> disagree that is precisely the same question as "the script at dfgjkdf.bit.ly would like to save a file, allow?" as far as the ordinary user is concerned. They have no idea if it is a good idea to allow that or not and at the moment can't take the steps to even try to figure that out.

Again, everyone is missing the point here.

It's asking for permission. It's ASKING for permission. Each and every security problem it's asking for permission.

Do you have any idea how annoying that is? Have you ever dealt with an irate marketing idiot who is furious that Firefox or Chrome is asking for permission to open a pop-up window that THEY WANT UP NO QUESTIONS ASKED NO USER INTERVENTION REQUIRED? Have you ever dealt with one that is furious a video won't autoplay and the user has to click on the video to make it play?

THEY hate that shit.

Ever wondered why every marketing website that pushes notifications now has a JS dialog on it that asks you if you want to enable notifications, when there's one built into Firefox and Chrome? It's because the marketing people want to keep asking you. If you say No, they'll ask you next time. Whereas if you say no to the one built into Firefox and Chrome, they can't ask you any more.

But that's one of the rare occasions the permissions system is working.

Basically, the status quo is: you go to bad website. Owned.

The way it should work: you go to bad website. DO you want to allow this website to track you across multiple websites? Yes/No. Do you want this website to show notifications? Do you want this website to save files on your computer? Yes/No.

By the time they've exhausted every possible way to screw you over, you've closed the window because no fucking article on how to make money buying gold is worth that amount of work. Just like people now do every day when they get a cookie banner followed by a subscription email pop up followed by a sure you want to click that close button followed by a special offer pay $1 for one month followed by a... and can't get to the content.

I cannot believe people here are ignoring how dialogs like this can deter users from browsing a shitty website, and as a result from marketing predators from forcing programmers to make them.

It's so fucking obvious, yet I'm actually being modded down over it.

> Asking for permissions at this point would be like a Toyota Corolla popping up a dialog on the dash board "Would you like to advance timing by 1.5 degrees?" while the driver is cruising along I-70. The percentage of drivers who could think about the question intelligently is small, the number of them familiar enough the current state of that specific car in terms of tune, conditions, etc without doing additional analysis no practical while operating is even smaller.

I wouldn't put "Do you want this website to be able to access the files on your computer?" (or "Do you want this website to store information that lets the website track you when you visit other websites?") in the same category as a technical engine tuning issue, no.

Also notice that if the car did that you'd think there was something weird going on. Which is exactly the same situation as you should feel when a dialog comes up from your web browser. It's fine for the web browser to automatically accept same domain session cookies. It's not fine for the web browser to just give random websites access to the file system or allow them to set permanent cookies that can be read from multiple domains.

> The problem is that is how the SaaS, Ad, CDN, Surveillance capital, guys want it!

Ironically they, for the most part, don't want the API under discussion. The people who want this API are you and I, people who do not want our data in the cloud,. They want our data in their clouds. What they do want is tracking, and you'll notice that no dialogs currently pop up every time a website sets an overly privileged cookie. We don't get the dialogs because might say no, not because we might not understand them.

Your point being what exactly?

So a desktop might be able to guess where I am. So what? Does that mean it should prompt me even when it only has an IP address to go on? (An IP address that according to every website I go to locates me literally 100 miles South of where I am?) And why does that mean I shouldn't be able to turn the requests off permanently given it's a dialog I will never say yes to?'

> re "location information" on a desktop PC, sure it's not a mobile device, but there is still a reason to geolocate it

You miss the point. Desktop PCs do not contain GPS devices. Therefore any "location" information browsers provide is generally inaccurate, often radically so. So they shouldn't even be offering the API unless they've actually given the user an interface to enter the position of the computer, and has given permission.

There are plenty of "nice to haves" that are both technically impossible on conventional desktop PCs and dangerous with privacy. You wouldn't expect the browser to give websites the ages of users (for the same reasons you say location information is useful) either, and for the exact same reasons: privacy, and while it can make an educated guess, it doesn't actually know.

> "why not just force them to ask permission?" - look at the experience you get if you turn on "prompt every time a cookie is set".

Are you just anti-privacy at this point? Because I literally explained this (literally the last sentence of my post), and you're acting as if I didn't which makes me think you don't think the problem with too many requests is that someone violating a victim's privacy is with the privacy violations.

Do you work for Facebook or something?

I don't think the attack is limited to SSD. It felt, reading TFA, that "SSD" was being used to mean "local storage", so if it had been written 10 years ago it'd have used "hard drive" and if in the 1980s, "floppy drive", I'm guessing.

I'm not. There's a sizable amount of movement towards putting basic applications on the web, such as Google Docs and Office Online. But at the time implemented they could only access "files" in the cloud and couldn't even use the local file system for caches or temporary files, needing to maintain their connection to the Internet once loaded (and giving the user little control of their own data.)

What I'm stunned by is that there's no permissions structure. A web application should be required to ask for permission to use these APIs, just as they do when using location information or something like that. (Also location APIs for desktop browsers need to have a "Never show this again for any webpage" checkbox - why the fuck is it there? There's no GPS in my PC, idiots. But... that's another subject.)

The browser makers seem to have an aversion to permission dialogs, but half the privacy invading crap could be rendered unusable to privacy violators by just forcing them to ask permission. "I just tried to load our website, and was forced to click through 100 dialogs about cookies" is not something anyone wants to hear from the CEO, even if it's the marketing team.

> Your opinions aren't facts

Your's aren't either. But mine are at least rooted in observations and logic. (Insert YouTube picture here with "serviscope_minor DESTROYED by facts and logic!" here. ;-)) Seriously though, knock it off with the "opinions" BS, you're not posting any fewer "opinions" than I am, and generally what I've said is either obvious or something I've explained the logic behind. I'm actually baffled that you felt UBI and labor pool linkage was only an opinion, for example.

> The government already makes benefits and pensions broadly livable (well just about, opinions vary as to what livable is).

Unemployment here in Florida is about $250 a week per person. The average rent is over $1,500/mo for a two bedroom apartment. So a father losing his job with a stay at home mom and kids is suddenly $500/month in the hole if the family was already poor and thrifty and had made a two bed apartment work before food, energy, vehicle usage, etc. You get some help with healthcare and food stamps can make some food ingredients free.

Both unemployment and social security (government provided pensions) have been subject to repeated cuts over the decades, and social security is only viable to live on because most elderly people own their own homes or can be supported by their families. Social security depends on the person, but a couple I know personally received $2,000 a month via SS per person. When one died, the household income cut in half.

The government does not generally want to be in either pensions or the unemployment business. When the great recession started, Florida cut unemployment benefits, putting an arbitrary $3,000 cap on it (that is, once you've had 12 weeks of $250/week, you don't get any more.) That cap has never been lifted.

So benefits are already low. Too low. It "succeeds" only because people who work try to save money for events like this, and people who are retired usually own their own homes.

> No you're sating opinions that you think are obvious facts but aren't actually facts.

Please discuss this in good faith. Simply quoting sentences out of context isn't good faith. Nor is wasting time just saying "Nuh-uh" which is what the above quoted sentence actually boils down to. You're being an asshole. Stop it.

> Same way it works with benefits, really. We as a society don't generally like people starving in the streets so we don't have a complete starvation level welfare state.

Again, good faith please. You claimed it was only an opinion (and somehow thus wrong) to state "Increasing (UBI) reduces the number of people in the labor pool". We're discussing the effects of the government facing pressure to reduce UBI when employers need more workers. You claimed, bizarrely, that "You're stating an opinion as a fact."

So the above comment pretends that we were discussing something else. Again, if you reduce UBI, then unless you seriously believe that people will say "Welp, time to go bankrupt and die", you have to accept it will increase the labor pool. People will become desperate to accept jobs they otherwise wouldn't. That's basic economics. Is economics an exact science? Of course not, but calling it "an opinion" is an absurdity.

> You explained the reasons and having read the reasons, I disagree. They apply equally to the existing benefits and yet that broadly has not happened.

And yet it's both untrue that they apply "equally" AND those benefits that supposedly will never get cut keep getting cut.

It doesn't apply equally:

- Most people see benefits as something they may have to rely upon in an emergency (Krugman's "A government is an insurance company backed by an army" quote springs to mind), so as long as the number of people claiming them is minimal, they're comfortable with them being livable.
- UBI will be a source of income that won't even make sense to many recipients, and people receiving when earning many times the UBI rate and making future decisions based upon that level of income (ie when getting mortgages etc) won't see it as a fall back they can rely upon when jobs become scarce.
- UBI's level is directly related to the size of the labor pool, no matter how much you want to call that "my opinion" or pretend we're talking about something else. Employers can and will put pressure on the government to keep it as low as possible. This is not as true (it's partially true, but not to the same extent) of pensions/social security. This is also mostly not as true of unemployment as long as unemployment is policed and those on unemployment are forced to prove they're looking for work. Governments can at least protect the unemployed from poverty while encouraging them to work.

The above points mean there isn't nearly as much pressure on governments to keep UBI rate high as there are existing benefits. The above points mean there is more pressure to keep the UBI rate low, than there are existing benefits.

- Benefits are constantly being cut. It is not possible to live on unemployment benefits in much of the US. They remain the same numeric number as they were in 2008, but are capped, and inflation has shot up. Social security is constantly under review and COLA updates occur sporadically, not automatically.

At the end of the day, you ignore the central point that I and OP originally made: UBI is, very clearly, a politically unsustainable system by design. It's designed to be killed by increasingly conservative governments, rendered useless, and by replacing existing benefits, something that will ultimately result in the complete destruction of the safety net.

You want it to not be that, I get it. Everyone loves the idea that they never have to worry about unemployment again. When I was in my twenties (and unemployed! and a Wired-reading libertarian doofus) I "invented" (that is, thought of it without anyone telling me everyone else had already thought of it) UBI as an obvious fairer way to handle income and inequality and so on. But 30 years of living in a world where recessions are greeted with layoffs, even by governments, and where the only US President to ever prioritize employment over inflation had his successor defeated by a notorious conman because "he'd be better on the economy, have you seen the price of eggs?!", makes me know that it's just not going to work. To make it work, you'd probably have to pass a constitutional amendment, have that amendment define and tie it to the cost of living, create an wholly independent unelected agency to manage it, made of people of Monk-like devotion to that system.

And... someone who ends up earning many times UBI, starts a family, buys a home using a mortgage to house it, and then loses their job, will still end up going bankrupt and on the street. So in the end, what's the point?

But that's not how it'll happen. There will be no constitutional amendment. There will be no permanent minimum. There will be no priesthood maintaining the system. It'll just replace the existing benefits, without the pressure to make sure the benefits are high enough to... not go bankrupt when qualifying for them.

> What's that got to do with UBI specifically? The government already does that with tweaks to benefits and to taxes. If you simplify benefits and taxes with UBI the government will still do it from time to time, but nothing fundamental has changed.

Finish. The. Post. It wasn't hard or complicated, I put in TWO paragraphs the issue: the first explaining why UBI levels will drop below levels capable of supporting people, the second the consequences of that.

I am stating the obvious: that the government is NOT going to set UBI to an amount people can live on permanently. That has implications. The implications follow.

> You're stating an opinion as a fact.

I'm literally stating the obvious. You think that if you reduce people's ability to live on UBI alone, they're just going to say "Welp, time to go bankrupt and die"? Please do tell, how does reducing UBI not cause more people to seek work?

> That's more likely because most of the population is irrational. Man people would rather spend money on punishment and suffering than a smaller amount on prevention with better outcomes. Such is life. But with that said welfare states are generally accepted to some degree.

Indeed. But the point is that it's another force that will push UBI down. People who work will consider it a subsidy on those that don't, and many would argue they'd be better off if their taxes were reduced and those lazy scrounging (etc) people who rely on UBI were forced to work or get higher paid jobs.

> The main difference between UBI and what we have now is you don't lose any benefits if you start taking on work so it's always a benefit financially to do so. Also, I left disabled people out of the discussion because some do require more benefits, and so UBI is not the only solution.

I'm glad you accept that it's not a panacea and that some means-tested/situational benefits will still be required, because most promoters of UBI seem to refuse to accept that. The first sentence... I'm not sure what point you're making here, that's the entire point of UBI, the question here is what happens when inevitably, for the reasons I explained, UBI gets reduced to a level nobody can live on. That's something you don't seem to think will ever happen, but instead of telling me how, and what political and economic forces would keep it at or above subsistence level, you're getting angry, replying to single sentences instead of reading the context, and just noping me to death.

Because there are no positive forces to keep UBI high. If there's something we've learned about humanity and the government and so on, it's that people prefer "low taxes" to safety nets, or can be easily manipulated into believing that, or, if push comes to shove and a government says "Well, recession coming, time to tighten our belts!", will just go along with it, rather than voting for governments that expand benefits.

To put it simply:

UBI Is unsustainable because there are more forces to keep it too low than to be high enough to be a viable replacement for benefits, which in turn means UBI means the end of the safety nets and protections against unemployment.

And if that sounds like the end goal of Silicon Valley billionaires who think taxes are some kind of attack on them, and who so far have shown little or zero respect for the people that made them billionaires, that's because it is.

There's little wrong with the central concept, it's just dumb the way it's handled.

The law should have been "IF an operating system stores an age AND an admin enters that age into the operating system for the current user, THEN, and only THEN applications are required to use it in some privacy-protected way (ie, not "What is the user's DoB?" but "Is the user under 18" IF they're displaying adult content, or else lose legal protections."

That wording would even have been FOSS compatible. No OS is forced to store an age, so no FOSS is illegal.

Instead they mandated the functionality, required it be set up (and from what I can see, no, Dad setting it up in a password protected field before giving it to his 8yo is not enough), and imposed no privacy protections whatsoever.

Absolutely stupid. Stupid enough that I don't think age verification was ever the goal here.

> What is defined as "adult content"?

Anything that might stop a young teenager who is questioning their sexuality from committing suicide.

Let's be honest, that's what it's actually about, make sure the underdesirable off themselves so "Good Christian folk" don't have to cope with their existence.

Given the reference list, I suspect not ChatGPT, but rather https://magisterium.com/

It's a bunch of text files. Code snippets and log extracts. How large can it possibly be? They could probably serve the entire thing with an older Raspberry Pi and a 32Gb microSD card. If that's outside the budget, they can save the money by firing the person who says that less than $100 worth of hardware is outside the budget.

> With UBI you get a fixed income from the government regardless of any other income you may or may not make. The idea is generally you replace a lot of the existing benefits (income support, pensions, the whole lot) which have to be applied for, administered, policed for fraud and etc with UBI, and you then bump the taxes a bit so people earning some target income basically see no net change, thereby ensuring that you don't just print money, and the overall change to tax receipts vs money spent is basically zero.

Yeah, but it sounds like GP understands the implications of that, and you don't.

The government can, and will, vary the level of income from time to time. There will always be an incentive to lower it, but almost never to increase it. Increasing it reduces the number of people in the labor pool. It also will feel victim to the current prejudice against those who do not work. If there were forces likely to result in it increasing, those forces would already be applied to, say, the minimum wage, which hasn't changed in nearly 20 years, not even to keep up with inflation.

That means anyone reliant upon UBI to live, such as those currently receiving social security/pensions, disabled people (who frequently need far more money than most to live on because of the costs of maintaining their disability) or other benefits (unemployment etc) will end up with an unlivable quantity even though they have no other sources of income.

So instead of UBI being a way to eliminate these benefits in favor of some means-test-free utopia, what it actually is is a scheme to remove benefits from those who need it most, forcing the disabled and the elderly to work, and ensuring there's little or no safety net for those who lose their jobs.

Which is probably why the Epstein class, which has never shown any signs of being "pro-great-unwashed" in the last 20 years, is so in favor of it. Introduce it, raise the cost of living, and get everyone to have enough economic anxiety they'll put up with Amazon level labor standards and Walmart level wages. If we're lucky. Now they can run their corporations the way they want.

It's fucked up. UBI is as much of a con as genAI. It's just people are so eager to see what appears to be a utopian escape route from the current system they can't see it's a trap.

No, and not just because of Betteridge, but because TFS says the only proposal involving DST is to make it permanent. That's not "ending" it.