I’m sorry but I’m not buying it. We’ve been sitting on top of abstractions for years.

What, you think the average engineer knows assembly? You think they know how to design gates? You think the gate designers know how to make lithography work?

How do you build a new factory, of anything? By using machines that have been built in other factories! We’ve got a highly redundant, interwoven mesh of things that rely on others things to be made. There is no “starting point” that you can trace today - all is done with something else that’s also complex.

Everyone’s got something they’d miss. For me it’s Affinity (though that’s on the way, it sounds like) and Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’s insane, but MSFS is the 800-pound gorilla; it’s not just visuals, but almost all the new stuff (like Beyond ATC) is targeting MSFS.

It’s Lemmy’s Law - within a comment depth of 2, all discussions evolve into a discussion of communism and/or anarchy.

FWIW, I have a U.K. citizenship at this point too, so my rights in the EU and the UK are the same.

EU citizen living in the UK for many, many years.

The EU would restore all the exceptions that Britain had. They might call it something else, but the advantages of having the UK back in would be too great to ignore.

And I say this as someone that regularly rolls my eyes at the inflated sense of self-worth the UK constantly displays. The UK has become the south-Italy of the north; poor infrastructure, poor governance, poor outlying areas, yet we act as if we still are owed an empire.

They’re charging but they’re burning cash by the truck load.

I’m guessing they’d need to charge north of $1000/month to get in the black.

Short answer: If you don’t know if you’re using it, you’re very likely not using it.

Npm is a package manager for node.js, a programming framework for JavaScript.

I mean, prohibition of firearms works fairly well.

Same. Just waiting on a native Linux version.

Literally not a single lick of usability improved from glass theme. Lots of elements worse. I support a handful of relatives and none of them like the change and still find the theme confusing.

That’s not quite my understanding of EEE.

• Embrace - adopt something that someone else has done
• Extend - add proprietary extensions on top of the original, quicker than the original owner can
• Extinguish - Kill the original owner off by moving quicker then either slow down or kill your own support for the product

What the AI model owners are doing seems to me just to be normal loss-leading with a view to gain market share.

They are currently selling it at a huge loss, agreed. They’ve got plenty of runway for specialised hardware prices to come down, for companies to get hooked and plugged into the ecosystem and for real value to be demonstrated.

When this happens they’ll raise prices and companies will gladly pay it.

Profit at this point is not relevant, seen from the perspective of investors.

Again, this discussion is about the EU proposal, which explicitly does not connect your ID to everything you do. In facts it’s designed exactly to ensure that sites can verify you being over a threshold age without having any other knowledge about you. Have you read the EU implementation or are you conflating it with the US proposal?

I’ll talk to my researcher.

A good watch, like a Citizen Exceed or a Casio G-Shock Square. Price/performance out of this world and will last you a lifetime.

No that isn’t why.

There is no correlation between population density and broadband speed in the west.

I think we are veering off topic. I agree that pornography can degrade all genders, not just women, and that much of what appears degrading to an observer is actually just someone’s kink (and power to them).

That said, this is a slightly different discussion to age gating.

No definitely not. Smoking at 13 is obviously worse than watching a picture of a naked person. FWIW I grew up in the Nordics which very much has a culture of nakedness (children and old and young all shower in a shared space, all naked, for example). I don’t have a concern at all about nakedness and I agree finding a bag of damp porno mags in a shed is part and parcel of growing up in your teens. No concerns from me.

Having said that, I hope you also will agree that “a couple of titties” is not what most pornography online, today, actually displays. The vast amount of pornography degrades women, and a lot of it glosses over the very real power imbalances and subsequent abuses of a lot of vulnerable people. I haven’t got a single concern with what consenting adults choose to do together - if you’d like to dress in a plastic outfit and be spanked red, go for it! And seeing naked people in communal spaces (beaches, dressing rooms) is super helpful for your development and understanding of what “normal” is (beautiful, flabby, wrinkled, brown, pink, curly and all the wonderful sizes and shapes we all are). Count me in on nakedness!!

But I do have a concern with the adult industry as a whole and I seriously doubt that a 12 year old having unfettered access to what porn today actually portrays is helpful for that person’s development.

All that said, age gating and access to pornography is clearly not the same discussion.

Age gating is a discussion that fundamentally asks “ok, if we age gate products in the real world, like alcohol and tobacco and pornography, why don’t we also age gate it online?”.

If we decided not to age gate pornography - at least “soft pornography”(hard to define, but let’s pretend that we could), I’d be all up for not also age gating this online.

But if we, as a democratic society, decide that some things should be age gated, I’m all for also attempting - indeed ensuring - that these are age gated online.

Of course there a enormous risks of age gating online - I get that showing an ID to a shop keeper is a transaction that’s very hard to log and therefore track at large - that has to be adequately handled. Here, I believe the US proposal is atrocious and an enormous violation of privacy. But, genuinely, when you read the EU implementation, I do not have the same privacy concerns. Don’t forget the EU proposal is authored by the same bodies that forced GDPR onto the world (with ALL the good that this brought for ensuring our PII was protected). The EU isn’t perfect, but largely the EU is of, by and for the people, still, and our collective democracy, with all the faults that it has, is trying to balance all these concerns appropriately. I think the current implementation achieves the right balance and I am frustrated that many who are against the EU proposal haven’t actually read it, then equate it with the US proposal, which is fundamentally different, and equate the democratic EU with the plutocratic US. Like always in the US, almost everything degrades into “how can this make the rich richer”. That is, luckily, not yet the case in the EU.

Ok, but for what it’s worth, I’m only trying to defend the EU proposal. This discussion was about the EU proposal, from the very first OP. The US proposal, such as I understand it (I haven’t looked into it that much, since I don’t live there), seems a huge privacy risk that plays into the hands of corporations. No thanks.

In the EU system, you start with a verifiable online identity system. These differ from country to country but all perform the same task: They allow you to prove who you are.

So you go to an online portal and you log in, as you. This system issues you a set of tokens, which does not hold your PII. They solely say “This person is over 18”. If you want a token to say “this person is over 13”, you need a different token. A token is a number that has been signed by the issuing authority in a way that can only be done by the issuing authority. You store these tokens, encrypted, in your age verification app.

Now IF the issuing authority stored “I issued token X to person Y” we would have a huge problem. They don’t. All they do is store “this token was issued”. If they chose to store that a specific token was issued to a specific person, they could track what sites you used the tokens at. So you have to trust your state here, just like you have to trust them not to access your phone records, or your credit card transactions or which mobile mast your phone logs on to.

You proceed to a site that requires an age gate. You are presented with QR code, which you scan with your age verification app (the one that stores the age verification tokens). This QR code contains a URL that holds the verification attempt ID (created by the gater) and your app now connects to this URL (be advised this URL is not the URL of the gater, but of a third party gating service) and sends one of your verification tokens. The third party verification service checks this with the issuing authority and confirms it is a valid token, then retires it if it is. The third party service now calls to the gater and says “this verification attempt has indeed proven their age”.

The gater then lets you proceed.

Throughout this attempt the only place that can be hacked to reveal your PII would be the issuing authority - no other services knows anything about you. What a hacker would have to do is insert code that captures the issuing of tokens and somehow grabs your PII at tha time. But what’s important to understand is that the issuing service also doesn’t know who you are, because they don’t store all your PII when they issue your tokens - they just have the required information about you from the identity service you used to log in (chiefly your age). So even if a hacker got in here, they couldn’t grab who you were, merely when you were born).

Many security experts have analysed this flow and supported it. I myself cannot see what a hacker could really do here. So, in this case, specifically for the EU system, which this post was about, I am willing to accept that the advantages of not having minors access tobacco, alcohol or age gated media far outweighs the privacy risks.

I’d love to engage in this. Before we do that, please can we be clear if we are talking about the EU system, or the USA-proposed OS-based system? Given they are not the same, the reactions to these two systems have also not been the same.