palordrolap

According to the legislation, the concepts of “user” and “18 and over” are mutually exclusive. Anyone over 18 is “an account holder”.

The most charitable reason I can think of that they would do this is that short phrases like “minor user”, that would otherwise be far better choices, have an unwanted secondary reading that the creators of the law sought to avoid (that being “user of minors”), and they wished to keep things more terse than repeated use of the phrase “user under the age of 18”.

I don’t think that’s a good enough excuse to blatantly redefine a well-established term, even if the scope of the redefinition is limited. Even if there’s precedent for having done similarly in the past.

And it’s all but guaranteed that someone will attempt to leverage that redefinition outside of the scope.

If they’re even remotely like us, then they’ll have the same sort of story, which will entail multiple languages.

That is: To assume that a sapient, language-capable genus evolves in one place, then spreads across a planet from there.

Even if they all speak the same language when they begin the spread, the same sorts of factors will encourage semantic drift in different ways in different places, and over enough time, multiple languages are all-but inevitable.

I’ve been keeping my head in the sand about all this because frankly, smarter people than me are already dealing with it, and if there’s a way out, they will find it.

But I chose to read this. And my major takeaway, beside the point they’re trying to make, is that the California law has taken the asinine step of redefining the word “user”.

I hate this apparent trend of legislatively redefining words to mean what is most convenient for a party, often a powerful one, acting in bad faith, and not what is commonly understood or could reasonably be understood by someone encountering the term for the first time.

May these redefiners each have an excruciatingly bad time with a bone in a “boneless” chicken wing. (In some jurisdictions, “boneless” is now legally “a style of cooking”, and not what it outwardly appears to mean.)

And when trying to use any form of technology more advanced than a spoon, may they ever receive the message “You are trying to use this device but you are not a child. To use it would make you a user and by law all users are children. Please become a child or log off.”

“UK seeks bribe to not look into Microsoft’s business practices.”

I bet there’s a not insignificant chunk of Win3.11 code still lurking at the heart of Windows even now. Patched and recompiled for 64 bits, but still there.

Though most of it is probably for backwards compatibility by this point. Or so we should hope.

Having come off a medication, eventually had a bad time, and then had to go back on some sort of medication again, I can say that both you and your doctor can be fooled into thinking that you’re doing fine without them. Even when you take that knowledge into account.

Be sure to bear that in mind when you stop taking things.

In British and Australian slang at the very least, “k*ddie fiddler” is a legitimate euphemism for, well, you know.

Would not be surprised if that’s somewhere at the root of the miscategorisation.

You ticket. You wait two weeks. When it isn’t paid, you find the car, impound and immobilise it.

Actually, since all cars of a certain type run the same software, they’re all effectively the same “person” doing the driving, so you’d have grounds to lock them all up at the first infraction. And I bet you could get a judge to agree with that.

I seem to remember hearing about a town that installed cameras to spy on citizens monitor for crime and took them all down again when a judge enforced freedom of information legislation. That is, the public requested access to what the cameras recorded and were found to be entitled to it.

It’s not true that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, but the converse is true. And dirty cops reeeally don’t like it.

There’s a bit at the end of the article that might be counter to the RDP that it talks about, even if it is deliberately vague.

Webrings need to make a comeback.

I’d like to believe that this means that these three pieces of software actually work and that someone in high office has decided that that is unacceptable.

Paranoid authoritarians really do not like ordinary people having access to secure communications and personal privacy. That might be an avenue they can use to organise and elect someone who isn’t a paranoid authoritarian, and that won’t do.

On the other hand, these pieces of software might already be compromised and this is all an elaborate double-bluff.

In which case it’s time for a few well placed communications over purportedly secure channels that would be guaranteed to generate an authoritarian response. Which they’ll then have to pretend they didn’t read until it’s too late.

I’m talking organising - horrors - peaceful protests. They really don’t like those. They have to use their brains, or someone else’s, in order to find a good excuse to stick the boot in.

Neat. Don’t give them the ability to self-replicate and we’re golden.

Part hubris, part greed. They believe their own hype and either think that other people will believe it too or that they can force it on the unbelievers, thus leading to great profit.

Where is the profit? Enforced cloud accounts and storage mean users’ information is permanently held ransom, and users shall pay monthly to retain access to it.

They can also pick through users’ files and sell that information to data brokers and advertisers, if not also various government intelligence agencies.

Actually that last one is more about the continued ability to go on bleeding users dry, but it amounts to the same thing.

That just means that the lowly, customer-facing peons that work for government offices don’t have access to any such master database.

Most people work for companies that hold information inaccessible to them. Other government databases would definitely be on that list.

You mean to tell me that such a database doesn’t already exist?

Sometimes the only real options are “bad” and “less bad”. An uncomfortable echo of something else we’re all familiar with, perhaps.

This does not mean that we should not criticise the less bad option, only that we should not switch to the the bad option.

And then the LLM says something like “You’re absolutely right, there was an error in that code that is clear and obvious now it has been pointed out and despite the fact you gave the instruction to make no errors. Is there anything else I can help with?”

… and they’ll be too blind to take that as the warning it is and continue to ask even more of the LLM.

You don’t happen to use a VPN service, do you?

I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of accounts have been using the same exit node as you, and since you all have the same IP address, you must all clearly be the same person running multiple accounts.

Alternatively, you’re on an ISP with a non-fixed IP address and during the various rotations you’ve at some point had an IP address that was - previously or subsequently - leased by someone who did something against Reddit TOS. Again, clearly, there is absolutely no way you could possibly be different people and so all of those accounts must be banned.

Alternatively, alternatively, someone took exception to what you said, went on a power trip, booted you and, when asked for an explanation, pulled the first excuse off the pile, valid or not.

Annnyway. Welcome to the Fediverse.

Call me cynical, but I think you’ve put quotes around the wrong part of your title.

Try around “accidentally”.