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Ian's works wonders for running shoes, but alas tying it requires a lot of free string, and sometimes whati is left after looping for heel lock is not enough.

A literate person is able to read an article in a newspaper and understand it has a bias or a certain angle, though. Or see an headline in social media and understand it's fake, or bullshit.

As an EU citizen I am glad there's at least some overwatch and control over these companies. I don't trust them at all. In the US unregulated capitalism is fine: everything and his mother are for sale. Here, not so much.

Ironically if there is a single population that will immensely benefit from socialism, is the United States. Yet they are raised in fear of the very doctrine that would save them.


I'll take our #1 companies, #1 tech scene, #1 innovative companies and #1 stock market over.... whatever you have, any day.

We aren't raised in "fear" of anything. We are raised to reach our potential, not depend on a nanny state or the USA. (which the EU does, you conveniently omit)


> I'll take our #1 companies, #1 tech scene, #1 innovative companies and #1 stock market over.... whatever you have, any day.

Good, just don't expect others to do so.


Yet all you hear in this forum are voices against regulation for the platforms.

It's mostly just that we are worried that anyone seeking to regulate the platforms is mostly just seeking to control said platforms and get them to spread their version of the truth. Something we already see with CNN, NBC, Fox News, etc.

Yes. Don't regulate the platforms, the platforms aren't the problem. Go after the actual sources spreading misinformation - many of which will likely be connected to the very same government you want to act as cop and censor - and support better critical thinking in education. Rather than making it illegal for platforms to moderate content, refuse to use platforms that don't.

This forum is dominated by AI bots.

I don't get why a problem specific of parenthood should apply to everyone else. Don't give your kid a smartphone then.

This is such a naive take, I see it a lot. Have you considered they can:

* Buy one themselves

* Get / use a friend's

* Use public internet access points

* Need one for school

* Use the smart fridge / tv / gaming console / anything with a browser

* Access stuff in Minecraft, Roblox, etc

You can only stop it by going offline and raising them in a cabin in the woods, which is a whole other thing.

What you can do is give them The Talk, of course (but that only helps / prevents to a point, it's more to prepare them for what they may find or how they can identify problematic things). And the other is to push back as a community effort, with e.g. many schools banning kids from having phones in the first place.


Have you considered that even if unwanted material was only accessible in physical form with age restriction for buying. Like porn magazines, cigarettes or alcoholic drinks, kids can still access them and find a way around it. You can ask older generations. Perhaps you can't stop it by "going offline and raising them in a cabin in the woods".

Best is to assume they have access to it one way or another if they seek it. The discussion should not be about banning vs allowing, it should be focused around how to deal with situations that arise regardless.

Education about the subject and why kids shouldn't seek access is quite effective, additionally they will be informed once they are allowed access. Think about how the last decades saw a sharp decline in smoking and alcohol consumption.


I think the earlier commenter is right. If a parent fails to... well... "parent" that's on them. Locking down the internet to republican-approved sites only is not the answer.

I can see that you don't get the problem, indeed.

One problem (there are others) is that it's not always possible (or easy) to not give your kid a smartphone, or access to social media.

Imagine that your kid doesn't have those and is having a hard time at school because all the other kids do have them. They have a whole culture based around those, and your kid is excluded from it. What do you do? Tell your kid that it's okay to wait 10 more years before hoping to not be excluded?


Once again American capitalism ruins everything for everyone.

Not only that. The Eu is also implementing 'age verification', at the same time with - surprise - digital id.

It's just an attempt to reverse the free internet and implement total surveillance.


Yeah, I feel as though people have seen the error of creating a free internet and are trying as much as possible to reverse it. It's kind of like how Photoshop (and most software companies honestly) have seen how selling a license in perpetuity does not work and opt for the rent-seeking monthly subscription route.

The age verification with the EU ID card can be implemented without leaking any identifying information. If it's gonna be like that is questionable, but it's technically possible.

For $5 I'll give you an age token from my card.

Yeah but $1.50 Costco hot dogs! I got nothing more on that.

The irony of writing this on this particular board, out of all places.

Without American capitalism you wouldn't have computers, the Internet, smartphones, AI, electric cars and countless other things. That, and the Costco hot dogs mentioned in another reply.

Smartphones and AI are tady's cancer, so good job America! Polluting the earth and its inhabitants once more. For electric cars, I have my doubts that without China we will have them, but I'll leave you simmer in your exceptionalism.

"Without American capitalism you wouldn't have computers, the internet, ..."

In fact, the internet was born out of the American military, i.e., government, and American universities, not "American capitalism"

The first time I used this internet, there were rules against using it for commerce



But the widespread adoption and cheap client devices are a product of the market economy.

The American military would not exist without the economic freedoms we have.

We don't have any of these so-called 'econonic freedoms'. Anybody can be de-banked at any time.

These "economic freedoms", specifically the actions of so-called "tech" companies with respect to the internet, are the cause of "age verfification" legislation

The original internet had rules against using it for commercial activity

It lacked "economic freedoms"

FWIW I still found it worth using at the time, despite no so-called "tech" companies

It also lacked websites of unmanageable size with hundreds of millions of pages of user-generated content used as bait to lure in ad targets for data collection and surveillance, so-called "platforms" or "social media"

It lacked "age verification" to access those websites because those websites did not exist

There will be at least one HN reply arguing that the original internet sucked, or some other brainless dismissal

As if the internet we have now does not suck. Clearly, it does suck for some people

It is not a lack of "economic freedoms" on the internet that has led to "age verification". It's quite the opposite


Dude, we get it, you’re a super fan but these are some intellectually lazy comments. Our military is powerful, yes, but if you want to make some exceptional claims you need to show your homework demonstrating that kind of claimed huge leap over other economies (China, Russia, Germany, etc.). Be sure to explain how Iran is doing so well for so much less.

Um, where did I mention China or Russia?

Intellectually lazy? What are you even talking about? Stay on topic, you are embarrassing yourself.


There was no advertising on the internet, originally

This was before the www


Was 0

American capitalism and the American government and its policies are intertwined. You are arguing literally nothing.

The world would still have them but perhaps not as quickly is the only difference.

"The global Internets progenitor was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) financed and encouraged by the U.S. Department of Defense.

In order to understand the wonder that the Internet and various other components of the Net represent, we need to understand why the ARPANET Completion Report ends with the suggestion that the ARPANET is fundamentally connected to and born of computer science rather than of the military.

The Completion Report goes on to differentiate the research ARPA supported from the research done by the computer industry: The computer industry, in the main, still thinks of the computer as an arithmetic engine. Their heritage is reflected even in current designs of their communication systems. They have an economic and psychological commitment to the arithmetic engine model, and it can die only slowly.12 The Completion Report further analyzes this problem by tracing it back to the nations universities: furthermore, it is a view that is still reinforced by most of the nations computer science programs. Even universities, or at least parts of them, are held in the grasp of the arithmetic engine concept.13

Computer networking was developed and spread widely in an environment outside of commercial and profit considerations, an environment that supported such research."

   Michael Hauben
   Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (1997) 
   IEEE Computer Society Press
   ISBN 0-8186-7706-6
https://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/book-pdf/CHAPTER 7.pdf

HN commenters/voters may reject the use of the term "military" in the origin story of the internet

That's fine

However it was American taxpayers, through the _Department of Defense_, that financed the creation of the internet

That's government spending, not "American capitalism"

The original internet was non-commercial and was not the result of "American capitalism"

As above, the American computer industry (capitalism) at the time was not focused on computer networking and using computers for communication, it was focused on computers as "arithmetic engines"



And the WWW is a Swiss invention.

British or European. Inventor was British, working for a European organisation.

To act like no private citizens or businesses contributed to the internet because it came out of DARPA is ignorant at best. DARPA literally pays private entities to do research for them to this day. It’s their primary mechanism for action. So confidently ignorant.

Take your Reddit tier America bad slop back to Reddit.


The only reason the US Gov had the expertise and resources to fund DARPA in the first place was because it was a massive capitalist country with enormous wealth

Which is very well known for collecting taxes, right? :D

Did the USSR have a space program?

Yeah but like didn’t it bankrupt them?

Meanwhile the USA barely blinked at the Space Race spending


This is not an argument against American capitalism. It is a correction of the false assertion that "without American capitalism there would be no internet"

American capitalism can create ARPA but capitalism did not create the internet

Neither American companies, nor "private citizens" looking to profit, paid for the research into computer networking that resulted in the internet. At that time, there was no commerercial incentive to support such research

"Computer networking was developed and spread widely in an environment _outside_ of commercial and profit considerations, an environment that supported such research."

Hauben, Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (1997)

Without American capitalism, specifically "Big Tech", there would be no "age verification" legislation

Let's cut to the chase. The "age verfication" problem has nothing to do with "American capitalism" or other silly HN tangents. The issue is the lack of rules governing governing data collection, surveillance and advertising, rules that would interfere with the Big Tech "business model". "Age verification" will be another means of data collection for Big Tech but it could also intefere with Big Tech's access to U16 ad targets. It could interere with "indoctrination" into a belief system where Big Tech _is_ the internet

The truth is that the internet does not require "Big Tech" in order to exist and have value. I know this because I used it before so-called "tech" companies existed and, with respect to the state of the art _at that time_, it was amazing. Information was shared between internet users without any attempt to profit from it financially. Today, so-called "tech" companies intermediate (act as a middleman for) the sharing of other peoples' information over the internet in order to profit from data collection, surveillance and advertising. This is unnecessary

The myth that commenters supporting Silicon Valley try to spread is that the internet can only exist and have value if "Big Tech" exists. Their "business model" is "free" intermediation of information retrieval or communication over the internet, thus their argument in favor of status quo becomes something like "online advertising (and associated data collection and surveillance) is essential for the internet to survive"

Their next argument may be that a "healthy AI ecosystem" is necessary for the internet to survive


*commercial

*interfere

Except that the www came out of Switzerland, the first electric vehicles out of Scotland and Germany, the earliest descriptions of neural networks - also Scotland, and countless other things, like Rockets and whatnot, also out of Europe. But, sure, congrats on that ARPANet thing.

Final sentence was unnecessary.

Can you point to the stock markets and silicon valley, and tech leaders and military of those countries?

Oh, wait...


Those are bad things to have.

It is American ingenuity that turned academic curiosities like neural nets into usable products. The missing ingredient in places like Europe or Asia is not intelligence, it is a business friendly environment and the right incentives for entrepreneurs. This is why countries like China can copy existing stuff and make derivative improvements, but don't meaningfully innovate.

Thank god we have "American ingenuity" to enshittify new inventions. Where would we be without that?

> seemingly forgetting that before AI people did mistakes as well.

It's just that they now have the chance to do them 1000% faster and not even realize


> In 5-10 years AI is going to be so much better than even the best human coder

How, if it learns from humans?


How did alphago become better than any human Go player?

Because it can Monte Carlo his ass out of problems, humans can't

> What that means is that if you find yourself thinking of its output as significantly better than yours in a particular domain, there's a high chance that you are not equipped to judge that quality effectively.

This is why code generation is a disaster waiting to happen. Hunderds of thousands of "programmers" with no idea of what they are pushing to production.


I am Italian.

I recognize Ferrari is one of our most iconic and exported brands.

Also I could not give any less fucks about the new Ferrari, the fact that it's ugly, the fact that it's probably going to tank or be a hit. They and their products are so detached from the lives of 99.9999999% of the population.

Also, what do you expect from a guy that used to design computer mice.


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