It's not just Germany. Most of Western Europe has been trending this way since the end of the Cold War, and the roots of such thinking were there long before Hitler was even an itch in his daddy's pants. A lot of Americans seem surprised by this. But Europe isn't America, and European governments have always had a more paternalistic view of their role than American political philosophy allows for. Further, most Europeans are fine with that. Americans gasp when they see such things, but this is just the latest line of code in the old European We'll keep you all safe, comfy, and warm under the blanket of *insert European capitol here* script. European thinking sees the welfare of their people in totality. So it's not just social welfare you get from such systems... "free" healthcare, subsidized housing, schools, etc... but you also get the rest of the "protection" philosophy... that you have to protect people from themselves. Speech codes, bans on anything the government deems "extreme", they're all part of the paternalistic view that you're protecting and providing for your people. Father's job is to feed, house, and keep the kids safe. Part of that is disciplining and setting rules that they have to follow, for their own good. With a few exceptions, this is No Bueno is most of North America, but again, Europe isn't America. It has a considerably different mindset.

Did you even RTFA?

"Our analysis takes advantage of administrative data from a large, urban, public college system "

The analysts are from Columbia, a private Ivy League school. Not the students. Since they're NYC based, the students they were studying were almost certainly from the public City University of New York system. Not at all hard to get into, and no need for "nepo baby" admissions.

There was a movie called Kill the Irishman, starring the late great Ray Stevenson, that had a similar plot point: Danny Greene borrows money from the Mob to start a restaurant. The courier tasked with delivering the cash decides to take it and buy heroin with it, re-sell it at a profit, and keep the difference for himself. Except the sellers are Feds in a honeypot scheme. The money is gone, the Mob demands Greene pay them back, he refuses, so the order goes out to "kill the Irishman".

So here's the thing: I think most websites can tell whether their content is "safe" or not, even given the varied desires of parents. And it'd take all of thirty seconds for the W3C to come up with a standardized way of indicating whether a page is intended to be adult or not. And it'd take all of an hour for Google to add something to Blink to respect a preference set somewhere, password protected of course, as to whether to show adult pages or not.

Most of the arguments would be "But can we guarantee that this type of content isn't seen as adult-only" and TBH I think the W3C could easily define it, and legislators could then basically decide whether it's worth the hassle of going beyond the W3C's recommendations. (Remember that a world wide standard for what constitutes adult material is going to be an issue anyway, to obey Australia's law as well as those of various US states a website will have to go for the most all encompassing definition to cover both. So having the W3C define something reasonable, and having nations decide whether they want to accept that, or basically create something unworkable more likely to result in their region being blocked than anything useful, would be an improvement.)

So we have a potential solution that doesn't involve the extreme "Upload your driver's license and other forms of ID and basically reveal to the world who you are and fuck anonymity just when we need it most" garbage, we just need to implement it.

The question then becomes: would Reddit support it under threat of prosecution? My guess is they would. My guess is Facebook, Reddit, X, etc, would happily mark their websites as adult-only to comply with a social-media-adults-only law. They wouldn't be happy with it, but the alternative, which blocks adults too, is worse.

Microsoft could be making a killing on ex-VMware customers if they would just improve their management tools on Hyper-V. That keeps a lot of enterprise customers away. MS's management software for VM's is barebones compared to what VMware offers. But Broadcom seems determined to dare their customers to leave. They're pretty arrogant because they're confident most of their customers will pay the bigger bill instead of jumping to a far-less feature-rich solution.

Hard disagree: LLM, sold as you're selling it, is a con. It is not a viable replacement for human beings over the long term. LLMs train on information that's created by human beings. There's zero incentive to create that content if LLMs will just gobble it up and sit between the end users and authors.

Be very clear on this: as we shift to LLMs being put in front of everything, the incentive to post answers to StackOverflow or Reddit, the incentive to post news, the incentive to post movie reviews, the incentive to blog, the incentive to write anything at all, tends to zero.

And that in turn means that, assuming this gets worse and we don't have those incentives back in place by, say, 2030, that LLMs will be based upon 2030s information.. in 2040, in 2050, etc.

That's just not sustainable or viable. It's not going to work.

And just to add insult to injury, LLMs are already being fed their own material. LLMs trawl the web looking for content, and an increasingly large amount of content is generated by LLMs. Nothing sane can come out of LLMs ingesting their own poop.

And YOU may be too short sighted to see that, but you can bet the fraudsters selling this technology are not. They will cash out eventually leaving the rest of us holding the bag.

China? China may do the same thing as well, but that's not going to mean they "beat us", it just means we'll all sink faster.

If I'm reading this correctly, this is to allow other services, eg YouTube "creators", to create their own AI slop based on Disney characters. So you can create a movie where Luke Skywalker battles Thanos with the help of Woody and Elsa using OpenAI's movie creation system. It'll be terrible, but you're now allowed to do it without suffering the wrath of the mouse. Just be warned you'll suffer the wrath of everyone else. Just Disney won't sue. Probably.

Perhaps you should look up "sarcasm" and figure out why I ended my comment in /s.

And FWIW, the current Opera has barely any relationship to the browser from 2004. It's a different code base, different people are behind it (it's a Chinese company now, no longer related in anything but corporate history to the Norwegian company, with development taking place in a variety of different countries.) Opera today is essentially another Chromium-based browser, as it's been since 2013 or so.

It's a shame, it was an innovative browser in its day. Now it's another AI slopfest.

(Original reply has disappeared for some reason, apologies if the original reply suddenly comes up)

It isn't OK for the Swiss to do it. Who is telling you that other than white supremacists?

Asylum treaties exist for a reason. And the Swiss will shoot themselves in the foot if they ban skills-based immigration as the world doesn't evenly distribute skills across it.

And, in classic fascist style, it's a dumb law that proffers a simplistic, wrong, answer to a complex question, designed to distract you from the inherent corruption of fascist leadership.

I don't think it's possible to make a less nuanced and less coherent argument than this. At best, you're telling on yourself.

I can't even figure out the mentality needed to post this comment, let alone mod it up. Even the attempt to reframe the proposal leaves the proposal as ugly and racist. And since when was invading a country by military force and imposing your own government the same thing as joining it organically, either because it has a culture you love and believe would thrive in, or because you're escaping persecution?

What a horrific mentality you guys have. What truly horrible people you are. You're not even making an attempt to understand the issues you pontificate on, you just believe the world is divided into "races" that should, for reasons you can't explain, never mix, and must always be in competition with one another.

Jesus.

It isn't OK for the Swiss to do it. Who is telling you that other than white supremacists?

Asylum treaties exist for a reason. And the Swiss will shoot themselves in the foot if they ban skills-based immigration as the world doesn't evenly distribute skills across it.

And, in classic fascist style, it's a dumb law that proffers a simplistic, wrong, answer to a complex question, designed to distract you from the inherent corruption of fascist leadership.

Yes, but unlike the $20 a month version with AI, it costs $40 a month... /s

You've completely made all of that up, even after having it explained to you that antifa just means anti-fascism. Yes, communists are antifa. So are anarchists. So are democrats. So are liberals. So are people who are merely pro-democracy. So are many people who are anti-democracy.

You've basically taken some Fox News coverage of anarchist protests where antifa signs were waved, somehow conflated communism with anarchism (maybe due to Fox News's own narrating) and then ignored the evidence of your eyes and ears after hearing so many people who aren't communists loudly proclaim they're "antifa", and decided to live in your alternative reality instead.

And the fact you uncritically accept a Fox News narrative suggests, given it's current support for an American fascist regime (big clue even if you for some reason think a gang of con-men who are scapegoating a powerless group, making a big show of treating them inhumanely, building concentration camps for them, and using the military to suppress dissent, is somehow not fascist: why would Fox News misrepresent what antifa means if they were anti-fascist?) you probably lean fa.

Think about that.

Antifa is not a group, it's a general position of being anti-fascist in thoughts and deeds. There may be groups named after antifa, just as there are groups with "conservative", "liberal", "anarchist", etc, but the concept itself is not a group. And unless you're a God-damned fascist, there is no reason to be opposed to antifa.

But you know that, hence your attempts to pretend it is a group, and then point at random anarchist groups (most of whom do not have the word in their names, but who occasionally will describe themselves as antifa because of course anarchists are anti-fascist) and pretend they are that group.

And again, like the previous idiot, how pathetic is it that the modern conservative just stupidly and without even a moment of thought repeats the same lies about terms they've been trained to hate even after having it explained what it means and how they're also wrong about terms like "woke" and "DEI"?

What went wrong with you lot? In the early 2000s, you were not this dense.