It's stupidly irresponsible to encourage people to forage Japanese Knotweed in countries where it is a major threat to existing ecosystems. Even small fragments on shoes or in water can cause outbreaks. That's why dealing with contaminated soil is extremely expensive.
Article is paywalled. I assume it is a response to this [1] discussion from earlier. The linked article appears to be about iceberg calving events. Does it deal with freshwater discharge? If not, it is not a relevant counterpoint to the earlier post.
> The new study takes a detailed look at what happens when the balance is disrupted by greater quantities of freshwater flowing into the ocean, and the findings are a “major advance in AMOC stability science,”
Once the effects of climate change become too expensive or inconvenient for the ruling class you mean, which might be never since they are really good at shielding themselves from consequences.
I wholeheartedly agree though am questioning whether shielding will actually work if effects of climate change become dire… not just for the ruling class personally but in the way that made them and keeps them a ruling class.
Yeah yeah. They'll see usage dropping thanks to their spyware, sorry strike that, telemetry. Then there will be a point where "too few people use this why so we keep it around" and it will get removed.
Why does "spyware" only matters for Firefox but not other browsers, considering ~97% of the browser market share is proprietary browsers.
If people cared about privacy majority of users wouldn't use Chrome.
Also what is the point of complaining about spyware when the only viable option is Chrome (and other Chromium based browsers), I trust Mozilla more than any proprietary browser vendor. They collect less data than any of the proprietary browsers. I can actually disable "spyware" using config options. They are not some black box switches that might disable the "spyware" unlike proprietary browsers.
Telemetry doesn't help make a browser better. If anything it makes it worse by diverting resources from the actual browser or any other project it gets shoved into. Furthermore it is used as an excuse to remove features.
And yes 97% of people are idiots who should never have been given a computer. They don't care that every bit of data is phoned home thereby making worse for the rest.
I see "Q/acc" in the authors twitter name, which I guess is a sign of allegiance to some modern Silicon Valley movement or ideology like how "e/acc" is Effective Accelerationism. Anyone know which one this is?
Does anyone else feel uneasy about the idea of children having to curb their behavior because they know they're being constantly monitored by their parents?
This product concerns me not only due to corporate advertising surveillance but also parental spying.
My child has more freedom now, because I can let her walk further from home, unsupervised, to see if a friend can play - because she can immediately text me and let me know she's staying at the friend's house for the next few hours. She no longer has to wait for me to be ready to walk with her.
She can text me if she wants to be picked up from aftercare early. Or if she wants to stay later. Or if she wants to make plans for afterwards with a friend.
I don't mean to dismiss your concerns, they're valid. But this question also varies hugely with age. It would feel very odd tracking every step of my child's life if they were 16; it's different if they're 8.
Thank you to share. My experience (different countries) was similar to yours.
Do you know anyone who grew up in a big city in the same era? I do. They didn't experience the same type of freedoms. Their parents were much more concerned about crime/kidnapping/"the boogey man".
Anecdotally, where I live in a more rural area now, it's common to see kids out riding bikes during the day. Contrast that, I work in the city and unless it's right after when school lets out, I don't see nearly as many kids just riding around. Perhaps it's because they really stay inside the neighborhood or culdasac, but the city is small enough and well connected (Netherlands) with bike infrastructure, that I would expect to see more kids around.
Perhaps this is also influenced by the number of expats in the larger cities and those people are unsure of the safety/normalcy aspect and tend to lean towards caution? I'd be interested to see some data!
I grew up in a socialist apartment block neighborhood with more apartment blocks around and more even further.
You came home from school, watched tv, did whatever, then around three, parents would start coming home, so we (the kids) went out, you knew approximately when dinner would be ready to go home and eat, and that was it. The playgrounds, benches, basketball courts, etc., where full of kids and noone really cared. Sometimes when someone was needed at home, a mom would yell his name through the window, and someone heard it and told someone else, and than that third person knew where that kid was and told him that his mom is looking for him, and the kid went home (usually to eat, or if some relative came to visit).
Germany showing its incredible infrastructure again then. But then giving the kids a cell phone really is a necessity huh. Can't even call parents at work if they're back from school or on break and something happens.
You're talking about giving the kid the ability to send messages to their parents - I don't think anyone thinks that's a bad thing.
The person you're responding to is talking about the location "sharing" feature, where the watch constantly reports the kids location to their parents without the kid doing anything.
From skimming the page, it looks like it mainly just lets you know their location. Were there other more invasive features than that? Parents keeping tabs on where their kids are and who they're with is associated with positive outcomes like reduced drug use risks.
And then when they finally break free they don't have any feedback mechanism that they had since childhood. This can go both ways. They might turn out to be model citizen or your worst nightmare.
People raised children for 1000s of years without any technology. I bet we can do that too.
I don't disagree, but we didn't had a choice and now we have. How much guilt is a parent going to have in, the unlikely situation, that something unfortunate happens and that it could have been prevented by this device?
Possibly -- but we're looking at a smartwatch to give our 7 y.o. _more_ freedom. If he has a way to call home and we can check on his location, I'm much more likely to set him loose in the neighborhood.
In the US, the biggest danger to free-range kids is nosy neighbors, who are convinced kids out wandering alone are in danger of… something! Kidnapping? Sex trafficking? Darned if I know. But it’s a huge problem to those of us who want our kids to be free to walk to the corner store. My kid had a woman call the police on him at age 7, in a safe suburban neighborhood, when she wasn’t satisfied with his answers about why he was out alone. Having a phone would have helped: he could have called me right then. (As it is, he ran away before they got there, and I still chuckle wondering what the cops thought about the whole thing.)
I am pretty comfortable with him moving around w/o a cell device but it would give my wife peace of mind (which is fair). Plus the convenience of calling him home without driving around.
Correct me if wrong, but the anti-vaxxer movement is limited to Americans. I never once heard any other nationality talk about it, except to make fun of loonies from the US. In many highly developed countries, you cannot go to public schools without evidence of many vaccines.
Apple purposefully leverages its closed ecosystem to generate social friction amongst kids in order to drive hardware sales, making them persona non grata in my book.
As mentioned by others in this discussion, Apple does have a way to limit the functionality of an Apple Watch, as outlined: https://support.apple.com/en-us/109036
You can do similar things with an iPhone or iPad. Turn off all kinds of stuff entirely, require a request (comes through in the parent’s phone) to override. No Web browsing without asking? Done. No installing apps without asking? Done. Web browsing allowed, but allow-list only? Done. Allow some app, but max one hour per day? Done. Lots of stuff.
Your kids won’t appreciate it once they grow up and they found out later that their whole childhood been recorded and being used to train AI or even worse, a data breach, since they didn’t have the choice to opt in or out.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
> You can be sure they won't be slowed down by regulation.
You should read up on existing regulations. The EU AI Act explicitly exempts national security, research and military uses for example.
Regulation isn't some all or nothing force that smothers everything. It's carefully crafted legislation (well, should be../) that is supposed to work to benefit the state and its citizens. Let's not give OpenAI a free for all to do anything because you think China is making Skynet drones.
I'm pretty sure China is making Skynet drones. Why wouldn't they be? Russia, North Korea as well. Seems a no-brainer to me. They are dictatorships where a handful of people rely on military power to subdue their populace and achieve their goals, why wouldn't they be throwing everything at weapons development?
Times have changed and it's probably unwise to rely on the tech geniuses and multi-year procurement cycles inside the military industrial complex for our weapons, things are moving so fast and the tech is already in the hands of the masses.
If a genius Chinese kid is tinkering around and attaches a nerf gun to his DJI drone and creates a super effective autonomous weapon, then his govt will gratefully take that and add it to their arsenal.
If some US-specific regulation prevents his peer genius American kid from even attaching a nerf gun to his drone for fear of being locked up, that means China has an edge in the weapons development race.
> Existing laws cover almost everything "bad" you could do with AI/ML.
If (like many non-EU countries and parts of the US) you don't already have basic digital privacy laws, transparency or consumer protections, that is simply not true.
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