AnyOldName3

You not mentioning LLMs doesn’t mean the post you were replying to wasn’t talking about LLM-based AGI. If someone responds to an article about the obvious improbability of LLM-based AGI with a comment about the obviously make-believe genie, the only obviously make-believe genie they could be referring to is the one from the article. If they’re referring to something outside the article, there’s nothing more to suggest it’s non-LLM-based AGI than there is Robin Williams’ character from Aladdin.

AGI being possible (potentially even inevitable) doesn’t mean that AGI based on LLMs is possible, and it’s LLMs that investors have bet on. It’s been pretty obvious for a while that certain problems that LLMs have aren’t getting better as models get larger, so there are no grounds to expect that just making models larger is the answer to AGI. It’s pretty reasonable to extrapolate that to say LLM-based AGI is impossible, and that’s what the article’s discussing.

Windows permissions are more flexible than basic Unix ones. A file doesn’t just have an owner and a group, it can have individual permissions for arbitrarily many entities, so taking ownership doesn’t remove any of the permissions from anything that already had access, it just adds more. The command shown here is closest in effect to deciding you’re always going to log in as root from now on, although Windows has a way to effectively do that without modifying the ACL of every file. Either way, it’s silly, and usually people who suggest it are under the impression that XP did permissions right by not meaningfully enforcing them and not having an equivalent of a root account you can temporarily switch to, and Vista only changed things specifically to annoy people, and not to be more like Unix.

As I said, I fundamentally disagree. Even if you can make a nearly-teenager-proof website (and so far, your example has been something that most of the people I was at school with could have beaten aged thirteen), teenagers can just go to a different website, so the system is only ever as teenager-resistant as it is difficult to find a website that doesn’t care. Most vaguely competent teenagers know how to find pirate sites with illegally-hosted TV, movies and music (even if they’re not techy, one of their friends just has to tell them a URL and they can visit it). Governments have had minimal success stopping online piracy even when aided by multi-billion-dollar copyright-holding companies, so there’s no realistic reason to think they’ll have any more success stopping porn sites with non-compliant age checks.

My point is that you can’t build a completely teenager-proof system. Even if most parents uphold the most unimpeachable password discipline, someone’s going to put a password on a post-it note near their computer, and have their child see the piece of paper, or use their dog’s name despite their child having also met the family dog.

The original comment I was replying to was framing the issue as teenagers being allowed to watch porn versus no teenager ever seeing porn and maybe some freedom is sacrificed to do that, which doesn’t match the real-world debate. If freedoms are sacrificed just to make it a hassle for teenagers to see porn, that’s much less compelling whether or not you see it as a worthwhile goal.

As for what a teenager with access to their parents’ bank password would do, if they’re not a moron, they’ll realise that spending their parents’ money will leave lots of evidence (e.g. that they have extra stuff, their parents have less money than expected in their account, and there’s an unexpected purchase from The Lego Group on the bank statement), and so they’re guaranteed to end up in trouble for it. It’s not any different to a child taking banknotes from their parent’s wallet. On the other hand, using it to prove adulthood, if it was truly untraceable like adults would want, wouldn’t leave a paper trail.

• Teenagers can find out their parents’ passwords (or their friends’ parents’ passwords) if they really want to, and if things are anonymous enough not to leave a paper trail that would allow spouses to see each other’s porn usage, they’re anonymous enough to let teenagers hide that they’re using their parents’ credentials. 2FA helps, but it’s not like teenagers never see their parents’ phones.
• There’s not anything that all adults in the UK have that could be used for everyone. There’s no unified national ID or online government identity. There’s no one-size-fits-all bank login system. You’d have to build and secure tens of independent systems to cover nearly all adults.
• As I said in the post above, if it’s too much hassle for teenagers to access mainstream, legitimate porn sites, then there’s very little anyone can do to stop them accessing obscure ones that don’t care about obeying the law or can’t do so competently. If governments could stop websites from existing and providing content, there wouldn’t be any online piracy.

They consulted with MindGeek, who own Pornhub etc… They’re one of the few companies big enough to comply. It was designed to preserve their monopoly, not Meta’s. The politicians voting on it didn’t necessarily understand that, but the law had been approved by children’s charities and (a single representative of) the industry, so there’d be no reason (if you didn’t understand how technology works) to question it.

There is no possible way to actually stop teenagers accessing online porn that doesn’t require such a massive invasion of privacy that it leaves no safe way for adults to access it. To go with your adult video store analogy, it’s like if the store staff would have to accompany you home and watch you watching the porn to check there wasn’t anyone standing behind you also looking at the screen, and while they were there, they were supposed to take notes on everything they saw. Even if they had no interest in doing anything nefarious, a criminal could steal their notebook and blackmail all their customers with the details it contained, and there’d be enough proof that there wouldn’t be any way to plausibly claim the blackmailer had just made everything up.

If you want to prove someone on the Internet is a real adult and not a determined teenager, you need lots of layers. E.g. if you just ask for a photo of an ID card, that can be defeated by a photo of someone else’s ID card, and a video of a face can be defeated by a video game character (potentially even one made to resemble the person whose ID has been copied). You need to prove there’s an ID card that belongs to a real person and that it’s that person who is using it, and that’s both easier to fake than going to a store with a fake ID (if you look young, they’ll be suspicious of your ID) or Mission Impossible mask, and unlike in a store, the customer can’t see that you’re not making a copy of the ID card for later blackmail or targeted advertisements. No one would go back to a porn shop that asked for a home address and a bank statement to prove it.

Another big factor is that if there’s a physical shop supplying porn to children, the police will notice and stop it, but online, it’s really easy to make a website and fly under the radar. It’s pretty easy for sites that don’t care about the law to provide an indefinite supply of porn to children, and once that’s happening, there’s no reason to think that it’s only going to be legal porn just being supplied to the wrong people.

Overall, the risk of showing porn to children doesn’t go down very much, but the risk of showing blackmailable data to criminals and showing particularly extreme and illegal porn to children goes up by a lot. Protecting children from extreme material, e.g. videos of real necrophilia and rape, which are widely accepted to be seriously harmful, should be a higher priority than protecting a larger number from less extreme material that the evidence says is less harmful, if at all. Even if it’s taken as fact that any exposure to porn is always harmful to minors, the policies that are possible to implement in the real world can’t prevent it, just add either extra hassle or opportunities for even worse things to happen. There hasn’t been any proposal by any government with a chance of doing more good than harm.

Those photos are of Shah-era Iran, when the West was propping up (including providing weapons, training and funding to) an unpopular authoritarian that had been installed by the UK and US when the previous democratically-elected government dared to attempt to nationalise the oil industry, which was owned by BP. Under the Shah, traditional Islamic dress was outlawed, which is why everyone’s in 1970s clothes. If you disagreed with the Shah, the secret police would take you away and kill you.

Eventually, a coalition of leftists and religious leaders overthrew the Shah. The religious faction then assassinated all the prominent leftists and switched the secular authoritarian dictatorship for a theocratic authoritarian dictatorship. Under the Ayatollah, traditional Islamic dress was mandatory, which is why women in contemporary photos from Iran always have some kind of headscarf unless it’s in a news report about a protest that someone got executed for. If you disagree with the Ayatollah, the Revolutionary Guard will take you away and kill you.

So Iran’s had laws forcing women to wear only the clothes approved by a dictator both with and without help from the West.

A cheap record player or a cheap CD player were always better than a high-end cassette player. Cassettes were designed to be small at the expense of quality at a time when technology didn’t allow things to be both small and high quality, and the constraints of the medium are well within the bounds of what most people can easily hear. Once CDs and their players became cheap, tape was entirely obsolete, and didn’t have the I don’t understand Nyquist Sampling Theorem or acknowledge the existence of dust excuse that vinyl had.

Unironically, if you bing Windows API related queries rather than googling them, you’re much more likely to find a relevant manual page that answers your question clearly. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is actively worsening Windows-related queries to make Windows look bad and sell Android devices and Chromebooks. Another example is that googling msvcp140.dll not found or similar queries gives you loads of dodgy download this individual DLL here and put it in System32 and we promise we’ve not tampered with it websites instead of the page for the universal MSVC redistributable installer that’s the only supported way to get the DLL (and a bunch of other related ones) as an end user.

As for silly nomenclature, generally on Windows, API functions are much more likely to describe what they do and much less likely to be a town in Wales. If you don’t already know what fstat does, it’s much easier to guess that GetFileTime would be the right function to get a file’s last modification time than fstat, for example.

It’s cheaper, so if you’re not keen on crime, that’s a reason.

That will be in large part because of the changes to the non-dom tax rules, where (broadly speaking) you could live in the UK, but opt out of the UK’s tax system and pay tax somewhere else where there wasn’t any tax. The people who left will largely be people who weren’t paying a meaningful amount of tax anyway.

In the case of AI, even if consumers actively try and avoid products with AI, it’s difficult. There are studies showing customers are generally less likely to buy a product if it’s described as having AI features, so the overall market demand is already for consumer products to have less AI. The demand companies are catering to is from investors, who don’t need to care about whether it’s viable to sell anything until after the bubble pops.

Most software is like this, but you also don’t get to look at the source code either.

It looks like the change happened nearly a year ago, and no one’s kicked up a fuss, so either it was done properly (i.e. past contributors were contacted and consented to the licence change, and any that didn’t had their contributions replaced), or there’s a big problem once a past contributor notices.

It doesn’t make it any more legal to fork the project without going back to the last GPL3 commit, though, as any contributions after the license change have to be assumed to be covered by the new licence, so the combined work would be under an invalid licence (as the old and new licences aren’t compatible) rather than being still covered by the old licence.

Normally, I’d completely dismiss the possibility that a licence change like this could have been done properly, but Stenzek is associated with Dolphin Emulator, which did manage to pull off a switch from GPL2 to GPL3+ by emailing lots of people and replacing a lot of code.

The licence doesn’t permit derivative works, so no forks and no downstream packages.

At the moment, they’re already at risk of being removed by the government, who can make them illegal, and simultaneously at risk of being removed by payment processors, who can prevent the stores from operating. It makes no difference to the government whether they’re also the payment processor. They could remove them anyway. Having two entities with unilateral power to remove something can’t be worse than just having one of them.

They can do a really shit job of administering payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner before they end up being worse than the status quo where it’s entirely untransparent and undemocratic. Also, governments already have the power to make things they don’t like illegal, so there’s no reason to expect they’d block payments for things they’ve left legal, whereas payment processors currently block plenty of legal things.

Soldiers are supposed to question potentially-illegal orders and refuse to execute them if their commanding officer can’t give a good reason why they’re justified. Being in charge doesn’t mean you’re infallible, and there are plenty of mistakes programmers make that the compiler can detect.