My back button is actually a triangle at the bottom left of my Android screen so I don't think that works, but it's a great hack to know for desktop and I'll remember it! Much obliged
Have you seen the original bicycles. Boneshakers and so on. No pneumatic tires. They were just enough more efficient than walking to sell but other than that pretty dreadful. Penny farthings where your feet directly drove the wheel. So many injuries!
Of course it's accurate to say a lot of people aren't smart.
A lot of people also may or may not be smart but have limited knowledge of this area and limited time/effort to expend thinking about it.
I don't think you should rail against those things because they will always be true for every topic.
Instead, people who have understood the deeper implications of this, for instance the typical HN reader, need to connect with the average person, engage with rather than dismiss their child protection fears, while explaining the downsides.
Taking a high handed dismissive attitude will not help to shift public opinion.
I am so tired of everyone assuming the worst possible implementation of age verification.
Whatever happened to steel manning? It's supposed to be in the fabric of HN. Curious enquiry.
Is it nice children are exposed to dreadful things? No. Could we, with tech, come up with a way to improve things? Probably! Let's discuss and think about how!
I love the computer too. Never more than while writing 6502 assembler for a decades-defunct home computer for literally no purpose at all.
Meanwhile, the economy needs software to be written and I need employment, and I'm lucky enough to have a job that hews somewhat close to my interests, whether that be learning the latest JS framework or to prompt Claude. It's all pretty decent and better than chiselling coal out of a pit for 10 hours a day.
I have a 10yo. I know loads of parents too. I don't think I've ever heard the "freedom" position taken apart from on HN. To non-techies it just seems self evident we should block kids from seeing beheadings and donkey porn. They haven't usually thought much about how that would be achieved and what the knock on effects would be. But they do want it.
A deeper dive would go into why this seems to be such a quintessentially American pursuit.
I'd speculate perhaps something to do with capitalism, and also maybe a culture made out of people coming together from other cultures was more able to throw out "baggage"(ie context) and distil pure experiences.
I think the right comparison is the invention of the microprocessor. At that time people were grappling with a lot of the same things we are today - would it automate jobs away, would it transform education and the work place, etc.
I wouldn't describe it as malice. If your job is to make the line go up, you make the line go up, and are rewarded for doing so, then you have done your job.
> If you're the kind of engineer who reads the implementation instead of trusting the function name, we'd like to talk.
Functional decomposition, combined with good naming, is what allows engineers to raise the level of abstraction and localise understanding of a large codebase.
Without it, if your only option is "read the implementation" for every line of code, you've lost control of the codebase.