I live in a small town with no lights, only stop signs. Everyone yields to bicycles and no one expects them to stop at intersections. Not really relevant to the majority of places though.
I’m not sure I’ve seen unanimous agreement in an HN comment section before so that’s nice I guess.
But to address the article in a simple environment dns _just_works_. I’ve never once had an issue with bind. It’s incredibly simple and stable and easy to understand when working with within a small environment without much churn and enables other technologies to operate in an expected way because it’s the standard. ACME, kerberos, sshfp, many more are enabled by DNS. Sure maybe you can kludge some of that back together with hosts but I’d rather not just to replace one of the most stable services that exist.
DNS does start to get more complicated in massive environments but that’s just a reflection of the environment. Using ansible to manage /etc/hosts across hundreds or thousands machines with churn will not be less complicated to manage than dns.
Can someone help me understand? Why is it not enough to just be able to manually set an age on local OS user account. If unset assume adult. If set applications can use it to verify age. Require admin permissions to change. All responsibility on parents to restrict admin and set the age. No data collection. No responsibility for services beyond a simple check. It seems like an incredibly simple solution with very little compromise on either side that gets everyone 95% of their stated goals.
EDIT: Oh it seems like that’s what the CA bill does? Seems good to me. I have zero problem with age restriction if age verification goes no further than mom buys kid iPhone enters birthdate, Instagram asks phone is user 18.
The compromise is that it is either really easy to work around, effectively defeating what it is trying to do, or it becomes tightly locked down to trusted devices only, destroying the free internet.
A full answer is somewhat dependent on specific implementation details, but the simplest approach is much like the simplest way to acquire alcohol or other age-restricted product as a child: Ask someone else to act as an intermediary. Get another computer that identifies as an adult, and that isn't concerned about your age, to send the data to you.
And maybe that's a healthy way to think about it. That it doesn't matter if kids find it easy to work around. There is no child who hasn't been able to get their hands on alcohol when they want it, but perhaps the infinitesimally small amount of friction leaves many to second guess their choices? Then again, from what I see out there, just rationally explaining why alcohol might have negative consequences is enough to see that second guessing. Alcohol consumption amongst the youth has completely plummeted now that we no longer treat it as some magical taboo thing and finally started talking honestly about it. The same pattern has been observed over and over in other things with undesirable consequences for children.
Yeah there’s no getting around that kind of thing. My parents would unplug the router at night and take the power cable so i found another device in the house with the same cable and plugged it in. But my sister never did that so at least it worked for half of us.
I’m all for sane best efforts for restricting children’s access to mind warping materials online if the consequences on the overall internet are minimal which I think this does. I’m not on board with killing the internet as we know it to get from 80% of children off social media to 90%.
The problem with social media and to a lesser extent porn is addiction. If a kid had to go to a friend’s house or sneak on to their parents computer to scroll tiktok that’s already a huge step in a healthy direction.
Is it? Only around 10% of the population will develop an addiction (of any kind). About the same rate as the population who live chronic sedentary lifestyles, which comes with equally (or maybe even worse) health and social consequences. Where is the regulation that forces you to prove you are of a certain age to sit on the couch?
This seems like a lot of effort for something that impacts such a relatively small group of people — a group of people (in size) that we otherwise don't normally care about one bit. 10% of the population is marginalized time and time again. What's special about this particular case?
I would hazard a guess that much higher percentage than 10% of the population thinks that they themselves are on social media more than they’d like to be, whether thats addiction or not idk.
You’re probably right though, i don’t think 10 year olds should be on social media in any capacity. Why? Partially because they can easily get addicted sure, but also because really any amount of interaction with these platforms is bad for them because they are monstrous mind warping engagement machines.
> they are monstrous mind warping engagement machines.
No doubt kids will choose social media over cleaning their room. Would they choose social media over going outside to play, if society still allowed them to do that?
The "boob tube", so given the derogatory nickname due to the perception of much the same idea you present, may not have been able to take the warping engagement to the same extreme, but during its prime also didn't really capture the youth attention because the youth had better things to do, like disappear into the woods until nightfall. TV use has always been dominated by older people who, through things like failing health, have lost the ability to do anything better.
True addiction or not, it is worth noting that addiction doesn't happen overnight. One needs repeated exposure to develop the necessary neural pathways. This is why addiction shows up much more commonly in obviously tough environments. People use a device as an escape from their situation, which feeds the mechanisms necessary to develop an addiction. Social media is most certainly engineered to tick the "this is enjoyable" box, but that alone isn't enough to develop a problem. There needs to be something that sees someone want to use social media above all else on a regular basis and, as you point out, it is very likely that much more than 10% of the population don't actually find social media to be all that enjoyable; just more enjoyable than taking out the trash.
So, maybe we can reframe this as: All this work to continue to keep up not wanting to see kids without a metaphorical helicopter constantly over their heads as a result of an imagined boogieman that was invented in the past? Seems like a horribly misaligned effort.
> the simplest approach is much like the simplest way to acquire alcohol or other age-restricted product as a child: Ask someone else to act as an intermediary.
They can do exactly the same with other proposed solutions - ask an adult to register a social media account with their id or pass selfie-age-verification for them.
That is when the conspiracies start popping up, because a lot of people agree with you, me included.
However, you cannot make parents actually use such systems, so ignoring the obvious control this gives nation states, giving states this power might help the children of those irresponsible parents, which is the only real argument I have heard, since the effects of it are the same if the child simply had responsible parents.
Well it’s not even necessarily irresponsible parents, good luck keeping your child from going anywhere you don’t want them to go if you have internet enabled devices in your house.
In my mind you have states mandate that adult content (porn, gore) and social media services are legally required to check for the age from the OS. No other sites need to do anything. No data collection or ID verification anywhere. All responsibility on parents.
I would imagine for the zealots out there its worth it to go further and destroy the entire internet to prevent a single 14 year old from jerking it to a tiddy. And then of course the advertisers want device attestation. At least it seems California is picking a sensible middle ground.
Because many children will have parents that arent responsible and that doesnt mean they deserve to be taken advantage of by a billion dollar corporation.
I have unlimited PTO, called DTO (discretionary time off). The only downsides in my case are that since it’s not accrued hours you are not owed it on termination and we are limited to two consecutive weeks. Otherwise I have never once been denied DTO, even when I’ve had bad overlaps with my coworkers. I would guess I take somewhere around 6 weeks off per year plus holidays. A few vacations and then odd days and long weekends here and there. I’m not really sure though, I don’t think about it, I just take off when I want. It’s absolutely wonderful.
I’ve heard horror stories about unlimited equating to zero. But I’ve also heard plenty of horror stories about PTO and unpaid time off getting denied as well. There is not much for employee protections in the states.
Maybe the hate for DTO in well compensated circles like this comes from people who were already getting 6 weeks of PTO. I would imagine they’re not comparing DTO against the 4 weeks my sister has as a senior dev in a marketing firm with an extra day per year of service or the _3_ weeks my mother had at 65 working as a data analyst for a healthcare company. Or maybe my company is just a unicorn in a sea of companies abusing it with people not being able to get any time off at all.
People are talking about how it’s always busy, there’s never enough time etc. That’s true almost everywhere. The work never stops. There’s always a project, always a critical bug, always a new initiative, always the next sprint. There’s more work than could ever be done with twice the employees. Good culture just mandates that you work around peoples absence and so is fine if people are out. Likewise as a good employee you don’t abuse unlimited and take off half the year.
People have been using emacs for how many decades? Or vim and terminal? Linux DEs rarely change entirely without the ability to run old versions, with the notable exception being gnome 3 which is still divisive to this day in large part because of it. And even then it was still possible to keep your workflows with MATE, the continuation of gnome 2. Libre office just recently implemented the ribbon and you can still disable it.
Radical workflow changes with no recourse is the standard in proprietary software, not so much in FOSS.
Jokes aside: yes, I can see how it's technically possible to never experience a workflow change. But also using the same tools at work, your kids school, family you help etc. I just find not very probable.
I think GP was more talking about having your main workflows changed out from underneath you not so much never having to interface with something outside it. I haven’t had the luxury of a non windows workplace but if I worked in a Linux shop I’d be matching my home workflows. I see plenty of anecdotes on here about users who haven’t worked outside of emacs in decades. Not a probable scenario though I’ll agree with that.
I don’t see it leading anywhere but a flat earth. When no one can be trusted whoever can tell you want to hear will be who people listen to and snake oil salesmen will reign supreme. Even if he was CIA, Cronkite’s world was closer to the truth than Alex Jones’.
Many (all?) of the people using windows 7 as their only OS at this point are zealots. It’s not surprising that some would respond that way. It’s largely a group of people who will never willingly change their habits and any removal of support is an assault. There were many valid reasons to not upgrade to 10 but the rational people have given up and upgraded or migrated to Linux/mac over the past decade.
Why as their only OS? I assume many people connect their old PC to their TV and install a bunch of emulators. I suppose Linux could be an alternate solution for those machines.
A PC like this that doesn’t support Windows 10 is so outdated that even a $50 investment would get you a massive improvement.
The only reasons to keep Windows 7 are for niche SW/HW that only work on it and have no replacement, or because you want it out of principle. Neither of these are reasons to expect everyone else to bend over backwards to accommodate you.
Other than needing more RAM, all the hardware that works for Win 7 will work with Windows 10 and 11. Most software should as well.
Windows 7 drivers are compatible with windows 10 and 11 so there really isn't a reason you couldn't continue using basically any hardware after an upgrade.
I was thinking of the odd XP era PC which could run W7 but just barely. Those would be truly outdated machines with no reason to be around a livingroom.
I have netbooks which ran XP ok but W10 is a pain to run on them, or tablets with more modern Atom CPUs which ran W10 ok at the beginning but by the latest update they became close to unusable.
Yeah, I’m not sure who else would be raging about dolphin dropping support. Not talking about people who keep an extra w7 box around for legacy software which Dolphin is not.
These sort of windows users have been drawing lines in the sand at every version of windows thusfar, when push comes to shove they always fold and accept the new thing they resisted for years, declaring that to be their new line in the sand. They come up with all manner of innane cope like "every other version of windows is good", but take a step back and its obvious they're getting slow boiled. The ones dying in a hill for Windows 7 now were once dying on a hill for 2000 or XP, refusing to use 7, and in a few years they'll be dying on a hill for windows 10 or 11.
These aren't serious people. Serious people have either gotten off windows, or have made peace with sleeping with microsoft. Those clinging to the past can't bring themselves to do either, and therefore must not be taken seriously.
> These aren't serious people. Serious people have either gotten off windows, or have made peace with sleeping with microsoft.
I am one of those people. I am serious, as are most of the other people resisting updates. It's just that most of them are not technically competent enough to switch to Linux or oppose sleeping with microsoft in an effective way. I think it's very ignorant of you to not consider them serius.
I fought to keep every version of the old OS since Win98, as each version since that was worse than the one before.
I'm using Win7 now, isolated from the internet without a DNS or a valid route out. Access is via filtering proxy server from Firefox only. Fortunately Firefox uses its own proxy settings, separated from the rest of the OS. This is how I fight sleeping with microsoft.
I am prepared for the future. I know I can't win the fight. I have a Win10 ready to go, for that time when most websites stop working with FF 115. Just in case that doesn't work, I have a Linux machine with Gentoo and Firefox that I can run via VNC and then I can go back to at least WinXP. I'm using it now for Discourse forums (Discourse devs, I hope you all rot in hell!).
I never understood how devs could accept this kind of crap on their machines. You of all people should know better and fight harder. Maybe you get indoctrinated by your education buzzwords like "engagement", "metrics", "telemetry" and you can't think straight anymore?
Personally I’m happy to not have to perform that level personal due diligence for all aspects of my consumption and engagement with society and to instead pay more to reduce my risk via regulation, even if that’s less effective.
And I think that sentiment is significantly more representative of the populace outside of some edge cases around speech and vices. The vast majority of people do not want to have to investigate if their food has too much rat shit in it. They want the rat shit out of the meat or the meat not to be on the shelves.
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