Literacy.

Percentage of children to survive to adulthood.

Global food surplus.

The was a big phase shift over the course of the 20th century...

So the individual website has to subscribe to the surveillance operator's IP location verification service, or be fined.

Basically. Party of small government, my ass.

Edit: actually, not even then. In my home VPN scenario, the IP is a legitimate residential connection.

This is exactly it. Compliance is a big business. When your company's lawyers tell you you've gotta do something then you do it. Half my team is wasting time on this bullshit and big money is getting paid to those who make the lists.

I don't understand the need for age verification.

I mean, I understand what it effects it has, and why many parties want to perfect their expanding panopticon, and why screaming think of the children makes politicians' brains turn off.

It won't fix children or social media. That's been apparent ever since Facebook defaulted to real names and people still posted everything they would have otherwise. It makes it easier to use social disapproval to destroy nonconforming individuals, I suppose. And to sell ads. And to destroy anyone who criticizes the government. So no real downside if you don't care about that sort of thing.

When I was a kid, I acquired long distance calling cards[0] so that I could dial into faraway BBSes and access a different variety of pictures of nakedness than I had access to locally. This notion that you can bar kids from accessing porn is highly amusing.

[0]Fictional; this is not a confession; I know my rights

Secure encryption has been classified as controlled munitions in the past. Making SSH illegal is well within the range of possible futures.

It'd be a stupid future, but it's a stupid present so I'm not going to rule it out on those grounds.

There were a lot of millennials at the time. Still are, it's just that they're pushing 40 instead of 14.

Groups that are excluded from unemployment statistics aren't a specific generation. They are retirees, students, people who gave up on seeking a job, etc.

In the US, homelessness per capita peaked in the 90s. It remained relatively high afterwards compared to the pre 1980 numbers, and has recently spiked higher in the wake of 2020 and following, but in the 1990s there were a lot of homeless people in the US.

Now I want to see this implemented via vacuum tubes, similar to running Eliza on punchcard-driven mainframes...

> The authors of the study weren’t stupid. They knew the LLMs would provide poor results. They ran the study to quantify it and create a resource to spread the information in response to the rise of AI carb counting apps.

Yeah. I think it is under-appreciated that much of science is intended for debugging purposes. Sure, you and I know that X is positive, but what's it actual value? Can we find the causes that make it that way? Et cetera.

I was complaining about AI generated clothes being misleading marketing, deceiving customers as to whether the garment even exists.

And then I learned that the pre-AI norms weren't any less fictional: they made an exemplar garment and did photoshoots, sure, but then they send the pictures and patterns to the lowest bidder factories with permission to make whatever edits are necessary to make it cheap and manufactureable. The whole thing was already a simulacrum.

That's an interesting bit, where reducing friction too much can eliminate the side effect that is actually driving the desired results.

Do you want to count calories, or do you want to lose weight? Sounds like it's possible to hyper-optimize calorie counting to the point that it becomes counter-productive...