nickhammes

@nickhammes@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨First Porn, Now Skin Cream? ‘Age Verification’ Bills Are Out of Control.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s an important distinction here: “is a good idea” is not “is the right way to do it”. You can also keep kids off of dating apps by banning dating apps, banning children from the Internet, or even just banning children. All of those are horrible solutions, but they achieve the goal.

  The goal should be to balance protecting kids with minimizing collateral damage. Forcing adults to hand over significant amounts of private data to prove their identity has the same basic fault as the hyperbolic examples, that it disregards the collateral damage side of the equation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨First Porn, Now Skin Cream? ‘Age Verification’ Bills Are Out of Control.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s all about the implementation. The Washington bill is treating diet products as similar to alcohol (check ID in-store and on delivery), which seems fine to me.

  The NY law seems to be suggesting that dating app services need to collect (and possibly retain) sensitive information on people, like identification, location data. That’s troubling to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I basically agree with you and the author here. People applying technology have a responsibility to apply it in ways that are constructive, not harmful. Technology is a force multiplier, in that it makes it easy to achieve goals, in a value neutral sense.

  But way too many people are applying technology in evil ways, extracting value instead of creating it, making things worse rather than better. It’s an epidemic. Tech can make things better, and theoretically it should, but lately, it’s hard to say it has, on the net.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm doing my part!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Fax is commonly used at least in the US because it has regulatory recognition as a secure means of transferring information, it’s highly interoperable, and it doesn’t really have a successor that has caused the network effect to die out entirely.

  11% seems slightly higher than I’d expect, but not crazy. Contracts, medical records, interactions with the government are all good reasons to need to send or receive one occasionally. That about 1 in 10 households did last year? Makes some sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do the majority of women still take their partner's last name?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Having one name (at least in common, using hyphenation) is easier for legal reasons too. If you have kids, and one parent doesn’t share a last name with them, you’ll have headaches at school, maybe crossing a border, unless you brought some extra legal documents with, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do the majority of women still take their partner's last name?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re making a good choice Mr. Beer Belly

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky Social surpasses 19 million users as more celebrities leave X⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Or perhaps fucking st*pid

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has Fast Food Gotten Worse, or Am I Just Getting Old?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Cost cutting has made fast food restaurants worse in ways that aren’t essentially shrinkflation. Restaurants like Taco Bell cutting their beef with cheaper ingredients (though apparently it’s only 12% fillers). Chipotle giving you more of the cheap ingredients like rice, and less of the good stuff like guac. Even slower service and longer lines because they don’t want to pay as much staff during peak hours.

  Smaller (especially privately-held) chains have been able to buck the trend, but cutting quality has been a popular option as of late.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google creating an AI agent to use your PC on your behalf, says report | Same PR nightmare as Windows Recall⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m excited for the fun gopher hole you’re gonna go down

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google creating an AI agent to use your PC on your behalf, says report | Same PR nightmare as Windows Recall⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Alright folks, in 2025 we’re bringing Gopher back

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Eat lead⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We can’t prove that the world we live in wasn’t created last Thursday, with our memories, the growth rings in trees, and so on created by a (near) omnipotent trickster to deceive us. But science and rationality give us tools for determining what’s worth taking seriously, and sorting out the reasonable, but unconfirmed, claims from the unverifiable hogwash.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 1900s⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And even then it’s probably not a hard rule as much as a good heuristic: the older a source is, the more careful you should be citing it as an example of current understanding, especially in a discipline with a lot of ongoing research.

  If somebody did good analysis, but had incomplete data years ago, you can extend it with better data today. Maybe the ways some people in a discipline in the past can shed light on current debates. There are definitely potential reasons to cite older materials that generalize well to many subjects.