For those who downvoted without reading the link… This whole thing is satire.

The aim of this satirical campaign is to use humour to connect your personal needs for Earth’s resources with the evidence of just how much of these resources are now being claimed for the data centres running generative AI. And to make you smile.

https://savethe.ai/about/

Yup… right what I suspected! The Slippery Slope Fallacy!

Whats gonna happens when politicians realize kids are just gonna click “I’m at least [Age]”?

Many pornography work like that and can, as such, be easily bypassed. But does that mean we should drop the age restriction for access to pornography? Of course not!

Here is another example:

Murder. Murder shouldn’t be legal and it is not. However, despite this restriction, some find ways to get away with murder. Does that mean that laws against murder are useless since we cannot stop murder 100% of the time? I highly doubt it.

It is impossible for any law enforcement to prevent 100% of all crimes, but that is not justification for those law to not exist.

Either you have a toothless law, or you live in a country with Great Firewall of China.

False dilemma fallacy.

Again, I’ll refer to pornography. Many pornography work on the trust system. By your logic, that means we should drop all laws restricting access to it. However, that is absurd.

The point isn’t to stop 100% of all usage. It is simply there to reduce the usage. You are forgetting that we are talking about human beings. Beings which have a natural tendency to conform to social norms as to not be cast out of their tribe (since humans cannot survive in the wild without each other, such would be a death sentence).

This law would set the societal precedent that people need to be of a certain age to access these social media apps (as shown by scientific data, which revealed that social media usage can have many negative effects on a developing mind). This societal precedent will, hopefully, make it taboo for people bellow 16 to access social media, which will, in turn, reduce, but not outright 100% stop, underage social media usage.

???

How is restricting access behind an age requirement the same as the “Great Firewall”. Right now, as we speak, you cannot use social media until you are 13. They are just increasing that requirement to 16.

There are many many many other things that are already lock behind an age restriction and I don’t see you freaking out. Here are a few examples of things locked behind an age restriction:

• alcohol

• gambling

• cigarettes

• pornography

Media has age restrictions. Books have age restrictions, movies have age restrictions, games have age restrictions. Media has had age restrictions for a very long time and it’s high time the same standards are applied to social media.

Just because it isn’t perfect it doesn’t mean it’s useless.

Just because there is no way to stop 100% of all crime it doesn’t mean taking measures to reduce crime is futile.

There is a lot more to this than just blocking the site. It will also change social norms. Right now, if a 14 year old as social media, nobody bats an eye; but with the 16 year requirement, through all the sudden, parents aren’t too comfortable with letting their 14 year old have social media. So not only will they need to find some free VPN totally not spyware to use (and even know that that exists and how to use), they will also have to hide it from their parents, as it is no longer socially acceptable for 14 year olds to have social media.

And before you say “Kids can easily get a free VPN and hide it.” Never underestimate tech illiteracy.

just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?

As I said, Lemmy is federalized. Jumping from Twitter to BlueSky/Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy is difficult due to the network effect. The people you want to follow aren’t posting on BlueSky/Mastodon/Lemmy because there isn’t an audience there. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

However, Lemmy is federalised, that means you can change instances without loosing access to the people/content you follow. Sure, the fediverse isn’t immune to corporate takeover, but it is more resilient.

Migrating from Reddit means you loose access to all Reddit content. Migrating from .world to, I don’t know…, .ml means nothing sense you can still access .world’s content.

You need the plurality of site content

I wouldn’t say plurality. If the biggest instance only had 10% of total content, that 10% being taken over by a corp wouldn’t kill Lemmy. That 10% would be too little to perform the drawbridge strategy and so people could migrate to a different instance and access the same content.

Wait, Trump is doing what? Can you link some sources?

BlueSky isn’t decentralised yet. Right now the only thing that is decentralized is data storage. You can’t set up an independent federated instance yet. They promise they will add that feature, but it hasn’t happened yet.

a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.

Lemmy is federalized. It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance. And I don’t see how the venture capital firm could stop them… For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we should be unshitifiable. It is possible for enshitification to happen… but it is of a greater difficulty, because the other non-shit instances still exist and they are federated, thus able to access the same content.

They could try and pull up the drawbridge and de-federate from every other instance that isn’t under the control of the firm so that the content of the venture capital instances are exclusive, but for as long as they don’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we are good.

It is not to hard to imagine that, if .world where to be sold like that, half or more would jump ship. At least that’s what I hope.

Philosophy is fine and all but we can’t forget that from a practical standpoint, all this philosophizing is useless. We can’t live our day to day lives operating under the belief that the material world doesn’t exist and using The Problem Of Knowledge as a way to dismiss empirical evidence by stating that we can’t be sure if the material world even exist is impractical and useless. Remember: Philosophy is completely useless. The only value you will find in it is the development of critical thinking skills.

Just imagine if a murdered caught red handed could get away scoot free by just saying “Hey, you can prove the material world exist, therefore you can prove the victim ever existed!”

It’s the problem of knowledge all over again. Something which philosophers have been debating for centuries. But I highly doubt you have studied any of it.

That whole thing of “facts are just opinions” is nothing more than the devaluing of empirical evidence and turning observable facts into a matter of opinion, turning any and all political discussion into a shouting match where nothing ever comes of it because “it’s just my opinion”. This propaganda tactic is called “The Fire hose of Falsehood”.

I could go on and on about the nature of knowledge and the evolution of science, but I highly doubt you would care as you do not seem to know even the most basic things about The Problem of Knowledge and choose to go the self-contradictory skeptic route of “Knowledge doesn’t exist”.

Edit: I would just like to add that just because our sense are 100% reliable that doesn’t mean that everything is false.

This kinda stuff should be opt-IN, not opt-OUT. Just think of how many people don’t even know this is happening, or that there even is an opt-out.

I don’t think you understand exactly how theses machines work. The machine does not “learn”, it does not extract meaning from the tokens it receives. Here is one way to look at it

Suppose you have a sequence of symbols: ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ¹§ŋ And then were given a fragment of a sequence and asked to guess what you be the most likely symbol to follow it: ¹§ Think you could do it? I’m sure you would have no trouble solving this example. But could you make a machine that could reliably accomplish this task, regardless of the sequence of symbols and regardless of the fragment given? Let’s imagine you did manage to create such a marvellous machine.

If given a large sequence of symbols spanning multiple books of length would you say this pattern recognition machine is able to create anything original? No… Because it is simply trying to copy it’s original sequence as closely as possible.

Another question: Would this machine ever derive meaning from this symbols? No… How could it?

But what if I told you that these symbols weren’t just symbols: Unbeknownst to the machine each one of this symbols actually represents a word. Behold: ChatGPT.

This is basically the general idea behind generative AI as far as I’m aware. Please correct me if I’m wrong. This is obviously oversimplified.

No… Capitalism is when a handful of individuals own the means of production and have full authority on how they are used.

Communism is more akin to when the workers decide what to do with the means of production they operate.

You got this literally backwards.