I personally welcome this change. Anecdotally, I experienced unimpeded and unsupervised internet access throughout my younger teenage years, and was exposed to some truly horrendous material courtesy of the bigger social platforms. My parents knew I used social media. They believed it was fine because it was "just MySpace and Facebook".
Meanwhile, I witnessed large amounts of open bullying between my peers, recordings of physical assaults, underage revenge pornography, and a massive decline of people physically spending time together outside of online contexts, culminating in widespread loneliness and isolation.
In recent times I have seen the dramatic failure of social media companies to moderate their content, actively promoting extremist content, and even openly protecting the originators of illicit material.
Rates of youth suicide skyrocketed shortly after the rise of smartphones, social media and always-available internet access as evident by published statistics. While none of these can be individually attributed as the cause of this rise, all are undoubtedly a contributing factor, as suggested by countless studies globally.
I started using the internet unsupervised heavily in my tweens in the early 2000's and came across some horrendous stuff pretty early. Despite that, for me I think it's been a net positive and I would like my children to grow up in a similar environment.
The lasting qualities I think it's given me are:
- An open mindedness and the ability to examine issues from multiple angles
- A thick skin against shocking material/online forms of bullying
- A stronger understanding of how technology interacts with society/power structures
I think the country needs to be building digitally strong youth, not trying to put the genie back into the bottle.
Considering that 300 light-nanoseconds is about 90m, getting a response (or even just one-way) in that time is essentially running right at the limits of physics/causality.
You give it a set of source images and a target image. For each pixel in the target image, it will look at the same pixel in each of the source images and choose the closest colour, using that pixel to then paint a new image.
I think this is right. We routinely check the integrity of the packages and installers that we download using cryptographic hashing. OpenBSD even has a dedicated tool for this purpose.[1] It would make sense to take the same approach with curled shell scripts.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's all a gigantic fraud, as there are some small worthwhile innovations in distributed cryptographic verification.
However, almost every single addition to that point is riddled with corruption and scams for what is essentially a gigantic linked list.
We have lit a metaphorical forest on fire with proof-of-work mining and been told that it's good for the environment.
We have charged a weeks wages in transaction fees for a loaf of bread and been told that it's good for the poor.
We have seen people lose their life savings over typos and been told that it's a good store of value.
We have allowed blockchain founders to walk away with billions of stolen savings and been told that it's decentralized.
As a generalization, blockchains and cryptocurrencies cause more far more damage than good.
