DomeGuy
@DomeGuy@lemmy.world
- Comment on Three questions about California AB1043 C. 675 2 days ago:
So, if I understand right, basically they assume its correct unless given significant evidence otherwise?
That’s how it reads to me this morning. Assuming by “given” you meant “they have at all”.
So like, if this flag is enabled and I visit a website and don’t directly provide personal information, then they have to assume I am a child under CCPA and thus can’t share my data. Right?
Based on the CA AG’s page at www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa , I don’t see how “the browser reports the user as a child” gives a substantial additional burden on website developers. Presumably, the most they’d have to do to comply is use the flag to change “do you agree for yourself” to “PARENT OR GUARDIAN: Do you agree for the user of this account…”
I’m missing the part where an adult setting their age category incorrectly for themselves would do more than get a stronger porn block and a bunch of “go get your parent” pop-ups instead of “click here if you’re over 18.”
Presumably, if Microsoft and Google and Apple don’t get the Digital Age Assurance Act blocked in court, we could see a broad adoption of it as a way to skip paying for third-party age validation for sites like Reddit, BlueSky, and Lemmy, and all of the porn sites on the internet would just ask for the flag in lieu of their current “do we have a cookie where this user clicked that they’re at least 18” code.
- Comment on Three questions about California AB1043 C. 675 2 days ago:
Not a lawyer, answers based on legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1043/2025
- Under section 1798.501. (b) 4A, wouldn’t this make collection of almost any system information illegal?
No. Because the terms are defined in 1798.500. They can ask your system directly whatever they want; they just can’t ask Microsofg, Apple, or Google for correlating specifics.
- Since 1798.501. (b) 2A seems to require that developers that receive this age flag treat assume it is true, this would at least apply to CCPA, and California Civil Code, right?
Yes, but only insomuch as laws that protect minors impose additional constraints on those who have “actual knowledge” that a user is actually a child.
It doesn’t mean they need to trust the OS flag if they have suoerior knowledge as to someone’s actual age. If I ask a child to contact Imgur to delete my account they’d block out my porn stash but otherwise treat the request as any other “delete an adult’s account” request.
- Would 1798.501. (b) 2A also apply to COPPA? I know this is state versus federal law, but…
Statr law can expand upon federal law but not contradict. And it smells like AB1043 is more “add a more explicit signal of user age” than anything affecting data retention relating to children.
What part do you think is contradictory?
- Comment on Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence 2 days ago:
“Actual coverage is less than what’s theoretically possible” is a hell of a way of saying "these things aren’t good enough (yet) to actually replace real people ".
- Comment on How to I prove to someone that the U.S. moon landing wasn't staged? 3 days ago:
a) Explain why the US hasn’t gone back in so long, and why with modern technology it seems so difficult?
Going to the moon is expensive and has essentially no direct revenue. There are no resources to be had on the moon that provide worthwhile efficiency over what we already have on earth, and most of the basic science was done by the Apollo missions.
How do you verify moon rocks without having actually been on the moon? How did scientists figure out what a moon rock looks like?
Getting moon rocks, which have a unique microscopic texture due to no water erosion, was one of those “basic science” bits I mentioned before. They don’t really prove the moon landing except that “they’re from the moon” is the simplest answer for why these rocks have that unique texture.
Why aren’t the old Apollo designs being reused for a moon landing? (by either the Americans or the Chinese)
Because thre 1960s were fifty years ago.
The industrial base to build an Apollo rocket isn’t there anymore than the industrial base to build a 1965 Buick skylark or an Atati 2600. You could throw money and rebuild all those factories, but it’d dramatically balloon the cost even before you start to recon with correcting the inevitable mismatch between the original spec and what your rebuilt factory can make.
(And even if we did just rebuild Apollo, we’d wind up with a rocket that didn’t have the advantage of 50 years of advancement.)
- Comment on We already passed 1984's prediction of the future: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever" 4 days ago:
1984 is an anti-tyranny dystopia that has more bad readings than any other work I can think of.
The essential problem isn’t new-speak, the five minute hate, constant war, one-party rule, rat-based psychotorture, or even ubiquitous surveillance. Rather, it’s the abandonment of truth. It’s not nearly so bad if Big Brother is Watching, except that Big Brother lies.
(And Orwell wasn’t even inventing the danger out of whole cloth: both the German Nazi and Russian Communist tyrannies had well trod the path of internal propaganda and historical revisionism)
((AND you don’t have to squint all that hard to argure that 1984’s Britian was most plausibly a pariah state that didn’t actually have any power beyond its aquatic border…))
Like nearly all science fiction, 1984 wasn’t so much written about its future as it was written about the past.
- Comment on What do you think of Paramount merging with Warner Bros. Discovery to create a new media company? 1 week ago:
This is a billionaire buying the good name of trusted companies so he can have a propaganda house that isn’t obviously such.
- Comment on Did I discover a fake conspiracy theory? 1 week ago:
Like the woman who sued macdonalds for getting third degree burns because their coffee was too hot.
Please never mention this story without pointing out at least one of the following;
- The coffee was hot enough to cause crippling burns to her genitals.
- McDonald’s intentionally had their coffee too hot to drink to keep customers from hanging out
- the woman only asked for medical expenses and did not sue until her complaint was ignored.
- the eye-popping headline number was calculated as something like one day of the company’s coffee profit.
There literally isn’t an instance of a US company being sued by a customer more deserving of empathy and horror.
- Comment on Can I get some support rn please 1 week ago:
Oof, girl. (?)
While I’m not a doctor, I’d expect that 60 hours of fasting would have as great an effect on your brain as several alcoholic drinks. Of course you’d be struggling with impulse control afterwards!
It’s a huge accomplishment to just say “wow, I did something I don’t like having done and don’t want to do it.” I’d still have an older brother if fully grown adults were universally capable of saying “I should stop this” and then doing just that.
From your last several posts I’d guess that you’re trying a ketogrnic diet / intermittent fasting for weight loss reasons. If so, remember that the length of a fast or time-on-diet doesn’t matter nearly as much as your weekly caloric net. Maybe plan for how you want your fast to end, so you’re not figuring out something with a glucose-starved brain?
Whatever the case, you seem brave and strong and are definitely worth this. A setback isn’t a failure, just a discovery of some way that doesn’t quite work. :)
- Comment on LibreOffice blasts 'fake open source' OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft to lock users in 2 weeks ago:
You’re the first account I’ve seen endorse OpenOffice, and I’ve been casually looking for a better alternative to word since the copilot bullshit last year.
Do you have a good example of something they added since LibreOffice forked off that’s worth considering if choosing an alternative?
- Comment on Extreme wealth inequality is baked in to the system 2 weeks ago:
Any work that wouldn’t be done if we had a UBI should either be automated away or sufficiently well-paid that it would find workers even without the threat of poverty.
We don’t need to ritually kill a homeless person just so someone will pick up our trash any more than we need to do so for someone to tended to our elders dying of cancer.
- Comment on Before AI, the better technology was the less valuable eye witness became. In the future, the better AI technology gets the more valuable eye witness will be. 2 weeks ago:
*Tell me you’ve never encountered a real courtroom without telling me never encountered a real courtroom… *
Our legal systems have long required things like “chain of custody” and “corroborating evidence” for essentially any claim. Because in essentially any instance where the opposing sides dispute a question of fact they need to convince a mildly annoyed rando that things happened a certain way while the other team is arguing that it’s all a hoax.
They generally skip all that in courtroom dramas and even broadcasted courtrooms, because the very first phase of any trial is discovery where both sides show some or all of their cards to try and convince the other team to fold.
AI slop is hardly the first time someone invented a new tool for faking evidence. Heck, we had a whole industry based on faking video evidence before the first surveilance camera was ever installed.
(There’s a huge possibility for slander and fraud that the general public should wise up to, but starting with an assumption that evidence is fake unless proven otherwise is kinda how things go.)
(And, yes, the big hole here is that “best avaliable” evidence is often nonsense. ACAB and all that. My point is just that fake evidence isn’t a dangerous new invention courts have never seen before.)
- Comment on Is it possible that none of this is real? 2 weeks ago:
Sex is way too enjoyable for this to be a poorly coded simulation.
I think you just saw someone who needs either a break or some better mental health care.
- Comment on If a time traveller posts a video from future, it would probably be tagged as AI generated video 3 weeks ago:
Causality is just determinists starting with “time travel is impossible” and finding a fancy name for it.
I don’t want to say they’re wrong, just that asserting casualty in a discussion about time travel being impossible is kinda like asserting Godwin’s Law in a discussion about whether or not Trump’s a nazi.
- Comment on YSK that if you hesitate between Ketchup and Mustard, you should pick Mustard. It's healthier. 3 weeks ago:
When the USA was civilized we required every food sold to the public to list its nutritional information.
calories-info.com/mustard-vs-ketchup/
100g of ketchup or mustard both have about 100 calories, with ketchup getting more of those calories from carbohydrates and much less from fat.
Even if you make your own ketchup or buy a no-sugar added brand, it still has a fair amount of carbohydrates. And a substantial amount of salt.
tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/2594364/…/1
Both are worth including if you’re calorie counting. (And don’t necessarily trust the per-serving size label, since if they set that low enough they can round down and claim a 100% fat cooking spray is 0 calories. We only used to be civilized.)
- Comment on Do you ever feel guilty for trying to sign up for government assistance programs? 3 weeks ago:
Don’t ever feel guilty for doing exactly what every last plutocrat and “entrepreneur” would do in your place.
(Do feel outraged that the richest country on earth still demands we work or beg if we don’t want to starve to death.)
- Comment on Discord walks back age verification fears for most users 3 weeks ago:
A better question is what sort of legislation should apply to every website on the planet, without exception.
Off the top of my head:
- Do not store user information in an unsecure or identifiable mechanism.
- Be transparent as to what parts of the page are ads and which aren’t.
- Follow best-practices for accessibility.
- Give @DomeGuy a lollipop if he asks.
- Comment on Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email 3 weeks ago:
Just because they are a distasteful company, doesn’t give us free reign to spread lies about them.
To be pedantic, I’m spreading alarmist rumors at worst. In English a “lie” has to be something the speaker doesn’t actually believe. And I honestly believe that users of WhatsApp should assume that Meta can read their messages.
The signal protocol and encryption explicitly prevents the transit server decrypting messages. That a theoretical hidden third person … in the chat doesn’t change that is e2e encrypted.
You’re splitting a hair that’s not even worth curling.
If I ship you a locked box via courier, and the courier can get a copy of the key without talking to either of us, we should presume that the courier may have looked inside and take appropriate measures. Like, inventorying the contents of said box before and after, and not shipping things we don’t want the courier to know about.
It doesn’t matter if the courier keeps the box locks, doesn’t habitually carry a key, or even promises that they won’t get a key. We don’t even have to assume that they actually looked in the box, or use a slower or more-expensive courier.
If there’s a plausible way they can open the box, we should start with the presumption that they did and then go from there.
- Comment on Is browser preference a personality flaw? AI job interview evaluation raises questions— AI said applicant's 'habitual' Chrome use could indicate a 'lack of adaptability' after screening interview 3 weeks ago:
Websites that break in Firefox are websites that should not be used.
- Comment on Discord walks back age verification fears for most users 3 weeks ago:
Words don’t have meanings. Meanings have words.
Amazon the internet megastore allows non-employees of Amazon to add content to their store. Both as supposed vendors offering goods for services and as customers giving reviews and ratings to such store listings. And Amazon chooses what listings to show to users through opaque algorithms.
Can you give an example of the sort of regulation a social media site should need to follow which Amazon should be exempt from? Or the sort of rule that should bind reddit and Facebook but not Amazon?
- Comment on Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email 3 weeks ago:
If you don’t like meta any more than I do, why are you arguing so strongly that they deserve the benefit of the doubt?
And, more interestingly, what precisely do you mean that Meta including themselves as a recipient in every WhatsApp chat would not render their E2E encryption equivalent to HTTPS?
AFAIK both are in-transit encryption that prevents casual monitoring by other entries along the network path between you and the person you’re chatting with, but expose you to undetectable monitoring on the part of the service provider.
- Comment on Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email 3 weeks ago:
You are assuming good behavior on the part of a corporate giant grown out of a social media site literally founded to spy on its users. A company who is literally being sued for their claims that their chat app is meaningfully encrypted
indianexpress.com/…/whatsapp-lawsuit-encrypted-me…
Even if Meta isn’t currently including themselves as a hidden participant in every WhatsApp chat, you should assume that they can do so and act as if they will do so.
Odds are pretty good that their encryption usage is good enough for any lawful behavior you may engage in, but you shouldn’t trust Meta or any software they provide with anything that would destroy your life if it was revealed.
- Comment on Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email 3 weeks ago:
Meta using the name of a formerly independent company for their current pseudo-private messaging app does not mean said app meaningfully predates the one whose tech they use.
signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
(Please share if you have a link arguing the opposite.)
More importantly, the encryption in Whatsapp is closer to HTTPS than it is to PGP. It keeps anyone except Meta or the recipients from keeping a record of what you say, but you should absolutely assume Meta is recording what you say on WhatsApp.
(And you should also assume anyone you talk to is keeping a record as well.)
- Comment on Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email 3 weeks ago:
Most of the people I know have largely abandoned personal email. Way back before everyone had a personal number it made sense to share your email with your friends, but nowadays ‘contact that goes directly to them’ is good enough for casual purposes.
(And as understand it, WhatsApp is a cancerous fork of Signal created by Meta as a response to people abandoning their social media site for private communication or discord. Plain carrier messages for casual communication, signal for avoiding third-party interception, and social media for folk you don’t trust with your phone number.)
- Comment on it's a long distance relationship 3 weeks ago:
schroedinger’s cat is an intentionally absurd metaphor from when QM dorks were still arguing about spooky action at a distance.
Both the cat, the box, the vial of poison, and the cesium atom itself are all observers as far as a real QM wavefunction would care. But as i understand it, getting any utility out of the idea of real collapsing wave-functions requires treating at least the atom as if it wasn’t, and once we start including atomic scale things we might as well just include everything up to and including the cat.
- Comment on How are locks and keys mass produced? 3 weeks ago:
While I certainly don’t want to argue about the wisdom of preventive measures towards petty crime or dangerous outcomes, i think it’s worth knowing that even trivially surpassed barriers can alter what recompense or punishment can be provided from a court of law.
For example: There was a big copyright infringement case against an AI company recently, which ended in a settlement of a few thousand dollars per registered work so infringed. Authors whose work wasn’t registered were not eligible for the same amount, because the law limits how much they can recover if a work’s copyright wasn’t registered.
- Comment on How are locks and keys mass produced? 3 weeks ago:
Mass produced items are not all the same. They are merely similar, and can have whatever variations the bulk manufacturing process requires or allows.
Not every car made on the same assembly line on the same day had the same options, and near every cake baked in a mass bakery will have a distinct internal structure.
- Comment on How are locks and keys mass produced? 3 weeks ago:
The utility of a lock is that it’s a clear permission barrier. If you don’t have the key and bypass the lock, it’s clear at least to you that you aren’t using a key. Which can be the difference between ordinary trespass and burglary.
- Comment on it's a long distance relationship 4 weeks ago:
“it can’t be hidden variables because they’re not as even as this math says they should be!” really just seems to be the whole QM field agreeing to stop arguing about spooky action at a distance.
The distinction between wave-functions as real things that collapse at superluminal speed and the same as mere mathematical placeholders for deterministic local effects which occur without subjective time seems to be a semantic and philosophical one, similar to the “multiple realities” explanation of quantum uncertainty or the “11 dimensions” explanation for why gravity is weaker.
As a practical matter, the only thing that students and non-physicts should remember is that wavefunction collapse allows superluminal coordination but not superluminal communication.
- Comment on AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it 4 weeks ago:
This isn’t a paradox. It’s the ordinary and expected outcome of you have a junior whose work you can never trust.
Regardless of what your profession is, if you have a source of “work input” that requires specific instruction for near every task and whose output must be carefully examined, then the part of your job which is reviewing drafted work would necessarily increase.
This is especially true in engineering fields, where the things that can be abstracted into repeatable tasks usually are. Computers saved structural engineers from having to do all their math separately and higher-abstraction languages saved programmers from having to futz around in assembly, but neither of those had to be manually checked.
- Comment on "Luke, I am your *second* father" 4 weeks ago:
If nobody else, Obi-Wan. Although the exchange at the Lars household over dinner suggests that Owen and Beru didn’t exactly hide his father’s name from him. Since “Anakin” doesn’t appear at all in the script until after the twist, it’s likely that there wasn’t a firm name for him until ROTJ.
imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-A-New-Hope.html imsdb.com/…/Star-Wars-The-Empire-Strikes-Back.htm… imsdb.com/…/Star-Wars-Return-of-the-Jedi.html
Luke definitely knew he had a father, though. And had an idea of who he was from the aunt and uncle who raised him, Obi-Wan, and even the rebel pilots.