Unlurker|Replay|About
OVH forgot they donated documentation hosting to Pandas (github.com/pandas-dev)
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I wonder why they didn't use readthedocs.com. Their community plan promises free hosting for docs of open-source projects. I thought most Python packages prefer it. Surprised to see pandas outside of it.
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Why does documentation require hosting it on a server? My assumption is that it's a static site, and as such, even GitHub Pages would be sufficient. I know... all content has to be served via a "server" but in case of OVH it's a full-blown hosting solution isn't it? Besides, I'm sure GitHub wouldn't mind supporting Pandas documentation. They do it for a million other projects for free (even though they're not popular among the HN crowd these days)
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Probably because your assumption is wrong - they host a live shell and documentation search. https://web.archive.org/web/20260220092649/https://pandas.pydata.org/try.html https://web.archive.org/web/20260225185816/https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/index.html (I don't know anything about pandas, incidentaly, I just did some basic research before posting.)
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That's not a shell, it's a Python interpreter compiled to WASM and running in the browser.
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Free stuff has a way of short circuiting things.
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Before cutting a service, OVH sends several warnings. In my opinion, the worrying point is not that OVH made a mistake, it's that important messages to the "infrastructure mailing list" of Pandas were ignored for weeks... until the post-mortem.
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To be fair, if I had an agreement with a hosting provider and started to get "Your balance is too low", I'd also chalk it up to their payment/metering systems not knowing about the deal, not for the entire platform and organization to have forgotten about it. Still I'd look into it at that point and send them an email about "Billing system not agreeing with what we've agreed on" or similar, rather than just ignoring it...
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I've always wondered how these types of "waived" accounts are coded in the backend. Are there flags in a table (i.e. first class support) or is it hacked together with duct tape? Seems like OVH is using the latter solution.
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The pertinent comment is "again" - apparently this has already happened once. (OVH should either have a special type of free account they can use for donations, or just bill themselves for it as "internal" usage.)
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The comment says "again". I'm not too surprised agreements like this are not the normal procedure and can get forgotten about (it shouldn't... but if this isn't automated, humans can make mistakes), but more than once?
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As someone who's been around the block for affordable hosting providers, OVH was one of those that never really impressed. They never had any major downtime for me, but micro-outages, blips... things like that were common. Support was fine. In time I migrated off in search of better stability. Overall my gold standard is still Hetzner or DO for easy-to-use, affordable VPS/hosting options.
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I'm using OVH for downloads from PortableApps.com as their un-metered VPS was one of the better and affordable options. Haven't noticed any issues (knock wood). Is there something else I should look at?
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Isn't Hetzner strongly associated with OVH? I thought they were under the same umbrella.
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Competitors on the same market segment - France vs. Germany.
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Nope. OVH Groupe is a separate VPS (and an extremely large one) based in France and Poland. They are backed by Xavier Niels (one of the powers behind Macron's throne). Hetzner is a smaller but imo better managed VPS and colo in Germany. HN idealist types will probably like Hetzner more than OVH Groupe's more enterprise driven experience.
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OVH is not backed by Xavier Niel. Niel is behind Scaleway, which is OVH’s main French competitor.
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> They never had any major downtime for me One of my server was lost to a fire so... That being said, only happen one and I had no data on it so I didn't mind. I switched to Hetzner too.
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DO is amazing. Easy to use and clean
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Does it really need a VPS? Can’t throw it onto a cloudflare page for free?
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Please don't encourage MITM-ing even more of the web by a US company.
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They're already throwing cloudflare in front of it
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Ah, dammit.
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Vibecoders messed with billing service again
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Hehehe AI sucks amirite HN?? Upboats to the left!!
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Sorry, couldn't resist
Channel Surfer – Watch YouTube Like It's Cable TV (channelsurfer.tv)
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See also https://ytch.tv/
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Any way to toggle full screen?
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This reminds me of a similar project called Hypertext.tv, but instead of YouTube videos, it shows websites. It's an interesting take on channel surfing since each airing is interactive http://hypertext.tv
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Thank you so much. Enriching
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That is really creative.
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It just so happens I'm right in the middle of trying to change how I watch YouTube at my computer. Despite my best efforts, I find myself getting sucked into shorts, so I'm starting investigate if I can take advantage of YouTube RSS syndication. I recently build yt-dlp and got all the dependencies sorted out, so I can bring videos to my machine locally. I'm also checking out elfeed[0] which is an Emacs based RSS reader, and elfeed-tube[1] which further customizes the elfeed experience for YouTube as well as adding an mpv integration that lets you control video playback directly from Emacs. [0]: https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed [1]: https://github.com/karthink/elfeed-tube
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There are greasemonkey scripts available which hide shorts from appearing.
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I do something similar as I hate interruptions of various kinds; what I'd love is a way to show a YT playlist in something like Jellyfin, where it downloads the "next" episode while you're watching the current one. As it is, I can do that somewhat manually and it makes for a nice interface where I'm sure what the kids are watching.
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I like the idea of everyone getting fed the same content. But I also especially love being able to discover new videos and channels that are hopefully curated by humans. It might be better to just turn this on when I'm wanting to watch something than open YouTube and look at my homepage.
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I'm the creator of this. It is human curated. :-) Actually, there's zero AI with this one.
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This is super cool, I love the aesthetic. The biggest thing I want out of something like this is curation (and it seems like there's at least some degree of that happening here among the various categories).
Why would you want to do that? I'm so happy I can search exactly what I want among heaps of long tail stuff, I would never want to go back to a "live tv" interaction model.
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Sometimes I just want to know "what is popular on youtube right now? What is it that the world is watching?" and Youtube won't tell me anymore. The algorithm isolates me and my preferences from consensus reality. Youtube doesn't want me coming out of my cave.
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I prefer searching too, but sometimes it's nice to just "put TV on." I do this now with Amazon Prime Video, which has a "Live" feature that mimics a guide akin to Channel Surfer. Also my dad (age 85) struggles with Youtube on our TV because of the decision paralysis.
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Not the author, but did a LOT of research on this during my time at Disney while working on Disney+ prior to its launch. This is, effectively, no different than a carousel of algorithm-recommended content. However, UX studies have found users reluctant to watch something recommended to them. It requires making an affirmative decision on time investment. Most people have the experience of a friend recommending a movie or book and still being reluctant to dive in. The problem is very similar to dating apps, if you think about it. This is why Tinder's innovation on "swipe left/right" took off the way it did. In UX terms it's better to drop users into something and make the cognitive effort be choosing to get out of it rather than choosing to get into it. It's a big part of why TikTok works. The reason this isn't more common in video apps has more to do with UX norms at this point. Another important thing I learned about streaming at Disney was that no one really cares how innovative the browsing experience is. They just want to watch Frozen. They're used to carousels now, and they're easy to program. This, I think, speaks more to your sensibilities.
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Decision fatigue
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Sometimes, it's nice to just sit down and watch something without needing to make repeated decisions about what's on. I typically share your mindset, but I can see the appeal. There was something nice about the TV that just, ya know, already had something going when you turned it on. I spent many happy evenings in hazy basement rooms enjoying whatever Adult Swim decided was going to be on the TV that night.
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I miss this too, and sort of get it on airplanes where I almost never use my seat back screen and end up watching someone else's instead (yes there's no sound). I chalk it up to overwhelming choices. Sometimes I just want to watch something but don't want to go through dozens of options and having decision anxiety. Bonus is sometimes I discover something I never thought I would have liked.
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I was getting my hair cut the other day and one of the guys at the barbershop was talking about how his wife bought a radio and it's nice to just have NPR going all the time instead of searching for a podcast or playlist. I love radio too but haven't listened much outside of my car since 2019. Back then I had a different work schedule and would regularly tune in to Science Friday and just have the radio going much of the day. Since 2019, I've moved 4 times, had roommates most of that time who wouldn't want the radio playing all day, and just never fully unpacked and haven't set up my stereo system. Mostly I've listened to podcasts on my phone and a Bluetooth speaker or earbuds. Radio is nice, I like it better than TV because it's less distracting to me. Those moving pictures mesmerize me and I find it difficult to look away, which was why I didn't even have a TV for half my adult life.
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> it's nice to just have NPR going all the time I used to do that but the shows repeat and at the top of the hour or sometimes multiple times they repeat the same news over and over. I get someone else might be tuning in and not have heard the latest news Maybe there's some middle ground where instead of a stream it's on demand but continuous. So I go to videostream.npr.com and since it knows it's a single user it can push the news once and then just be shows. That said, youtube autoplay is the basic concept, it just sucks at what it recommends.
Love it, but when I clicked another show in the guide, nothing happened.
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You have to click on the channel number in the first column.
You need to click on the channel number. Clicking in the title of the show doesn't do anything.
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Ahh, now I see it. So cool! Bookmarked.
Original HN post 2 days prior (0 traction then): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47336100 Recent media coverage: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/12/channel-surfer-watch-youtube-retro-cable-tv-guide/ https://www.theverge.com/tech/893598/this-is-immediately-my-new-favorite-way-to-watch-youtube https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/youtube/this-web-app-lets-you-channel-surf-youtube-like-a-90s-kid-watching-cable-220651107.html https://hackaday.com/2025/10/17/channel-surfing-nostalgia-machine/
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Thanks! When there was a recent Show HN we usually merge the comments thither and re-up the post (sorry speckx, I hope that's ok with you). I'll do that now.
Launch HN: Captain (YC W26) – Automated RAG for Files (runcaptain.com)
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Having tried this a bit I do really like the single api call for all of it. I also appreciate transparent pricing but I am not 100% sure the sense of scale of costs. It could be helpful to give some ballparks on things for each of the plans. I'm not sure exactly what i could get out of a plan. My guess, trying hard to figure it out, was if i had about 1,000 pages of new/updated content per month, I would pay $295/month for unlimited queries on top of it. Is that roughly correct?
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Good looking! I didn't get to watch the video or look at docs in depth, but do the results trace back to the location of the answers in a document? Let's say it finds an answer in a PDF, and I'd like to know where in that PDF the citation is. Is that possible or intended?
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Great question, we have deterministic page # citations for PDF results and exact bounding box citations coming very soon. If you want to check out the Query API response example, here's a link: https://docs.runcaptain.com/api-reference/query/collection-v-2#response.body.search_results.page_start
NASA targets Artemis II crewed moon mission for April 1 launch (npr.org)
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Surely they are joking?
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The whole program is a joke.
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Operation: Sike! is a go! ;)
Can't they just schedule it for March 32nd?
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They are snip hunting that day.
“As early as April 1” is a weird way to describe something that is two months behind schedule
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I didn't even know we were within years of putting people around the moon, so I was surprised!
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Seeing how the last test at the beginning of Feb found hydrogen leaks, it does sound very early to me
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As it's currently March, April seems very close to me. I didn't know there was a moon flight planned so this is a great headline to me.
Being a few months behind schedule is forgivable for human space flight. If a SpaceX Falcon blows up on the pad, that's one thing. It's expensive but they accept that risk to move faster. At least they gain knowledge of what failed, to do better next time. You can't apply that mentality once a human is piloting it however. That's how you get Columbia, Challenger, or Apollo 1.
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> If a SpaceX Falcon blows up on the pad, that's one thing. It's expensive but they accept that risk to move faster. At least they gain knowledge of what failed, to do better next time. Assuming it's not carrying a SpaceX Crew Dragon with crew onboard ;) Also, it's a bit of a dated metaphor. Falcon 9 is by most accounts, now the most reliable rocket in history and is pretty design-locked. The modern metaphor is SpaceX Starship :)
They don't really have a choice. The launch window is small and they either make it or they don't.
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Well at least there’s a 50% probability of success
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There is a window on the 2nd. But you don't aim for the second half of the launch period and hope you make it, you aim for the start to allow time to resolve issues without waiting for the next window (which is the end of the month).
Meta Platforms: Lobbying, Dark Money, and the App Store Accountability Act (github.com/upper-up)
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I'm incredibly dubious of the conclusions of this researcher. Claude Opus was used to gather and analyze all of the data. I am not skeptical of any of the research, the sources seem to be cited properly. I am skeptical that this researcher has thought through or verified their conclusions in a systematic and reliable fashion. This part gives it away: "Research period: 2026-03-11 to present." This individual dropped his investigative report two days after beginning research! Yes, AI is an incredibly good research assistant and can help speed up the tasks of finding sources and indexing sources. The person behind this investigation has not actually done their due diligence to grok and analyze this data on their own, and therefore I can't trust that the AI analysis isn't poisoned by the prompters implicit biases.
Main takeaway: > Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a "grassroots" child safety group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA). The ASAA requires app stores to verify user ages before downloads but imposes no requirements on social media platforms. If it becomes law, Apple and Google absorb the compliance cost while Meta's apps face zero new mandates.
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A comment someone made on the post about OpenAi lobbying the DOD against Anthropic to mind: "Not only are the whores - they are cheap ones too".
Anyone reading this purely as a child safety or campaign finance story might miss the broader architectural war happening here. If you zoom out a little, this is the inevitable, scorched-earth retaliation for Apple's ATT rollout from a few years back. Apple cost Meta billions by cutting off their data pipeline at the OS level, justifying it with a unilateral privacy moral high ground. Now, Meta is returning the favor. By astroturfing the App Store Accountability Act through digital childhood alliance, Meta is forcing Apple to build, maintain and also bear the legal liability for a wildly complex state-by-state identity verification API. Gotta give it to Zuck. Standing up a fully-fledged advocacy website 24 hours after domain registration and pushing a bill from a godaddy registration to a signed Utah law in just 77 days is terrifyingly efficient lobbying.
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Well, I certainly prefer if big tech fight each other instead of the user as sometimes there might even come something good out of it - like elevated privacy in Apple's ATT case. Overall, that's the reason anti-trust laws must be applied rigorously, otherwise the normal population has no chance.
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Sometimes something good (ATT). Sometimes something bad (this terrible age-verification thing that is a huge barrier to entry for small entrants and comes with massive state surveillance risk). In the end, all the little people are just collateral damage or occasionally they get some collateral benefits from wherever the munitions land.
> Gotta give it to Zuck. if "it" is the middle finger, for sure. "terrifying" is a great choice of word for it.
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I was equally impressed/terrified by Apple's marketing blitz around client-side-scanning. So many people got paid to advocate for that, and the community barely convinced them it was a bad idea. There's not much hope left for any of FAANG deliberately resisting surveillance.
Only 26 million is way way lower than I expected, especially given how much these companies make in profit
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"Emails from October 2005 show that after Mandelson complained to Epstein about a lack of British Airways air miles, Epstein offered to pay for his plane tickets to the Caribbean."[1] The biggest shocker to me has been just how "cheap" a lot of people are to buy off. Mandelson is complaining about air miles FFS. So much of this is a few thousand here, some fancy tickets there, a jet ride elsewhere, etc. In my mind it was always much, much bigger sums that people were selling their countries & souls out for, sadly, it turns out a lot of people, even in really high positions, are shockingly cheap. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Peter_Mandelson_and_Jeffrey_Epstein
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I donated $100 to my state's gubernatorial campaign as a part of my annual "make the world a better place" campaign, and was surprised to receive a call from an unknown number the following day. It was the Governor, thanking me for my donation personally, and wondering if there were any issues close to my heart that she could keep in mind. Note that this was from her personal cell phone (for whatever value of personal an executive politician actually has, but still), and she invited me to phone her if I had any issues that the state government could resolve. That's a wildly low sum of money for a 5 minute personal call, let alone even a modest intervention.
Scott Alexander had a few posts about that ("why is there so little money in politics?"): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tech-pacs-are-closing-in-on-the-almonds
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I think one of the reasons politicians can be bought so cheaply by interest groups is that the opponents of the interests groups have practically no money. The interest groups don't need to spend a ton as long as they spend more than their opponents. The linked post talks about the effectiveness of AIPAC but fails to mention how much is spent by say, Palestinian interest groups. Perhaps there's a good reason for this: do Palestinian groups have any money to spend on US elections? Try fundraising in Gaza right now. Likewise, business interest groups have a lot more money to spend on elections than, say, environmental groups. The latter have to beg for small donations from individuals just to stay afloat. Thus, it's relatively easy for business groups to outspend environmental groups. To win an auction, you just have to be the highest bidder.
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We should really come up with a system where the entire population chips in a little bit of money and we hire some lobbyists to represent us.
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This assumes enough of the small dollar population agrees on anything to meaningfully compete on the cost of buying. They may on paper, but of course a lot of money goes to dividing us up come election time. What you are suggesting is no shortcut - it would rather be almost like inventing an alternative political party.
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I don’t think this is a great example as a big complaint recently has been the influence of the gulf states on American politics.
Two long-lost episodes of 'Doctor Who' have been found (apnews.com)
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Film cans? I thought the whole reason the series was missing was because it was shot on video, and then the tapes were wiped after shooting?
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Film prints were made for overseas sales.
I was afraid this would never happen again. Two very good episodes, too. I just pray that we'll get to see a few more Troughton episodes. He's the doctor that set the standard that all future doctors followed, yet the least known because the moronic BBC wiped basically his entire run, and now we only have about half of it. Tom Baker was "my Doctor" because he's the one who made me love the show when I was a kid, but Troughton (and Zoë and Jamie) are my favorite era. edit: Zoë and Jamie are from way back when the companions were expected to be useful, before Sarah Jane. Zoë was better at math than the Doctor; imagine them doing anything like that now.
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Companions are still useful, they just bring different skills to the Doctor (humanity?).
We have all the voice recordings, feed that into AI along with the extant episodes and it should be able to regenerate (geddit?) the missing episodes.
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Do we also have stills of all the episodes? Or only audio?
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From a utilitarian pov yes. But that's completely missing the artistic point. Why shoot a film when you could just feed the script into an AI?
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It could recreate missing episodes using the extant episodes. That's something worthwhile doing until someone finds them. It's not creating a complete new series.
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Feels a bit like Jurassic Park
Parallels Confirms MacBook Neo Can Run Windows in a Virtual Machine (macrumors.com)
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I’m excited that Apple now has a reason to keep MacOS small. Their soon to be top-selling machine has 8GB and they won’t want to make all those millions of Neos unusable by shipping a bloated OS.
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If Apple continues with the budget Neo brand into a 12 GB iteration, I can see this becoming more realistic (rather than a novelty). That being said, Parallels may need to review its licensing with a budget tier in mind. Few will buy a cheap computer and then pay what Parallels charges for a license (regardless if one-time or subscription). They need to introduce something below the Standard license targeting the Neo. What I'd personally consider is: - Standard gets 16 GB vRAM (to perfectly target the base MacBook Air). But leave it at 4-6 vCPUs to not compete with the Pro (still for general computing, not power-users) - New "Lite" tier with 8 GB vRAM max for the Neo (4 vCPUs). Increasing to 12 GB vRAM if the Neo does. Then you target a $89 price point one-time-purchase for the "Lite" tier. Essentially three plans, targeting your three major demographics: budget, standard, and pro/power-user.
In a VM, definitely. Just like other Macs.
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If the A18 Pro has the same ISA as the M-series chips then this may not be so straightforward. I am still hanging on to my 2020 Intel MBP for dear life because it is the only Apple device I own that allows me to run Ubuntu and Windows 11 on a VirtualBox VM.
Funnily it probably runs Windows better than the typical corporate spyware burdened x86 laptop.
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Every thread about Windows on Hacker News includes claims about apps taking 30 seconds to launch, web pages taking 20 seconds to load, simple applications being unusable, and other extreme performance problems. These are puzzling for anyone (like me) who uses Windows at home without all of these extreme performance problems. That was until I realized how many reports are coming from people talking about their work laptops loaded with endpoint management and security software. Some of those endpoint control solutions are so heavy that the laptop feels like you've traveled back in time 15 years and you're using a mechanical hard drive.
Wouldn't corporate spyware equally burden the NEO? Especially more give the 8GB of RAM vs 16+ on X64 laptops? Chrome, Teams, IDEs, websites etc are equally bloated on both platforms.
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The cpu in Neo is 2-3 times faster.
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My (former) corpo HP laptop with 16GB RAM had 75% RAM used at idle after a fresh boot with Outlook, Teams and all the copro shit running in the background. So the 8GB NEO CPU will spend its time swapping data from ram to disk versus the 16GB+ ones, given both being filled with corporate spyware and same heavy use cases. Also it isn't 2-3x faster, stop with the made up nonsense please. Just checked and my 3 year old AMD laptop is on par with the NEO geekbench score I found online (slower in single core but faster in multi core), not 2-3x slower.
Always excited to hear about fellow M1 users. I’m not limited in the slightest. 5-6 years strong now?
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Yeah, honestly not even counting. The only reason I even consider moving is that I dislike Tahoe and I know eventually I won’t be able to stall the update; hardware wise it doesn’t even cross my mind. I have a current gen MacBook Pro for work configured with stupid amounts of ram and I feel no difference in terms of fluidity at all.
Run NanoClaw in Docker Sandboxes (nanoclaw.dev)
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The next step to this is using a better tool to access containers (BuildKit), like Dagger, where you can track every step as a new container layer, time travel, share via registries... This has been my setup since early this year, not even that much code: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/tree/_next/lib/agent/services/environ The bigger effort is making it play nice with vscode so you can browse and edit the files and diffs.
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I hope they never drop the Apple container mode. I vastly prefer it because of the lower overhead on limited RAM.
What are the most obvious use cases for Nano/Open-Claw. I can't imagine anything obvious that I'd want to use it for. Is it supposed to run your digital life for you?
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It's simply just either a LLM-cron job OR a telegram/email/etc chat connector to a sandboxed LLM. For former can be solved with regular cron jobs and the later can be done via manual code or Gemini Gems (if you use google).
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Email summarization, calendar notifications, briefing documents, .. the list goes on. Think of anything knowledge-based that's moderately repetitive you don't want to do, and just ask
They may seem like small details, but I think a couple novel design decisions are going to prove to be widely adopted and revolutionary. The biggest one (as Karpathy notes) is having skills for how to write a (slack, discord, etc) integration, instead of shipping an implementation for each. Call it “Claude native development” if you will, but “fork and customize” instead of batteries-included platforms/frameworks is going to be a big shift when it percolates through the ecosystem. A bunch of things you need to figure out, eg how do you ship a spec for how to test and validate the thing, make it secure, etc. How long before OSs start evolving in this way? You can imagine Auto research-like sharing and promotion upstream of good fixes/approaches, but a more heterogenous ecosystem could be more resistant to attacks if each instance had a strong immune system.
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> having skills for how to write a (slack, discord, etc) integration, instead of shipping an implementation for each I'm not sure what is the advantage. Each user will have to waste time and tokens for the same task, instead of doing it once and and shipping to everyone.
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Agreement, excellence in one domain does not confer it to others. This is bad advice / prediction by people with hammers imo
Docker sandboxes uses a MicroVM as an additional isolation layer - its not just containers (as also mentioned in the nanoclaw post)
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This still does not help with, you can call foo, but not bar. We have plenty of existing tooling for that too.
You must explicitly state what your threat model is when writing about security tooling, isolation, and sandboxing. This threat model is concerned with running arbitrary code generated by or fetched by an AI agent on host machines which contain secrets, sensitive files, and/or exfoliate data, apps, and systems which should not be lost. What about the threat model where an agent deletes your entire inbox? Or sends your calendar events to a server after prompt injection? Bank transfers of the wrong amount to the wrong address etc. all these are allowed under the sandboxing model. We need fine grained permissions per-task or per-tool in addition to sandboxing. For example: "this request should only ever read my gmail and never write, delete, or move emails". Sandboxes do not solve permission escalation or exfiltration threats.
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> We need fine grained permissions per-task or per-tool in addition to sandboxing. For example: "this request should only ever read my gmail and never write, delete, or move emails". We already have: IAM, WIF, Macaroons, Service Accounts Ask you resident SecOps and DevOps teams what your company already has available
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> We need fine grained permissions per-task or per-tool in addition to sandboxing. For example: "this request should only ever read my gmail and never write, delete, or move emails". Yes 100%, this is the critical layer that no one is talking about. And I'd go even further: we need the ability to dynamically attenuate tool scope (ocap) and trace data as it flows between tools (IFC). Be able to express something like: can't send email data to people not on the original thread.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Monster Is the Machine (kirkcenter.org)
Tolkien was probably right in that he would have hated to live in 2026. We are literally building machines designed to replace people like him. And yet, I can't help thinking that I would hate to live in Tolkien's time. When I was around 10, in 1975, I built a giant computer out of a cardboard box. To me, a computer was the same as a spaceship--something I would never own. Then in 1978, I saw an ad for a TRS-80 personal computer, and my world flipped. Even now, in my 60s, I can't wait to sit down and start programming (with or without AI). I've had a long, fruitful, and extremely fun career with computers, and I can't imagine what I would have done without them. Does that mean it's all relative? Whatever we're used to, that's what's good and any change is monstrous? Or is there really such a thing as progress and degeneration? Is it possible to say our time is better or worse than Tolkien's in some absolute sense? I don't know. I think if you take a Rawlsian perspective, and imagine being a random person of the era, I think being born today is far preferable to being born in 1892. On every measure--childhood poverty, violent deaths, even air quality--2026 is better than 1892. And that improvement is due almost entirely to technology--to the machine.
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> and I can't imagine what I would have done without them. You're falling into the trap of saying I could've only been happy if I did X. But humans aren't like that - even garbagemen find happiness in their work. The brain adapts to baseline no matter the field. The second trap you're falling into is saying look how abundant things are compared to 1892. We have every statistic proven and locked down that abundance does not equal happiness.
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I heartily agree with you except for the ongoing childhood-screentime pandemic where kids aren't going outside to play, but instead are staying inside, alone, and maybe playing with others virtually, but with more exposure to harm (e.g. gambling). This is clearly going to cause some serious long term generational fallout.
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Agreed--we're already seeing some of that, and I fully support minimizing kids' exposure to that. I probably should have been explicit that I don't think technology has no downsides--it most certainly does. It's just, IMHO, the benefits outweigh the risks. And, over time, we figure out how to ameliorate the downsides.
E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May (help.instagram.com)
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The only reason I can think of for this change is governmental pressure. I don’t see how it benefits the platform itself (nor its users).
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I can think of a few reasons why a company built on profiling (and advertising to) user interests might be interested in the private conversations of their users
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I can think of some. Less code complexity to support a feature that didn't work properly and nobody was using? More ability to detect spam?
one thing to consider is how just the optics of major players using e2e was an overall benefit. people who otherwise would have gone their entire lives without ever hearing about encryption were exposed to the term and the marketing convinced them that encryption and privacy was a valuable thing, even if they didnt fully understand the mechanisms or why e2e might not necessarily be very effective in specific circumstances. later, when presented between option a and option b, where one has encryption and the other doesnt, they are more likely to choose the one with it ("well, if instagram and facebook use it and say it is good...")
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If someone's given the choice between say Instagram and IRC, and chooses Instagram because they heard it has E2EE, that's a loss.
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perfect is the enemy of good, etc etc. between signal and plain text, it is easier to convince friends to use signal if they see positive marketing about encryption on other popular apps they use. it is easier to convince them to encrypt their backups before uploading them to their google drive. hell, its just a good conversation starter to introduce encryption/online privacy to people that never really think about it. that type of thing. those same friends are not going to use irc regardless. not really a loss if it was never even on the table.
That's an okay use, but in that use you're not attempting to achieving privacy. Everyone knows you talk to your parents, but code phrases are not a way to get privacy.
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It's not for privacy in the way you may be thinking . This was long before the internet and the conversation would have been over the phone and it is assumed someone is in the house with me that should not be. Goal being police have authorization to kick down the door and assist the person or people that are nutritionally deficient in lead.
There's a general trend right now against privacy and in a more general sense against freedom. More and more companies are on board with it. I'm not sure if anyone in HN has any useful advice in this regard. I feel like I don't know what to do about the internet for the next 5-10 years. Does this particular measure matter very much? No, but it's another brick in the wall.
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> I'm not sure if anyone in HN has any useful advice in this regard. Self host. It's still possible to buy computer hardware and install FOSS replacements for most/all of the services you need, and plumb it all through to your mobile devices using wireguard/tailscale. If you're behind a CGNAT you can proxy it through a cheap VPS that won't fuck you on bandwidth costs. Thanks to Proxmox, I probably have better uptime on my services than e.g. Github these days. When it becomes impossible to get open PC hardware, I don't know. I like to think I will just stop using the internet for anything besides the bare minimum NPC type activities that are required to engage with the institutions of society.
The US is building out the infrastructure for a police state. The people who control the consolidated tech platforms are either spearheading or collaborating with that process. Privacy as a concept isn't even in the cards. You need to be prepared to avoid saying naughty things on the internet. Otherwise, perhaps someone will figure out that you great-great grandfather didn't sign in the right spot in 1897 and you're presence in the United States is void, retroactive to your birth. Off to El Salvador with you, enemy of the people.
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Just want to clarify that "naughty" doesn't at all mean "bad" or "immoral". It means "Anything any current ot future regime will dislike"
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Pretty safe to say that you pointing that out counts as naughty. And so does my response to your comment. But I do wonder if self-censure is really the best strategy.
It feels to me Europe and the UK, in the western world, are further ahead on the legal road to surveillance than the US.
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Someone pointed out something to me and it's really struck a chord with me. In the USA, we hate the government collecting information on us, but shrug our shoulders when corporations do it. In Europe, it's the exact opposite. They created GDPR to restrict how corporations collect and share data about you, but they shrug their shoulders at government doing it. Obviously, this is incredibly reductive and over-simplified, but the general idea of it feels pretty true.
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Sorry, this is just not true. Stasi was a government agency, and it was from this kind of thing that European privacy advocacy sprung up.
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But Europe and the UK have regimes with the correct politics so we don’t talk about them.
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Sure, but I think the point of this thread was (or should be) what can be done in the US to resist this. There's a lot of things the US resists doing because voters who never traveled outside of it can be convinced that what it is as implemented elsewhere is somehow flawed or worse than the status quo. You see this exact pattern with real health care, common sense gun laws, investment in mass transportation, probably more that I'm not thinking of.
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What differentiates correct politics from incorrect politics?
I feel like e2ee on phones with OSes from the big two is a lost cause. I'll bet this is the year where open hardware/bios starts getting more popular, hopefully. So we can have open hardware/software.
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Is Google snooping your SimpleX chats?
GNU/Linux phones already exist. See: Librem 5 and Pinephone.
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If you like privacy without security then yeah .
Historically, like 10-20 years ago, libertarian would be staunchly pro privacy. Is this no longer the case? If libertarians have dropped this stance, since it is so close to what was the core beliefs, I really have no mental model of the philosophy/politics for libertarians any more. Any primer/link on what current libertarians believe is welcome.
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Yes, but there's really not very many libertarians left who haven't cast their lot in for Republican support, resulting in the present situation. Not that there were many to begin with.
How do they know your ideology? Are they scraping your social media or running sentiment analysis on your customer service chats?
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They probably don't care. It's probably a mostly BS number. But they probably have to have it and have it at least look like they're trying to be serious about generating it in order to qualify for preferential treatment on some sort of permitting or write off some class of investment in a slightly better way at tax time or something.
When most of your social circle exists on one platform, you tend to use that platform less for its specific features, and more because of the fact that all your friends are there. I don't personally use Instagram, and this is anecdotal information, but I know a lot of people who only use Instagram to see what their friends and family are up to, and to watch the occasional reel. But you're absolutely right about Instagram's evolution. It's crazy.
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this is a very 21st century thing, the ability to know what everyone is doing at any time. extremely voyeuristic too. the only social circle that truly matters is the geographically close one. no amount of E2EE or fancy chat app will replace being physically present.
I keep hearing this one. But at least for EU, the eCall system requires external communication to be disabled until activated during serious accident. It cannot be used for tracking the vehicle in real-time. Some parts of the legislation ( https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32015R0758 ): > 2. The personal data processed pursuant to this Regulation shall only be used for the purpose of handling the emergency situations referred to in the first subparagraph of Article 5(2). > Manufacturers shall provide clear and comprehensive information in the owner's manual about the processing of data carried out through the 112-based eCall in-vehicle system. That information shall consist of: > the fact that there is no constant tracking of the vehicle; That vehicle nowadays are equipped with always-on internet and microphones is not related to remote assistance.
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Kindly read point number 2 slowly. There are two definitions: a) Personal Data and b) Emergency Situations What is an emergency situation and how can a car determine it is one? These are "smart" cars which aren't nowadays smart enough to process all your data locally, so that data is sent to servers elsewhere which process if either points a) or b) apply. It is your choice to believe that voice data is ever deleted once acquired by governments and entities thirsty to benefit from that information. For security experts this is just another "I told you so" within a few years.
Can I run AI locally? (canirun.ai)
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if you do, would you still want to collect data in a single pane of glass? see my open source repo for aggregating harness data from multiple machine learning model harnesses & models into a single place to discover what you are working on & spending time & money. there is plans for a scrobble feature like last.fm but for agent research & code development & execution. https://github.com/russellballestrini/unfirehose-nextjs-logger thanks, I'll check for comments, feel free to fork but if you want to contribute you'll have to find me off of github, I develop privately on my own self hosted gitlab server. good luck & God bless.
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This doesn't look accurate to me. I have an RX9070 and I've been messing around with Qwen 3.5 35B-A3B. According to this site I can't even run it, yet I'm getting 32tok/s ^.-
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Is there a reliable guide somewhere to setting up local AI for coding (please don’t say ‘just Google it’ - that just results in a morass of AI slop/SEO pages with out of date, non-self-consistent, incorrect or impossible instructions). I’d like to be able to use a local model (which one?) to power Copilot in vscode, and run coding agent(s) (not general purpose OpenClaw-like agents) on my M2 MacBook. I know it’ll be slow. I suspect this is actually fairly easy to set up - if you know how.
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Having the rating of how well the model will run for you is cool. I miss to also have some rating of the model capabilities (even if this is tricky). There are way too many to choose. And just looking at the parameter number or the used memory is not always a good indication of actual performance.
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I don't see my beloved 5060ti. looks great though
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The RAM/VRAM cutoff matters more than the parameter count alone. A 13B model in Q4_K_M quantization fits in 8GB VRAM with reasonable throughput, but the same model in fp16 needs 26GB. Most calculators treat quantization as a footnote when it is actually the primary variable. The question is not "can I run 13B" but "what quantization level gives acceptable quality at my hardware ceiling".
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This lacks a whole lot of mobile GPUs. It also does not understand that you can share CPU memory with the GPU, or perform various KV cache offloading strategies to work around memory limits. It says I have an Arc 750 with 2 GB of shared RAM, because that's the GPU that renders my browser...but I actually have an RTX1000 Ada with 6 GB of GDDR6. It's kind of like an RTX 4050 (not listed in the dropdowns) with lower thermal limits. I also have 64 GB of LPDDR5 main memory. It works - Qwen3 Coder Next, Devstral Small, Qwen3.5 4B, and others can run locally on my laptop in near real-time. They're not quite as good as the latest models, and I've tried some bigger ones (up to 24GB, it produces tokens about half as fast as I can type...which is disappointingly slow) that are slower but smarter. But I don't run out of tokens.
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Raspberry pi? Say 4B with 4GB of ram. I also want to run vision like Yocto and basic LLM with TTS/STT
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Cool website. The one that I'd really like to see there is the RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell 96 GB, though.
Honestly I was surprised about this. It accurately got my GPU and specs without asking for any permissions. I didnt realize I was exposing this info.
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Do you mean the OPs website? Mine's way off. > Estimates based on browser APIs. Actual specs may vary
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How could it not? That information is always available to userspace.
TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool (tui.studio)
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Seems nice. I launched https://github.com/alganet/tuish yesterday (pure shell backend). Exporting to pure shell could be a killer feature, especially for smaller and ad-hoc apps (no dependencies, no compilation, etc).
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The hardest part of TUI development has always been the layout model, not the widgets. Most people start with absolute positioning and then discover their terminal is 80x24 on the CI server. A visual designer is useful if it outputs layout constraints rather than fixed coordinates. Otherwise you end up with UIs that only work at one terminal size.
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I built something like this in 1993, it was used to design layouts for DOS apps and headers for printed listings. Imitating the BorlandPascal and Novel TUIs of the day
Better get ready for almost all software to use AI assistance in its creation. You can build great things using AI agents, and you can build trash. Your ideological opposition to that is not shared by as wide a percentage of developers as you may think based on some highly self selected online corners.
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Your ideological opposition to that is not shared by as wide a percentage of developers as you may think based on some highly self selected online corners. Opinions do not win by "high score". Asserting the validity of opinions based on how widely they are held is dumb. If 30% of devs love openclaw, I'm not re-examining my informed opinion, I am forming a new one about that 30% cohort.
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That was a reaction to "Not sure why this gets voted to the frontpage.", not to any correctness claims.
The TUI hype seems like nostalgia for COBOL mainframe apps that most people have never even used. A sort of secondhand cyberpunk role play with zero focus on actual UX. Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?
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I personally think the opencode and kilo CLI have great UX, certainly better (and easier to use) than the web versions of both. A lot of the recent TUI apps are really not old-school in any way. Not all apps need the feature-set of a browser engine. And compared to native mac/linux desktop apps, TUIs get cross-platform support by default. > Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app? We all know the answer to this
This is nonsensical, there is nothing textual about the UIs being shown here. It doesn't stop being a GUI if you have a 1:1 representation of the concept within character cells. The UX actually matters, and TUIs are generally built for effectiveness and power (lazygit being an excellent example). But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI.
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I've been working with notcurses recently and it is a full TUI that handles mouse events just fine. Runs over slow SSH connections and everything. The nice part is that you can fully operate applications built on top of it with the keyboard if you so choose, the mouse is just a shortcut. Sadly the project is not really in a usable state at the moment. The documentation is incomplete riddled with errors, the code has some pretty glaring bugs, and it's close to abandoned. It's a shame because you can do some really amazing stuff with it.
> But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI. Hard disagree. Borland TurboVision [0] was one of the greatest TUI toolkits of the DOS era, had all of these: > Turbo Vision applications replicate the look and feel of these IDEs, including edit controls, list boxes, check boxes, radio buttons and menus, all of which have built-in mouse support. Well, I can’t remember if it had tabs. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision
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Vasellating. TurboVision was awesome, but it was pushing the boundary of TUI, which in my mind was great for moving hard copy to computer entered use case. To wit, hard copy on your right side, you transfer data to app without looking at screen, but just looking at hard copy, remembering when/where to hit return key, maybe tab for prior field, stuff like that. But hey, if the screen is drawn 24 x 80 with extended ascii, it's TUI. And man, loved the "absolute" keyword in turbo pascal. Instant screen writes when writing to a 2 dimensional array.
> TUI runs in a text session. A GUI runs in a graphics session What do you mean by this? I have never heard these terms before. I can launch and interact with a GUI from a text application, or a text application from a GUI.
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Is it character mapped, designed to run in a tty terminal? TUI. Is it pixel or vector mapped, designed to run in a graphics terminal? GUI. Of course strictly speaking TUI is a subset of possible graphical user interfaces, but the term GUI was coined to denote interfaces other than the already-ubiquitous text terminal interfaces. TUIs have since absorbed GUI interface elements like buttons, checkboxes, and even pointer input, which I think is causing the terminology complaint here. Classical TUIs like Norton Commander are more about keyboard input and navigation. But being text-mapped is the identifying feature of a TUI, I think most people accept.
It's a TUI if it uses text to build those elements. No. All you've done is make a low-resolution GUI.
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Would you say old DOS applications like Borland's Turbo series of compilers were not TUIs? They ran in the console but had menus, mouse support, dialog boxes, etc... How about those text games that used ASCII art and you typed in commands like "look" and "go north"? I would say using text mode is the primary requirement for a TUI. The other requirement being some kind of human-machine connection, IE a User Interface.
Look up Visual Basic for Dos for a surprisingly good TUI editor!
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Yes!
This is so cool I immediately wanted to convert my apps. But then when I thought about it, well it's trying to recreate CSS but in a majorly worse way. Browsers are ubiquitous and I can just tell ai to build a web page. I can't really see a use case other than novelty.
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If you need a UI over SSH or inside tmux, skipping browsers and CSS isn't just a novelty, it's essential since HTML can't touch that territory. TS-based layout in terminals can be ugly but it also dodges a pile of accessibility, latency and bloat issues you get by default with anything running in Chrome.
Peter Thiel's Antichrist Lectures (apnews.com)
I think you're missing the historical context of how the "life after death" idea served as an utility, in many religions. We today have laws and moral separated from religion and institutions that both teaches it to the young citizen and uphold it. But that wasn't the case for vast majority of the history. How would you convince a tribal person that can't perceive something beyond "good for me & my family/tribe is all justifications required" to act collaboratively beyond that view? Especially if that attitude is also causing suboptimal behavior around him. Introduce the concept of "good behavior" but there's no guarantee he will follow. Even if you introduced law & punishment you really have no efficient way to enforce it, back in the days. So you introduce the idea that "if you behave bad,(or your children does) you'll suffer beyond your death". Just so happen this simple yet powerful idea don't really scale with a complex world
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This is a naive world view. Religion became a tool for the powerful to suppress the masses. I doubt it was ever "for the good of the tribal man", although it's a nice story. I believe most people have an innate spiritual side, questioning our roles in the universe and what life is really all about. But powerful people(like Peter Thiel) have throughout history enforced their own fucked up world views on the rest of us, via indoctrination and blunt force. It's still ongoing. People are wired to follow their leaders.
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I don't follow how your take is any different? We're essentially saying the same thing: it's a "nice story" == easier to sell to people for the powerful to control them. Organized religion is pretty much about manipulating our innate spiritual side with nice stories to keep us bought in to the "nice story" that serve the top the most. I'm just pointing out that the utility of the idea is just that: organization and control. It is quite redundant today because there are more advanced way of doing the same thing. Or are you just pointing out that things have to be argued in a cynical way for it to be true?
> pretty much anti-russian propaganda Russia bit of the prophecies: > [...] If my requests are [not] heeded, Russia [...] will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. I'm not sure it is fair to call it propaganda when it is bang on the money. Even the Holy Father bit checks out, seeing how John Paul II narrowly survived a KGB-sponsored assassination attempt.
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Those who triumphed against “Russia” (also a tell) had anything but immaculate hearts. > The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. Rings a bell. Errors are spreading but Russian they are not. > The date of the attempted assassination, 13 May 1981, was the 64th anniversary of the first apparition of the Virgin Mary to the children at Fátima. Do I have to spell it out.
This is an attempt at a reverse Streisand effect, right? He didn't like people memeing that he was the antichrist, so he did all this so any searches would turn up his lectures rather than the memes/accusations.
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No, Peter Thiel is a nut job and these are his beliefs. Unfortunately, he also knows everything about you and everybody else in the so called free world.
I traced $2B in grants and 45 states' lobbying behind age‑verification bills (old.reddit.com)
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I was already on my way to de-internetizing and de-digitalizing my life, this just makes it more of an imperitive. Have at it Meta, you broke it you most certainly bought it!
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Here is an Archive: https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=ids&ids=t3_1rshc1f
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Age verification is surveillance. The organized campaign to push age verification is not actually trying to protect children. You can’t do age verification without identity verification. You can’t have internet privacy and identity verification.
Does this surprise anyone, just over a decade ago there was a whistleblower who said the government was spying on its own citizens. The president and half the country called him a traitor. The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification. That includes working any job that also requires the use of that tech(Basically all jobs). The only thing that talks is money and when half your workforce is not working(or buying anything because they aren't working) then things will get changed real quick. But most people don't want to do that because no one is willing to suffer short term for long term gains. The govt and 1% know this that's why they increment it slowly overtime with generic causes like "save the children"
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> The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification. You have consumer activist brain. Next you're going to suggest that we complain to the manager or start our own government and compete in the marketplace. > The only thing that talks is money No, the only thing that is talking is money. Money wants this. You're busy pretending like you're going to do a boycott; they're going to boycott you. Complain about the internet? They'll just blacklist you from it. Complain about the phone? Well now you can't use one; try smoke signals. Complain about the landlord? They'll settle the case, kick you out on the street, and blacklist you among all private equity landlords and the management companies that service small landlords. You'll just go to a small landlord that doesn't use one of the management companies? Well they won't have access to a bunch of vendors that have exclusive contracts with and share ownership with the management companies; now they can't make any money and have to sell to private equity. You've been fooled into thinking that being victimized is a moral failure of the victim. The perpetrators taught you that. They taught you that the only appropriate action is to beg and threaten to leave, and they shut down customer service and monopolized the market. But, again, the worst thing they trained you to do is to blame the victim.
Removed! Anyone got a copy of the original text?
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> This isn't age verification at the point of accessing restricted content. This is a persistent age-broadcasting service baked into the operating system itself, queryable by every installed application. You're not missing anything. It's just an AI generated summary of the original GitHub link https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings I found the original article much easier to read anyways
Your take in this entire ends up with you blaming Bill Gates like some MAGA tinhat? The GOP are literally the cabal of pedophilic, privacy ending, freedom crushing elites you’re looking for and this is somehow your perspective?
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I suspect you only read up to the 2nd paragraph of OP's comment if that's what you got. They certainly aren't pinning the blame on Bill Gates. I don't think "current "Dear Leader"" (quotes included) is common MAGA vocabulary. Also, given the bipartisan support of the bills, funding and presence in the Epstein files, it seems unfair to include only MAGA as the "cabal of pedophilic, privacy ending, freedom crushing elites".
Not just governments, though. I've wondered if FaceID and the Android counterpart are actively creating an extraordinary labeled dataset for facial expressions at the point of sale. With users trained to scan their face before every transaction, tech companies could correlate transactions to facial expressions, facial expressions to emotions, and emotions to device content. I can imagine algorithms that subtly curate the user experience, selectively showing notifications, content, advertising to coax users towards "retail therapy".
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Any webconferencing app on iOS probably fires up the TrueDepth camera to power background replacement and could conceivably do that, albeit not so responsively. Recommend heading to your provider and opting out of share-or-sell if you can. Also keep in mind keystroke dynamics can probably do that too and has been a topic of study in one form or another since the nineteenth century vis-a-vis telegraph operators.
A very bold claim I have heard repeatedly, backed up with zero evidence. Care to share any proof you have found?
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It's very important to pretend that ICE goons are significantly different from regular cops, because Democrats are going to wave a magic wand and declare ICE to be regular cops again when they are in control of them again. Meanwhile, regular cops have been doing the same awful things that they've always been doing, literally at the command of Democratic mayors who are pompously declaring that they won't enforce immigration law in speeches. They'll send cops to throw your shit into the street when your rent suddenly doubles, and won't report an illegal immigrant felon (whose history we know nothing about) to ICE. Organized white supremacists are nobodies with no power, they're all over the military, the cops, prison guards, and ICE. Meanwhile, Parchman Farm in Mississippi doesn't even report the people who are dying there, and has plastic all over the floors because the roofs are open to the elements. That's just legal American black people who this country actually owes something to, though. That was trendy like five years ago, it's so over now.
We're all going to have to use service accounts created on Windows Server 2003 or RHEL 4, otherwise they won't be old enough and will require manual login from an of-age administrator
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Good luck enforcing that on Guix, or 9front. The auth server would lie in Colorado. The FS server, in New Mexico. The CPU server, in Nevada. The terminal (the client), in Alaska. Shut down and repeat at random. Watch the lobbies collapsing down tring to sue that monster.
I disagree slightly. It may not be good business, but it could be good PR, situationally. I expect a lot of 2nd-tier distros will refuse to implement it, and see a boost in their installs as a result. Debian, Ubuntu, etc., they'll all fall right in line because the clear and immediate losses will outweigh any PR issue.
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When they fall in line and add the age bracket drop-down menu, we'll keep using them because throwing a hissy fit over a distribution allowing you to select your age bracket is very obviously stupid.
That seems much more intrusive and bad for privacy than having the parent click a button that says the account is for a child under 18.
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We already have that. On a spectrum of options, no verification is the least privacy intrusive. Baking it in at the OS level or forcing passport uploads are the most intrusive. My proposal is in the middle. A determined actor could maybe follow you to the store when you purchase your verification code, take a quick picture with a powerful camera (or bribe the store to do it sneakily) and unmask you online. But there's no way to do it at scale. And if you buy the code from a reseller (ask a panhandler to buy one for you, perhaps) then it's even more robust.
When the government decides not to issue certificates to websites they don't like.
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It’s not the government that is issuing the website certificates.
This doesn’t make sense, how do these fake accounts bring revenue ? I thought the end goal is to improve conversion rate by removing the “bots” and this would therefore lead to higher ad spend and more money to Facebook direct
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The advertisers still pay, they just don't get conversions.
>it create difficulty for undocumented people to access the web Why is this such a sticking point in US politics? If the "undocumented" people aren't supposed to be in the country in the first place, why should rest of society cater to them? Even if you're against age verification for other reasons, dragging in the immigration angle is just going to alienate the other half of the population who don't share your view on undocumented people, and is a great way to turn a non-partisan issue into a partisan one. It's kind of like campaigning for medicare for all, and then listing "free abortions and gender affirming surgery" as one of the arguments for it.
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> why should rest of society cater to them? Because these undocumented people are still humans. They deserve access to information services. It's as simple as that.
> In the non-zero-knowledge case, it's possible to revoke falsely shared credentials. In a true zero-knowledge system sharing falsely shared credentials becomes easy because it’s untraceable. If the proof has no knowledge attached, you can’t conclude who used their credentials on a website that generates proof-of-age tokens on demand for visitors.
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Yes, that's exactly why it can't work.
Most civilization is not in Eastern Europe though, Russia is not a threat outside of its immediate proximity and its relative strength has only lessened over the decades
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A country with hypersonic missiles and the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on the planet is only a threat inside its immediate proximity?
ZKP methods are just as draconian as they rely on locking down end user devices with remote attestation, which is why they're being pushed by Google ("Safety" net, WEI, etc). The real answer to the problem is for websites/appstores to publish tags that are legally binding assertions of age appropriateness, and then browsers/systems can be configured to use those tags to only show appropriate content to their intended user. This also gives parents the ability to additionally decide other types of websites are not suitable for their children, rather than trusting websites themselves to make that decision within the context of their regulatory capture. For example imagine a Facebook4Kidz website that vets posts as being age appropriate, but does nothing to alleviate the dopamine drip mechanics. There has been a market failure here, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for legislation to dictate that large websites must implement these tags (over a certain number of users), and that popular mobile operating systems / browsers implement the parental controls functionality. But there would be no need to cover all websites and operating systems - untagged websites fail as unavailable in the kid-appropriate browsers, and parents would only give devices with parental controls enabled to their kids.
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[delayed]
What if all the useful apps refuse to run on the childproof operating system?
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Then ditch propietary software completely and join free as freedom OSes.
Knowing if the user's over 18 doesn't imply total surveillance, it only implies a user profile setting that says if they're over 18.
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It implies that the user has access to the technical infrastructure that supports age verification. Sucks to be you, if you can't afford a recent Apple or Android device to run the AgeVerification app. There is also the problem of mission creep. Once the infrastructure is in place, to control access to age-restricted content, other services might become out of reach. In particular, anonymous usage of online forums might no longer be possible.
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Do you know what the word "infrastructure" means?
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Do you know what "total surveillance" means? It doesn't mean a checkbox for over 18
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I can't tell if this is a troll or not. OS-level ability to verify the age of the person using it absolutely provides infrastructure for the OS to verify all sorts of other things. Citizenship, identity, you name it. When it's at the OS level there's no way to do anything privately on that machine ever again.
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