Well idc about the semantics, the fact is it is useful and there is a good reason to use it. Personally I think the “they can’t see or reply to you anymore” style of “block” is super toxic and Reddit switching to that model was a major factor in its decline. It is very easily weaponized and basically amounts to giving powerusers moderation powers. If someone who makes a lot of popular posts or top level comments blocks you under that model, that instantly limits your ability to participate, and no one ever gets to know this is happening or to what extent. The most obvious way this gets abused is by commercial spammers trying to monopolize relevant subs by blocking everyone who may call them out or post competing content, but it also shuts down disagreement and debate; if you have something controversial to say and don’t want it to look like any good objections exist, you can just silence your best critics. It also gets commonly used by people right after they write an inflammatory reply to ensure they get the last word.

So those replies won’t show up in my inbox of course

I mean… so your that sibling/roomate/kids/family doesnt mess around and replace your OS with a malicious OS)

Unfortunately the goal of simplifying your security setup is very much at odds with the really difficult goal of defending attacks from people with physical access to your hardware. Personally I live alone, don’t even have a lockscreen on my phone, and set my computer to skip login on boot.

Something supernatural coming to kill me, so I can’t explain anything to get help, and when I’m dead everyone thinks I died for some other reason.

Well sort of. Is it really yours if you can’t be secure in your person or belongings? Being homeless wouldn’t be so bad if you had a magically powered hiding space that can be accessed from anywhere that no one else can get to if you don’t want them to.

There are ways to see what’s at your door when you aren’t home that don’t rely on third parties having access to the footage at least

Living space. Imagine being able to instantiate unlimited pocket dimension instances and invite people to live there for free, would be really cool.

Maybe there’s an argument to be made there, but to me the privacy issues with all of the source material being sent to the servers of some AI company, and that company having the ability to put their thumb on the output in addition to the risk of the data being misused or leaked, are so much more of a thing to worry about. Those issues exist independently of how doctors use these tools and what risks those particular uses may have, which honestly I know nothing about, definitely not enough to argue that it is ok, it just isn’t something I would personally stress over as much as the other stuff.

I would only be ok with an AI note taking app if the model is running on hardware the doctor physically has in their office because otherwise any privacy assurances don’t mean that much.

You’re mostly right that it’s not about child safety, but in that case why are you asking for suggestions about how to do it? What goals should age verification have if child safety is not accepted as a goal?

Parental control already exists, but seemingly valid criticisms are that it is not a default, has limited effectiveness, and is not easy enough to use. The important detail here is that there are not widely accepted standards for it to interface with online platforms, which are now being pressured to develop privacy invasive child protection schemes they implement independently. What I’m suggesting is that instead of that, letting them rely on “verification” of whether a user is on a restricted device would do mostly the same thing in terms of benefits and be less harmful, if more work is put into building a standard for that and making it an easy to use default.

IMO the issue is way deeper than the method of age verification because you cannot automate child safety (from what I’ve read Roblox and Youtube Kids are notable failures here), and tech platforms are going to pick between some half-assed attempt at such automation and entirely banning minors, at which point they find a way to bypass it or go somewhere else on the internet that is also unsafe for children. It’s all about deferring blame to someone else, not creating a society where people are making sure the kids are ok, and cannot possibly address the actual problem.

But if the idea is that people are too stupid to understand this and it’s necessary to come up with the least bad form of plausibly functional age verification to placate them, maybe the best bet would be something like those self-attesting OS verification laws but modified to be less shitty. Something like a more voluntary system where when you buy a device, there’s a prominent option to get a version of it that is for kids and has parental control software preinstalled as bloatware. This could (optionally!) broadcast a flag (only to preapproved apps and websites!) that lets the service block the user from seeing or interacting with certain stuff, and otherwise do parental control things. It could at least somewhat work since kids don’t have the ability to buy their own hardware. It could be open source and collectively developed and funded as a set of common standards that experts have thought about and agreed on.

It wouldn’t solve the biggest issues, but at least it might make it a little simpler for parents who are overwhelmed and need a simpler solution for handling the problem of the raw internet.

excuse

People don’t need an excuse to not want to talk to you, which incidentally is itself one of many “great” ways to learn to be quiet. As an example, I once had a roommate who was on some kind of medication for social anxiety, and he was one of the most irritating people I ever met. Failing to overcome his inhibitions was clearly not the main problem, those inhibitions were totally rational, and could have been a stopgap to avoid stepping on people’s toes despite not having any intuitive understanding or intrinsic interest in how to do that.

Probably the girl who is dashing around the room squeeling with joy every time a new person arrives and giving them a huge hug, the girl who is excitedly talking about her hobbies, job, or emotional revelations to a circle of smiling friends and acquaintances, the girl who is grabbing people and dragging them onto the dance floor to get the party started.

…

And maybe someone will say that this whole analysis is shallow and misguided, and that pursuing any of these things by opening their mouth and speaking more would be a betrayal of their deep inner self or something.

I think something that people who are casually socially successful often don’t understand is how important it is to that success to have the correct emotional reactions to other people, and how difficult it is and how wrong it feels to fake those. That is a betrayal of yourself. You should strongly resist approaching friendship as an instrumental goal or a puzzle to be solved. For this reason it isn’t well described as a skill, because the most important factors are not skills.

and you could very easily end up completely alone if you never developed the skill of meeting new people and developing relationships with them.

Solitude really isn’t the end of the world, it could be a lot worse, despite how challenging it is to face. It does no one any favors to think of this as a high stakes game with solitude as the punishment for losing, that’s not actually how it is.

If you want quiet people to talk to you, the main thing would be helping them understand that it is genuinely safe to do so. If you want quiet people to talk to other people, that’s probably none of your business.

Maybe in some ways it’s better, but being pushed to spend 4+ hours a night on homework and encouraged to think it would be the end of the world if you get a bad grade on an exam really sucks.

One option is to do this for them, and just send the link to the instance most suited to your current audience when recommending using Lemmy, rather than trying to explain what instances are, because they don’t need to know that to use it.

Get health insurance, a good one

And then I had one guy inform me that I can also look over my shoulder

I usually do that but one of the few times I didn’t a car cuts me off and almost runs me over, hence buying a handlebar mirror

Yes, a lot, it’s my favorite hobby. I like trying to make good arguments, appreciating when other people make good arguments, and pointing out bad arguments. Topic doesn’t matter too much, though maybe free speech is the one I get most heated about, especially the idea that arguments are worthless and should be suppressed.

It isn’t normal for human beings to modify their behavior because someone scolded them about it in a rational way, especially when popular approval is still on the side of doing what they are doing, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing that moves the needle on people changing their behavior. You need positive reinforcement when they do something else instead, and stuff like that.

Something that elaborates in the direction I was already interested in imagining. Back when there were few open world games, that was really interesting to me, because I was always trying to find ways to get around the confines of constrained game areas or think about what could be there, where the game does not let you go. After playing enough of those, open world specifically got less interesting, but I think the same concept can apply to a lot of different things; a game gets a lot of points with me if it goes somewhere new that I have imagined going but been disappointed that it isn’t yet possible.

Are there any equivalent quarantine subs that would have a similar effect on the threadiverse? Right-wing people in particular seem to be convinced it is not what they are looking for, fortunately, judging from comments I saw when I browsed r/RedditAlternatives.