Paying to get access to data and eyeballs. Social media is about mass surveillance and influence. The customers pay the service for access to the stupid people. Always have.

It looks like it will be handled by third party verification services in Australia. You will likely provide some form of ID with age which is likely to be government id and the service will check it then inform the social media company you pass. The legislation doesn’t allow direct government involvement in running the verification service and the verification companies have to conform to privacy laws.

It is certainly a flawed system. If kids want to access things they will and there is potential for abuse. However when considering harm mitigation you need to look at the whole population.

A lot of the more extreme libertarian views on the Internet originate in the US where their “freedoms” of speech and firearms have obviously just been a distraction while they were robbed blind. They couldn’t even protect their school kids from mass shootings because they put ideology and theoretical bullshit ahead of morality, empathy and the survival of their families. I used to buy into the Internet libertarian stuff in a huge way in the days of IRC and Usenet before the mega rich tech bros moved in and turned the Internet into a shitshow of scams, mass-surveillance and brain washing. Still a big proponent of free software and agree with a lot of stuff from the EFF but the oligarchs ruined it. Now I want to burn it down. Anything to keep these nonses away from our kids is good with me.

The idea in Australia is to place the responsibility on the social media companies.

The government isnt filtering traffic or enforcing behaviour. It is fining companies if they don’t implement a form of age verification that is compliant with privacy laws.

We can’t even make these companies pay tax and obey other laws so I am not very optimistic but at least it raises awareness of the problem.

a lot less CGI than I was expecting.

Less CGI is just invisible CGI Hollywood consistently lies about the amount of visual effects used. If it is done well, as it mostly is in a movie like this, it isn’t too distracting so I don’t know why they lie about it.

We tried guys, really we did. The vibe coding was working but it was sabotaged by liberals and Canadians. The only option is to end social security and put the poor and elderly into workhouses or send them to the shower blocks.

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The MBAs are going to extract as much value as they can for themselves while they ride it to the bottom. Private equity will buy it at the bottom, sell off the profitable bits. Then IPO some hollowed out shell to clueless investors who will lose their money. The name will eventually be owned by a Chinese company that will slap it on Temu products.

Since it is BAFTA I will limit myself to a UK game. Tomb Raider with special mention for Elite. My main memories of my 3dfx card was low poly Lara, not Quake. The mix of story, setting, problem, solving and combat lives on in a lot of popular titles. And I can’t look at space sims like NMS today without thinking of Elite miraculously shoe horned into an 8bit micro.

Prosecution only happens for criminal offences here and copyright infringement would be a civil matter. I have not heard of civil actions against downloaders for years though I may be out of the loop. The notices scare people off and some ISPs might kick you off under their terms of service but they don’t take people to court.

I have never seen a copyright warning. My old, old ISP never forwarded them on principle. And now there are VPNs.

Reply that you work for Meta and Mark said it will be ok.

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Probably should point out that DeepSeek is owned by a Chinese hedge fund. They specialize in algorithmic trading. Can’t get much more capitalist than that. Very happy to see Chinese capitalists release an open source model. No doubt Altman and cronies will seek protection under the guise of national security. I guess free market competition is only good when you are not getting your arse kicked.

Awesome. More availability for the rest of us.

They do it because they can. They are squeezing every last drop out of their customers. Clueless people with roo much money won’t cancel. People who want to keep the product but are feeling the squeeze will go ad supported.

The rest were probably going to leave at any price as there is a lot more competition now and Netflix has adapted very poorly.

People either hop between services or go sailing wearing an eye patch or increasingly just so something else.

I think a lot of viewing time has been lost to social media, gaming and other alternatives. Don’t know if most people these days have the attention span for day long binges with their phones going off every few minutes and the FOMO. I can handle sitting in a room watching a movie with someone with them looking at their phone for half of it

That was obvious.

Option 1: a nation of predominantly anti-intellectual xenophobes organically discover a foreign language community and embrace it or option 2: a bunch of influencers from an existing platform are recruited to promote a competitor to a bunch of addicts looking for another fix. Social and mainstream media universally promoted the incorrect narrative.

I wish US citizens didn’t look so much to authoritarian states like Russia and China when they have old friends who they worked and faught alongside for years. These friends have been happily enjoying the benefits of social democracy despite an onslaught of anti-democratic propaganda, much of it from US citizens and their media.

Which brings me to the other narrative that pisses me off. That Chinese media are a national security threat but Meta and X are not. Lets be real. It is all the same shit. Any organized effort to manipulate mass opinion: politics disguised as religion, social media, conspiracy theories, cults etc have the potential to derail rational political debate, elevate populists and hand the keys to a generalissimo and it always leads to mass graves. Left or right doesn’t change the outcome which is shit. We all have to take some responsibility to fight back against this influence. Engage with people who are sucked into this shit and encourage them to disconnect.

I was a huge SpaceX fan from the early days so watched a lot of Musks presentations and interviews and noticed a lot of repetition and always felt he was strongly working from talking points combined with a reasonably good high level understanding of the topic.

He didn’t work as well off script and seemed to have stunted emotional development, not unlike a lot of internet age manboys raised on memes, video games and porn. It is difficult to reconcile his behaviour with an adult, father and manager of people and money. I suspect he has some seriously competent peiple around him like Shotwell who cover for his fuck ups.

IMO he probably is the kind of guy who can soak up stuff around him, turn it into a set of talking points and repeat it with the appearance of expertise. I think he may have had some cognitive decline due to age and lifestyle but I think he was a pretty competent bullshit artist in the past.

I am not an expert at anything but like many IT people discovered long ago that I can pick up most things in my general field with a bit of research. It is a dangerous mindset sometimes. There really is the feeling that with some basic undergrad math and comp sci and a weekend of googling you can understand quantum field theory and it’s totally delusional of course.

Unfortunately the fake it to you make it culture seems to have won. It doesn’t matter how crap you are, if you put yourself out there with confidence you will outcompete the quiet competent types. And when you get caught out there never seem to be consequences.

The only software I have paid for in the last couple of years are games. The licensing is still crooked but they are ephemeral entertainment so its not like they control your life.

The problem with commercial software isn’t the price. It is the lock in. They have you by the balls whether you pirate or pay so I don’t pirate as it doesn’t address my main issue with closed source software which ismt price but control. I prefer to adapt, sometimes live with less features and use free and open source.

Its hard if you have to work with others which is the whole network effect BS, everyone is on Reddit and shitter so why aren’t you. If you can work independently though you can get a lot done and have more control.

I have been using PayPal increasingly for online payments. Not sure why. I have heard old stories about PayPal but Honey seems really bad. Its basically a given that any fintech company are going to be dodgy scammers but PayPal seemed almost grown up and respectable. Guess not.