I think I’m following what you mean. To me, though, (using your house analogy) it isn’t that your ex has a key, it’s that the government is demanding that your door remain open. Sure, it’s already off the hinges, but it’s a whole lot easier to put a door back on than to fight the government about it. It’s not currently illegal to protect your data through extreme measures, but this is the beginning of laws that make it illegal. That is why this is worth fighting over to me. What’s more, I can hate and fight against more than one thing, so it’s not a huge issue to be against this.

And sure, all this data is out there, but that isn’t true for future generations. Old data becomes stale. It just seems like such a defeatist attitude to me to cede ground on this, especially when the laws you mentioned actually being worried about would use this as precedent. It’s certainly easier to argue for an ID requirement when you have the data on millions of users lying about their age and use it as justification for a more controlled implementation.

But either way, I think I need to step away here. I feel like I understand you, I just disagree and to continue beyond this without doing more reading on the topic, laws, and trends won’t really help, I think (the last I saw for the New York law was that determining what was an adequate attempt to verify age was fell on the AG, who seemed to be leaning towards third party verification. I’m already out of date with developments there).

That’s fine, I’ll agree to disagree. Out of curiosity, what do you consider real AI to be?

I… didn’t say that? Not sure if you replied to the wrong person? But I’ll try to respond to what I can?

Oh whoops, if I did, my bad. That’s what I was understanding your comment about “it’s literally the same check we already have” to be. You’re saying there are already age checks for certain sites (and analysis of your web traffic and associated data being sold) and that this is no different, if I understand correctly. It is worth pointing out that while the California law requires no verification, the New York law potentially requires more than just a declaration of age. It’s worse elsewhere in the world.

All of that is the same thing. It is about building profiles…

Right, but you see how this is also a bad thing right? Given that the FBI has now spoken about buying this data and uses it to target people, I would think that we would all want better privacy protections, not fewer.

1. This is not exclusive to the US.

I don’t see how that should sway opinion about this being a good or a bad thing. It’s a bad thing for everyone, right?

2. I never said this is “the first step towards something >worse”.

No, I am saying that. I was saying that calling this a slippery slope doesn’t feel like it is based in the history of privacy erosion. I’d love to learn more about the original sin in all of this, but just because it isn’t the first step doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight against consolidated, government-mandated privacy violations, right?

Yes? I am sorry that protecting your privacy takes effort? I am >sure that if you pay a random sponsor on an LTT video that >they’ll claim to do everything for you? Like… I really don’t know what to tell you?

I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not complaining that it’s difficult. I’m asking why we don’t try and just fix the problem instead of letting something like this slide by because there are other, similar issues.

Can I ask you to explain your point, “age doesn’t matter, your digital footprint carries over?” You mention solutions to protect yourself from the digital footprint carry over, but this law would just make it easier to overcome those solutions.

Now instead of having to figure out the various unique patterns of accessing the internet to determine info about you, you just tell them your age (or that you’re an adult, whatever) on those systems directly.

I also think it’s a bit disingenuous to call ‘this is the first step towards something worse’ a slippery slope when that is exactly how the creeping erosion of privacy has gone in the US historically, but especially the last few decades.

You acknowledge that a lot of people don’t fully understand how to protect themselves (and offer solutions that require more money, time, and education to accomplish) and in the same breath that is why it’s okay that we make data collection easier.

I know this probably comes across as accusatory, but I really don’t mean it that way. I’m genuinely trying to understand what your perspective is.

Personally, I think that’s kind of a matter of opinion. AI is a pretty broad term.

‘Artificial intelligence’ has been around for quite a while. The headlines were grabbed by LLMs, but that’s not the only place that the investment money has gone. None of these major companies with public facing LLMs are exclusively working with them.

Huh, okay. I guess I’ll avoid going over that way. I’m hesitant to outright mute anything that I don’t immediately have a huge issue with in case it becomes a source I learn of something through.

I hear a lot of negative talk about those instances, but rarely any specifics. What’s the deal with them?

What do you mean by ‘steals’ or ‘personal’? People who buy this are willingly giving everything to Amazon by buying this.

It hurts and it takes a while (at least on my face), and it costs a fair bit depending on where you’re at… but when it finally starts kicking in, I would STILL say it’s worth it.

Feeling a bit cuntyescb’lee myself just looking at it.

Exactly! On the a.roomy.place there’s a good, non-technical breakdown on what makes the concept good and what flaws it has, but the core of it is the concept of owning your own identity. The idea of “login with Google/Facebook” significantly reduces internet freedom, this gives you a way to “login as yourself”, beyond the ownership of a company. That’s the big boon here. With the IETF lending some credence to it now, it’s a good sign that self-hosted identity for your public presence will be adopted into the mainstream and a less locked-down internet is on the horizon.

/over-enthusiastic optimism

The thing that I love about it is that you can host your own account. So if Bluesky decides that they are huge fans of fascism, you can take your account and move to a competitor, Redsky, and not lose your posts, messages, follows, etc (assuming those people also move to the new platform)

So, your account can be the same between any number of platforms, you just have to let the platform add it to their list so their crawlers can show your activity.

And, like Lemmy, you can host your own “node” (I forget what they call it. A box that can whitelist, crawl, and display accounts that people want to be visible there, similar to an instance) but you can also just host your “account” and you can bring it to whatever platform you want and people can be confident they’ve found the same person.

Projects like https://a.roomy.space/ are also super interesting. It’s sort of like how Lemmy uses and reformats the content you might see on Mastodon into a traditional forum, except Roomy can use the AT Protocol to format it into a sort of Discord concept. It’s public, but they also are working on private, self-hosted ‘rooms’ as well. There are also other projects that reportedly have managed E2E encryption for private messaging. (Edit: on this topic, ATP is very pointed at public content. Any encrypted messaging solution isn’t likely using ATP for the messaging, just for your web identity. The major thing here is having a consistent presence and login that you and your friends can follow to various platforms without issue and can’t be controlled by another entity).

I’m super not a technical nerd, so I’d have to go reread documents to give you any specifics about it as a whole. And even then, I can only really understand them to the extent that I’m not actually a developer on the protocol, so I don’t have a first-hand understanding of how it works, but the concept of it and what it seems to enable is just really exciting to me.

This would shatter my soul, lmao.

Oh that’s so amazing! I’ve been smitten with AT Protocol since I learned about it from their paper. I have such high hopes it gets more widespread.

That’s perfectly fine for people to interpret it that way, and if they’re right and Altman fires his programmers (I highly doubt this, because while he’s an idiot, he’s not stupid) they will be proven correct.

My point is that for a journalist to make the interpretation and deliver is as fact, to me, crosses a line.

It’s one thing to say, “Altman thanks programmers for their work amidst layoffs across the industry” and another thing entirely to say, “Altman says programmers time is over”. It weakens trust in journalism to make an interpretation as a journalist and deliver it to an audience as fact when it very well might not be true.

No, I’m totally with you on providing the surrounding context for a clearer picture. That would be an example of good journalism. Providing the context with the tweet is different than titling the article “[person] says that [programmer’s] time is over”. That is fully just interpreting the situation for readers and delivering it like fact. Especially with how prevalent it is for not reading beyond headlines, it’s (in my opinion) irresponsible to do something like that.

Before anyone just reads the title and doesn’t look at the tweet or article, here it is: ![Sam Altman tweet - I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by- character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took.

Thank you for getting us to this point.](https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/f397013d-66ae-4a5e-b9f9-455c99014dde.webp)

It’s a huge stretch to go from that to take from that ‘he says the time for programmers is over’. Like… there are plenty of very valid reasons to hate him or his company, why do we need journalism like this?

Control + Shift + V pastes as plain text.

How does Zen handle blocking adds? I peeked at them but didn’t see anything like uBlock in the mod list. No proton mods there either, which is a tough sell for me.

Usability looks awesome though. I’m tempted for that alone.

Edit: I just realized it’s a fork like WaterFox so it will just work. I did also learn there are some weird check ins with Google on that browser though, so maybe not the more security focused browser I’m looking for.