Technical debt is a thing. Everyone says Xorg is too old to be maintained so we have to switch to Wayland for example. I don’t know the state of Libre Office but it’s possible it simply can’t be easily migrated to newer, better tools.

This doesn’t make any sens. They would be susceptible without what experience? With scammers? You think children learn about scammers by interacting with them? I remember when I got my first “Nigerian prince” scam email. I was maybe 16 and I had no idea what it was. No one knew back them. What previous experience would help me deal with it? I’m sure being older would help but I’m not sure if someone trying to scam me when I was even younger would. There would just be higher change of me falling for it.

Also, the system is not predatory, there are simply predators in the system. The age verification laws are like bad tasting batteries and child proof bottles. Parents should make sure their kids don’t have access to batteries or pills but since a lot of them don’t care the government has to step in and put some protections in place. You can’t simply ban pedophiles from roblox and you can’t trust parents to oversee what their kids are doing online so politicians come up with some safety measures. Unfortunately all solutions are huge pain in the ass for everyone else.

Saying that age is just an ‘arbitrary number’ is delusional. We don’t let kids buy cigarettes, alcohol, drive or vote. The concept that kids can’t be trusted to make informed decisions is well established in every society in the world. Calling it ‘ageism’ is silly.

Yes, definitely can be a temporary thing which would make it even harder to protect people from. It’s also most likely some spectrum. If you’re “resistance” is at 10 you may not be at risk even at your lowest point. Other people can be at 5 when they are doing great but risk psychosis when they are down for some reason. I just think it’s kind of scary that people interact with it voluntarily (unlike with scammers or cults) without knowing how it will affect them. We all tried LLMs but most of us was lucky so far.

I think what we’re seeing is similar to lactose intolerance. Most people can handle it just fine but some people simply can’t digest it and get sick. The problem is there’s no way to determine who can handle AI and who can’t.

When I’m reading about people developing AI delusions their experiences sound completely alien to me. I played with LLMs same as anyone and I never treated it as anything other than a tool that generates responses to my prompts. I never thought “wow, this thing feels so real”. Some people clearly have predisposition to jumping over the “it’s a tool” reaction straight to “it’s a conscious thing I can connect with”. I think next step should be developing a test that can predict how someone will react to it.

No idea why would they be more susceptible to scams. You think they would be more gullible? Or that they would be so confused about the ability to talk over phone? Smartphones for kids are security devices that let them communicate with parents so you would have to replace them with something, either dumbphones or smartwatches. Both would let them communicate with people over phone so it’s not like at 18 they would be exposed to something completely new.

Still, laptops would be more complicated because how do you ban those? A lot of grooming and child abuse happens through Roblox. How would you solve it without some sort of age verification? I think we either have to accept that kids will be exposed to those things or do what Chat Control 2.0 is proposing and impose age verification in high risk platforms. Since I don’t have kids I’m fine with just accepting the risk…

Actual studies say that kids that use phones and laptops are actually less intelligent. I think no phones until 18 would be doable. No laptops would be hard though.

This. Smart watches exist. Kids don’t need smartphones.

Guy, I found the bot!

So you’re using iPhone now but are anonymous to apple? You didn’t register any accounts on your phone or in the AppStore with your email or credit card data?