites?
If you don’t want to give it away openly, publish it as a book or an essay in a paid publication.
Its important to consider others perspectives, even if inaccurate. As it was expressed to me when I suggested "why not write a blog" to a relative who is into niche bug photos and collecting they didn't want to give their writing and especially photos to be trained on. They have valid points honestly and an accurate framing of what will happen, it will get injested eventually likely. I think they overestimate a tad their works importance overall but still they seemed to have a pretty accurate guage of likely outcomes. Let me flip the question, why should they not be able to choose "not for training uses" even if they put it up publically?
Spoken as someone who probably hasn't used iOS/Mac parental controls. It is a hot buggy mess that randomly blocks whitelisted applications as well. We use it, but it is a constant pain. Also a lot of applications only work half, e.g., TV apps blocking off all content rather than only content that is not age-appropriate.
By the way, we were initially firm believers of not using parental controls at all, by limiting time and teaching kids about how to use devices in a healthy way. But a lot of apps (e.g. Roblox, YouTube Shorts) are made to be as addictive as crack, making it very hard for a still not fully developed brain to deal with it.
That said, I absolutely dislike the current lobby for age verification because the goal of Meta et al. seems to be to be to absolve themselves of any responsibility by moving verification to devices and to put up regulatory walls to make it more difficult for potential competitors to enter the market. It is regulatory capture.
Seriously. There are mountains of evidence all of this is harmful to developing brains.