• 15 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The statement that the new commercial veneer is dying needs to be backed up: YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, and Reddit still drive traffic, despite the slop, and because of the commercialization. Meta and Facebook are doing fine.

    I like what he says about the underlying protocols, but it is missing a bit of nuance: Google has been instrumental in the evolution of HTTP; SMTP became a very different game when Google (via Gmail) pushed authentication; DRM made it into browsers thanks to Google and media companies.

    Commercial companies may be benefiting from open protocols, but they are also pushing them in new directions. The stack the author remembers still exists, but it has been changed by that commercial “veneer”.





  • Or the AI on shopping websites saying “I’d recommend this model…”

    We don’t have a pronoun for “this non-human unit”. LLMs are marketed as conversational, so they need to conform to the limitations of English.

    One could argue that “we” or “one” would be more appropriate, but that would sound stilted in many contexts.

    I’d prefer linguistic markers to distinguish between people and machines, but we haven’t gotten there yet.


  • no way to verify it isn’t beyond “trust me bro” and I don’t trust them

    If the verification service is structured like oauth, then the request could be passed through the browser as signed plaintext. You could verify that the requesting site is only passing a minimum age request to the service. That would be as straightforward as viewing the interaction in your browser’s debug tooling.

    If you say that you don’t trust the signature, and that it could be used to smuggle identifying information across, there’s a couple of ways to deal with that: open source and audited provider governed by legislation; information theory that would show personally identifying information wouldn’t fit into a field of that size; and “personal auditing” where you can try throwing data at the service to see if you can trick it into accepting invalid input (that really goes with the previous point, because the only field you can usefully vary is the signature).