Yes, what we remember is interesting, especially while reflecting on posts such as OPs. The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots, neighbourhood gossipers, weaponised propaganda... we spurned people trying to sell stuff. My teenage Internet predated widespread use of email, so predated spam. Maybe my rose-coloured glasses remember a smaller number of real people and a demographic that was closer to my own.
I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child.
If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other.
I had to do an age check in the UK recently. There were various options (credit card, face scan, etc). The one that I chose was email address. My email address has been around long enough to vote, so I am that old. It seems like a good heuristic. If your email address is, say, 10 years old, you are likely to be old enough to create an account.
I will get downvoted by people suspicious of handing over a lot of personal data, but we do have GDPR laws, and they're not getting me to install a proctopod (tm). Giving someone my email address to verify my age is not a big deal. They're getting my email address to create an account anyway.
The practicalities of implementing 'good enough' age verification, where the website can prove that they conformed to an acceptable approach, do not require giving up all or significant freedoms. Maybe we get to something similar to DNS verification where you need to create a dummy TXT record in an already verified account.
What kind of class teaches 'tech-illiterate' parents to help their children not succumb to a multi-trillion dollar industry pushing out addictive and damaging content? It should be easy to develop such classes right? Maybe dust off the classes for 'health-illiterate' parents that were needed to stand up to the tobacco and alcohol industries? </s>
If the only benefit of space-based datacentres is a hedge against infrastructure attacks in a world war then we are in an awful place.
I'm not disagreeing with you but peace is far more prosperous for humanity than blowing the worlds' retirement funds on datacentres-in-space as a military endeavour.
An curious example where an academic at full-time at Harvard is obviously less qualified than millions of people that live in 15-minute cities all around the world. Maybe he should spend less time researching urban planning, and more time doing field work.
It was only really the US that was left with the legacy of installed fibre.
The 2000 crash left a lot of broken economies worldwide. Many non-US stock markets benefitted from the tech stock feeding frenzy without the investment actually being used to build anything.
If the AI bubble pops, a handful of US megacorps may be left with good models, datacentres and other assets, but the economic shocks will be felt around the world.
I have to work with ISO-purchased pdf documents that are heavily DRM-controlled. I can only open them on two PCs with a plugin that only works in Acrobat reader. It is so closed and unusable.
I am surprised that people are surprised by this finding, and support your position.
Anecdotally, doctors get things wrong quite frequently. Almost everybody has a bad medical diagnosis/advice story. The amount of reference material that a doctor needs to know off-hand and the data that they are given to make a diagnosis makes it a really difficult job. They also seldom have the ability to know whether their diagnosis/treatment worked, so have a limited ability to 'learn' from outcomes. (I did some work for cancer research and one of the most difficult problems was trying to get 'end of treatment' data because the end of treatment was often an unknown, to the researchers, death).
The ability to have a 'prompt' that includes lab data is likely to be better than the opinions of a doctor that only has one person's professional experience, limited ability to interpret 'prompts', and needing map it to an in-memory conditions database.
Our company made a 'bet' that energy management, sustainability, clean energy and whatnot would become a big thing. This was around the time of COP26 (2021) where there seemed to be a societal drive for reducing carbon emissions and a general acceptance that climate change was a thing. We employed young and enthusiastic sustainability consultants, we run a successful project to reduce energy consumption in polymer manufacturing, we build product that worked. That part of our business has shut down completely.
Unfortunately governments were reluctant to really get behind regulations that were needed, and the business case for investment in any drive to sustainability did not exist. People lost interest as inflation went up, and other things seemed more important. The market was flagging and Trump's "drill baby drill" was the final nail in the coffin.
The world was _nearly_ there to rapidly accelerate reducing the dependency on fossil fuels on the back of climate change. Instead we went back to fossil fuel cars and built energy-intensive AI data centres. We collectively dropped the ball and one day will look back on it as a missed opportunity.
There is a little bit of a political kerfuffle underway in the UK regarding police being overcautious in banning a group of supporters for a football (soccer) match. The political focus has brought some awkward evidence gathering to light that may not have been noticed with something more mundane.
What is interesting to HN is that the police may have used AI summaries to determine the risk, and the AI/Search gave them the wrong information. Essentially they relied on Google or copilot (it is not clear which) to inform them of a riot at a match that didn't even take place. Police intelligence relying on public search and AI that is hallucinating is probably as common as it is worrying.
In my experience, marketers wanted quick and catchy copy to post on linked-in and copywriters obliged. It reached a point where the content was irrelevant. You just had to get something posted on linked-in and get engagement. It was all slop long before AI came along. Nothing useful is posted (to linked-in) because the quality of the posts has been so low for so long that you don't even notice that it is turned into AI slop. All corporate 'news' and 'blog' pages are the same. Copywriters left us a long time ago.
This is how the world ends. Administrators on both sides being replaced by AI and consuming all the worlds available compute arguing with each other about healthcare bills.
The 'unrestricted web' from your youth did not have you uploading 8k video of you performing sexual acts that both landed up on pedo sites and was used for blackmail (the threat sending to the whole school). Children are getting roped, not into gramps' porno collection, but sophisticated networks that financially exploit naivety of children in a shocking manner that simply did not exist 10+ years ago. My daughter tried to commit suicide as a result of getting caught up in pedo rings that trawled Roblox. For visibility, I'll spare you the downvote, but you are wrong... things are very different from 'back in the day'
I try to comment on Roblox whenever it comes up as my daughter was pulled into a grooming pedo gang through Roblox.
Read some of the comments from a HN thread from 3 years ago where HN parents insist that they are able to properly educate and self-censor. Enough people don't care (enough), despite Roblox being called out all the time by people with big platforms.
I am shocked that Roblox has not been shut down, not by regulators, but by parents flat-out denying access. All evidence suggests that yes, it is that bad.
I think that a lot of people will still support Brexit. Leaving the EU allows a (future) government to do a lot of stupid things. Throwing out good fiscal policy, eroding human rights, aggressively stopping boats or changing migration rules, reversing climate change regulation. A lot of people believe, or will be led to believe (because previous governments were hamstrung by the EU), that those stupid ideas are actually quite good ideas.
Brexit was necessary for those ideas to be implemented. An individual's view on whether those ideas are good or not will correlate with their continued support of Brexit.