The GPDR is far more complicated than just that superficial example.
But I'm curious about how far you feel that assertion goes. Ignoring what the GPDR says exactly, how do you feel about the various examples?
I have http request logs from requests that you've made. Do I have to delete them when you ask?
You sent me an email, do I have to delete my copy?
I host an email service for me and a friend exclusively, you request that I delete your data, do I have to delete emails you sent to him as well?
You answered a long thread about an esoteric computing question, hypothetically under the name denvercoder9, do I have to delete that comment? What about the replies to it which quote you?
I have evidence that you committed a crime of some sort, do I have to delete that?
Someone else posted true information about you to my site intended to categorize comments to HN posts. It's someone else data about you, do I have to delete that when you ask?
Do I detect some sarcasm in that response? If so, why? The Internet is literally just a communications protocol, adding a chat system on top of that it is not difficult.
Nor even was it when Skype and IRC were made (by Europeans). SMS (also European) was slightly harder to invent because that's not on the internet.
The technical aspects of the software aren't the problem. Convincing enough people to adopt your app before you're getting a great deal on a 20sqft studio apartment is.
This is a response to a hypothetical where every single existing (or possibly just US) chat provider leaves the EU, and I'm saying the claim that this will cause any degree of pain whatsoever to the EU population is ridiculous because the replacements are far too trivial to not immediately replace the US apps.
I fully support your argument and can't understand why people in this thread assume the EU doesn't have millions of programmers who can bash out a chat app, one of which would rise above the others and get a critical mass of users.
Sometimes I think it would be good for Meta, X, Google etc. to lose market share in the EU and UK. It's ridiculous that we're beholden to one country for so much software, and they're all being actively enshitified anyway.
But the notion that a five-year-old is able to consent to anything is absurd. So we have to draw the line somewhere. The UK has chosen to draw the line at 18, which for some kids will be absurd, yes. But for others it will be appropriate. And yet others will still not be emotionally mature at 18 and capable of making that kind of decision properly.
Not just the UK. In about 30 of the United States of America the age of consent is 16 [1]. Beyond that marriage is permitted with a note from parents of the minor and approval from a judge up to 1 or 2 years below the AoC depending on the state.
It would be particularly absurd to think scummy companies wouldn’t track you if the requirement for consent wasn’t enshrined in law, and failure to comply with the law didn’t come with consequences.
But would you at that, this is a discussion started by a news article where one of the scummy companies is discovering what those consequences are. So something must be working.
That’s because you’re looking at this ass backwards. The law determines an age at which a person is considered capable of making legally binding agreements, like providing consent. In the UK that’s 18, with some exceptions.
It would be absurd for the UK to create a special exception to allow underage youths to consent to user tracking at an age lower than the standard age for legal consent in any other context.
its more complex than that. There are many agreements you can make younger than that. Kids can, for example, buy services such as transport (e.g. the monthly bus tickets my daughter bought at 18) that are subject to legally binding agreements. They can buy things in general, on and offline. You can enter into employment contracts in general at 16, and for some limited exceptions even younger.
IMO, the law should establish some parental rights over their children, I don't think this is controversial. You can argue with what the limits of the rights are, how they interact with the rights of the child, and how that changes as the child ages, but the basic ideas is pretty sound.
And then given that, it is the role of an elected government to determine all these factors, subject to review of the courts. That all seems to be working here.
There are a few pretty notable assassinations around people that helped or collaborated with the Nazis. Argibly those assassinations prevented further worse outcomes.
But in _recent_ memory, the one that comes to mind immediately is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi not too long after 9/11. His death disrupted Al Qaeda in Iraq which almost certainly was a net benefit.
Bin laden himself also comes to mind but it's unclear how much more potential he had to inflict terror on the world at the time in his life when he was assassinated.
> But in _recent_ memory, the one that comes to mind immediately is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi not too long after 9/11. His death disrupted Al Qaeda in Iraq which almost certainly was a net benefit.
Giving rise to ISIS.
> Bin laden himself also comes to mind but it's unclear how much more potential he had to inflict terror on the world at the time in his life when he was assassinated.
Debatable as to weather it delayed or intensified ISIS but I think you're missing my broader point; his disposal prevented immediate harm and that was a net benefit.
> Political theater at best.
I'd argue there was a very symbolic benefit and even if there is/was a power vacuum.
I floated this question to a friend that likes to nerd out on geopolitics and they suggested that there's a few warlords in africa that tend to end civil wars and make way for successful peace talks after they're dead. I had never heard of the UNITA but as soon as
Jonas Savimbi was assassinated, a decade+ civil war ended and Angola had elections shortly thereafter.
Goodwins law would apply if any of the _many_ attempts had succeeded.
> Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates last week put the number of foreigners now arriving in Iraq to join the AQI-led Sunni insurgency at "perhaps several dozen a month" from neighboring Syria, most of them volunteers for suicide-bombing missions.
> Little more than a year ago, AQI's back was against the wall, its efforts to recruit Iraqi Sunni nationalist and secular groups undermined by its violent tactics against civilians and the fundamentalist doctrine of its founder, Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Its attempt in January 2006 to draw other insurgent groups under the banner of a Shura, or consultative council, was largely unsuccessful.
> "When Zarqawi was killed in June," a senior intelligence official said, "a lot of us thought that was going to be a real milestone in our progress against the group." Instead, he said, "al-Masri has succeeded in establishing his own leadership, keeping the operational tempo up and propelling sectarian violence to higher levels." From the February 2006 bombing of the golden dome of a Shiite shrine in Samarra through the huge bombings in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad in November, AQI steadily "pushed the sectarian violence into a new era," the official said.
You know, I’m sorry. Can you introduce me to that geopolitics nerd friend you have? I wasn’t even aware of the full context of this thread. I just had the urge to nerd out and share resources and make points and do anything short of trying on only prove you wrong about one specific part of an argument that I don’t even agree with—that assassinations are universally bad.
I think whether it's viable preemptive measure depends on a lot. In the present context (Kirk’s), it’s doubtful.
I’m sorry for putting you through this, baby_souffle.
And did you mean to refer to Godwin or Goodhart’s law.
At the risk of being simplistic and reductive... you just... stop.
Unless it's calling or texting, what you do via phone can almost always be done on a computer/laptop. Allot a certain time of your day/week for handling life shit via a desktop or laptop, and a certain time of the day/week for reading news. Limit it to just that timeframe, and try to keep that timeframe small. Avoid social media as much as you can within that.
Honestly, the only way I found is to go cold turkey and really focus on hating the smartphone and "always online" culture. Reading up on the dangerous effects this stuff has on us and our children really helps with motivation, too. You won't stick to it if it's just for a specific reason like improving sleep or trying to read more books or whatever
> Solar tax credits are subsides for the well off.
Sounds like a good thing to me! Subsidizing things that benefit the whole of society are 100% a good thing, even when rich people take advantage of them
group discussions over zoom just don't work IMO. The sound only allows one person at a time to speak so its extremely your-turn-my-turn in a way that an organic, in-person group socialization isn't. It isn't as jarring in a 1:1 because you can watch that person's face and without much effort predict when they're going to speak and so not interrupt them. When it goes beyond that, the flow of the conversation gets stilted
Even worse is the situation our hybrid half-remote/half-inperson company runs into during meetings:
The in-person group will go into the conference room and naturally start multiple rambling side conversations.
But the remote people just have to sit there and watch. Usually they can’t really hear each of these conversations and you can’t casually join a room-based side conversation from the remote because any audio that comes out of the teleconferencing screen automatically commandeers the whole rooms attention
And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video.
The the in-person group tends to be resentful that they've commuted into the office just to spend a good chunk of their day at their desks on Zoom calls.
It's always a tradeoff. Even pre-COVID and hybrid work at large companies, you were dealing with groups at different locations, often in vastly different timezones. But certainly current hybrid work makes the dynamics even trickier.
> And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video.
But practically though, how does this work in an office setting? I work in an exorbitantly nice office, and we still don't have near enough conference rooms/enclosed spaces for everyone to individually book a room
And in another sense, this is just defaulting to the lowest common denominator. People in-person go to side chats because its beneficial to do so.
They call from their desks. Just like people did in the not so "old days." Back when I was a product manager I spent a good part of my day on the phone in my cubicle.
the in-office folks still go into the conference room together, but they log in to the meeting from their laptop using "companion mode". that way every individual shows up in the meeting instead of one "room" member that has 20 blurry faced crammed into it
I lived in Atlanta GA in 2020. My company went remote - a startup - and stayed remote from then on (well it got acquired by an all remote company shortly afterwards).
A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about a position as an SDE. It would have paid $75K - $80K more than I was making. But would have required me to relocate to Seattle at some underdetermined time in the future. There was no way in hell I was going to relocate to Seattle and sell my big house in the burbs that I paid $340K to have built in Atlanta in 2016 to work at Amazon.
She kept talking and suggested I apply to a “permanently remote” [sic] role at AWS ProServe. The position paid about 20% less but still around $60K more than I was making. I said sure why not?
I got the job and two years later we ended up selling the house anyway and moving to cheaper, no state tax Florida and downsized to a condo (and sold our house for twice what we paid for it a year later).
I currently make the same as a staff consultant working permanently at another company as I did as an L5 working at Amazon - still remote (not much by BigTech comp standards. But comfortable by every other metric) - and that’s after turning down an offer for a permanently remote role for a large non tech company where the director who was a former coworker was going to create a position for me to oversea the cloud architecture and migration. It would have paid around L6 level at Amazon - all cash.
I just didn’t want the headache of working for BigCorp anymore.
> group discussions over zoom just don't work IMO. The sound only allows one person at a time to speak
I do wonder if there are any technical solutions to be found to this. Now that high-speed fibre is pretty widespread, what if we transmitted every participants audio feed to every other participant, and merged them on the client, instead of the server?
Discord is designed like this, because there is no special "presenter" or "organizer" and all participants are equal. Everyone can present simultaneously and you can mute individual speakers for yourself and not everyone else.
The single speaker is a design decision, not a technical issue. Only one "presenter" is allowed is allowed in business, or in school.
Metaverse and VR Chat? They mix on the client because also you get to hear where each speaker is in the space next to you. Without it in zoom it's just one garble if more than one person talks
I feel like we could probably just distribute everyone in a virtual circle - as if they are sitting around a big conference table - and skip the VR headset part of this
(don't get me wrong, I like a VR headset, but it's not something I've managed to work into my coding and docs writing setup just yet).
Felt like a few dozen toys and a handful of startups all came up with this same solution during 2020-21 as next-big-things and Zoom still came out on top for so many other reasons
reply