1) Bravo. This was actually a fun, enjoyable read. Thank you fellow writer.
2) Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments on this. As one of the authors, I must confess it was not my intention when I wrote that tvtropes wiki page that was ingested by that dodgy script with that weird user agent string and a bad attitude, then added to the data set that eventually made the LLM weights just right for this beautiful story to be possible. I'll be working on more wiki pages soon, so you can look up to more of my stories in the future.
The parents can already do that. Its called "parenting". The fact that they won't even though there are (non-required!) tools they could be using to do so is baffling to me.
> if the kids lie during setup, it's on the parents
Pretty much a "Yes, and?" scenario. See above.
> The arguments I've heard against it are almost all slippery-slope (e.g. "they're gonna do this first, and then add ID requirements next year, because that's what I fear will happen.")
I get where you're going, but precisely this. These things always start slow... then fast. The old adage "first they came for x, then y" is not a joke or an exaggeration. It is pretty much historic observation. I've lived long enough to know that whenever someone invokes the "think of the children" defense, there's always a catch.
I hear this and it makes me wonder if you have kids. Do you really have the ability to supervise their internet access at all times? Mine are in the next room, I check in on them regularly, but that still results in them being up to no good. Conversations on the topic are a regular thing, losing privileges as a punishment for breaking the rules is happening all the time, but they still always want to push up against the boundaries of what's allowed and what isn't.
And they're not even teenagers yet, with hormones and thirst-traps and whatever else there is to watch out for.
A little bit more control within the house would be useful - I don't want it to come in the form of anything that impacts anyone else, though. I don't need draconian laws, I just need some voluntary, owner-informed device controls that aren't completely trivial for unprivileged users to bypass.
I already responded to what you're saying in my initial comment. I'll expand for you.
> The fact that they won't even though there are (non-required!) tools they could be using to do so is baffling to me.
My parents set me up with an AOL account when we first got a computer and dial-up internet. At first, I was kind of required to go through the AOL desktop application to browse the web since that's how we connected to the dial-up. Sometimes a website would be blocked through AOL, and I'd have to have one of my parents come and sign in to allow me into it.
But once we moved onto broadband DSL, I eventually figured out I could just open Internet Explorer instead of AOL to bypass the parental controls without having to get my parents to come allow a website. Of course, a few years after that, I was secretly browsing porn... at 10 years old.
As a parent today, what non-required tools would you suggest I use to effectively filter NSFW content from the internet for my kids? Network-level methods don't work in the age of laptops and smartphones. Any on-device software you might suggest would probably be for iOS/Android or Windows, not both. And which software supports Ubuntu, or do you think I shouldn't let my kids use it? Yes, it's probably possible to lock things down eventually (for me, as an IT professional). The parents next door probably have no clue about half the stuff I'd use, and my kid's gonna end up having access to whatever their kid does. Even if everyone does everything perfectly, all it takes is a slight paradigm shift or new piece of technology to sidestep all of it-- like when my parents did their jobs setting up AOL parental controls but then switched our connection type and inadvertently broke them.
The value of this legislation isn't necessarily making parental controls technically possible. The value is standardizing and normalizing it. As someone in another comment chain brought up, you're not expected to individually coordinate with every movie theater or every liquor store, or to helicopter your kids IRL with it being your fault if someone sells them beer when you let them go out with their friends. There's a basic societal understanding that certain things aren't available to kids. The internet being "wild west" for a few decades doesn't invalidate that, imo. This isn't parents not parenting, it's adjusting the level of burden we're expecting to come with parenting to a more reasonable level.
OK, I'm going to ask a potentially-dumb question: why are we trying to stop kids who want porn from getting it? As I see it, part of parenting should be telling your children what's not good for them and why. As a kid, if I had seen a case of beer left out I wouldn't have gotten drunk because I wouldn't have wanted to. Likewise I wouldn't have gone to porn sites because I wouldn't have wanted to.
> As I see it, part of parenting should be telling your children what's not good for them and why.
We tell our kids that smoking is bad for them. It's still illegal to sell cigarettes to minors.
> As a kid, if I had seen a case of beer left out I wouldn't have gotten drunk because I wouldn't have wanted to.
Good for you, and neither would I, but that's because I'm a wet blanket (still don't drink today). Selling alcohol to kids and teenagers is still illegal.
My experience is that success with AI seems to be directly influenced by what technologies were employed. IA cannot learn further than its own context window when dealing with technologies it has not seen before (like an internally-developed framework). It does a good job on React, but it does a very poor job on a hand-rolled ORM.
For small greenfield stuff and throwaway code though, its generally very useful. For bigger projects, seems to be i tend to have more success with it mocking stuff, populating structures with test data and combing through logs to identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement when i've exhausted my tricks.
1) Bravo. This was actually a fun, enjoyable read. Thank you fellow writer.
2) Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments on this. As one of the authors, I must confess it was not my intention when I wrote that tvtropes wiki page that was ingested by that dodgy script with that weird user agent string and a bad attitude, then added to the data set that eventually made the LLM weights just right for this beautiful story to be possible. I'll be working on more wiki pages soon, so you can look up to more of my stories in the future.
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