Hacker News: owisd

New comment by owisd in "Measure internet censorship"

owisd — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:41:24 +0000

Trusted authority with democratic accountability is the least worst option. Too much censorship is authoritarian, but too little and authoritarianism can flood the public discourse with so much noise that free speech becomes impossible.

New comment by owisd in "Texas judge rules TikTok misled users on child safety feature"

owisd — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 19:25:44 +0000

Why not a layered system of all 3. Everyone starts in #3 by default, your grandma can do her shopping and banking and pay for parking without the constant risk of being scammed. Then jump through some hoops to get to #2 and/or #1. #2 has regulated adult content. #1 ends up only appealing to tech-types and so, due to self-selection, ends the Eternal September.

New comment by owisd in "Everyone should slow down AI development except for me"

owisd — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 06:21:51 +0000

The path to deregulation creates a "market for lemons". Suppose any bank was completely unregulated and could abscond with your money and the government would just shrug its shoulders. Great, now there's no trust and everyone will go back to stashing cash under their mattress and you've killed the banking sector.

The extent of regulatory capture in the US is a problem it's created for itself by normalizing huge political donations allowing corporations to buy regulation.

New comment by owisd in "Claude is only available to people over 18 years"

owisd — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 20:11:47 +0000

We already tried that. The companies had the option not to exploit kids and chose exploitation, and given trillion-dollar companies they can massively out-resource any parent's individual action - no amount of parental controls will stop a teenager saving up their pocket money and buying an inexpensive second-hand device themselves - the parents' only option to fight back is the ballot box.

New comment by owisd in "Write Software in Latin (2025) [video]"

owisd — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 20:52:13 +0000

It was actually first cracked by Marian Rejewski at the Polish Cipher Bureau and the details were handed over to Bletchley Park at the start of the war.

New comment by owisd in "Invisible Companies"

owisd — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 13:34:45 +0000

Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone strongly insinuates Kinney Services got started as a gambling front, so possibly a poor example of a boring business turning a healthy profit.

New comment by owisd in "Making the Internet Boring"

owisd — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 19:07:31 +0000

If you've got an iPhone/Mac I recommend Apple's free Apple Configurator tool to lock down your phone to only the set of apps you whitelist and/or route all traffic through a VPN/Proxy that whitelists only certain IPs. You can only change the whitelist when you're physically back at your Mac so prevents me impulsively relaxing the restrictions in any moments of boredom.

New comment by owisd in "Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity"

owisd — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:04:38 +0000

Japan already did it - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cjej4y3gvzlo

New comment by owisd in "Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children"

owisd — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:29:27 +0000

All the recent evidence (https://www.npr.org/2026/03/09/nx-s1-5736553/fast-food-scree...) is that people who are best at self-regulation don't do it by surrounding themselves with tempting things and will-powering themselves not to indulge in them, they do it by changing their environment so the tempting things aren't an option. They're changing the environment via the courts and the ballot box. The people with no self-regulation are the ones complaining about the possibility of having their dopamine toys taken away.

New comment by owisd in "Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study"

owisd — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:11:48 +0000

You know any time any legislature proposes anything they have dozens of people involved in months of debates and consultations and reports and committees to go through all of this kind of minutiae to decide where to draw the lines.

New comment by owisd in "France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s"

owisd — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:42:22 +0000

A few options: (a) load a digital copy of an existing ID into your OS's wallet app then the wallet app can simply attest to any service that the device is owned by someone over 18 (b) sell single-use tokens in grocery stores that require an ID to purchase like alcohol. token can be used to verify you're 18+ for one site. (c) require that any network-enabled device can only be bought by showing ID to prove 18+ and then when set up can be configured at the OS-level as child-owned so a parent can buy a device and do the initial setup so it's locked in child mode.

New comment by owisd in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

owisd — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:27:15 +0000

> I'm not sure if the EU would really go along with it again.

Sounds like Project Fear to me! The EU needs Britain more than Britain needs them! The German car/French wine/etc. industry will beg the European Commission to give Britain all their opt-outs back to secure a rejoin!

New comment by owisd in "I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program"

owisd — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:33:06 +0000

Could solve this, and in turn rid the world of a huge amount of algorithmic slop, by taxing companies according to how much personal data they hold.

New comment by owisd in "Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy"

owisd — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:18:07 +0000

The article is claiming it's happened in the last 20-25 years but you seem to have used 1950 as your starting point, so you're not excluding the possibility it's been in reverse since 2000 but not yet fallen to 1950 levels.

New comment by owisd in "Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM"

owisd — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:39:05 +0000

Feels like this has gone completely meta and it's now way more common to see people who don't care about children refusing to support that any proposal that might benefit children under the assumption that nobody cares about children so there must be an ulterior motive.

New comment by owisd in "Why all new flags look the same"

owisd — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:14:06 +0000

It does seem to be a general internet discussion trend that any complicated topic that can be lossily compressed into a few useful rules of thumb will develop zealots that consider the rules of thumb the be-all and end-all, like Clean Code or Econ101ism.

New comment by owisd in "Malaysia enforces ban on social media accounts for children younger than 16"

owisd — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:54:02 +0000

Yet like cigarettes or lead you're not prepared to be very careful about results that claim it's all a moral panic being favourable to a very rich elite.

New comment by owisd in "ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline"

owisd — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:31:56 +0000

They don't really 'call' elections since they only publish probabilities. If you'd bet on the candidate 538/Silver was more bullish than the bookies, then the only election year you wouldn't have made money would have been 2024.

New comment by owisd in "AI chatbots could be making you stupider"

owisd — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:29:23 +0000

Feels like one of these things that's been known for decades in the general form: tools that take cognitive load off your working memory (a calculator, writing) free your brain up for higher level thinking make you "smarter", whereas tools that take the higher level tasks off you and load up your working memory (hypertext, AI) make you "stupider".

New comment by owisd in "Gen Z is 10 times more accepting of violence against speakers than Boomers"

owisd — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:56:59 +0000

John Stuart Mill recognised over 150 years ago that free speech was only free if it was honest, good faith, polite discourse. Allowing it to descend into lies and ad hominems only benefits the elite who have the greatest resources to shout down dissent, in which case it's not really free if you're setting it up to favour one side. Not unsurprising Boomers would prefer the system that benefits them.