The "rights" of my children to not be exploited by Zuckerberg and the rest of them are far more important as far as I'm concerned.

To counter the privacy nuts, no age gates and social media bans won't lead to a North Korean style government. If anything it is the antidote as children will have a chance to grow without being radicalised by the attention stealing algorithms. The Stasi in East Germany did rather well without internet age gates.

I read an article where some children were asked about their social media use. A few made the point that they just felt crap after a scrolling session. I think everyone here knows what it's like to realise you just lost an hour to two of potential productive time to HN. And this is just a text site.

Social media is engineered to steal your attention and feed you junk, divisive information. Why on earth would we allow kids to become addicted to that?

The US was on course to invest more as well (I guess the reason Musk saw the opportunity in Tesla), but then fracking happened and the US became energy independent with fossil.

Add the energy industry lobbying to kill clean tech and two Trump terms.

To get something better I expect more than a one-shot is needed, and the knowledge to guide it in the right way.

But it's not because I'm cool with my government "[not] doing it for protecting children" or any other conspiracy theory nonsense.

It's because governments ALREADY have all this information if they want it. Most people freely log in to their favourite services, and corporations will hand over data when asked. There are vast amounts of hacked data available, which any government with a competent intelligence service has a copy of. Then there are all the existing laws and intelligence apparatus that can track people.

Age gates wont help the government find out what porn you watch, or who you message on WhatsApp, they already know if they really wanted. But they will create a social contract that letting your kids loose on social media and unfiltered internet is unacceptable. At the moment bad parents have all the power, drawing the line somewhere and enforcing it will give power back to parents that want to raise their children responsibly.

Raising a generation of kids not addicted to internet brainrot is the real way to make sure democratic governments don't overreach with the data they have.

In the same way kids should not be infecting their minds with social media slop, or porn, or plenty of other internet content.

The only way this is stopped is when a social norm is created which shames all but the most negligent parents into compliance.

At the moment the absent and bad parents have all the power. Their kids scroll all night for memes, injest YouTube brainrot and turn up at school disruptive. Kids with responsible parents either want to that as well, or can't escape it.

Surveillance from age gates is a red herring. That horse bolted long ago. You are surveilled already by tech bros when voluntarily logging in, or by making yourself stand out a mile by using a VPN and a uncommon browser setup. This data gets handed to your government on request.

Having an anonymous VPN won't stop the tech bros or an authoritarian government forming, or bring one down.

People taking part in their existing democracy and maintaining the foundation of that is the best course of action. Raising a generation of kids not addicted to internet brainrot is a key part of this.

But that would spoil some good click bait for the media, and ad hominem attacks from political opponents.

The only hope is China spoils the party.

It is run to maximise growth for example, so even though Norway is way ahead with electric car usage and infrastructure (presumably because they have a climate likely to be most affected by global warming/heating) their fund still invests in fossil fuels as they are a profit/growth opportunity.

Anyway, i don't think it's as easy as "simply stuff shit loads of cash into buying whatever they need". I believe there would be a serious political discussion needed for that to happen.

I am at 2 for 2 at the moment in the "infrastructure as code" arena (I wasn't involved with choosing to use a consultant, just dealing with the output). Which is an area that AI was supposed to eat for lunch. And it seems like it should, DSLs with a narrower scope seem perfect for an LLM, but I'm not convinced.

I think the issue is, infrastructure DSLs like Terraform or Azure Bicep are distilling down an architecture that has complex interactions and often needs a lot of "inside baseball" knowledge from outside of the code to create a congruent result. Unless you feed a bible of markdown files to the LLM to guide it in the right direction the output goes off the rails fast. The time spend creating the bible might as well be spent creating the code.

Of course there are areas where an LLM will definitely help, like re-factoring, stamping out boiler-plate or even building on a solid base. But attempt to create even a semi-complex architecture from scratch using a few paragraphs of prompt and you are asking for trouble.

The trouble with the consultants I have interacted with is they don't write the bible first, as far as i can tell they just iterate on slop and you end up with multiple 800+ line PowerShell scripts in IaC pipelines and other craziness that is almost impossible to unpick after they have gone.

Trading blocks (like the European single market) are specifically designed to protect their members from shit that global corporations or other nations attempt to get away with.

I'm not sure what "Trade within Europe has massive restrictions." means without context. Compared to some Randian capitalist utopia where there are no rules and no governments? Or compared to before the creation of the European single market?

You could hit up juleiie from above for his/her winning method I suppose, or you put a portion of your savings into an appropriate ETF and get on with your life.