MudMan

I do like to cancel my golf appointments when I die. It just distracts from the work at hand, you know?

Yeah, see, I’m not a lawyer, but I am confident enough that “committing crimes in another country remotely is safe” is absolutely terrible legal advice. Don’t do that. I am confident enough in my understanding of legal matters to issue that recommendation.

I mean, I’ve given Rochko crap here for not thinking things through when he incorrectly suggested more decentralization would make Masto behave differently than Bluesky in this issue. I don’t for a second assume he meant “because fuck it, fine me if you can, USA” or I would be giving him way more crap and closing my Masto account just in case for good measure.

If you run a social media platform that hosts American users they actually might.

Same as the bar for whether GDPR applies to you isn’t whether your server is physically in the EU, it’s whether you’re processing data from EU users. Or, in fact, how you’re supposed to get explicit permission from EU users to host their data anywhere outside the EU in the first place.

Now, I’m not a lawyer in Mississippi, so I’m not gonna give you legal advice, but I would definitely look into it if I’m setting up a public instance. The same way I’d be looking into what compliance things I need to do to host people’s data, both due to GDPR and due to other privacy laws around the world. It’s one thing to set up for friends and family, but if you’re hosting data from outsiders you probably need to understand what you’re doing.

I’ve also not looked into what happens if you are sharing data with a noncompliant server in a restricted territory (so someone is self hosting in Mississippi and then federating with your server elsewhere). I don’t think the legislators who wrote this dumb rule know, either. They clearly haven’t thought that far ahead. Common sense dictates that the outside server would be fine and it’d be the local server’s problem to be compliant. I presume that’s what Bluesky is counting on (i.e. that someone will set up a local instance and act as an ingest bridge for them without it having to be them). Then again, you have British legislators now claiming that all VPNs need to have age controls, so I am not taking common sense for granted when it comes to these things.

Yeah, Mastodon gGmbH also hosts mastodon.social, as far as I can tell. Or… I mean, at least that’s the address and company info they show in mastodon.social’s about page (not Mastodon, but mastodon.social, there are two separate About pages, both reference Mastodon’s gGmbH’s address).

The one thing I’ll give you is that the statement they issued is talking about Mastodon software overall not having the technical tools to comply with the law in the first place and are explicitly refusing to comment on what mastodon.social will specifically do about it.

Which is irrelevant because, one presumes, if the answer was to build the tools to be able to comply with the age verification law they would have said that and put them into the Mastodon software, not just kept them exclusively for mastodon.social.

That seems overengineered as hell to me. But then, having an entire LLM to do what much older voice recognition software could do better is overengineered by definition. The LLM won’t validate those things because the point of it, if it has one at all in this scenario, is for it to recognize off the cuff speech and malformed orders.

Which is partly why people are finding this idea doesn’t work, I suppose. Have a chatbot improvise based on what people are shouting and you get garbage inputs. Have strict requirements for voice commands and you get lots of failed attempts.

Unlike a bunch of other applications of AI chatbots this one maaaay eventually work. But then again, so may your idea. Honestly, if I was going to overengineer the shit out of having a tortilla-wrapped laxative inside a car I’d have you order directly in your phone and use that license plate recognition idea to prevent you having to talk to anybody or anything in the first place.

Yeah, well, remind me not to do business with you under any circumstances.

Self hosting is cool and all, but if you think decentralized networks and services are a get out of jail free to bypass regulations applying to their centralized counterparts you shouldn’t be hosting decentralized networks and services.

For one thing if you have no understanding of legal compliance I don’t want you to store any of my data at all.

No, the article is about Mastodon.social’s nonprofit following up with an official statement after not responding when approached about the original report.

Eugen himself was just shitting on Bluesky, his entire comment was that Bluesky leaving showed “why true decentralization is important”. Ironically, that whole pissing match ended up hinging about how much Eugen was focusing on Bluesky rather than their protocol, too. Turns out to be a popular deflection and it turns out to not change anything practical.

You are retroactively trying to reinterpret the subject matter here to save face and I’m too tired right this minute to entertain it. We don’t have to have a conversation, man, no hard feelings, but if you insist on having one here I’d appreciate if it wasn’t about something else entirely.

We are focusing on mastodon.social because you jumped on a thread about mastodon.social confirming they won’t be complying with Mississippi’s age verification law, which in turn is a follow up to coverage of Bluesky doing the same thing. And also because Eugen Rochko jumped into that announcement to claim that Bluesky stepping away from that territory was an example of how Fedi’s wider decentralization was an advantage, even though it turned out to no be an advantage at all.

Why would we be talking about anything else? That’s literally the topic. You may be looking for a different thread. If anything, the uncontrolled impulse to talk about the ways in which AP is more decentralized than AT whether that’s relevant to the conversation or not is the exact communication mistake Eugen made. Which makes doing that again even weirder.

To be clear, it doesn’t matter where your instance is hosted. Mastodon.social is not hosted in Mississippi, either, it’s hosted in Berlin. You’re still taking on a TON of potential liability if you don’t comply with their age verification or block that territory from access if the law stays in the books, just like you’re risking a ton of liability if you breach GDPR even if your site isn’t in the EU.

It doesn’t matter, though. They all have the same choice to make: comply, shut down in that territory… or be fined an insane amount.

Eugen argued… well, pretty much what you are arguing now. The question Bluesky guy posed to him is what Mastodon.social would do and how would the presence of smaller instances prevent the issue, especially for instances without the resources to comply at all in the first place.

Eugen did not respond to that, but Mastodon.social just did, and the answer is… Mastodon.social will do the same thing as Bluesky and so will every other instance.

Because of course it’s pretty obvious that having a decentralized platform doesn’t help with stupid regulation, because stupid regulation applies to every instance. There’s no reason decentralization would bypass a blanket requirement unless the legal requirement has carved an exception for smaller platforms (and even then there’s a question of what counts as a platform in that scenario).

And the thing is… I’m okay with you not having though that through, but Eugen certainly must have. Right? I mean, they had a pretty well thought out answer for Techcrunch in 24 hours, they must have given it some thought. It’s an unforced communication error.

“The bad guy” is not a thing I’ve thought about anybody since I was 12 years old.

I think Eugen jumped onto a common talking point among Fedi people when they try to highlight the difference between Masto and Bluesky and he didn’t think it through.

Like I said, I’m surprised he messed that up. He certainly should know the impression he was giving wasn’t accurate.

So in this whole embarrassing dick measuring contest Eugen was wrong and Mike Masnick was right, then. Turns out “real decentralization” or not, Masto/Fedi’s structure doesn’t do anything to bypass this nonsense.

This is not new. People constanty claim AP and Fedi have benefits or features just for being decentralized that they absolutely do not have, but I have to admit I’m kinda shocked that Eugen will do that exact thing without any more self-awareness than the average Masto user. He should know better.

Holy crap, people have been reposting takes on this interview for like three days and you can track the degradation of the actual content via the game of telephone in the headlines.

It’s kinda depressing.

FWIW, having read the original interview everybody is reheating, the 18000 waters was a random example the Taco Bell exec WSJ interviewed used to explain that part of the issue is that people feel less guilty about messing with automated orders than when they’re talking to a human. They are also not backing out from automated orders, which is why the headline is using “rethink”.

The core of the issue is correct, though, the guy does spend a significant amount of time giving corpolese synonims of “it’s a mess”. “We’ve certainly learned a lot” has to be my favourite.

It wouldn’t be Data, though, it’d be the ship’s computer.

Not only does it have a natural language interface, it is canonically shown that they do both searches and generate images and games in the holodeck by entering prompts.

There are at least a couple of examples of them getting wonky or imperfect image generation output from the holodeck in particular and refining it via modifying those prompts multiple times. And there are certainly a ton of examples of the holodeck messing up a prompt. Honestly it seems to fail more often than it succeeds. One time Geordi asked it to generate a famous scientist/love interest and then when we meet the real person they turn out to be completely different than the AI sexbot the computer generated the first time. Famously, and underbaked prompt leads the holodeck to hallucinate an entire sentient being. We are aware for a fact of a specific character using it to make deepfake porn of his coworkers.

One of the very first times we see the holodeck Picard almost gets people killed by having it generate a noir detective videogame and by the end of the gaming session the holodeck has hallucinated a villain that kills themselves by walking out of the deck and a character that is asking questions about its own sentience and what happens when the deck is turned off.

Say what you will about TNG, but they got this surprisingly right.

I am very confused by this repot, as it seems to imply something different than what it’s saying and what it’s saying seems to be… nothing specific at all?

So things are not going great, but that is not stopping Taco Bell from pushing forward with its AI embrace in one way or another. The fast food staple’s parent company, Yum Brands, announced a partnership with Nvidia earlier this year with the goal of improving the technology that powers its AI operations, including the order takers.

Now I have cognitive dissonance from both the uncanny use of fastidiously grammatically correct but unnanutral sounding Spanish in the headline AND the headline being entirely mismatched with the article.

Also, Gizmodo is still a thing? Holy shit. Would have lost money on that bet.

EDIT: Oh, it turns out the mismatched headline seems to be because the article is straight up retyping a similar piece from WSJ. WSJ’s take is also light on a specific event they’re reporting, beyond an executive talking about a thing, but at least they bother clarifying to what extent there is a change of policy. Turns out Gizmodo is absolutely still a thing. I had forgotten the regurgitated reporting-on-reporting stuff.

then why do you support this thing at all?

I don’t? I’ve said multiple times that I don’t.

Can somebody tell me what’s the minimum guaranteed attention span in people reading stuff online so I can crunch down any points that aren’t a binary of “Down with this sort of thing/Up with this sort of thing” to not have people waste my time by knee-jerk assuming my stance without reading what I’m saying? Maybe we need AI summarization more than people say we do.

Also, this is me doing that for Google now. Best I can tell Google isn’t stopping sideloading, they are stopping sideloading of unsigned apps in devices with Android security certifications.

The second caveat is irrelevant, in that uncertified devices presumably don’t get Google services and the Play Store, so outside off-brand Android retro handhelds it doesn’t matter. The first caveat is important, because on paper you can still install stuff from a website or F-Droid or the Samsung store or whatever but those developers will have to leave their info on record.

What you need to do

Complete these two steps:

Verify your identity: Provide information and documentation to confirm your identity as an individual or an organization. Register your package names: Prove ownership of your apps and register them with your verified identity.

This isn’t the full app certification you need to publish on Play Store, as far as I can tell. In their words

Android developer verification is a new requirement designed to link real-world entities (individuals and organizations) with their Android applications.

This is very bad for a number of reasons. Just not the reasons people are reporting.

Ah. That’s more of an accessibility issue than an advertising issue, then. I imagine even without ads a bunch of modern websites expecting higher resolutions and smaller scaling factors will look cramped.

I was not kidding before, if you have vision problems that don’t play well with desktop views, mobile versions of websites tend to be a LOT friendlier to large text sizes. Have you tried setting your browser to a vertical window and calling up the phone version? On Firefox at least you can set the resolution of the phone you’re emulating and zoom it all the way up. The setting is buried in the developer tools, but there are tons of tutorials out there (TLDR, press F12, look for the button that looks like a tablet/phone). I’ll try to add an image of what it looks like on my device for the site you shared.

I don’t think it seems like a benign change at all, for those reasons.

Well, for most of them. It IS a concern that every single piece of bootable code on the platform is traceable to a specific person worldwide, for sure. The last one shouldn’t be an issue. If Google disappeared you’d still be able to run unsigned code on Android, since on paper this will only apply to “Android certified” devices. Not being certified may remove Google services and the Play Store, but in your scenario those are gone anyway. And there isn’t a ton of clarity about whether ID certification will be automatic. I presume it will be, but we won’t know until we hear from devs in their early access program.

But apps being persecuted or censored by governments? Sure. That’s a very real issue. And Google and Apple deciding what people can run in their devices single-handedly? That’s entierly unacceptable.

What resolution are you browsing at? I have a hard time showing that ad at all in my setup, but I’m not even at 4K and I get a HUGE picture of the rocket in question and still see more text than you show in the screenshot. That’s what? 720p?

I man, don’t get me wrong, ads are annoying, there’s a reason why I have so many layers of blocking I couldn’t even shut them all off to test this, but you seem to be browsing at what I’d call… legacy resolutions. You’d almost be better off twisting that screen 90 degrees and asking for the mobile version. Or, you know, you could lower the UI scaling in your display settings.

Hell no, I do not want to help Grandpa avoid anything. I don’t want to be part of Grandpa’s owning appliances at all in the first place. I have way better things to do with the little time we get to share together in this world.

And again, this hypothetical old person is not a child. I don’t “allow” anything in this scenario. And even if I did, and even if I had the time or interest to run IT interference for somebody else, this solution does not scale. For every tech savvy person there are thousands of people who have never read a warning pop-up in full.

Your perception of where the onus is, how much understanding of how computers work or the usefulness of foolproof computing devices is way out of whack. And I get it, it’s easy to lose perspective on this. Average familiarity and all that. But you’re setting up a scenario that works just for you and not for everybody else.

So no, you are wrong, for a whole range of devices, restrictions should be the default. Absolutely. No question. This isn’t even up for debate.

That’s, in fact, not what is being debated, seeing how Google aren’t changing install restrictions at all. The changes are more insidious and extremely bad for entirely different reasons. It is frustrating that this conversation is both being had on the wrong terms for what Google is actually doing AND showing how much even casual dwellers in tech circles misunderstand how UX needs to work to be serviceable at scale.

I am literally cutting it off at 18, hence the safety net thing.

If you’re gonna go into biological limits we’re looking at the end of the 3DS era. You could technically have grandparents who weren’t born back in Red/Blue days, but we’re trying to keep things from getting gross, we’re just aiming for depressing.