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  • I guess there are probably a lot of people trading that stuff dumb enough to be networking on facebook and instagram with their real identities

  • do they need to? I don’t think so.

    Why not? How can you be sure that all these laws are going to be about all the same things and not have many tricky edge cases? What would keep them from being like that? Again, these laws give unique rights to residents of their respective states to make particular demands of websites, and they aren't copy pastes of each other. There's no documented 'best practices' that is guaranteed to encompass all of them.

    they don’t want this solution, however, but in my understanding instead to force every state to have weaker privacy laws

    I can't speak to what they really want privately, but in the industry letter linked in the article, it seems that the explicit request is something like a US equivalent of the GDPR:

    A national privacy law that is clear and fair to business and empowering to consumers will foster the digital ecosystem necessary for America to compete.

    To me that seems like a pretty sensible thing to be asking for; a centrally codified set of practices to avoid confusion and complexity.

  • Scientists have concluded that widespread physical distancing and masking practiced during the early days of COVID-19 appear to have pushed B/Yamagata into oblivion.

    Too bad these sorts of precautions haven't been normalized, I bet we could have made progress against a lot of diseases.

  • The listing notes that special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used.

    Any chance that's the real reason and not just a flimsy excuse? What kind of information would you even need a fake identity to gather from a public forum?

  • In 2022, industry front groups co-signed a letter to Congress arguing that “[a] growing patchwork of state laws are emerging which threaten innovation and create consumer and business confusion.” In 2024, they were at it again this Congress, using the term four times in five paragraphs.

    Big Tobacco did the same thing.

    Is this really a fair comparison though? A variety of local laws about smoking in restaurants makes sense because restaurants are inherently tied to their physical location. A restaurant would only have to know and follow the rules of their town, state and country, and the town can take the time to ensure that its laws are compatible with the state and country laws.

    A website is global. Every local law that can be enforced must be followed, and the burden isn't on legislators to make sure their rules are compatible with all the other rules. Needing to make a subtly different version of a website to serve to every state and country to be in full compliance with all their different rules, and needing to have lawyers check over all of them would create a situation where the difficulty and expense of making and maintaining a website or other online service is prohibitive. That seems like a legitimate reason to want unified standards.

    To be fair there are plenty of privacy regulations that this wouldn't apply to, like the example the article gives of San Francisco banning the use of facial recognition tech by police. But the industry complaint linked in the article references laws like https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa and https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb21-190 that obligate websites to fulfill particular demands made by residents of those states respectively. Subtle differences in those sorts of laws seems like something that could cause actual problems, unlike differences in smoking laws.

  • changing how its “block” button works. That option previously allowed users to hide their profile from certain accounts – but will no longer do so.

    So I guess all that stuff they did to lock down the ability to see things on Xitter without an account was strictly for evil then

  • True, and that is an issue, but I guess the main thing I'm getting at is that despite voter registration not being a unified system a majority of people moving between states aren't going to be deterred from registering by a Kafkaesque bureaucratic labyrinth.

  • I think for most people in the US when you move you have to get a new driver's license, and that process also lets you register to vote as an automatic bonus if you check a box saying you want it

  • Seems like a good thing, 3 chances one of them will get it right

  • That doesn't sound like something you get arrested for though

  • I'd be skeptical that's even real, outside of a select few countries with especially strict copyright enforcement

  • people being arrested for using pirate streaming services

    What circumstances does that even happen in? Like a bar that plays a pirated sports stream?

  • I could see it making sense in combination with a "you can't get there from here" type of situation. Someone asks, "Where is ____?" and the response is "over yonder as the crow flies", because it is literally in that direction, but since there are no direct roads to actually get there you must travel in a different direction first, which is why "as the crow flies" needs to be specified.

  • Sadly, Porn

    I don't know how to describe it, expect to be confused and offended and gaslit.

  • It's not actually clear that it only affects huge companies. Much of open source AI today is done by working with models that have been released for free by large companies, and the concern was that the requirements in the bill would deter them from continuing to do this. Especially the "kill switch" requirement made it seem like the people behind the bill were either oblivious to this state of affairs or intentionally wanting to force companies to stop releasing the model weights and only offer centralized services like what OpenAI is doing.

  • The real term is synthetic data

  • Being paid is a kind of attention/validation. The things he's selling are "branding" stuff that feed into his cult of personality. It's probably more of a narcissist thing than a money thing.