Am I the only one that is repeatedly amused at how many smart people are just caving to making this about parents/children at all?
We've literally watched things unfold in real time out in the open in the last year I don't know how much more obvious it could be that child-protections are the bad-faith excuse the powers that be are using here. Combined with their control of broadcasting/social media, it's the very thing they're pushing narratives in lockstep over. All this to effectively tie online identities to real people. Quick and easy digital profiles/analytics on anyone, full reads on chat history assessments of idealogies/political affiliations/online activities at scale, that's all this ever was and I _know_ hackernews is smart enough to see that writing on the wall. Ofc porn sites were targeted first with legislation like this, pornography has always been a low-hanging fruit to run a smear campaign on political/idealogical dissidents. It wasn't enough, they want all platform activity in the datasets.
I can't help but feel like the longer we debate the merits of good parenting, the faster we're just going to speedrun losing the plot entirely. I think it goes without saying that no shit good parenting should be at play, but this is hardly even about that and I don't know why people take the time of day. It's become reddit-caliber discussion and everyone's just chasing the high of talking about how _they_ would parent in any given scenario, and such discussion does literally nothing to assess/respond to the realities in front of us. In case I'm not being clear, talking about how correct-parenting should be used in lieu of online verification laws is going to do literally nothing to stop this type of legislation from continually taking over. It's not like these discussions and ideas are going to get distilled into the dissent on the congressional floors that vote on these laws. It is in it's own way a slice of culture war that has permeated into the nerd-sphere.
I make this argument to neutralize the "protect the children" excuse and also delegitimize the age verification "solution" by pointing out that on-device settings are more effective and easier to implement yet rarely discussed.
There are some parents genuinely concerned with parenting. We should give them the tools to do that and thereby removing them from the discourse, then we can focus on the bad faith people that want more control. I think there are still enough well-meaning people in governments that if we popularize on-device settings, it will prevent age verification in at least a handful of countries, and that's good enough to keep the spark of the free Internet going until we figure out a more permanent solution.
> It's not like these discussions and ideas are going to get distilled into the dissent on the congressional floors that vote on these laws.
You think the idea of parents, not governments, being responsible for parenting doesn't translate well to voters? In the country founded on the idea of freedom from overreaching governance and personal responsibility?
that's not what i'm saying at all. i highlighted that that is quite literally the convenient narrative that's being used to get everyone squabbling amongst themselves. it is very clear that this is being used in bad-faith to get people to immediately side a certain way. yet here on hackernews we find dissenting viewpoints to that, rather than discussion about the entirety of it and what the real motives at play are. i am once again amused at the efficacy of the smokescreen here.
what i'm saying is these discussions around parenting have had zero impacts on preventing the passage/implementation of such legislation/policies to date despite many smart people in here understanding what's actually at stake. and it's very likely that these parenting discussions will again go on to have absolutely zero impact on preventing the continued impelmentation of id verification on platforms. these policies/legislations aren't simply being implemented because people have failed to fully thought-exercise out good/bad parenting styles enough yet in the marketplace of ideas, it's becoming a reality because we aren't collectively raising awareness of the downstream ways this legislation will be harnessed for shitty outcomes. we aren't talking about it for what it is, but instead talking about it in the way they want us to talk about it. these parenting discussion points have been beaten to death and nothing new or novel is being shared, and rather than looking straight at the wolves right here in the room with us (data brokerage & who benefits from this type of data brokerage & figuring out how to stop it) people just look at each other and get butthurt about idealogical parenting differences. it's literally a slice of the now-ever-so-common 2d culture war we're all acutely aware exists, right here on hackernews, and we're all actively participating.
The technology is the easy part, the people are the hard part. The reality is that we simply don't have thought leaders in charge anymore, there's no innovations or anything that are coming to correct course, very few if any channels even exist anymore for good ideas to flow upwards that result in good & proper solution implementations that positively preserve/protect/harden what we want the web to be. I think a lot of bright minds who could be solutioning for some of these things understand the dynamics at play even if they've never taken a huge moment to think about it. Subconsciously they are aware that becoming a person to try and steer such a big ship would require a monumental exertion that is maybe not worth it anymore. The great leaders never actively seek out leadership positions, similarly I don't think the people who could be good decision makers and influence these types of ideals coming to fruition in society actively seek out such positions. The possible mental tax of getting there is probably enormous. It is not an economic win for anyone to take up the mantle of trying to steer ships this size, it is a massive sacrifice. People who would be fit for the task probably just want to sign off at the end of the day and... have a good life and exist/be a benefit in their communities. In some ways perhaps that makes them.. unfit for carrying this torch. Perhaps there are simply too few people out there that are adequately qualified to carry this torch, we are in dire need of competent people at the helm of many fronts and we simply don't have that, that's just the real life variables at play right now.
We plebs are just driftwood floating in massive waves of nation state decision making. I don't doubt there are people who literally work at ISPs who are depressed at the state of things, depressed that theyre not allowed to take action on certain things, depressed that they see first-hand what kind of control mechanisms they're forced to implement or disallowed from implementing and more. It's got to be a trove of BS in an age of misinformation which has always been an information systems problem that humanity has implemented checks notes zero solutions for. And at the end of the day they, probably like all of us, just want to live a good and meaningful life.
That's not to say just... give up on ideals. But instead to acknowledge the realities of ideals not being enough on their own. Have some real conversations on what it would actually take to embed these types of fundamentals into a society, get comfortable with the uncomfortable realities. So much work needs to be done before new ideals can even be shared. Outreach alone to spread ideals is a massive uphill battle at this point due to conglomerate control of broadcast media and concentrated ownership of social media apps. A lot of these particular ideals require a decent understanding/background of technology in general which most people don't even have, making these things an incredibly unlikely basis for a society where these things are well-enough understood. So the circus trick here is how do you make it a digestable topic that touches the souls of many and galvanizes them to take the correct stance so that these things become embodied in the set of ideals a society values, so that legislators and whatever other proxies that are tasked with decision making give these things the resourcing or policy making attention they deserve. That's the mega hard part, which is then additionally compounded in difficulty by ... most households in our societies just never having these types of discussions make it to their TV/computer screens. Hackernews types like to call these people "normies" and tack the blame on them, but they can't seem to wrap their mind around that not everyone could or should have a deep compsci background. We should be coexisting with people of a variety of backgrounds and instead we should be looking at their "normie"-ness as a thing to account for, not blame. It would be absurd to have a "normie" expect us to be exceptional at rebuilding car engines or any other broad subset of knowledge that we haven't ourselves committed our own lives/spare time to.
So that leaves the other route to take which is just... renegade fine-we'll-do-it-ourselves. Which can succeed, but has its own set of challenges. Fronting infrastructure for a lot of stuff is expensive, so donors are needed on sometimes vast scales. To another commenters point like... ain't none of us on the renegade front laying undersea cables any time soon which are multi-billion dollar projects to cross the Pacific. Often times we see these underground efforts fail in their infancy simply because the UX just flat out sucks and we're up against entities who can giga-scale all their infrastructure/resources & ultimately capitalize on making whatever app thing fast&pleasant for users. It feels like we're drowning against titans sometimes, it's overwhelming.
If you think about where in the training data there is positivity vs negativity it really becomes equivalent to having a positive or negative mindset regarding a standing and outcome in life.
I don't have a source offhand, but I think it may have been part of the 4.5 release? Older models definitely needed caps and words like critical, important, never, etc... but Anthropic published something that said don't do that anymore.
For awhile(maybe a year ago?) it seemed like verbal abuse was the best way to make Claude pay attention.
In my head, it was impacting how important it deemed the instruction. And it definitely did seem that way.
i have like the faintest vague thread of "maybe this actually checks out" in a way that has shit all to do with consciousness
sometimes internet arguments get messy, people die on their hills and double / triple down on internet message boards. since historic internet data composes a bit of what goes into an llm, would it make sense that bad-juju prompting sends it to some dark corners of its training model if implementations don't properly sanitize certain negative words/phrases ?
in some ways llm stuff is a very odd mirror that haphazardly regurgitates things resulting from the many shades of gray we find in human qualities.... but presents results as matter of fact. the amount of internet posts with possible code solutions and more where people egotistically die on their respective hills that have made it into these models is probably off the charts, even if the original content was a far cry from a sensible solution.
all in all llm's really do introduce quite a bit of a black box. lot of benefits, but a ton of unknowns and one must be hyperviligant to the possible pitfalls of these things... but more importantly be self aware enough to understand the possible pitfalls that these things introduce to the person using them. they really possibly dangerously capitalize on everyones innate need to want to be a valued contributor. it's really common now to see so many people biting off more than they can chew, often times lacking the foundations that would've normally had a competent engineer pumping the brakes. i have a lot of respect/appreciation for people who might be doing a bit of claude here and there but are flat out forward about it in their readme and very plainly state to not have any high expectations because _they_ are aware of the risks involved here. i also want to commend everyone who writes their own damn readme.md.
these things are for better or for worse great at causing people to barrel forward through 'problem solving', which is presenting quite a bit of gray area on whether or not the problem is actually solved / how can you be sure / do you understand how the fix/solution/implementation works (in many cases, no). this is why exceptional software engineers can use this technology insanely proficiently as a supplementary worker of sorts but others find themselves in a design/architect seat for the first time and call tons of terrible shots throughout the course of what it is they are building. i'd at least like to call out that people who feel like they "can do everything on their own and don't need to rely on anyone" anymore seem to have lost the plot entirely. there are facets of that statement that might be true, but less collaboration especially in organizations is quite frankly the first steps some people take towards becoming delusional. and that is always a really sad state of affairs to watch unfold. doing stuff in a vaccuum is fun on your own time, but forcing others to just accept things you built in a vaccuum when you're in any sort of team structure is insanely immature and honestly very destructive/risky. i would like to think absolutely no one here is surprised that some sub-orgs at Microsoft force people to use copilot or be fired, very dangerous path they tread there as they bodyslam into place solutions that are not well understood. suddenly all the leadership decisions at many companies that have made to once again bring back a before-times era of offshoring work makes sense: they think with these technologies existing the subordinate culture of overseas workers combined with these techs will deliver solutions no one can push back on. great savings and also no one will say no.
yea im surprised i see so many times that people on _hackernews_ are convinced profile activity is real.
theres entire marketing companies that provide what is effectively a botnet of social media activity to generate buzz, promising packages with "social media engagement". disney uses these to try and hype movie trailers, when the recent tron trailer came out it took 1 minute for a bunch of comments that looked like seemingly real enough accounts to be in there posting "im not ready for this" "omg" etc. and yes, these networks of fake accounts on all social media platforms do have non-vacant profiles meaning theyve got comments and stuff all over each others pages. there was a recent smaller production that is suing their marketing agency which promised this deceptive engagement and their implementation shit the bed and all the bots just interacted amongst themselves on the movies instagram page. the movie completely tanked at the box office because they never got their fake accounts to start engaging outside of the movies instagram account.
everyone focuses on the actual content itself as the subject of AI platform abuse, but are we really so naive to think that the companies pouring millions of dollars into these efforts are too stupid to understand that controlling the narrative involves requires simulating human feedback?
its in our nature to want to "go to the comments" to "get the real tea" and. im just going to say right now that yeah, the entities deploying these types of accounts are well aware that that is how many of us look for perspective. they're not stupid, and it's easier than it's ever been to game commentary in 2026.
> The killer feature is everything is a stream/thread. I argue that is a better UX over Slack, but it takes some getting used
I personally can't stand it. _However_ I just learned today that it can actually be disabled, which I would do if I was deploying a zulip instance for my team. We are all very wired towards the crackhead energy of just.. a chronological chat and a competent search.
we want topics allowed in certain channels only (ie #announcements) so that's probably what we'll use this feature for which certainly was not there when we tested maybe a year ago or so
True, though even before this we just made a chatting topic with the name "general", that worked just fine while still letting people make other threads for long discussions.
was just chattin zulip in another thread. news to me that there is a setting for disabling topics which puts thing in a normal "chat room" style chronological order though it looks like it still retains some sort of topic visual heading which looks kind of noisy.
zulip is the most solid of the open self hosted solutions so far imo. last my team tried it sometime a year ago maybe we were super turned off at the threaded topics. my entire team hates them and anyone trying to post important stuff in topics gets ignored lol we can't help it our brains just don't want them in our lives.
but now seeing that there's a way to disable that, it's possibly time to revisit zulip
Topics are otherwise incredibly useful even with a small number of people, if you want to carry out parallel & wide-ranging conversations on different timescales. Implicitly designing for a single topic per channel forces chats to be ephemeral and makes it very hard to have long timescale discussions.
Eg. If I'm discussing buying a house or a career change (personal) or a new business strategy for my company (work) I don't want all conversations dumped into a single river. Slack's model of threads within a channel feels too schizophrenic; Zulip's model of multiple conversations arranged loosely by theme (and accessible from the sidebar) is much better.
Catch-all topics are good for the ephemeral stream of chatter.
Some might say that chat should be only for ephemeral stuff, but then that is basically avoiding the essential complexity (of long term conversations) which must live somewhere to enforce some Procrustean simplicity on the chat platform.
My frustration with the flow, is that you’re forcing me to make a decision at a point where I don’t really know if a thought/idea/comment I want to share will rise to the level of warranting the organizational overhead of making it a “topic” vs just a little toe in the main stream.
I haven’t used Zulip in a while, but can’t you reorganize messages/topics after posting? I remember that as being one of the biggest advantages over Slack for exactly this reason (the Slack equivalent is “I wish I’d known to reply in a thread, because oops, this topic took over the channel”).
> my entire team hates them and anyone trying to post important stuff in topics gets ignored lol we can't help it our brains just don't want them in our lives.
I have a theory for why some people love Slack and others love Zulip (Completers -vs- cultivators) which I shared in a sibling thread.
my team tried it for a couple weeks. couldn't stand the threaded "only see what's important" style of chat. it's undoubtedly our least fav part of microsoft teams---the channels and the threads, we all operate in the chat tab and the channels tab has been relegated to announcement posts no one reads. huge shame zulip can't just like... have a toggle for normal chat chronology/presentation.
some people have gone way too for trying to efficiency max or "cut out the noise" but chronological chat and a competent search feature will always be the goat.
But even without that, in a normal threaded channel, you can see all messages in all topics chronologically. IIRC that's the default view when you click a channel in the sidebar.
mother of god. its perhaps time to revisit zulip. now if I could perhaps disable the topic group heading this would make perfect sense and effectively be a chatroom.
interesting. id love an eclecticlight breakdown of this. they're one of the few if only that write anything worth reading on apple hardware, i once found a QOS/scheduler insight through those guys when I couldn't get my c/cpp project pinned to the cores I wanted on m-series. https://eclecticlight.co/m1-macs/
I mean that goes without saying on anything I read on the damn internet. With that said, I'm not seeing a comparative informational source anywhere that even takes the time of day. Feel free to bombard me with new resources.
I've been working religiously for like 2 years on the jedi academy codebase which is c & c++. It's Ravensofts variant of the idtech3 engine and it's insane how fragile the games combat is to precision and timing changes, I can't get away with adding much without destroying the lightsaber combat qualities. There are certain spots where I can't even add an incrementing i++ counter lmao it presents just enough of a slowdown or shifts something around that I haven't been able to track down that bleeds into the rest of the gameplay, but I am also sticking with the ancient compilers from 22 years ago so as to preserve the fpu characteristics of the game. There are some modern attempts at using this codebase with modern tooling but they've kind of bastardized/refactored all of it and it just feels different/unbalanced wrong. idtech3 is such an incredibly foray into c it's really something else and carmack and team really sent it back in the day.
ravensoft open sourced it in 2013 ish and promptly removed it because they accidentally included a bundled lib but i believe it was then re-added. theres quite a few repos that have it cloned. https://github.com/jedis/jediacademy
what am i up to with it? creating hardened vanilla base servers (no mods) and ensuring it gets compiled in a way that doesnt impact lightsaber combat. everyone has failed to do this for 22+ years because there's lots of subfactions in this game who fail to prioritize this as they have other priorities. tons of people who enjoy the prospect of modding the game or making it something different but the tiny remaining competitive player base has only ever needed the base game and what shipped by ravensoft in 2003. generally the guys who are competitive players arent.. coders. the game is ultra sensitive to mathematical FPU differences and virtually all recompiles of the game in the past decades completely failed to guard this, so every game mod and attempt at creating something better hasn't stuck for competitive players _except_ for something called ybeproxy which was an attempt to hook the original game engine binary and add some security/anticheat layer.. this was the best attempt to date but it still negatively impacts the fragile lightsaber mechanics.
That's so cool! I didn't know they open sourced it. Is your work also open? And how do you check that the frames don't change?
I love seeing people try to revive old games and improve them for players. I've made a couple of contributions to VCMI, an open source implementation of heroes of might and magic 3 that I used to play as a kid and it's so rewarding seeing people use those.
> the only thing that I ever snarl at is how many dials and knobs and options there are that's not a bad thing!
yea this is me. postgres is actually insane for how much is offered at checks notes free.99.
_however_ we are probably due for like. I don't know a happy configurator type tool that has reasonable presets and a nice user friendly config tool that helps people get going without sidequesting for a year on devops/dbadmin expertise. that isn't even a favored outcome imo, you just get pretty lukewarm postgres-deployers who are probably missing a bunch of important settings/flags. my team mates would probably shit themselves in the face of postgres configs currently, they are absolute rats in the code but good and proper deployment of postgres is just a whole other career-arc they haven't journeyed and a _lot_ of organizations don't always have a devops/dbadmin type guy readily available any time you want to scrap together an app who's just going to wait for your signal to deploy for you. or said devops/dbadmin guy is just.. one guy and he's supporting 500 other things. not saying the absence/failing to scale teams with such personnel is right, it's just the reality and being up against workplace politics and making the case to convince orgs to hire a bigger team of devops/dbadmin guys involves a lot of shitty meetings and political prowess that is typically beyond an engineers set of capabilities, at least below the senior level. any engineer can figure out how to deploy postgres to something, but are they doing it in a way that makes an orgs security/infra guys happy? probably not. are they prepared to handle weird storage scenarios (log or temp space filling grinding server to a halt) and understand the weird and robust ways to manage a deployment? probably not.
We've literally watched things unfold in real time out in the open in the last year I don't know how much more obvious it could be that child-protections are the bad-faith excuse the powers that be are using here. Combined with their control of broadcasting/social media, it's the very thing they're pushing narratives in lockstep over. All this to effectively tie online identities to real people. Quick and easy digital profiles/analytics on anyone, full reads on chat history assessments of idealogies/political affiliations/online activities at scale, that's all this ever was and I _know_ hackernews is smart enough to see that writing on the wall. Ofc porn sites were targeted first with legislation like this, pornography has always been a low-hanging fruit to run a smear campaign on political/idealogical dissidents. It wasn't enough, they want all platform activity in the datasets.
I can't help but feel like the longer we debate the merits of good parenting, the faster we're just going to speedrun losing the plot entirely. I think it goes without saying that no shit good parenting should be at play, but this is hardly even about that and I don't know why people take the time of day. It's become reddit-caliber discussion and everyone's just chasing the high of talking about how _they_ would parent in any given scenario, and such discussion does literally nothing to assess/respond to the realities in front of us. In case I'm not being clear, talking about how correct-parenting should be used in lieu of online verification laws is going to do literally nothing to stop this type of legislation from continually taking over. It's not like these discussions and ideas are going to get distilled into the dissent on the congressional floors that vote on these laws. It is in it's own way a slice of culture war that has permeated into the nerd-sphere.
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