I read that as an example of how we're seduced into using things - we start small because surely this one small thing won't hurt. And then it becomes one more thing. And one more. It'll start with him using it to change the color of his lights and 5 years from now AI will be embedded in his life.

It's the first step on the road to hell.

> That kind of value based education where parents used to educate kids to be compassionate to each other, to respect each other...

No, we used to teach them to hide their cruelties and told them which targets were acceptable. Ask anybody who experienced being gay before 2000.

There are broadly speaking two options, neither of which will ever be implemented. What will happen is young girls will learn to accept deep fakes are made of them and it's part of life, in the same way explicit sexual commentary starting at the age of ~9 is, or how men follow you when you go somewhere in public, etc. They'll accept nobody cares in the same way nobody cares if you're sexually harassed in other ways.

The two options are either the people in power standing up for the girls or giving the girls the power to deal with it themselves.

People who have power generally are benefiting from the structure in place and so don't want to change it and/or they don't want to do any more work. Expelling all the kids who create deepfakes would cause a lot of arguing from parents and people who are on the boys' side, and they just don't want to deal with that. It's easier to tell the girls to be quiet.

The other option is setting up a system that rebalances the power. For example, if a kid gets caught making deep fakes, give their victim access to every single thing on their devices: Private messages, Discord chats, images, etc. and let the victim decide who and what to release their private information to. Not going to happen.

Another reason nothing is going to be done is if we teach 11 year old girls it's not acceptable for people to do this to them, they'll carry that forward through their life and a lot of people who find it gross to create fake porn of children are fine with doing it to older women and they don't want to create women who create a fuss about it. There are a lot of people who think it's disgusting I was sexually propositioned when I was 10/11 but think it's fine I can't go for a walk in my neighborhood now without being bothered since I'm older.

No, you make it a crime and prosecute it. What loony tunes world do you live in where you start giving away peoples other info. This just incentivizes you to abstract your data like businesses abstract their profits.

Make it a crime. Prosecute it. This isn’t hard, unless you have a legislature that is incapable of passing laws. People are becoming fed up with this stupidity. Give it a few years and a few congressman kids getting targeted as it becomes more mainstream and things suddenly change. We’re at the leading edge of the stupidity, voters, families, politicians aren’t angry enough yet. It will change, legislation is cyclical.

That's what will likely happen. And that's why girls will just accept it. Plenty of harassment is already illegal, and it's still a normal part of life for women and girls.

And I agree that giving up that personal information would be a nightmare. That's one reason it won't happen. It's just probably the only analogue to what the perpetrators do that would actually scare them.

We're likely just going to put up with this state of affairs.

> Trust in society is failing, and people are not seeing a civilized solution through the usual channels - such as politics.

I agree. I think the lack of seeing a way out is a big component of this turn. You bring up politics and that's a good example. Who do I vote for, campaign for, etc. that actually wants me (an American citizen making around the median wage for my area) to be able to buy a home? To have affordable, accessible healthcare? I'm aging out of my childbearing years and am wrangling with the sorrow of not being able to afford a child. There are some promising local candidates and I do vote for them, but so many of these issues need to be tackled at a higher level due to their complex, interdependent nature.

There's nobody. There's red and blue with different culture war paint. I can choose whether trans women play in sports or if we pray at work, but I have no choice in the fundamental material reality of my life.

We're seeing this chaotic violence in part because there's no alternative. We know the old world is dying, but our leaders won't let anything else be born.

I was talking to my father a few days ago. He's a 67 year old man who's voted Republican my entire life - we'd have political sparring matches in the car when he forced me to listen to Rush Limbaugh as a teenager. Of his own accord, he started talking about the necessary end/change of our economic system. A man who'd banged on about the free market and considered himself a Libertarian for decades, and who still, when he does engage with the news, does so with right wing sources.

He's brighter than average, but not to an extreme amount. The understanding of the situation has trickled down to the point where every workplace has at least 1 or 2 people who understand how fucked everyday people are. My team at work is 6 people doing basic white collar work and we talk openly about how things are going to get worse, and there are nods to it cross-functionally all the way up to the top when our execs talk in an all hands. This is at a very apolitical giant mega corp.

None of these discussions would have happened 20 years ago. We still shy away from the specifics (candidates, policies, etc.) due to professionalism, but the broader picture (things will get worse for the average person and our troubling trends aren't going to be reversed anytime soon due to inaction at the top) is agreed upon regardless of voting record.

It kind of reminds me of being in an abusive household as a child. There is no escape and, once you've exhausted the 'official' channels, you start contemplating other options. I reported my mother to CPS once when I was about 7 and they didn't do anything (except piss her off obviously). On the other hand, the first time I smacked her back, the physical abuse stopped, and I've heard similar stories from men with abusive fathers - that there's a moment they realize they can actually go toe to toe and don't have to put up with it.

If all your abusers will listen to is violence and you're not allowed to escape/get out, it's reasonable to come to the conclusion that in this case violence is the answer. I see a similar dynamic/thought process emerging in the American public.

Re: Organized crime.

Organized crime is also going to escalate as the economic squeeze continues to hit white collar workers. Pumping out a bunch of computer science graduates and rendering them unemployable isn't going to lead to all of them giving up and working at Walmart. A certain amount are going to figure out that they can make a better living by going black hat. Likewise for all the office managers, etc. who are put out of a job as belts tighten. Threatening the livelihoods of people who were led to expect a certain standard of living and who can organize and exploit systems is exactly how you end up with organized crime. Doubly so when the burden is falling on the young, who have more appetite for risky decisions.

When I say organized crime, I don’t just mean intelligent criminals. I mean a culture of loyalty. For organized crime to function, all of the members need to have a system of justice underpinning their actions in order to keep the organization whole.

I agree with you. I think such a culture is more likely to arise when you have people who believe in the idea of loyalty but haven't seen it bear fruit in their lives, and who are used to acting within such an organizational framework, which describes a fair number of the workers who either are being displaced or feel themselves to be.

Yea, I think that's fair.

This depends on your genetics - there are different groups of caffeine metabolizers. I'm in the group that's super sensitive to caffeine and I can feel effects from less than 20mg.

Sure, but you're consumption is probably lower.

I'm considering doing this.

I'm eligible for dual citizenship and am in the process of acquiring my second citizenship.

My reasons are two-fold:

1.) I've fallen through the cracks and ended up in a situation the system did not account for. I had a medical incident during my last semester of graduate school that turned out to be a presenting relapse of Multiple Sclerosis. Obviously I couldn't have anticipated this when I went to undergraduate and graduate school. The problem comes in in that the system treats disability as completely binary: Either you can't work at all/can work so little you can't earn more than 1600/mo, or they assume you're fine and can pay everything off. I can work, but I can't work in the field or to the level that I planned for before I got ill. In addition, I have expenses working full time that an able bodied person doesn't just to allow me to do that full time work and that aren't considered in the income based payment calculations. So I fall in the hole of 'make too much to be considered disabled, but not enough to actually pay' due to a condition that is incurable. Also, I have a special Medicaid exemption that allows me to earn more without losing healthcare, but not enough to actually pay back my loans. So even if I could get and maintain a job that would pay a salary that would let me pay, I'd then lose my healthcare and I'd hit the out of pocket maximum every year on any private plan, resulting in a substantial decrease in actual salary.

There's functionally no way for me to pay my loans: If I give up the supports I pay for to pay my loans, I can't work full time anymore and can't pay my loans. the jobs that would pay over 100k in this state (what I would need at minimum to cover supports, healthcare I'd lose, and loan payments) won't hire someone who needs frequent time off, a bunch of employment flexibility, who can't work overtime, and can't be subjected to too much stress. I can barely work one full time job, so additional jobs or hustling isn't an option. I'm just stuck.

2.) I don't consider the US government to be a trustworthy contract partner at this point. I was one of the people who consolidated my loans to take advantage of the SAVE program under Biden's administration. They've struck down SAVE, but haven't done a thing for those of us who consolidated our loans and added to the principal because we trusted what we were told by the government. If I can be told by the government that doing something will help me, and then 2 years later they reverse that with no recourse offered, that tells me none of the terms can be depended on. If our own government's answer to this is 'you shouldn't have listened to the government, sucker', then well... I don't trust them to fulfill their end of the contract, and I don't particularly like the idea of owing money to an institution with both an extreme amount of power over my life and no intent on sticking to agreements or dealing fairly with me. It makes me nervous, especially for 10-20 years down the road.

> We wouldn't give our children a pass like this, nor would we teach our children to act this way, but we're perfectly willing to allow fully grown adults to act like this.

Speak to a group of K-12 teachers.

We (as a society/culture) are absolutely giving our children passes and teaching them to act this way.

> Speak to a group of K-12 teachers.

> We (as a society/culture) are absolutely giving our children passes and teaching them to act this way.

That depends upon where you teach. I've worked in schools where families who would put up with that type of behaviour were an anomaly. The school sends the same message.

Of course, one can argue that society is sending conflicting messages. Yet then my question would be: are those messages coming from people who are truly reflective of society? Those messages are certainly coming from the loudest voices, voices that are (more often than not) controlled by a few organizations that seem to have a moral compass that points towards the profit of the organization rather than social welfare. Even then I have to wonder whether the views of the organization reflect the views of the people it is composed of.

Yes, it does. I was speaking generally. I think if you selected teachers at random from the entire set of K-12 teachers in America, you'd find more who do have to deal with that behavior than don't.

That's the impression I have as well, but I am also cautious about accepting it. People tend to discuss the bad schools and ignore the good ones. They tend to focus upon the families who don't care for their kids (may they be poor or rich), and ignore the families who do care for their kids. It's easy to understand why. The kids who do act out need a disproportionate amount of attention to keep the system on track.

The negativity bias is a good point.

I wonder if it isn't so much the absolute number of kids who act out (at least initially) so much as it is the change in the way we've handled consequences? My understanding is in a lot of school systems, it's nearly impossible to hold a child back or to fail them, and that it's much harder to mete out discipline. Even if the number is holding steady, the rest of the class/families are still seeing that there are no consequences for not meeting standards and exhibiting problematic behavior, which is sort of the start of a slow moving poison.

I think the view you put here is legitimate, Greenwald had an article about Frances Haugen kind of saying the same sorts of things

Search.

There was some overlap between the webring age and the early search age, but once search became entrenched and useful, webrings faded. Blogrolls survived for a little bit longer, but it was search.

Specifically, once search became the way you found the first page/site to begin with. Before search as default, you found sites in a bunch of scattershot ways: advertisements, word of mouth, lists in books, or lists on websites that updated periodically (that you had to have found/heard about one of the other ways) for example. Then you crawled out from there because that was the only way to find things. You had to either know the URL or use a link. And not all of the links/sites in the webrings were good.

Once search got good enough, people found the initial site via search and instead of taking their time clicking through a webring which might at any point lead them somewhere dead or useless, it was quicker to go back to the search page to find something else.

Page access went from being a chained together web of back and forth links to a 2 step process of search -> page.