Anyone still using Twitter? Even before the AI rage, I stopped looking at it - in part because of a certain crazy techbro, but also because of the forced log-in-to-read. I am never going to log in there again, so this is now a walled-off garden to me.
> A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission."
I understand the problem domain - some people try to exploit and take advantage of kids. That's a problem, I get it.
At the same time, I still think children should not be assumed to be idiots. I remember we oldschool people, when we were young, we played Quake at university campus (we could only play on holidays because one friend had the key to the room, it was a side room though; on saturday other students were not there, so we had a full room with about 30 computers in the 1990s era). We were about 15 years old, so granted, no more young kids. And the technology wasn't quite as advanced, so I am not saying this is 1:1 comparable. But young kids today often have smartphones. They have the internet non-stop. I don't think parental censorship works as a model here. Again, I get it that too young kids are too trusting, and there are creeps - but there is not really an alternative to having kids go through thought processes and understand the issues here. In warcraft 3, young gamers were quite competitive and good. So if they can learn to be better than older people, they will have no real difficulty understanding predators. (Again, it depends on the age; but if your kid is 6 years old, why can there only be games that are played online? Plus it is just chatting right? I remember playing games at the yahoo website, we chatted too. I don't think that was a problem per se. The website makes it sound as if everyone and everything has that problem. I don't think this is the case.)
Edit: Others pointed out the age range problem. I agree. So, which age range are we talking about? Is the age even mentioned on the website?
Edit2: Ah yes, 12 years old. Sorry but at 12 years old, I am having a hard time buying into the "predators exploit him every time". That seems to be ... strange. His son would probably object to the claim he made on the website here aka slandering - perhaps.
I have been using Linux since almost 23 years now. I don't praise it as flawless in any way, but compared to Microsoft it is a much more efficient operating system. Top 500 supercomputers also running Linux kind of hint that Linux is very good.
Despite this, Linux as ecosystem has numerous problems. The "wayland is the future" annoys me a lot. The wayland protocol was released in 2008. Now it is almost 20 years. I don't feel wayland is ever going to win a "linux desktop of the year" award. Things that work on xorg-server still do not work on wayland - and probably never will. I am not saying wayland is useless, I ran it for a while on KDE (though I actually don't use KDE, I use icewm typically), but it is just annoying how important things like GUI on Linux simply suck. In many ways Linux is kind of a server computer system, not really a desktop computer system. I use it as one, but the design philosophy is much more catering to the server or compute-work station objective.
Also, GTK ... this thing keeps on getting worse and worse with every new release. I have no idea what they are doing, but I have an old GTK2-based editor and this one consistently works better than the GTK3 or GTK4 ported version. It was a huge mistake to downgrade and nerf GTK to a gnomey-toolkit only. Don't even get me started on GNOME ...
Celebrities in general are quite dubous. See a certain actor suddenly promoting Palantir spysniffing on mankind. I decided that guy won't get a dime from me for the rest of my life - when actors suddenly become lobbyists for Evil, they need to not get any money from regular people really.
This is just normal not supporting things you disagree with. It's not a rule of thumb you can quickly use to discount an opinion. Ignoring actors is a pretty handy rule of thumb. Their main skill is repeating someone else's words and emoting. There is no reason to consider them smart, knowledgeable, informed, or competent.
The numbers are quite solid. People who don't want to accept the numbers, need to come up with an explanation why the data can not be trusted. With regard to oncogenic HPV, I think the data is very convincing. To me it was a lot more convincing than the SARS covid datapoints (e. g. the media constantly shifted; I noticed this with regard to Sweden, which had a bad early data due to barely any protection of the elderly, but lateron it still had better data than e. g. Austria which went into lockdown - so Austria had worse data points than Sweden overall. Japan or Taiwan had excellent data points, so the respective governments were much better than either Sweden or Austria. The most incompetent politicans acted in Austria during that time, replacing facts with promo and propaganda. The data points, though, were always solid. I remember I compared this about weekly and it was interesting to me when Austria suddenly surpassed Sweden negatively; the media here in Austria critisized Sweden early on, but once Sweden outperformed Austria in a better, more positive manner, suddenly the media no longer reported that. Private media simply can not be trusted.)
A lot of viruses insert themselves into your DNA, they may mess up the 3D structure, or during DNA repair result in misrepair / duplications, or simply insert somewhere and break something important. All of these are ways that can contribute to kickstarting or accelerating cancerous growth.
"HPV is most commonly spread during vaginal or anal sex. It also spreads through close skin-to-skin touching during sex"
This focuses on sex, but any virus that can be found on skin, also has a chance to be transmitted without sex just as well. Admittedly the chance here for HPV infection is much higher with regard to sex, but not non-zero otherwise. The HeLa cells also contain a HPV virus in the genome, though this was probably transmitted via sex:
"The cells are characterized to contain human papillomavirus 18 (HPV-18)"
HPV-18. I think HPV-18 may in general be more prevalent than HPV-16.
The data is IMO quite convincing. Harald zur Hausen pointed this out decades ago already; this is another data point that adds to the theory which back then he proposed was fairly new (not that viruses cause cancer, that is much older knowledge, but specifically the role of some HPV strains; Harald died about 2 years ago).
One disgust-moment I had was when AI narrated nature documentary on BBC or BBC-like channel and faked as David Attenborough. Now people may say "he got a great voice, even after he is gone we should have his voice" (he is old but not dead right now, thankfully - protect David at all costs), but I kind of changed my mind. I think AI should not fake stuff to us. So no fake-narrations either - what you see is what you get, at all times. On youtube this is now rampant; I need a minus AI version for youtube since AI just wastes my time.
Funnily enough the BBC have something of a standard when it comes to presenting foreign-language speakers through an interpreter that would have worked well here, AI or not, and that's to play the original speaker slightly before but quieter than the translation. You can hear their true voice and their intonation, but you still get the translation.
Agree with you on voices. I love Attenborough but I would strongly prefer that when he stops working or passes on we not recreate his voice or likeness with AI. It’d ruin his legacy because it’ll leave me with that feeling of disgust when I hear his voice, the exact opposite of what he’d want.
Off topic, but do you comment on reddit under the same handle?
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