I'm not so sure. I think the push is from the government actually. But companies are not exactly opposed to it. Quite the contrary. Big corporations see compliance as a moat. Tobacco companies supported stricter regulations on tobacco advertisements, because they had the deep pockets required to follow the changing laws. Mr. Altman is all-in on AI regulation, because it will mire down competitors while OpnAI has already "slipped past the wire" and done all their training pre-crackdown. When given a choice between regulating their industry (platforms and operating systems) vs regulating someone else's (porn sites and the like) they'll always helpfully "volunteer" to be the first to be regulated. It's just good business.
"The government" is the same as those lobbying the government. The people in the government get paid to push it, so they push it, and get paid more when it goes through, by the people who want that PII to analyze.
A million dollars a year for... what? A gag that fans of infowars won't watch, and there aren't enough anti-fans to appreciate? It feels personal at this point.
Tim heidecker summarised their thinking wonderfully.
"I just thought it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity”.
Not to mention Alex Jones is still up and running elsewhere spreading his nonsense and hawking his merch. So it's a cute gag, I guess, and gets the Sandy Hook families some money, but doesn't really change the status quo.
Then the point was to send a message, which brings it back to being biased. I’m not a fan of Alex Jones but I am a fan of people making their own decisions about what content they consume. This sets a dangerous precedent that fundamentally stifles free speech. I wonder how long it will take Republicans to pull this on Democrats, which means this tit-for-tat back and forth will never end.
So, amongst all the things that happened and happening right now, you think "someone is incredibly petty against Alex Jones" is worth spending your time complaining about. Alex Jones, the one who harassed mass shooting survivors.
Pause for a moment. Do you have young kids? Imagine for a moment that they were slaughtered in a mass shooting and a bunch of people made money by launching a harassment campaign targeting you as a liar who probably never had kids, or alternatively used them as paid actors. Imagine this campaign went on for years.
And someone repurpose one of the instigator’s web sites as a humour outlet is the issue that leaves a bad taste in your mouth?
As opposed to the Alex Jones show, a Two Minute Hate for rightwingers? These people love to dish it out but can't take it when someone else uses their tactics against them.
Yeah, it seems hard to believe that anyone would take Alex Jones' behaviour so personally. He only suggested that the murder of 20 young children and 6 adults in a school shooting was faked for political reasons.
It is personal. He intentionally lied about the parents of dead children. Thats as personal of an attack as it gets. Of course those parents are going to take it personally and go after the sick pile of shit who lied about them.
I can't imagine a more useless dataset to collect, proving that Meta might have reached the peak of the graph of (reach/grasp)/time and the numerator is about to plummet spectacularly.
Guys, I figured it out. This isn't just a 4-day window for an Aerospace Engineer position, that's just the beta test. They're preparing for calling up a wave of volunteer civilians who want to spend a few months on Mars (and maybe even come back).
Something occurred to me, I wonder if the "hipster" is a creation of these marketing firms also. What do you do when tastemakers are getting their friends to listen to underground artists you don't make money off of? Flip the script, call THEM uncool and disingenuous posers. They didn't find good underground bands by having TASTE, they only like underground bands because they're narcissistically drawn to being different than everyone else!
Well, perhaps your mental model of the actual objections to it are incomplete. There are a few problems and I'm curious what you have to say about them. First, "The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification". Do you think that it "can" or that it "will"? Big difference. It could also go the other way, right? Opening the door to a more onerous version? Why do you think that isn't worth considering? Secondly, "This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking". What about parental controls that exist already? Someone seriously tried to tell me last time that parental controls "suck", but that's irrelevant, they don't have to suck, and in fact anything can suck. That's just happenstance. So, assuming parental controls were correctly implemented, why do you think this is "least bad" including parental controls? Thirdly, this "age verification" doesn't actually verify anything, because underage people can just choose "adult" anyway. What do you have to say to that? In that case, parental controls actually give you more power, and make this new age check completely obsolete. Thoughts? Lastly, maybe you're not from the USA, but we have a concept of "free speech" which includes the idea that people cannot be "compelled" to certain speech. If people were required to add a "sign here to confirm you're an adult" in every romance novel, that would be fine right? It's also a nothingburger, right? But then, you've compelled people to put something in every published book. Actually, that's a bad analogy. We should say that ALL BOOKS require this signature field on the first page. After all, we don't know what kinds of expletives and horrible things people might have written in the margins of the book (assuming it's being sold second-hand). That would be okay with you, right? Nothingburger? But it compels people to write something, and that's a door most legal scholars know not to open.
> The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end.
And books..? And the newspaper? What if a child reads about a horrible murder in the newspaper that keeps them up at night? What if the government outlaws books and newspapers because they can contain bad things? We'd better add a "adult/ not adult" checkbox to the first page to "short-circuit support for more onerous age verification".
This was a great comment, you challenged them but in a reasonable way and with really good questions
I wish public discourse were more this way - if someone is arguing in good faith, actually answering what you asked moves the conversation forward, it’s just on the person to give you a serious answer
>It could also go the other way, right? Opening the door to a more onerous version?
I don't see a plausible scenario where the implementation of this mandate makes further mandates more easy to get passed. An age field and an API to access it is as trivial as it gets. More onerous age checking is not something that is an extension to or somehow made more easy given the pre-existence of the age field. No argument against more onerous checking is undermined or rendered less severe due to an age field already existing. There is no slippery slope here.
>So, assuming parental controls were correctly implemented, why do you think this is "least bad" including parental controls?
There is already a pretty significant market for parental controls, so presumably if their quality were a limiting factor in their adoption the market would have responded already. Parents simply aren't interested enough or savvy enough to apply them. Parental controls also just intrinsically suck for a lot of reasons. They are either mostly ineffective or wildly intrusive, like giving total access to children's communications and internet activity to external companies.
>Thirdly, this "age verification" doesn't actually verify anything, because underage people can just choose "adult" anyway. What do you have to say to that?
Presumably an adult is involved in purchasing devices and setting up accounts for their young children. Putting an age of account holder field into the account set up workflow seems pretty effective. It's not 100%, but it doesn't need to be for it to be a major improvement over the status quo. The lack of verification is a feature of this mandate, not a bug.
>we have a concept of "free speech" which includes the idea that people cannot be "compelled" to certain speech. If people were required to add a "sign here to confirm you're an adult" in every romance novel, that would be fine right?
As those pushing this kind of legislation are fond of pointing out, we have age checks for buying alcohol or purchasing adult magazines in shops. Presumably these don't run afoul of the first amendment. This idea that we can't or shouldn't mandate age checking in some form to access content deemed inappropriate to children is just a losing argument. Again, the writing is on the wall here.
>No argument against more onerous checking is undermined or rendered less severe due to an age field already existing
From your point of view.
What I can tell you is that there are definitely people who will argue that this is, by the fact of being written into law, now the spirit of the law.
Then these people will argue that the spirit of the law is being broken, and the implementation needs to be better and tighter. Not that it needs to be repealed! Because clearly this is something that was wanted. And to many, many people, this will be sufficient argument not to complain about further measures.
At this point anything that makes computers less usable is a good thing, time we go back to the real world. It was extremely unpleasant while it lasted.
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