palordrolap

POTS isn’t quite dead in the UK, but it’s very much on the way out. The transition is slated to be complete by the end of January 2027.

Heh. That’s also my “reason to believe”, but I was trying to get an unruly comment under control and trimmed that part.

Namely, I once took an account right back to no watch history and no likes - either that was a feature at some point or I did it manually - and still got suspiciously familiar suggestions.

There are problems with this. Firstly, people might let their kids watch videos on their “adult” accounts. YouTube’s detection would have to be incredibly fine-grained and be able to flip-flop depending on what’s being watched.

The second one is a “damned either way” kind of deal: Consider the deletion of watch history; Should it forget you’re an adult if you do that? If yes, then you have to go through a different process or watch a load of videos that are not blocked but still sufficiently adult to get your account reidentified. If not, they’re storing metadata that you implicitly requested the deletion of.

I have reason to believe that they do keep such metadata and that they may have been taking steps to hide that fact. A permanent “user is an adult” flag would blow that wide open. As such, I reckon this will be the first, “forget” option. And users will have to suck it until the algorithm works out the user is an adult again (or else never delete their watch history; something that would suit YouTube’s advertising algorithm just fine).

And those who didn’t expect this joke to be interpreted as base 3.

I dunno, some people get confused beyond 11111.

Your company will be forced to make you redundant.

This whole thing smacks of the “anyone who has a sexual proclivity I claim not to share must have all sexual proclivities I claim not to share” logic. i.e. the logic that got gay people flagged as child molesters back in the bad old days. And occasionally still today.

Such logic might actually be rooted in projection, which is a deeply disturbing thought. Deeply closeted people desperately clinging to heteronormativity and traditional gender roles because they think that if they don’t they they’ll do something abhorrent. Maybe even to someone who can’t consent. Or they already have and they desperately want to hide away from it.

Yes, for the love of all that’s holy and secular too, ban the games with apparent child sexual abuse. Children can’t consent. Leave everything else the hell alone.

I don’t even play video games with sexual themes, but I do play ones that contain 18+ violence. I assume those will be next on the chopping block.

Cataclysms notwithstanding, human-level AI is inevitable. That doesn’t have to mean that it’ll be next week, or even next century, but it will happen.

The only way it won’t is if humans are wiped out. (And even then there might be extra-terrestrials who get there where we didn’t. Human-level doesn’t have to mean invented by humans.)

That immediately makes the Internet basically free for the rich and only partially accessible for the poor. Maybe you’re OK with that, but business models like that are partly what’s wrong with the world. In fact the Internet already has this problem. This would almost certainly move the boundary between who’s relatively rich and who’s relatively poor in the wrong direction.

Also, hosting providers would immediately crank up the prices so that they get as much of that sweet page-visit money as possible ensuring the site owner doesn’t.

The prices would find a level eventually, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as low as half a cent. We’d be lucky if it was a dollar.

There’s also the question of what constitutes “a page”. What if only part of the screen refreshes? What if you refresh an existing page because it didn’t load properly, or just because? Is that a new payment?

Data caps and charges would be the “better” way to handle all this, but let anyone tell you who’s on a plan that has those, that they’re awful and the money never goes where it needs to. Good luck getting legislation changed so that some of that money goes to the sites that the data ultimately comes from.

Are they now able to criticise Kim Jong-un and the DPRK or is this still a reasonable shibboleth for detecting them?

Y’know if I was the exec of a bloodsucking electricity company, I’d be explicitly putting something in my terms and conditions that commercial AI data-centre use of my company’s supply is to be charged double or triple, and that undeclared use will be subject to heavy legal repercussions and surcharges.

There has to already be precedent for specific commercial uses of resources being treated differently from others. And if not, commercial versus non-commercial use may be a close enough precedent.

Likewise, if I’m the oil company or builder of power plants, generators and the like, I’d be putting a similar clause in.

This would then be one of those situations where desires align, however different the goals.

When you’ve been around a while, you begin to notice certain trends.

This particular trend being the one where the young, bright, ethical start-up turns into the sort of monster they originally rallied against, ensh*ttifying their product and spouting all the same reasons for it.

Signal is relatively young, bright and ethical. The cynic says “for now”.