Thank you for pointing this connection out. It always felt a bit gross that an advertising company was leading the lobbying campaign given the industry's massive damage to teenagers mental health over the decades.
I blogged about this connection a year ago, glad to see at least one article published way too late. The Murdoch papers had their own 'let them be kids' campaign with identical talking points, and Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation also contributed.
What's weird to me is that this advertising company simply lobbied directly for what they wanted both to politicians and the public. Normally as the article mentions you'd have a cover group that's the face of movement to obscure the true intentions. God Aussie journalists are crap.
The only 'line go up' graph they have left is money invested. I'm even dubious of the questions answered graph. It looks more like a feature added to internal wiki that went up in usage. Instead it's portrayed as a measure of quality or usefulness.
The article makes them look psychopathic. Underpaying staff, layoffs, constant churn and providing poor services is 'not a flaw' and 'makes sense' because they boost profits.
This was always my pet peeve when working as a penetration tester. We'd run simple tools like this to cover the basics, but so many coworkers would blindly copy paste the issues without considering the site's context and suitability. Not to knock their skills, they'd find real vulnerabilities too. It's just that this stuff was considered beneath them, while I felt that giving a client tailored advice on little details like this is what they were looking for and shows attention to detail.
As a security conscious dev that has worked in various highly regulated spaces I want to say we really appreciate people like you, because they’re super rare
I feel you can apply this to all roles. When models passed highschool exam benchmarks, some people talked as if that made the model equivalent to a person passing highschool. I may be wrong, but I bet even an state of the art LLM couldn't complete high school. You have to do things like attending classes at the right time/place, take initiative, keep track of different classes. All of the bigger picture thinking and soft skills that aren't in a pure exam.
Improving this is what everyone's looking into now. Even larger models, context windows, adding reasoning, or something else might improve this one day.
How would LLMs ever be able to attend classes at the right time/place, assuming the classes are in-person and not remote? Seems like an odd and irrelevant criticism.
I was having multiple ESP devices from different brands running totally different firmwares all drop out randomly when I switched to a new Asus wifi router.
Came across even more 'work arounds'; No spaces in the SSID, disable IPv6 for the whole network even if the ESP ignores it. Thing is all of these settings would reboot the router and reconnect everything, so it would seemingly work until the next dropout.
I found limiting them to 802.11g instead of connecting with 'n' stopped the dropouts for good. Even now I wouldn't say that is a cure-all and that any of these other recommendations don't work, I'd guess that each AP's firmware might have different conflicts with different devices.
This one I've seen caused by N+ burst transmissions tanking the power rail, which causes acknowledgements to be dropped, which causes the esp to lower its TX rate so the TX takes longer...
Poor Grant in this article was always against the law but now has to talk as if it's a good idea.
I looked into who was pushing for this law; a personality on a Murdoch owned radio station, along with Murdoch's News corp, a TV advertising company owner, and Jonathan Haidt as mentioned in the article, who is an anti-woke anti-academia hack https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/07/why-academics-...
Feels weird and gross to me that legacy media / advertising companies are crying over kids's mental health when they've been targeting teenagers with impossible standards and negatively influencing their self image for decades.
My personal conspiracy theory is that it was done to avoid scrutiny of advertising practices. A few months before academics started publishing findings on how problematic social media ads are; unhealthy foods, gambling, alcohol, and just plain scams.
https://www.admscentre.org.au/adobservatory/
With 'kids' removed from social media, advertisers can better get away with less savoury stuff.
Well, it's also because apparently the gambling lobby donates a ton of money to whoever is in government and there's just absolutely no possible way we could stop every vacant TV spot, bus side and radio station being wall to wall sports betting advertising.
Roll out Matt Damon to talk about the potential of it!
