Assuming it's remotely true (and there's good reason for thinking it isn't), it still means the FBI director was negligent in their choice of personal email provider, that the email provider had incompetent security, and that the government's failure to either have an Internet Czar (the post exists) or to enforce high standards on Internet services are a threat to the security of the nation (since we already know malware can cross airgaps through negligence, the DoD has been hit that way a few times). The FBI director could have copied unknown quantities of malware onto government machines through lax standards, any of which could have delivered classified information over the Internet (we know this because it has also happened to the DoD).

In short, the existence of the hack is a minor concern relative to every single implication that hack has.

Addiction is neurological, not chemical. Addiction is the consequence of the rewards centre of the brain becoming dependent on stimulation and that can be from anything.

Do try to make an effort.

Doesn't have to be a credit card. A class III user digital certificate requires a verification firm be certain of a person's identity through multiple proofs. If an age verification service issued such a certificate, but anonymised the name the certificate was issued to to the user's selected screen name, you now have a digital ID that proves your age and optionally can be used for encryption purposes to ensure your account is only reachable from devices you authorise.

And those come with warnings, legal penalties on vendors who sell to known addicts or children, legal penalties for abusers, financial penalties to abusers, etc. There are cars which have their own breathalisers.

So, no, society has said that the responsibility is distributed. Which is correct.

It is possible to verify age to the same degree (or better) than any "age verification service" without any sort of privacy invasion.

A six digit UID is not one that could be remotely considered "old".

*goes off grumbling and looks for anyone he can shout at to get off his lawn.

It is legitimate for any service that constitutes a "common carrier" to be free of consequences for what it carries. But Meta do not claim to be a "common carrier", and that changes the nature of the playing field substantially. As soon as a service can inspect messages and moderate, it is no longer eligible to claim that it is not responsible for what it carries.

Your counter-argument holds some merit, but runs into two problems.

First, society deems any service that monitors to be liable. That may well be unreasonable at the volumes involved, but that's irrelevant. Meta chose to monitor, knowing that this made it liable in the eyes of society. There are, of course, good reasons for that - mostly, society is sick and twisted, and criminality is encouraged as a "good thing" and "sticking it to the man". This is a very good reason to monitor. But Meta chose to have an obscenely large customer base (it didn't need to), Meta chose to monitor (it is quite capable of parking itself in a country where this isn't an obligation), and Meta chose to make the service addictive (which is a good way of encouraging criminals onto the scene, as addicts are easy prey).

Second, Meta has known there's been a problem for a very long time (depression and suicides by human moderators is a serious problem Meta has been facing for many years at this point). Meta elected to sweep the problem under the rug and create the illusion of doing something by using AI. If a serivce knows there's a problem but does nothing, and in particular a very cheap form of nothing, then one must consider the possibility said service is not solving said problem because there's more money to be made by having the abusers there than by removing them.

Can one block every criminal action? Probably not, which means that that's the wrong problem to solve. Intelligent, rational, people do not try to solve actually impossible problems. Rather, they change the problems into ones that are quite easy. This is very standard lateral thinking and anyone over the age of 10 who has not been trained in lateral thinking should sue their school for incompetence.

I have Google Maps and Apple Maps next to each other on my iPhone. I really tried to give Apple a shot but it has always been a sub-par experience for me. And I already highly detest ads (goodbye iTunes). This has to stop. Like forcing an iOS upgrade that throttles my phone to being far less usable than before, while I am simultaneously budgeting to buy the highest end Mac hardware I can, before rampocalypse, is so frustrating. And you know what? I am finding my M2 Max MBP and iPhone 11 Pro Max are.. maybe.. enough. I did buy AirPods Pro but you know what? I hate em and will likely spend more time on over the ear headphones. If you want to kill the excitement, just keep on shitting everything up, Apple.

Huh. I thought it was because the AI kept sending him out to go make it a cup of tea whilst it ran the company.

Retire it. It is a product with so many defects that it is not meaningfully salvageable.

I have worked with game designers, have been a translator, and am a developer. I have been a professional translator and had a friend who only did game translation. Yes I know designers hate AI and I understand it. I translated patents, corporate docs, scientific papers, manga, etc. Translation business has probably gone poof by now due to AI. But.. manga translation is actually really hard. Not only did the margins shrink to impossible due to lack of interest / budget for quality, it is also like translating film subtitles and sometimes even required historical research.

These days, I use Claude to check my Japanese before sending and sometimes to figure out obtuse emails sometimes. My written Japanese has improved. Claude is really good but I wouldn't use it for a final production film subtitle, game, or manga. For this purpose though, it would be amazingly fantastic as the sheer volume and the purpose of research means nobody overseas would be able to ever grasp a fraction of it or translate it all manually. As noted in the Ars Technica article: “Famitsu alone is over 1,900 issues, each with [a hundred-plus] pages,” journalist and author Felipe Pepe noted. “That’s one magazine from one country. [Human translation] would be ideal, but it’s impossible.”

I skimmed the GPL'd code, after 1500 lines got tired and got Claude to quickly scan it. It sounds like a really cool scanned document viewer with side translation viewer, but is not a translator at all. The guy in TFA apparently used some of the project's funds for translation of the scanned magazines which he mentioned were like $1 per issue which honestly, it is like 1000x cheaper than a human. No human could ever do it unless it was their lifelong hobby maybe. But, there must have been a lot of issues so I guess he racked up some charges and AI haters gunned him down, apparently.

If you really were learning Japanese (like I did long ago) you might try all kinds of scanning, OCR, online and offline dictionaries, and still not understand everything due to made-up fantasy words. You might have to corral some Japanese gamers to answer questions you cannot figure out. So this is not as good as having a Japanese otaku next to you but still pretty great and you could improve the translations too, couldn't you?

It looks like Nichols who hates anything AI deleted his post, and the person who spent tokens to translate is paying back to the project with his own money. And he made a GPL'd viewer which sounds nice. So it sounds like in the end, we have butt-hurt and afraid people, one honestly kind-hearted guy, some new OSS software, a free archive at archive.org, and a lot of translations this guy paid for. Hopefully other people might contribute translations either automated or not, so that people do not *at home* each pay for tokens to just translate their own copies of magazines that could have been just translated once and posted on the archive. I have no idea about copyright though I think one was from 1992. Nobody mentioned anything about that and if it is for historical research it sounds like fair use..

Okay enough searching.. way to get us excited. Apparently it is not done yet or at least no photos are shown of the finished building just a crane outside (off a LInkedIn page) and something being set up in the DC Hall (on the Astoria progress site) which is otherwise empty. The Interconnect site shows a cool photo of the European project so I guess we can imagine, it looks like a big substation..

Okay maybe they are talking about the DC Converter Hall mentioned on
https://chpexpress.com/ ? Seriously Google gemini overview is giving more interesting info. ..

The DC Hall is a key component of the Main Converter Building at the TDI CHPExpress Astoria HVDC Converter Station. Part of the 31-45 20th Avenue facility in Queens, it houses equipment for converting high-voltage direct current (HVDC) to high-voltage alternating current (HVAC). The station, including the DC Hall, is designed with GridLink Interconnector HVDC technology to efficiently transfer power.

TDI CHPExpress doc https://chpexpress.com/wp-cont...
GridLink https://gridlinkinterconnector...
note this site shows UK and France hall schematics

Function: The DC Hall, often part of the larger Valve Hall/Reactor Hall complex, is essential for the conversion process.
Location: Located within the Astoria Converter Station, a 2-story building (69 feet high) in TDI CHPExpress Queens.
Project Context: The station is part of the TDI CHPExpress Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE) project, designed to convert renewable energy for NYC.
Status: The converter station is in the final stages of construction, with installation of high-voltage equipment underway as of early 2026.
Design: The structure is part of an TDI CHPExpress Electrical Generation (Occupancy Group F-1) facility.
Technology: Uses YouTube Voltage Source Converter (VSC) technology provided by Hitachi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The www.northsea-link.com converter station is crucial for connecting the 525 kV DC transmission lines from Quebec to the New York ISO grid.