Ok. I get the concept that pornography doesn’t harm children. We can debate that.

But by that reckoning should we also allow children to buy guns online and have them delivered at home? Is there nothing we want to restrict online, on account that whoever is buying it might be too young?

I’m am 100% any form of checks that identify you.

But for what it is worth the European Union’s proposed framework for this legally mandates zero knowledge proofs.

The UK’s implantation sucks. Big hairy monkey balls.

If you buy alcohol at a farmer’s market, the seller has a responsibility to ensure they’re not supplying it to a child. At least in most countries.

So you would also support a child buying alcohol online on account of being given money and access to the internet?

I too have been screaming about private online since the 90s. I have an intuitive reaction that sort of mirrors yours.

But can I ask you a question?

And it’s one that I’m asking because I genuinely wish to learn from others.

Because I can’t quite see the difference and maybe there’s something I’m missing.

Why is it not government overreach to ensure pornography isn’t sold to minors in an adult video store, but government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers?

I would love your enlightened view on this so I can learn from it. Because I can’t quite see the difference.

I understand that many adults go into an adult video store and need not prove their age, because they clearly look like adults.

And so the difference here is that everyone have to prove their age online, even people that are clearly adults by how they look.

But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice. In that world I would also expect the clerk to check every purchase as they would have no other means of assessing the buyer’s age.

Or maybe you think that adult videos should be sold to everyone and it’s the very concept that pornography is restricted to minors that you disagree with. I don’t personally hold that view but then I can least understand why you would also reject online age verification.

Or maybe you think it is ineffective and won’t make a difference. That argument I most definitely agree with, but how we choose to implement a law, and whether it’s effective, is two different discussions I would posit.

Edit: I love that I’m getting downvoted for expressing a POV respectfully.

I don’t really get this.

Whether I like the UK’s act, they are free to set the laws of their land. So if foreign websites don’t want to comply, the UK is also free to order its ISPs to block the site.

Which kids will then circumvent with VPN.

And so on …

I know! The joke doesn’t really work when you know how to pronounce it.

The polite version of lmgtfy

You must be great fun a parties.

I’ve got four kids. I work 50-60 hour weeks. I travel for work. I’ve got a lawn. Yes I’ve got a fucking robot mower. One of the best buys I ever did. Anything that buys me 1.5hrs a week is worth its weight in gold.

Maybe you’re just not the target market for robot mowers.

Also, a hedgehog shredder?!

We’ve got a garden full of hedgehogs. See one at least twice a week. I run the mower during the day, twice a week. If it bumps into the smallest thing it stops. I’ve literally never ever seen a hedgehog come to harm. Do you know how these contraptions actually work?

Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.

Hire a droplet VM, pre-installed with a server OS. Log in with provided credentials. sudo apt install docker Copy/paste a docker compose file that sets up a wg-easy container. Create a peer. Take a picture of the provided QR code. Connect to the server via a wireguard app. Done.

Are they going to ban VMs?

And what you could do is to enable an LLM to use these tools and reason about their outcome. Complaining that an LLM isn’t good at adding numbers is like complaining that humans aren’t as fast as calculators when multiplying large numbers.

This is such a misguided article, sorry.

Obviously you’d be an idiot to use AI to number crunch.

But AI can be extremely useful for sentence analytics. For example, if you’re trying to classify user feedback as positive or negative and then derive categories from the masses of text and squash the text into those categories.

Google Sheets already does tonnes of this and we’re not writing articles about it.

That was partly a result of seeking explicit compatibility with Lotus, IIRC.

They’re not. They’re using this as an excuse to become paid gatekeepers of the internet as we know it. All that’s happening is that Cloudflare is using this to menuever into position where they can say “nice traffic you’ve got there - would be a shame if something happened to it”.

AI companies are crap.

What Cloudflare is doing here is also crap.

And we’re cheering it on.

In addition to that, with great respect to the hard working developers on LibreOffice, at least some of what seems like “unnecessary complexity” in Microsoft’s format is most likely just requirements LibreOffice isn’t solving or haven’t even encountered yet. You don’t get to Office’s size without having to deal with the most insane batshit crazy backcompat or compatibility issues.