there is no anonymity on the internet. the sum of your devices characteristics are close to unique anyway (i could be wrong but i think this is accurate). which kind of supports the hypothesis that this is about shifting responsibility for age verification due to laws coming from other countries recently. i have no idea how this will work on linux, it probably wont.
Firstly, you keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.
On the Internet, especially forums such as HN, you are "pseudonymous". That is, you made up a name for yourself, and that's how you're known to others. At the very least, we are all identified by IP addresses, which are again, fairly stable and unique pseudonyms. There are nearly zero truly anonymous corners of the Internet, because anonymous communications are chaotic and anarchic.
Secondly, it was the NSF who mandated that everyone accessing the Internet must have an associated and authenticated account with an identity that is known to their provider. These rules went into effect in the early 1990s. Perhaps they have been discarded or observed only in the breach, but truly, nobody is a stranger on the Internet. Even if nobody knows you're not a dog, your ISP or your coffeehouse still know who you are, when you connected, what device and so forth.
So, please let us stop pretending there is "anonymity" here, or that there ever has been. Whatever you've done in the past, it will eventually be unmasked. Yes, people on Discord and Wikipedia alike are freaking out over this prospect, but it was always going to happen. We've been laying down a very permanent record for over 50 years. Eventually it will all be correlated with real identities, Facebook or not.
The NSF "rules" stopped applying when the NSFnet was shutdown in 1995. Actually, earlier, since commercial providers (upstream ISPs like UUnet, Sprint, MCI, PSI) were not dependent on the NSFnet and did not have to abide by the AUP.
It's an option if you can articulate an injury under the bill. I suspect non-commercial "operating system providers" arguing infringement of speech would be best positioned to be plaintiffs. This is not legal advice.
I share your wariness of the LLM garbage, but I believe the conclusions are correct. This has Facebook's stink all over it. I worked there and know of what I speak.
So we should believe the hallucinations because they sound like something that could be true? Does the LLM in the middle somehow makes it more trustworthy than if GP had just shared their own pattern-matching conjecture?
No. I think LLMs are garbage. Separately, and unrelated: I think Facebook is behind these bills. The LLM may be garbage and still sometimes produce a correct result.
Yes, it would be nice to know with certainty who is behind these bills. It sucks how much opaque money influences American politics.
Josh Gottheimer's press release[1] on HR8250 mentions the "Meta Parents Network." I don't know what that is, but it does have "Meta" in the name.
Buffy Wick's noise about AB1043 claimed it was passed with the support of tech companies. I have spoken directly to one person close to AB1043 who told me Facebook argued against AB1043. I have doubts. But if true, I suspect they were not arguing in good faith and had ulterior motives.
In the end, no matter who is secretly lobbying for or against age verification bills all over the planet, the bills are terrible, and we should fight them.
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.
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.
Let's try to be a little bit sensible here. Presumably the requirement to check depends on the nature of the application. A completely offline app for example has no use for an age check and thus wouldn't need to read it.
```
(b) (1) A developer shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.
```
That should be read as "when the application is (downloaded and launched)".
If it were meant as "when the application is downloaded and every time the application is launched" it would probably have been written as "when the application is downloaded or launched".
Also, there would be no point in mentioning downloads if that was a separate check because the app developer cannot request the signal upon download because their app is not running then.
The most reasonable conclusion is that the app must check the first time it is launched.
Polar opposite of my experience. To achieve the technical equivalent of changing a lightbulb, spend the entire day wrangling a dozen tools which are broken in different ways, maintained by teams that no longer exist or have completely rolled over, only to arrive at the finish line and discover we don't use those lightbulbs anymore. Move things and break fast.
IMO there's a mix of a few really good, widely used, well-supported tools as well as a long tail of random tiny tools where the original team is gone that are cruftier.
Yeah 100%. I found it immensely frustrating to be using tools with no community (except internally), so-so documentation, and features that were clearly broken in a way that would be unacceptable for a regular consumer product. If you have a question or error not covered by an internal search or documentation, good luck, you'll need it. Literally part of the reason I left the company.
People probably think you’re exaggerating but it’s true. Sometimes when I would get blocked the suggestion was to “read the source code” or “submit a fix” on some far flung internal project. Huge fucking waste of time and effort, completely unserious.
That’s how open source already works by default. The difference is if an OSS tool is broken my boss doesn’t imply landing a fix is my responsibility on top of my regular job duties.
> being able to land a diff to fix the issue is awesome imo.
yes, if its a one off. but for my last project that would involve spinning up many "XFNs" (multi-team chat fests) to argue that actually they don't want to have that change because of reason x,y and z.
At which point you just give up and make a stupid fucking hack.
So much is not about engineering excellence, its about trying to get people to accept change.
Doesn't sound like your type of company tbh, the flipside is that a "serious" company will often have broken bs too except now nobody is going to look at your contribution/fix.
Yes lmao, the number of times I would start off on some nominally useful task only to find out 3 weeks later that there is actually already a solution to that created by team XYZ that nobody in my reporting chain has ever heard of…(3 weeks was optimistic case, I remember my team member getting like 2 months in to some new data pipeline before finding out some tables already existed that did what he needed…)
Welcome to meta! where everything is a murder mystery.
Except you're not really sure if there has been a murder, or sometimes you wonder if you're the murderer, because at every turn you're told that you've been a bad dev for trying x,y and z
Same as Google. Many internal tools have painful interfaces and poor or documentation because the hiring bar was high and it was acceptable to assume that the user's skill level is high enough to figure it out. That attitude becomes a bigger problem when trying to sell tools to the public (e.g. Google Cloud Platform).
As an outsider, I was always under the impression that Google had a tradition of engineering excellence (robust tools, clean and while tested code following strict guidelines), while Meta has more of a Hacker culture (move fast and break things).
Agreed. I often get my work done using open source build instructions and tools and then when everything works I port it to internal infra. Other people are the opposite though, which for open source based code bases has a nasty side effect of the work having no upstream able tests!
But you're both talking about different things. The tools are both often left in disuse, lacking documentation, etc. But they also have a really tight integration with each other that allows for unparalleled visibility and ability over enormous systems with many moving parts.
The point is that some arbitrary number of weeks of vacation isn't the business-destroying choice this founder makes it out to be. Use your PTO. You earned it.
It depends on how important you are. If you are the director of sales, software architect, or something like that, it can be business destroying; particularly if some unforeseen emergency happens. An example is a new big client is suddenly requiring something happen before signing a contract and everyone needs to be on deck for that to happen.
If you are one of 100 CSRs, then it wouldn't be business-destroying obviously.
Any serious business needs to have a continuity plan and can't depend on availability of a single person. What if the person you depend on will have a medical emergency or resign?
Business owners can take this risk but using "don't take more than 2 weeks of PTO" as a risk mitigation strategy is disingenuous and disrespectful to their employees.
Startups running lean, which is what you need to do in order to maximize runway, don't have the money or time for "continuity plans".
Haven't you ever joked about the "bus factor"? All the startups I've worked at would have likely failed if any one of the core people had to depart, for any reason.
I've yet to see a job where hiring a new employee is more efficient than letting one have off 3 weeks instead of 2. There is a really good chance that a new employee wouldn't be working yet before they've returned.
I gave a measured reply given what the poster provided.
"Unbelievable nonsense" is a pretty harsh response. If they are working for a 10-person business burning cash, that is very different than a profitable 1,000-person one.
The poster asked about etiquette. Personally, I'd be offended as a founder or employee at a 10-person company if someone asked for 3 weeks off at the last minute.
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