I frequently see comments which would have made sense in the past (e.g. early 2000th) but kinda aren't fully reflecting reality anymore
it's as if humans have a tendency to make up their mind/world view in their younger years and then tend to kinda stick with it/only change it slowly as long as no big live changing events happen
> Age verification at the OS level makes no sense to me.
it's the only form of "age verification" which can be done in a somewhat privacy respecting way (as in at most leak the age)
the idea is to "bounce back" the "is old enough" decision to parent controls and let the parent choose (the Californian law doesn't quite do that perfectly, but goes into that direction)
and if you sell what is more or less a general purpose compute/internet access device with OS (which I do include phones into) I think it's very reasonable to either sell it to adults only (with a disclaimer it's "not for children") or include
proper parent controls
> Most households aren't going to have a separate device for every family member
in current times in the west it is very very common for many devices to be for one person only. Especially phones, or at least have different (OS) accounts.
but again this comes back to "parent controls", weather that is for a child (OS) account or a way to switch from a child profile to a adult profile doesn't matter
but in the end, the point of such laws should be to give parents tools to parent. As well as handling the case of parent acting in neglect by inaction. But if a parent intentional decides to give their children a device with their profile because they think it's fine than that should be their choice and responsibility.
> Likewise, people generally won't create a separate account for every potential user.
where it was possible I have not seen it not used, weather it's on a switch, gaming console or PC. It is the most convenient way of automatically separates logins, browsing history, game safes etc.
and the law als isn't made for that shared computer in the living room (through it will apply there). It's more about the devices children might use unsupervised, e.g. their phone.
What is wrong with parental controls AND parenting?
Nothing. This has never been about protection of children. It is tracking real identity from every source to every destination otherwise known as user-tracking. If this was about protecting children they would require an RTA header on all adult and user-generated content sites and require the most common user agents to look for that header if parental controls are enabled. No tracking, no uploading anything. [1] Sufficient for small children which is more than we have now or will ever have thanks to corporate greed and lobbying.
That's why Meta paid for these os-based age identification laws[1], shifting the responsibility from itself onto the app stores. I agree it's probably preferable to do it on device instead of every website implementing an id check through shady as fuck[2] third parties like Persona. This whole thing is just such a mess though, people rightfully distrust everybody involved, all these bought and paid-for politicians. All of a sudden we have the same laws popping up all over the place, US, UK, Australia, Brazil, ... Nobody, not a single person involved gives a fuck about child safety. It's different billion dollar lobbies fighting amongst each other, each with different monetary incentives.
You know what they should do? They should scrap it all, no more "child safety" laws until we kicked money out of politics. Western liberal democracy is in a corruption and legitimacy crisis, this is just it's latest symptom.
I read the article as a way for AI to check, classify and potentially partial fix the alerts you see when logging-in in the morning.
And for many alerts you need to look at other events around it to properly classify and partially solve them. Due to that you need to give the AI more then just the alerts.
Through I do see a risk similar to wrongly tuned alerts:
Not everything which resolves by itself and can be ignored _in this moment_ is a non issue. It's e.g. pretty common that a system with same rare ignoble warns/errs falls completely flat, when on-boarding a lot of users, introducing a new high load feature, etc. due the exactly the things which you could fully ignore before hand.
1. require functioning parent controls (here its also worth considering the abuse of parent controls). A problem here is the absence of a proper competing market of (phone) operating systems...
2. use parent controls to "anchor"/set the age/age category. I.e. NOT age verification, just age indication.
3. propagate them similar but not the same as with the Californian law, where possible do the decision before starting a program/fully loading the website etc. (1)
4. allow exception to be set (incl. per "origin" i.e. app, but also sub app e.g. browser:<domain>), it's a parenting tool not a state enforced
5. make it explicitly a non goal for this to be "hard to hack" or anything like that, it's a parenting tool not a banking tool. Proper trust management in a parent child relationship still matters and replacing it with "technology" is unlikely to end up well.
6. where possible leave the decision to the parent controls
7. Age categories are geographically/standard/age scoped, for most apps/site they only have one age gate and can just list them, potentially with content group hints, e.g. `us:pg:13,horror;de:fsk:12,horror` if the the user is in idk. uk the parent controls can make the decision, which might involve parent settings. E.g. a German parent probably wants to treat `us:pg:13,violence` as 14+ and very conservative people in the US want to treat `de:fsk:12,non-erotic-nudity` as 16+. For apps which serve content on a feed it's more shitty as they really want to be given the age gate instead of providing the contents age on access. This doesn't mean that they can't check the age gate for every peace of content "when serving it" (pitching back control to the parents controls) but still need a general age category, which will leak parent controls country, most times that will happen anyway by IP country of origin. So should work?
8. IP country of origin != age gate law which should apply. While legally not fully wrong to treat the same parents would be very surprised if their parent control allow/forbid things when they are on a holiday trip or because their child connected to a VPN tunneled hot spot... This loops back to 6. to give the decisions to the parent controls instead of the app/site/service.
9. criminal liability for intentional miss-classification of age gates (the "intentional" part matter a lot here).
If you are found personally responsible for tax evasion >1e6€ then the minimal penalty is prison sentence without parole option. This is true for many EU countries including Italy. Idk. about the max. prison length in Italy for this but e.g. where I live in the EU you are likely looking at ~15 years for 1e9€ tax evasion.
The reason executives commonly avoid such penalties is because they avoid being found personally liable by claiming they didn't known, did misunderstood the situation, where deceived by others etc.
Through it should be noted that this case is a bit unusual and complicated.
The tax dispute itself isn't as simple as Amazone directly having avoided paying their own taxes. And the case of missing taxes has already been settled. This new current investigations are criminal investigation (i.e. the failure of paying taxes is assumed to have been intentional instead of a booking error) and seem to be more targeting executives for having committed crimes (instead of targeting Amazone the company).
Or in other words, Italian prosecutors are feed up US companies not caring for EU law and no one being hold liable.
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(1): Without option to have it replaced with long time parole.
> The reason executives commonly avoid such penalties is because they avoid being found personally liable by claiming they didn't known, did misunderstood the situation, where deceived by others etc.
In the US, Section 302 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act exists literally to avoid this: the CEO and CFO have to personally sign filings so they cannot "not know" about financial disclosure content and have plausible deniability. While it only applies to public companies, the model seems reasonable to solve this case too.
"not know" was oversimplified from me, technically such things exist in many countries, most likely also Italy.
But this comes back to how thinks always tend to be more complicate then "clean cut direct tax avoidance".
E.g. here the case isn't as simple as Amazone directly avoiding tax. But them instead to quote:
> Amazon's algorithm and operating models enabled the sale in Italy of goods from tens of thousands of non‑EU sellers - mostly Chinese - without disclosing their identity, helping them avoid paying value‑added tax (VAT)
I.e. Amazon is seen responsible for acting with sever levels of negligence with suspicion of intentionally enabling/supporting tax evasion to profit from it. (And honestly given the level of fraudulent-looking things Amazone allows vendors since a very long time, there is likely some truth to the "intentional supporting malicious actions" part.).
And in turn executives don't claim exactly "they didn't know". They claim they did know and started actions to fix the issue but it the actions failed so you tried other actions and if asked why no bigger actions are tried they claim it didn't look like it was "that" big of a problem through they now realize that was wrong.
The end effect is still the same they doge responsibility as-if they could just claim they didn't know, just with extra steps. Instead of "didn't know" I probably should have used "they claimed incompetence" (and external factors outside of their control) or similar.
but also overlaps with other laws, e.g. wrt. failing to act in due diligence
(other laws) like you are legally required to act with due-diligence, as CFO this inherently means knowing about the finances of the company so even if you claim you didn't know it's not exactly changing anything as not keeping up with your due diligence still makes you as likely
> If you are found personally responsible for tax evasion >1e6€ then the minimal penalty is prison sentence without parole option. This is true for many EU countries including Italy. Idk. about the max. prison length in Italy for this but e.g. where I live in the EU you are likely looking at ~15 years for 1e9€ tax evasion.
There's o EU wide tax law, so that statement is misleading at best and there's many places where that's false. You're spreading misinformation.
> The reason executives commonly avoid such penalties is because they avoid being found personally liable by claiming they didn't known, did misunderstood the situation, where deceived by others etc.
Misinformation again. This blanket statement in just false. Again, because there is no EU-wide law. It's up to the countries and they handle it very differently.
AI can do a grate job for grammar, spell and formulation checking/fixing without changing any content. I.e. just adding as a fancy version of extended spell checking.
While I do currently not use it like that there shouldn't be any reason to ban it.
And tbh. given some recent comments I have been really wondering if I should use it, because either there are quite a bunch of people with lacking reading comprehension or quite a bunch of people with prejudice against people struggling with English spelling and grammar.
Either way using AI as extended spell checker does would help with getting the message through to both groups as
- it helps with spelling, grammar in ways where traditional spell checker fail hard
- it tends to recommend very easy to read sentence structure and information density
except you can nudge LLMs to use different stiles more similar to your writing
they aren't good at it but viable
and more important this is about LLMs fixing grammar, spelling and pointing out bad formulations with change recommendations. This is not about giving them pullet points and telling them to write text for you.
but spelling and grammar still isn't a good indicator for expertise, intelligence or anything like that even in an academic context
Mainly:
1. Dyslexia doesn't make you dump, just likely to misspell and a less likely to notice your misspelling.
2. When speaking about neurodivergence people mainly think about Autism or ADHD but sometimes just mean that your brain thinks in very different patters, this can make grammar hard. Especially if it's not your native language.
3. Sometimes people had shitty situations earlier in their live, leading to incorrectly learning parts of languages. This is hard to fix. But isn't really representative in any way for their expertise in any topic which isn't the given languages grammar.
4. English grammar and pronunciation to spelling mapping aren't exactly well designed. People not wanting to bother with it is not really related to intelligence, or excellence in other topics.
5. Some kinds of expertise are unrelated to general intelligence, expertise, education. So even if spelling and grammar where related to intelligence, it wouldn't be meaningful to judge expertise.
I think the grammar/spelling is just one (perhaps low-signal) sign. But a lot of these people really are not that intelligent. And not just the GlobalElite™. Think of the guy who owns the local car dealership or owns 20 laundromats in the surrounding 3 counties. These guys are not geniuses, either. They just happen to own things that make them rich.
I worked with a tech founder at one point in my life, and I once happened to get a glance at his undergrad college transcripts which were, for reasons unknown, just sitting out on his desk. It was all Ds and Cs. He barely graduated! Yet his networth was more than the combined net worth of all of his employees.
Your GPA isn't necessarily a measure of your intelligence. I graduated with a 2.01 GPA from college, because I spent most of my time learning about technology and things that interested me, and doing the bare minimum to pass my classes.
But my diploma still says "UC Berkeley" on it, just like the guys with the 3.9 GPA. And when I hang out with PhD friends' PhD friends, they just assume I'm a PhD too.
So what I'm saying is that sometimes smart people don't put a lot of effort into school.
I can't tell my kid with a straight face, "Work hard, study, get good grades in school, and focus on a good career" when I know it's fucking bullshit. And what I should be saying is "Sorry that I'm not rich and well connected--since that would have been the outsized predictor of your life success."
It is just also not an argument against their intellect either.
Just look at what they nonsense they say all the time, and how they arguments and reasoning is commonly full of hols and messy entangled problems often stump them.
Similar for many cases where it's publicly visible its very clear that their success story commonly highly relies on stuff like knowing the right people and luck of having the right think at the right time with the right supporter.
But it would be a mistake to assume that non of them are very intelligent (or that non are quite dump), that would run at risk of underestimating how dangerous they can be. Both in "clever dangerous" and "idiotic dangerous" ways.
The reason I care about this is because if you ignore the US for a moment in a lot of places the same kind of "all connections often little substance" elite exist, just with having bothered to learn to use "extra" eloquent language to the as arrogant if not even more arrogant look down on people.
Which brings us to another reason why it isn't a good indicator: In the same way that "elites" use eloquent language to differentiate them self form common people do the "elites" around the trump camp differentiate them-self by explicitly not using it.
it's maintained by companies
they have to comply with law
that they are mostly US companies doesn't exactly help either
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