Somehow all the countries are suddenly proposing the same thing. You'd think at least one of these countries might try something different if they actually cared about the kids, like banning algorithmic feeds. Not suspicious at all.
But so has trust in government (for very good reasons). And those same unscrupulous governments are heavily influenced by the very same tech companies people are suspicious of.
Not beyond the realms of possibility that Meta etc has decided it wants government/photo ID and has convinced governments to implement it
Big tech will act inconvenienced but they will in reality benefit
Just like any attempt by a UK Gov to fix housing: they just make it worse, because that was the real aim (yes I include the latest renter's rights legislation)
I'm probably going down a conspiracy theory, but it's notable when all the Five Eyes countries seem to start talking about the same problem and pushing through legislation. The US would probably do the same if not for the constitution.
Not sure how closely you follow US news, but a majority of Americans feel that the current US administration is not all that concerned with the constitution, so that not really a blocker.
And yet you're still labeled a conspiracy theorist if you suggest that their might be ulterior motives for identity verification in the nation that arrested 12,000 people for what they posted online in 2023.
I'm actually very supportive of getting rid of screens + social media for kids. I don't the reasons I'm supportive of that bear any resemblance to the motives of the UK's political class.
Do you not see that the largest companies on the internet are also surveilling everyone and that the massive troves of data they're collecting about their registered users and even non-registered users is directly and indirectly accessible to governments around the world?
How so? If you're anti-surveillance, wouldn't you be pleased that under-16s won't be able to use the most wide-ranging and insidious surveillance platforms ever created?
There's substantial evidence for harms on young people that go beyond surveillance, but I guess we now live in a society that embraces throw them to the wolves and see which ones survive?
There are tons of products and services that are subject to regulation for children because society has concluded (wisely in most cases) that it is not always possible or effective to rely on parental discretion to prevent harm.
> You shouldn't be thinking of my children, they are fine.
Extreme individualism is in my opinion one of Western society's biggest sore spots right now but I'd like to point out one very practical issue with this approach as it relates to social media.
I can keep my kids off of social media, but social media can still harm them. Your kids can take photos and videos of my kids and post them online without anyone's consent, and use social media to bully my kids.
There is a growing body of evidence about the harms of social media on children's' mental health, particularly as it relates to bullying, and plenty of cases of suicides caused by it.
But I suppose there are other possible solutions. We could enact laws that levy more significant civil and perhaps even criminal penalties on parents whose children use social media to harass and bully. Right now, when parents are found liable for damage caused by their children, civil penalties are usually pretty modest.
If your children, who you say are fine, do something to make my children not fine, you should be willing to take full responsibility for that, right?
How is it “obviously about the kids”? Is it because they mentioned them? I would argue it will impact the kids but this isn’t being done for their benefit, it’s being done to regulate what we have access to as a whole. Slippery slope coming up!
The way this has been pushed through after countless attempts over the past decade, and push back from advising experts, does not feel like it originates from genuine concern for children. It feels like a state trying to wrestle for digital control amidst rising civil unrest.
This points get brought up in every thread about this topic, and although I agree with it completely, I feel it's the wrong point to make. They don't want to raise our children. Caring about the children is just pretense. The goal is surveillance. So this is a moot point, really.
What do they do with all that money? According to wikipedia, they had about 750 employees. That's a lot of employees for the amount of useful products they have.
How did you come to the conclusion that 750 people is a lot to build a web browser? The Chrome-adjacent teams at Google are about 4,000 people, and that doesn't even include all the people at Google providing infrastructure (e.g. servers, workplace, HR, legal etc.).
Comparing Firefox to Chromium-based browsers doesn't make much sense since these browsers don't develop their own web engine.
How did you come to the conclusion that it's not? Google being bloated is not a good justification for why Mozilla should be bloated too. Someone in the comment below suggested that Ladybird was built by about 10 people. Call me naive, but I don't think you'd need 75x number of people to work on a browser that's already established for over 2 decades.
I did not come to any conclusion. I called out a baseless claim.
A few pints about Ladybird:
* It's an awesome project, and they appear to be pretty efficient.
* Greenfield projects always move faster than big codebases that are 30 years old.
* Bigger teams always have more overhead than smaller teams.
* Ladybird only does a small fraction of the things Firefox does. It's an important fraction, but still a small one.
* The Ladybird GitHub repository has 1.3k contributors. Not sure where the number 10 comes from.
* Only part of the people at Mozilla are engineers working on Firefox. There's also management, legal, marketing, HR and all the other folks you need to run a corporation. There's also engineers working on other products, backend services and infrastructure not required by Ladybird in its current stage.
None of the points above are quantitative, so Ladybird and Firefox are also hard to compare. I personally do think the Firefox org at Mozilla is pretty efficient for what it is; not based on the points above, but rather based on having worked at Mozilla for more than six years.
If you have worked at Mozilla then clearly you are going to have a better understanding of the company than I do. But my perspective, and I believe of many others from the outside looking in, is that the company is mismanaged, focusing on the wrong things, and paying their execs way too much.
Wait why is that fine? The whole point was that ladybird is yet to enter alpha which is the very reason why it's not the correct benchmark. And you said the Chrome comparison isn't the correct one but... didn't follow it up with an actual reason.
I meant it's fine for others to want to move faster and hire more people (like Google). just replying to your sentence. it's fine for others to want things different...
About ladybird, I think it is quite a good benchmark:
- they have accomplished a task many thought impossible in the modern world
- they accomplished it while having a handful of people
- they had a fraction of resources compared to both google and Mozilla. only about a year ago they had few hundred of thousands as support money to get them started.
The engine may not be finished yet. may not be as performant as the other two. but they did a 3rd engine. and given 10% of the budget Mozilla has, they would progress much more. Ladybird Team has shown how everything about Mozilla is mismanaged and simply broken.
I am not a bot and I am not associated with this company in any way. But I am a happy user of Ente Auth as well. This AI thing they made however just gives off "we have to do something with AI or we'll be left behind" vibes.
Nothing. I was very much aware of their prospects. Well, best-case scenario I could imagine them being acquired by Google or Microsoft, that would have looked like a prettier death, to be honest. Anyway, knowing that people eventually die doesn't mean you are immune to being sad when somebody dear actually dies. Especially when they die so young and full of potential.
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