I said elsewhere here that I haven’t gotten through the D20s, because they have a story that requires some dedication to sit through and I like the shorter form shows. I still like D20, I just need to be present and treat them like a book instead of just enjoying the mayhem. The on-a-bus iteration of D20 is led by Katie Marovitch, who appears in several Game Changers and Make Some Noise. I think she might be more of a writer than a contestant, but I’m not sure and haven’t gone to look her up. I love that Dropout lets people blur the line.

I think the on-a-bus series, which I’m only vaguely aware of and haven’t watched, is a bit on its own where they are somewhat picking on Brennan; which is funny because he takes this so seriously and Katie doesn’t seem to.

See if there’s a thread in one of the Dropout communities. If it’s old, start a new one and link the old. We don’t all find these shows when they are newly aired. I want to discuss many shows I’ve seen, and plan to use the lemmy.world community to start those.

If anyone knows of an older style forum where this is being discussed, let me know. A necro-post in this context seems like it would be neat instead of annoying.

So…

On Make Some Noise, there are occasionally ‘fan submissions’ for prompts. Where does that happen? I figured there was a secret forum I was just unaware of.

My guess is reddit, sadly, but if there’s some more official place and I just haven’t found it, I need to know.

If the official unofficial place is reddit, we need to push everyone to one of the communities here.

They really are. So many amazing people on their shows, and a variety of kinds of show.

I’m trying not to sound like PR for them, because I’m not, but I really like their content and ethos; and will recommend them as a place to go for fun stuff. Fuck Sam Reich (but only if you’re Elaine) - that probably proves I’m not corporate?

They need to re-up Gastronauts and Crowd Control. Those are some of my favorites, though they can be a bit hit or miss based on the guests. The D20’s are great, but require more investment since there’s a long story, and that intimidates me so I like the more self-contained shows. @samreich

I can. Clicking that link redirects me a few times, but results in an unauthenticated view of blahaj.zone, so I couldn’t comment without making a blahaj account

I’m myserv.one, so my view is via https://lemmy.myserv.one/c/dropout@lemmy.blahaj.zone

It had a newest post of 10 months ago as of when I looked yesterday. It now has many more, so I can tell federation is working. Probably just with a delay, and maybe because I subscribed instead of just looking at it. I’ll have to go revisit some other communities that I thought were dead, but might be active if I join them…

My poor server admin. With storage prices these days…

I think part of my problem is that there are communities that already exist, and some of them I can’t see, and the ones I can might not be sync’d to my instance.

Federation and decentralization has its pros and cons.

I don’t think my instance is defederated from much, we’re tiny, but my view of the community via blahaj has a newest post 10 months ago. If I go there directly, I see more posts. My instance block list doesn’t contain lemmy.blahaj.zone. Anyone know why I can’t see current posts?

What else am I missing?

I dropped a post in the lemmy.world one, because I think it might have a larger potential audience, since .world was like the semi-default instance when I joined lemmy. Now I need to learn how to crosspost so I can share to other instances.

Ask-lemmy-v2: Does crossposting link comments? If someone sees a post in lemmy.blahaj.zone and I’ve crossposted from lemmy.world, are the post mingled or isolated?

I’d rather solidify on a single community if the commentors can’t see each other.

Asking for a friend.

For a decade or two now, it’s been pretty much assumed that everyone has an internet-connected, camera-equipped, browser-capable device in their pocket. Restaurants, banks, hospitals, employers and even government offices use QR codes and websites to get you to their menus, forms or services.

If ID is being tied to my mobile spy device, then I need my mobile spy device to be a right and not a luxury. $40-50 for a few years of validity, internet access provided at no cost, even if slow. I can have my luxury phone be where I’m ‘anonymous’, but I want the government to subsidize the mobile spy device if it’s a mandatory expense. Even cheap phones cost a lot of money.

To be clear, I don’t want ID tied to my phone, but it’s gotten harder to exist without one, so it should be something we have access to with minimal friction.

Add food, water and shelter to that list, but you can’t ask for them without a web browser.

Many people with passports didn’t get the “RealID” because the Passport always usurped it.

That’s a really good point. I have a “RealID”, which is just a way to say that I showed my passport at a DMV; but I also had to jump an extra hurdle to get that star.

If you have a passport right now and don’t have your license with a star, you should do so.

I obviously carry my driver’s license with me everywhere, but when doing things like air travel or interacting with federal processes, I bring my passport since, to me, the federal document supersedes the state document stating federal was checked.

The dystopian scenario is that the federal side can revoke your document and, if you haven’t already been validated, you no longer can validate your federal status; and that federal status can be required to vote or travel.

“Your passport is no longer valid because of <reason>” + You need a RealID to vote now = people who can’t vote because the government doesn’t like them and can invent a reason to invalidate a passport.

I’d say have both: If you don’t have a passport, get one; if you don’t have a star on your state driver’s license or ID card, get one.

I hear what you’re saying, but counterpoint:

I’d prefer Steam’s helpdesk staff were paid more, and their janitors, and their contractors, and anyone else involved in making that business work. Gabe doesn’t NEED a new yacht. Some of the people working for him do NEED healthcare.

Gabe is definitely on the not-a-monster side of the billionaire spectrum, but you don’t get that much money with purely your output. You get lucky and have a good idea at the right time, inherit, or rent-seek. Two of those are stupid reasons to have immense wealth, and I don’t think getting lucky is worth the vast gulf between billionaire and struggling-to-get-by.

I think if we could have a wealth cap… say 10 billion right now, an absurd sum, where it’s almost impossible to even spend it all… and after you pass that amount you get fed to a wood chipper; then we would see a lot fewer billionaires and a better world.

I was about to reply that you forgot your /s, but then I refreshed my browser tab.

Like… there are multiple documented cases of sycophantic llms confirming people’s delusions. ‘ai psychosis’ is just a short way of saying the AI is a non-funny-improv-comedian and will always “yes and” your prompt.

prompt: “I feel bad and think I need to kill myself”

response: “You’re totally right, here’s some help in how to do that…”

prompt: “I have this great idea: If we eat broken glass, we’ll be healthier”

response: “Absolutely. Glass is made out of silicon dioxide, which has some health benefits if consumed in small amounts.”

prompt: “You told me to see a doctor, but I don’t want to”

response: “I’m sorry, you’re right. You don’t need to see a doctor. Your chest pain is perfectly normal.”

My examples are more physical things instead of mental because the consequence is more clear, but the same issue exists for mental health.

Using an AI for therapy or medical advice is a stupid, dumb, very bad idea. It will at best magnify problems.

Suggesting that disabled or impoverished people use it because they can’t access actual mental healthcare seems equivalent to eugenics to me.

the sad thing is, it’s the best option a lot of people have

That I will agree with. Maybe we should spend a small fraction of the money going into data centers on providing healthcare instead.

Who could have predicted this!?

Not an LLM, that’s for sure. Maybe all the people screaming about this exact scenario, though.

And everyone who cried out a warning at the first step was ignored.

And the stupidest part of this is the ‘omg my IP’ angle from a publisher.

You’ve destroyed this game because it’s not economically viable for you, and therefore the IP of how the server-side operates has no value; these are no longer secrets worth protecting.

If someone else is willing to host it at their cost then the only thing that can do is bolster the franchise. When a niche game has a devoted following that’s willing to build infrastructure to keep playing together, then you know it was a management fuck-up and not a game one that killed it.

Like… “This”

My computer, regardless of the OS that it runs, should do my bidding and only my bidding.

If I want to enable or disable something, that should be my prerogative.

I commented in a similar thread and I’ll restate it here:

I do support parental controls being an option, and will use the whole Free-Market thing and choose to use an OS that has parental controls for my children – but I am also happy to see my children evade my restrictions with their knowledge and skills. And, more specifically, these need to be OPT-IN. As a parent, I can create an account and identify it as supervised or give it an age range, and that’s all cool. What isn’t cool is making me Verify* MY age range in order to create an account on a device I own.

*especially verification that involves giving up my privacy, such as face scan, government ID or similar PII. We used to have laws protecting this data. I’ve helped build whole systems to ensure that only trained admins had rights to access customer PII.

H.R. 8250 is an attack on freedom to use… everything… It’s so vague, and doesn’t even describe it’s terms the way the California bill does. A Missile developed by Lockheed Martin has an Operating System and I’m certain that if I had one in my hands I could make it run DOOM, thus making it a ‘General Purpose Computing Device’.

… Maybe those Doom-on-fridge/toaster people were on to something. Samsung, LG, etc need to quickly evaluate their fucking toasters to ensure they can’t run DOOM, or ensure they can verify a user’s age before enabling toasting.

I also (dis)like how section 2.A.5.i will require the commission to describe how every operating system will verify a parent or legal guardian’s age’s within 6 months and then have an effective date of a year. Has anyone involved with writing this bill done software development?! Sure, this sounds simple on paper, but I have a 30+ year plan to actually implement it; because I’m a volunteer open source dev working on my OS in my free time without pay.

Anyone looking at this and thinking it’s a good idea, take a moment to think about this: Who has resources to dedicate whole teams to implementing this privacy invasion? It’s the big players like Microslop, Apple, Google, and a handful of Enterprise-grade Linux/Unix providers. Anyone else could face financial ruin for distributing their home-grown OS experiment if it gets enough attention and that will prevent new distros or operating systems from being developed, leading to effectively regulatory capture by the existing players. That’s not going to end well.

Edit 2, coming back later with more thoughts:

The real difference is that Attestation, or lack thereof, puts any legal issue on the user who claimed to be something they were not, whereas Verification will put the onus on the OS developer, API developer, app developer and anyone else in the chain, which is just insane.

Parent walks in on kid watching porn? That’s not the fucking OS developer’s fault, and needs to be handled inside the household and not in court, if at all. I could have a whole conversation about what I fear that my son might find online, and it’s not PornHub, it’s Joe Rogan or similar “influencers” and grifters.

Whole tangent into “protecting the children”:

In a sane, non-fascist surveillance-state world, this would be called parental controls, and be something opted-into instead of forced – and it used to be a thing. I’m all for an OS that has the ability to have supervising user with parental controls, and will chose to install those on my kid’s devices. My son has a phone that doesn’t have unrestricted access to the internet because he’s a pre-teen and is still developing the ability to discern reality from propaganda. He also has a Nintendo Switch with screen time and game limits so that he can play, but can’t play ALL the time and can only play things I’ve approved (As of like 2020, hes gotten older and I’ve removed most restrictions – hooray growth!).

He hates the restrictions, but that’s tough stuff for him because he can text his friends to coordinate an online game session, call me if he gets in trouble, map his way home, calculate pi, etc, which I couldn’t do in my pre-teen years before pocket computers. I think it’s OK for there to be options for parents to manage their kid’s digital existences and, critically, I think it’s OK when my son escapes my borders through skills he learned. When he installs his first VPN on his phone, I’ll be so proud.

It was a rite of passage when we learned how to get a terminal in an ancient MacOS, or use notepad to launch a program like a browser on a school computer. These guardrails will always fail and the only way to solve them is human to human conversation.

Not Legislation. Call your Representatives (And Senators if this or something like it escapes the House) and tell them this shit is not acceptable.

There is some nuance to the language, and there might be litigation to follow; but age attestation and age verification are wildly different things:

Age attestation is just providing a birthday, like many sites such as steam, require before accessing most games. There’s nothing stopping a 10-year-old from claiming to be 30.

Age verification, though, will be more of a legal process: requiring government documentation, biometrics, ai data harvesting, tracking, etc. and will result in the OS theoretically being required to keep your specific pii to provide to downstream consumers of this data.

Those of us who grew up in the age of the early Internet have ‘handles’ or ‘usernames’. Those that grew up in the later Facebook age use their real names. Us elders see this tying of identity to computation as an invasion of privacy.

I’ve had this handle for decades across multiple platforms. I’ve probably identified myself, but you would need to put in at least some work to figure out what human being I am. We call that doxxing right now, and it’s generally seen as hostile. This bill eradicates even that layer of defense by requiring my computer to know who I am, and sharing that data with Meta, Google, Facebook, Lemmy, etc. effectively my computer will doxx me.

While the intermediate result is not that my privacy is instantly compromised, anyone with a clue can see the future here: if the OS knows who you are because of this law, then the browser can know who you are, and the website can know who you are and when you say things the government doesn’t like, you can be… Removed.

This is what we call a chilling effect. And that is also generally understood to be bad.

This bill, and all others like it, are bad.

Edit: And if this bill is defeated, there will be others. This is not going to end, and each version will be an existential threat to privacy.

Claude, code me a robot dog admin platform. I want to be able to monitor and control the dogs from my iOS tablet.

Fair enough. My point wasn’t to equate code with github, but to suggest that github, and any other code repository, is effectively an app store by the definition of the California law, and is therefore supposedly responsible for handling this ‘age signal’ bullshit.

Similarly, GeoCities from the 90’s is a publicly accessible website (*actually it’s not – just tried and it seems to completely dead now as opposed to mostly dead in early 2000’s, RIP) with the ability to (and did) distribute software and would have also been an “application store”. Archive.org is maybe a better example now: you can download tons of ‘applications’ from there and none of them will ever have age verification baked in. Is Archive.org now illegal? Let’s find out.

I get really upset when there’s this association between “the libs” and “non-authoritarian voters”. I’ve not done and don’t support lobbying for state control of social media.

I fully agree that there are shitty people elected as democrats.

I could go on a whole mile-long monologue about this, but I won’t do it here. I’m aware of the various definitions of liberal and I don’t want to talk about that – I’m using the US scope of the two parties that can actually matter: Conservative/Republican vs Liberal/Democratic. [If you Identify as Liberal in the US, you’re probably actually Socialist, but the media hates that word, so we don’t use it]

The short version is that the PEOPLE want things to be better; the voters called “the libs” want things to be better. Not enough of us are engaged at the low-level to fix this and I think it’ll only take a few of us to do the grass-roots remix that the conservatives did as the tea party, and fix the situation with the democratic org that will both win us elections (if we get anymore) and cut out the rot.

Gotta start local though. If you’re mad, join your precinct and choose who votes in the district, etc. Don’t wait for November and then be mad at your choices. Primaries are over for 2026, but you can influence choices for local offices in 2027 and other state and national ones in 2028.

Don’t just be mad at your options, help make the options better. And 'Both Sides’ing is either malicious or at least detrimental:

“Oh, the system is fucked. Guess we’ll keep aiming for the dystopia! We can’t possibly change the system!”