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atrielienz

@ atrielienz @lemmy.world

Posts
4
Comments
793
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Student Reading Ability Spikes After Removing Tech From Class

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  • You don't write things down anymore. I very much do not have the option not to write things down. I cannot remember my ass or my elbow without writing things down. Having ADHD just be like that sometimes.

    But I'm gonna also say that a lot of it is about scrolling media that's visual instead of written. If you watch tik Tok and post photos or scroll photos instead of content where things are written and require other people to read, you get stuff like this.

    When I was a kid there was a poll about what kind of books kids liked to read. An overwhelming majority of those kids selected that they did not like to read (and this was before full fledged internet service in every home and cell phones in every pocket).

    So you're right that you don't get better at what you don't practice, but I think there's more to it than "people don't write things down anymore".

  • How much is that Ruby in the window?

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  • Priceless.

  • UK Introduces Full Social Media Ban For Under 16s - Including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.

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  • lt feels like there's two separate issues: whether children should be allowed on social media, and how age verification should be implemented.

    Let's take that at face value. There are portions of the internet that children absolutely shouldn't have access to and that varies depending on age. But since this is about social media, let's be realistic here. If it's 'bad' for everyone regardless of age it should in theory just be banned outright? Or is this subjective. Is the fediverse better than Facebook and Instagram for the average teen?

    How age verification should be implemented and how it is being "implemented'' are two very different things and the main take away there is thus far it has been implemented by people with no technical knowledge of how such a thing should be implemented, and who have a vested interest in using any such framework for surveillance of the general population. Since we cannot trust them to do one without the other there should be a third option. What's the third option? I have suggestions but people generally don't like them.

    It's perfectly reasonable to be concerned about privacy, data collection, and mission creep. Those are legitimate concerns that any age-verification scheme should address. But it doesn't follow that because some verification methods are bad, we should abandon the goal of keeping children off social media.

    The fact is I would challenge the people of Lemmy to show me where this has been implemented thus far that they do address privacy concerns (lip service doesn't count). I have yet to see a government entity the world over who has done this properly.

    People here do try to address them and brainstorm them here all the time and there are many suggestions but the fact is none of those ideas are being used because the entities implementing them are not doing it for the reasons they say they are and the suggestions directly impact their ability to use such apparatus for their true purpose.

    The fact that platforms already prohibit under-13s isn't much of an argument when everyone knows those rules are routinely ignored. If a law is unenforced and ineffective, pointing to its existence doesn't solve the problem.

    Why is that law unenforceable and what makes this law particularly more enforceable?

    You also seem to assume that age verification necessarily means handing social media companies copies of passports and driving licences. It doesn't have to. There are privacy-preserving approaches where a third party verifies age and only returns a yes/no answer. Whether those systems are good enough is a fair debate, but it's not accurate to suggest that the only option is mass identity collection by Facebook and similar companies.

    I am aware that it doesn't have to, but I am also aware that so far it has generally done that, either by providing that information to a third party for verification or by requiring the use of biometric data to do the same. For the same reason I don't want my or my kids ID being uploaded to a cloud service for verification, I also don't want my or my child's face scans being sent to entities that will face no repercussions when they fail to safeguard that information. Doesn't matter if that third party is a government service or not.

    I also don't think it's fair to characterise supporters of these measures as advocating government overreach or surveillance. Many parents simply look at the evidence around addictive design, bullying, self-harm content, and compulsive usage among children and conclude that some form of restriction is justified. They may be wrong about the solution, but they're not necessarily indifferent to privacy or civil liberties

    They do though either because they are unaware of what such measures actually entail/how enforceable they are, and think that it sounds good so it must be good, or because they are willing to sacrifice their privacy for the sake of the children possibly because they believe there's no other way. I didn't make a statement in favor of such measures without looking into it but lots of people do.

    Finally, if we accept that social media companies have failed to make their products safe for children, then regulation becomes the obvious next question. Saying that platforms should design better products doesn't tell us what to do when they don't.

    I don't think most social media companies failed so much as they did exactly what they set out to do. They want their products to be addictive and bad for you because they can keep you in that loop using their products if they do and that means they can profit off all the information they already collect about you. And they want to start their users as early and young as possible because that maximizes their ability to gather information and sell ad space.

    But further, why is it that laws prohibiting access to social media for those 13 and under are routinely ignored? If they already can't enforce the law they have, what makes this law more enforceable?

    Why don't they develope and enforce laws about parental control use? Why not limit the access parents are allowed to give their children to the internet?

    Why not educate people as a whole on internet use, parental controls, and social media literacy/ social media data collection?

    Why not use anonymized tokens instead of ID verification or facial recognition/biometric data collection?

    Why not outlaw addictive algorithms in social media full stop?

    This isn't me saying that governments shouldn't make laws to regulate social media or protect their people, including their children. It's me noting that they are going about it the way they are because they have an ulterior motive that cannot be achieved without invasive data collection that violates privacy.

  • UK Introduces Full Social Media Ban For Under 16s - Including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.

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  • A ten year old was already barred from using this social media. Generally you have to be over the age of 13 to engage with these social media platforms.

    But the big take away here is that instead of these platforms making their product not-addictive and generally safer, they will use this as an opportunity to force legislation that allows them more access to everyone's personal information (and invades everyone's privacy) because the law says they have to to enforce age verification to "protect children'. And since that data is their main product that they sell outright or sell access to for ad aggregation, and because they have proven to be incredibly bad as anonymizing and safeguarding that information, this is literally worse for everyone, especially children who's data is valuable because they don't have bad credit or other marks on their identities yet and that means their identities (if stolen and used for illegal activities) can detrimentally effect them for the rest of their lifetime.

    That's what you're advocating for when you agree with this kind of government overreach. The companies have this worked out. When your identity is stolen they give you some credit monitoring and go on operating as if nothing happened. Maybe (and that maybe is doing Atlas levels of heavy lifting here) they end up in a class action lawsuit and the people affected get $12.

    I have seen literally no ID verification law that combats this or addresses it in any way. And that's before we get to governments using this to surveil the general populace.

  • Amazon data centers used 2.5bn gallons of water in 2025

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  • Okay?

  • Nintendo's Palworld Lawsuit Is Falling Apart

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  • Ok. Palworld (a pocket monster style game like Digimon or Pokemon) released in 2024. Some people claimed it stole assets from Pokemon (or heavily plagiarized them). This has since been debunked but continues to be a bone of contention for some.

    Nintendo decided to sue for patent infringement based on game mechanics (not monster design), and apply for new patents on game mechanics like mounts/creature riding mechanics, and the ability to catch creatures to enable the lawsuit against the developer of Palworld, Pocketpair.

    This lawsuit has been ongoing for a couple of years now and in that time, Pocketpair have made changes to Palworld to further differentiate their game's mechanics from Pokemon games in order to mitigate the damages from the lawsuit.

    If you are so inclined you can read more about it here:

    https://www.ip-brief.com/blogs/nintendo-is-wrong-on-one-patent-claim-against-palworld

  • The end of uBlock Origin in Chrome is now weeks away, not months

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  • I think they mean approximate chrome users. There's about 3.8 billion of them.

    Firefox has a user base of approximately 150 million users (and that's down from 206 million in like 2024).

  • Class of AI Models Hyped as Scarily Powerful Apparently Scared the Government Too Much and Now They’re Disabled

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  • Nah they have too much income.

  • (Creating) Data that is too dirty for "AI"

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  • Why Your New Car Is Nearly Impossible to Fix (And It’s Getting Worse)

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  • I honestly think they are banking on it never having to go to court. Most people don't read contract terms, EULAs and TOS's, and for the most part all three are written in legalese so most people have a harder time understanding them. If nobody knows it's there they don't have to worry about people taking them to court over it. So they think it's better to beg forgiveness (or the court) than to ask permission (follow what few privacy laws we have).

    I think that's why people were so scandalized when Mozilla made their report about the data car companies collect on drivers and passengers and so on. A lot of car features that spy on people are marketed as safety and convenience features.

    Onstar started the whole "if you're ever in a crash or the car becomes disabled" etc thing and car companies decided that was a brilliant idea and they have been collecting data about everything they can ever since.

    About the same time they decided that the less maintenance a person could do on the vehicle the more they could make for repairs (locking in parts distribution with certified labor at dealerships). And then they realized cars that are expensive to fix and that people can't fix themselves sort of snowballed into people can (and will) just buy new cars so we can sell more cars etc etc.

    So it's all a whole interconnected plot of convenience, safety, telemetry data, data collection, and fixability leveraged against buying new cars every few years. And car companies have already proven to us again and again that they'll bet against our knowing enough to know we're being taken advantage of so they figure it's cheaper to do it this way and fight the few lawsuits that do crop up.

  • Disgraced FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Loses Appeal of 25-Year Sentence

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  • I guess this is why he's trying to get a presidential pardon.

  • Why Your New Car Is Nearly Impossible to Fix (And It’s Getting Worse)

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  • Not a lawyer. No idea, but possibly. Seems like it would be covered by some sort of clause about taking on those risks and responsibilities if you ride in or drive the car but how enforceable is that?

  • Why Your New Car Is Nearly Impossible to Fix (And It’s Getting Worse)

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  • I'd check owners manuals, and any rental policies, or bill of sale/contracts. Sometimes this may show up when the vehicle is first taken out of pre-delivery mode and never again.

  • Amazon data centers used 2.5bn gallons of water in 2025

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  • There are a lot of questions in this comments section about how data centers use water and how they are cooled.

    At least some of this information is available at resources like these:

    https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption

    https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961

    https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/

    https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water

    https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1

    https://eng.ox.ac.uk/case-studies/the-true-cost-of-water-guzzling-data-centres

    It appears they that are using both fresh/potable water and grey water where available and that not all of a data centers water consumption is to do with cooling of servers. There's also electricity generation and extraneous water usage on site.

    Amazon's AWS is at least no small portion of the internets infrastructure (30% of web infrastructure world wide). So I was cautious about whether this total was for all of their data centers or just for ones that run AI.

    I've read three articles so far reporting on this and none of them make it clear Amazon is reporting their total water usage for all their data centers world wide (I suspect it's this one), or if they specify the water usage of AI data centers.

  • Amazon data centers used 2.5bn gallons of water in 2025

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  • Google to challenge German ruling saying it is liable for AI-generated false claims

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  • Certainly. But what I mean is, anyone who gave this even a second thought upon hearing they lost in court would assume they would appeal. This isn't news so much as it's a forgone conclusion.

  • Google to challenge German ruling saying it is liable for AI-generated false claims

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  • Has there ever been a litigation that Google has lost that they didn't appeal if appeal were available?

  • The earthly limits of data centre resistance— What started out as a laughable idea – deploying data centres in space – is apparently a less ludicrous proposition these days

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  • This is why they tried to sell it before. They knew there would be outrage and they spun it as "we won't, but what if" and now they're moving to the next step of normalizing it with articles like this.

  • Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

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  • Your quotes carrot is in the wrong place for the first paragraph.