You can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be targeting children. The age verification bills I've read have steep penalties for retaining information, so that seems fine since that's literally more protection than you get in person.

It's really more just concluding that those corporations should be liable for their behavior. It also has nothing to do with "the Internet" which is largely unaffected. Except of course ideas for forcing OS behavior coming out of California which are obviously bad.

I actually think things could be a lot simpler if we just made the laws like alcohol: it's illegal (with criminal liability) for a non-parent adult to provide <restricted thing> to a child. Simple enough. Seems to work fine as-is for Internet alcohol purchases. Businesses dealing in restricted industries can figure out how to avoid that liability. That's entirely compatible with making it illegal for businesses to stalk everyone, which we should also do!

If you implemented that simple solution the expected outcome is businesses collecting ID at the door. But unlike the age verification bills there'd be no prohibition of or penalty for misuse of the collected information. It's a strictly worse outcome.

You can make intentional targeting illegal without criminalizing the accidental. And mandating self categorization of content by service providers would enable standardized filtering that was broadly effective.

The above won't get kids off of social media and it won't serve the purposes of the surveillance state but it will meet the stated goals of those pushing these measures.

Keeping children off of social media is a much trickier problem. I think we'd be better served by banning certain sorts of algorithmic feeds.

Okay, so make it illegal for them to record any information which is what the actual laws do (or better, explicitly criminalize all the other current stalking). The point is you don't need to be prescriptive about how to prevent children from accessing the sites. Just make it so you can face massive fines and be arrested if you don't. They can figure out how to comply with the law, and they can be effective or be shut down.

They're not actually owed a solution for how to make their business model work. They can just be told that what they're doing is unacceptable, and they can figure out what they'd like to do next. If you're worried they might react with some other unacceptable thing, we can clarify that that's not okay either.

I agree that open ended requirements are better than the imposition of prescriptive solutions. But I don't want online ID verification and that's where your proposal logically leads so I am equally opposed to it.

> They're not actually owed a solution for how to make their business model work. They can just be told that what they're doing is unacceptable,

You listed a few different things previously. Which one are we talking about here?

I think the rest of us are owed a solution where we can still do what we want without having our privacy violated. Regulations need to take the end user into account.

I already proposed what I think would be a workable solution to achieve the stated goals without unduly eroding the status quo. Do you have any response to it?

Self categorization was proposed in the 90s and has since been proven to be insufficient. More generally, assuming people agree that something is a social problem/should be restricted, I don't think "have a third party come up with a solution that people can buy to filter us" makes sense.

We don't give kids special debit cards that detect and block purchases of cigarettes and alcohol and say "make sure your kids don't get cash". We make it a crime to sell those things to a child.

Why is online ID verification a problem for e.g. porn and gambling but it's fine for alcohol? Why should it be fully anonymous? Should we also allow anonymous porn and cigarette vending machines in person? Why is online special?

This whole idea of anonymous access can't even work in a world where you actually pay for things, which makes the whole proposition even more dubious. If you're an adult and spending money online, you already told them who you are (modulo darknet markets with crypto). So what's the problem exactly? Ad supported porn specifically somehow is important enough to be special?

Manhattan is where basically everything you might associate with New York is (Empire State building, World Trade Center, Times Square, Central Park, etc.). The Bronx is where Jennifer Lopez reminds us that she came from as she keeps it real.

IME doing application servers and firmware my whole career, simple and fast are usually the same thing, and "simple secure" is usually better security posture than "complex secure".

Same experience here and even more powerfully illustrated in firmware development.

Interesting, never done firmware, but plenty of backends and frontends. Besides the whole "do less and things get faster", I can't think of a single case where "simple" and "fast" is the same thing.

And I'd agree that "simple secure" is better than "complex secure" but you're kind of side-stepping what I said, what about "not secure at all", wouldn't that lead to simpler code? Usually does for me, especially if you have to pile it on top of something that is already not so secure, but even when taking it into account when designing from ground up.

Not really. `return 0` is the simplest program you could write, but it's not terribly useful. There's an underlying assumption that there's some purpose/requirement for the program to exist. Through that lens "secure" is just assumed as a requirement, and the simplest way to meet your requirements will usually still give you the fastest program too.

"Do less and things get faster" is a very wide class of fixes. e.g. you could do tons of per-packet decision making millions of times per second for routing and security policies, or you could realize the answer changes slowly in time, and move that to upfront work, separating your control vs data processing, and generally making it easier to understand. Or you could build your logic into your addressing/subnets and turn it into a simple mask and small table lookup. So your entire logic gets boiled down to a table (incidentally why I can't understand why people say ipv6 is complex. Try using ipv4! Having more bits for addresses is awesome!).

I've always encouraged everyone more junior to review everything regardless of who signs off, and even if you don't understand what's going on/why something was done in a particular way, to not be shy to leave comments asking for clarification. Reviewing others' work is a fantastic way to learn. At a lower level, do it selfishly.

If you're aiming for a higher level, you also need to review work. If you're leading a team or above (or want to be), I assume you'll be doing a lot of reviewing of code, design docs, etc. If you're judged on the effectiveness of the team, reviews are maybe not an explicit part of some ladder doc, but they're going to be part of boosting that effectiveness.

Or just use Scala which has has a robust library ecosystem already, and everyone criticizes the BDFL for being an out of touch academic so you don't need to worry about appeals to authority.

Why do people let tweens wander a mall unattended when there are things like brewery/restaurants inside? Because it's illegal to serve them alcohol and as a social convention you know they won't.

Society works a lot better when we make the few bad actors that are out to exploit children stop, and instead expect everyone to look out for them/generally behave in prosocial ways. Things stop working when we say "why wouldn't you assume everyone around you is out to harm your kids and act accordingly?"

We can just say "actually you're not allowed to put gambling in a game targeting 7 year olds".

Unless you mean it just can't detect objects that small, my guess is we'll see things calibrate toward a lot more birds being cooked in active war zones vs drones with explosives being let through.

Because their (or their friend's) computer can't run the anticheat, but they're interested in playing with friends? My sister and mom wanted me to play Valorant with them a free years back, but apparently it needs kernel anticheat, so I just can't run it. I'm not going to buy a new computer for a game.

And the way community policing worked in the past is that the "police" (refs) could just kick or ban you. They don't need a trial system if the community doesn't want that.

There is one: universities. They're just really expensive so you can't stay there for more than a few years, and people aren't properly advised of how important the opportunity is.

Talking to a real human seems more depressing to me, especially when they're making less than $2/hour doing it, have multiple chats going all trying to hit sales targets, and they feel bad for you in the interaction. Paying for female attention is pretty bad, but not even getting the attention you paid for is just bleak. At that point go with the machine. At least it's not thinking "what the hell am I doing here?" while it's generating messages.