Really, I’m surprised that for all of the discussions on HN around these individual statewide acts that I see so little discussion of Meta as a primary force pushing them.
They don't but frankly no one who matters actually gives a s#it about HN anyhow.
HN is also much less representative of the demographics within the American tech industry now as well - almost all the references I see on here are stuff only men in their late 30s to 50s would recognize, and an increasing amount of users appear to be based in Western and Central Europe.
Heck, I'm on the younger end by HN standards (early/mid 30s) and when I introduced HN to my peers over a decade ago (this is my throwaway) even back then they complained that it was "toxic", "snooty", and "unhelpful". And it's reputation amongst the younger generation has only gotten worse.
HN has "SlashDot"ified, because most people are either in private groupchats on signal/imessage/discord or meeting each other with Luma invites.
Why does it matter specifically that Meta is doing it? This has long been a goal for intelligence apparatus and big tech: get rid of anonymity online to "fight terrorism" and sell ads respectively.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to know but it's not earth shattering information.
>Why does it matter specifically that Meta is doing it? This has long been a goal for intelligence apparatus and big tech: get rid of anonymity online to "fight terrorism" and sell ads respectively.
How does getting the OS to do age verification "get rid of anonymity online" or help "sell ads"? Assuming the verification is implemented in a competent way (ie. it's not just providing an id scan for any app to read), it's probably one of the more privacy friendly ways to implement age verification, that's also more secure than an "are you over 18" prompt on every website.
You've accepted the overton window shift that age verification is an inevitability and that we need to give up information to the operating system because any other way would violate our privacy! It's naive to see this internationally coordinated effort to "save the children" as anything other than the temperature in the pot being turned up.
> implemented in a competent way (ie. it's not just providing an id scan for any app to read)
What if there are vulnerabilities? You're inherently introducing more attack surface and providing more data than you would without these laws.
>You've accepted the overton window shift that age verification is an inevitability and that we need to give up information to the operating system because any other way would violate your privacy! It's naive to see this internationally coordinated effort to "save the children" as anything other than the temperature in the pot being turned up.
If you're trying to imply Meta is behind the "overton window shift", that's plainly not the case. The popular sentiment that smartphones and social networks are harming kids (thereby necessitating bans/verification) has been boiling over for a while now (eg. "The Anxious Generation, 2024", and the recent social media bans in Australia), and meta is just trying to get ahead of this with laws that favor them.
>What if there are vulnerabilities? You're inherently introducing more attack surface and providing more data than you would without these laws.
Probably less likely to cause vulnerabilities than web usb or web bluetooth , both of which gets some pushback here but nowhere as much an API that returns a number.
> If you're trying to imply Meta is behind the "overton window shift", that's plainly not the case
No, I'm saying the exact opposite: Meta is just one player in a campaign from intelligence agencies and other tech companies who want to normalize mandated prompts in your OS that collect information. Right now it's "just a DOB field bro" turns into "well... people can lie with the DOB field, let's just add a ID check step in that dialog" and build on it from there. Of course the pot has been boiling for a while and it's not just Meta looking for regulatory capture.
> Probably less likely to cause vulnerabilities
I don't care about likelihoods, this "feature" inherently introduces more risk and for something I don't even want on my computer. Even a small chance that this can be abused is unacceptable.
I find it odd when people write off policies as using “save the children” or “protect women” as if this isn’t something people are really capable of thinking. You fail to understand why the Overton window has shifted because you fail to understand people really are worried about their children
I don't know of any surveillance state act that used "protect women" as their top line, but maybe I missed it.
> because you fail to understand people really are worried about their children
No, I completely understand but that doesn't give anyone the right to start mandating that we give up our privacy in pursuit of that. That's sorta the joke with "save the children", it's meant to tug at your emotions and make you look like a bad person for not consenting to massive overreach.
Okay, so not every single person pushing surveillance is a bad faith actor and there are some parents in there who truly want the best for children. How does that change the substance of my point about overreach?
> Why does it matter specifically that Meta is doing it?
Their entire top leadership has shown a multi-year tendency towards psychopathy and lying. Knowing Meta is pushing this bill makes me want to understand why my views and theirs randomly agree as well as carefully read the bill text for any signs Adam Mosseri was within 500 feet of it.
I've seen skepticism about the veracity of the claims, in part as various sources cited in the git repo pointed to todo files not actual data[1] (in that example was only just hours ago a source file was added, when the project still claims part of the conclusions are based on data said to be contained there).
Which has led some to suspect much is LLM generated and not properly human-reviewed, in addition to the very short timeframe from initial self-disclosed start of the research to publishing it online (mere 2-3 days) despite the confident tone the author uses.
I don't think I need to enumerate every way our diets are bad in an HN comment, do I? You didn't even want to do it and you're the one gunning for it.
But processed meat consumption would be another good example of where we happily eat against dietary guidelines despite its link with colorectal cancer.
The people using these programs are generating massive amounts of code, and you won't convince me they're actually carefully understanding most of it, if they even read it all. And it bypasses the first verification step where you are actively typing in the code that will be run.
It's a similar problem in the human context, but I think the reason stuff like workflow agents haven't caught on is because humans don't really like to work this say. Writing a conditional and calling a function keeps you in your flow, but having to jump between an orchestration layer and your code with implementation details breaks that. But LLMs don't have this problem. In fact, they benefit from having all the additional information that's expressed in the graph layer.
I didn't downvote you, but I've noticed recently a trend on HN that just asking a normal question (possibly to start a discussion) gets downvoted for no apparent reason and without any explanation. Not good etiquette, in my opinion.
I think it's all the angry people who were wrong about AI. Every week they come on HN and say AI is utter crap and useless, and every week AI becomes more and more part of the developer work flow.
I would be pissed off too if I was a hypocrite who was so sure AI was total garbage and was now at the same time needing to use claude on a daily basis.
A lot of developers are going through an identity crisis where their skills are becoming more and more useless and they need to attack comments like the above in a desperate but futile attempt to make themselves matter.
You chosen AI agent can and will plan as far ahead as you tell it to plan. If you tell it to do things in iteration 1 that might block it in iteration 3 then you should have told it more about where you want to go back in iteration 1.
At some point I have to describe what I need with such a level of detail and precision, that if I had chosen to wrote it in my language of interest I'd have had the code I wanted long before i finish writing all the boundry conditions, safe guards, long term pitfalls etc. Thats if the system even respects all of those things, it might just lose track of some instruction at some point or make some bs placeholder and now we're back to bug hunting, only i'm now wading through code that is best described as slop.
You're saying that projects need to be waterfall rather than Agile in order to avoid making architecture mistakes you'll regret later.
The problem with that is that as you build you learn things, and that changes the plan. Consequently those mistakes are inevitable. What you should do is an approach where you have a high level plan up front, and detailed plans about the specific features as you need them. Mistakes will still happen but you'll be able to see them, and correct them, faster.
No, I am saying that you are trading what you spend effort on when using LLM's. Do you give up the effort of writing for the effort of review? Weather you should and if you will benefit really depends on your expertise and skill set.
If you're a novice, or even intermediate, use AI in a feedback kind of way, see if it can pinpoint and explain problems with your current code and offer feedback/recommendations. Not code, but dot point human language feedback like you'd get from a senior dev.
If the AI is writing code that is beyond what you could produce yourself, you have no business trusting the code the AI produces. This is because, as anyone who can produce high level code will tell you, AI is wrong too frequently to blindly trust. You have to engage critically with output. Full auto is a disaster waiting to happen.
The problem is, for many, good looking but fundamentally flawed code is indistinguishable from the real deal, and so they simply outsource their ability to critically think to a thing that simply cannot. This is a big problem and the evidence for this claim is littered throughout this comment section.
We used Monogame at a previous company and it's a nightmare to be productive in it. The lack of any kind of an editor makes any kind of dev a nightmare: 3d adjustments? Good luck, guess it.. UI adjustments: good luck, try it 300 times until you get it right.
This comment makes less sense if you are familiar with CSS. Web developers don't have to guess 300 times to make UI adjustments, despite having no direct editor. If this was a problem you should have programmed in better layout primitives.
Dev tools in the browser are a direct editor, sure you can't drag things around with the mouse, but you can edit values live and see them change. Big difference from recompiling to see changes.
Since game journos are completely woke and unreliable using Steam's game ratings from REAL players is a God-send.
Without it you simply wouldn't know if a game is any good or not.
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