I don't know whether Spotify could agree to provide its entire library of music to an archive for Torrenting by anyone.
Its not just about Spotify, but the record labels and the artists themselves.
For a community that usually wants to allow artists control over their music, or better yet people control over their own information in general. It surprises me that people are now okay with music being scraped and freely put online.
As someone who began their career in financial audit over a decade ago and learning about Enron, it has frustrated me that people have been calling Nvidia the new Enron.
Just because companies are throwing chunks of money around, does not mean Nvidia is like another company that was found to commit fraud and be required to file for bankruptcy. Its a classic social media reductionist take that has gained popularity and has been misattributed to what happened at Enron, not even close.
From what I have seen it has been "Nvidia is doing some big deals with other big companies in a way that I don't understand, it must be dodgy and an Enron like scandal"
Nvidia based on its audited financial statements which are audited in accordance with the very standards set following Enron (Sarbanes Oxley) which any US accountant would be familiar with, is an extremely profitable company.
Yes the article is very meandering. But near the end he mentions that the chips nvidia sold last three quarters alone would require about 15GW of electricity to actually run. But where are all the datacenters? And how long can this go on?
When the ground truth is someone keeps buying zillions worth of equipment from investors' money, but the chances to use it are slim, not to even mention getting some profit off it, there just has to be some fraud involved. Probably not on nvidia's side, but would not bet on it.
I am going to assume those GPU sales are AI specific chips and not gaming cards.
A lot of these data centers do seem to be being built with many more planned, either way Nvidia has sold the cards. I don't necessarily think there's fraud involved but simply a lot of demand, speculative or otherwise.
Nvidia's financial statements are externally audited, their inventory is audited and their accounts receivable functions are also audited. I'd put a lot of faith in those audits.
Its not uncommon for laws that allow for teenagers (14 or above) to be tried as adults for more serious crimes.
Should we prevent kids from doing things we think will harm them? Yes, should we give harsher penalties for kids who commit more serious crimes? Potentially.
So many people are looking at this from a technical stand point and how water tight or perfect its going to be.
But there is a large psychological part of this that helps parents and I know that part of it is what a number of parents I've spoken to like about it.
Its not just about the current generation, but the next wave of kids who have grown up under these laws, the psychology of it will have changed.
"the Social Media Minimum Age legislation specifically prohibits platforms from compelling Australians to provide a government-issued ID or use an Australian Government accredited digital ID service to prove their age.
Platforms may offer it as an option but must also offer a reasonable alternative, so no one who is 16 or older is prevented from having a social media account because they choose not to provide government ID. This includes situations where other age check methods return a result the user does not accept."
Digital ID is optional by default. Service providers that integrate with the Digital ID can apply for an exemption to make it mandatory. Given the mandatory nature of age verification checks for social media, the fact that social media is typically free to use and ad-supported and the cost of age verification would be prohibitive for smaller apps without significant VC backing, an argument for exemption could be made on the basis that their legal obligation can't otherwise be fulfilled without a prohibitive upfront cost.
I think you could argue teenagers have a right to discuss political issues in the public forum. That's basically the definition of good citizenship, and (for better or worse) social media is the public forum of the day. Kids don't go from zero rights at 17 to full rights at 18; minors' rights are limited, but they do have rights.
I dunno if that'd fly in Australian courts though.
Well kids can discuss political issues across other discussion boards just not those on the social media sites impacted by the ban. They can also continue to do it say, in person in public.
I think the discussion of political issues in a sensible way on platforms like instagram, tiktok, X, Reddit etc for those ages is perhaps a lower priority than the mental health impacts that those platforms in general provide.
What other discussion boards? They've all been subsumed by Reddit.
I was on Reddit a lot as a teenager. I was the kind of argumentative kid who likes to iron out the wrinkles in their beliefs by defending them, and the internet offers and endless stream of people willing to discuss niche subjects. It had a positive impact on me.
What mental health impacts? We haven't really established that social media has any, writ large. Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation has been very influential in teen social media ban discourse (in fact, I'm not sure the Australian ban would have happened without it), but Haidt never manages to establish a link between social media and depression or anxiety [1]. People just assume social media is really bad for teens, but the extent to which this is true, the proportion of the population for which it is true, and the extent to which social media may actually be valuable to some teens (e.g. to gay kids in conservative towns who are looking for community) is just not established.
I have a real problem with policy that seeks to cut teenagers off from communities they're part of without any interest in establishing the value provided by or the harm caused by those communities.
[1]: Haidt notes that teen hospitalizations related to mental illness have risen since the early 2000s, discounts the recession and climate change as possible explanations, and then just assumes that social media is the only other explanation (it isn't; for instance, teens started getting hospitalized way more after Obamacare lowered the cost of hospital stays). Elsewhere, he's cited a self-report survey indicating that social media use had a high mental health impact on teens, but the indicated impact of social media was greater than the impact of binge drinking, which was greater than the impact of eating fruit, which was greater than the impact of having survived sexual assault (https://bsky.app/profile/michaelhobbes.bsky.social/post/3kxs...). So, that survey is not reliable. Basically, Haidt doesn't actually have any evidence of how bad social media is for teens. He relies on his audience already believing this intuitively.
Interesting to frame this as a bad thing. As a parent, I would take that as a feature, not a bug. To me this is very suspicious why there seem to be so many people here, who I am assuming are mostly adults, advocating so strongly strongly for <16 olds told be on social media, as if it was something they need.
The “social media version of war crimes” is just .. war crimes.
15 - 16 year olds will grow up to inherit the war crimes of their state. The liabilities of the state are the responsibility of every single citizen.
And, let us not forget, that a government is always and only ever held accountable to its citizens if those citizens are well informed.
“Protecting children” is one thing. But a state that feels the need to defend itself from children - by mass murdering them at scale - is another thing entirely. Let us also not forget that the Australian government is a wholesale violator of human rights, and has committed genocide and participated in heinous war crimes with impunity, pretty much since its inception. This is a nation which was still practicing forced sterilization of cultures its ruling classes deemed inferior, well into the 1980’s. This is a nation that literally got away with the modern worlds’ first genocide.
That state of affairs is never going to change if there are a generation of bootlickers, raised by the state, to never question the state.
There will be a generation of Australians, in 3 or 4 years time, who will either strongly resist the totalitarian-authoritarian actions of their state - or they’ll participate in them.
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