so if I block it with my finger from takeoff to cruise I can create a little explosion? Or is the issue the repeated cycles of pressure weakening the material over time?
> Social media platforms with infinite scrolling, auto-play and algorithmic feeds will be required to display warning labels about their potential harm to young users’ mental health under a new law, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Friday.
> Legislation S4505/A5346, under the chapter amendment, requires social media platforms that offer addictive feeds, auto play or infinite scroll to post warning labels on their platforms.
§ 1520. DEFINITIONS. FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS ARTICLE, THE FOLLOWING
TERMS SHALL HAVE THE FOLLOWING MEANINGS:
1. "ADDICTIVE FEED" SHALL MEAN AS DEFINED IN SUBDIVISION ONE OF
SECTION FIFTEEN HUNDRED OF THIS CHAPTER.
2. "ADDICTIVE SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM" SHALL MEAN A WEBSITE, ONLINE
SERVICE, ONLINE APPLICATION, OR MOBILE APPLICATION THAT PRIMARILY SERVES
AS A MEDIUM FOR COVERED USERS TO INTERACT WITH MEDIA GENERATED BY OTHER
USERS AND WHICH OFFERS OR PROVIDES COVERED USERS AN ADDICTIVE FEED, PUSH
NOTIFICATIONS, AUTOPLAY, INFINITE SCROLL, AND/OR LIKE COUNTS AS A
SIGNIFICANT PART OF THE SERVICES PROVIDED BY SUCH WEBSITE, ONLINE
SERVICE, ONLINE APPLICATION, OR MOBILE APPLICATION. "ADDICTIVE SOCIAL
MEDIA PLATFORM" SHALL NOT INCLUDE ANY SUCH SERVICE OR APPLICATION WHICH
THE ATTORNEY GENERAL DETERMINES OFFERS THE FEATURES DESCRIBED HEREIN FOR
A VALID PURPOSE UNRELATED TO PROLONGING USE OF SUCH PLATFORM.
...
7. "LIKE COUNTS" SHALL MEAN THE QUANTIFICATION AND PUBLIC DISPLAY OF
POSITIVE VOTES, SUCH AS BUT NOT LIMITED TO THOSE EXPRESSED VIA A HEART
OR THUMBS-UP ICON, ATTACHED TO A PIECE OF MEDIA GENERATED BY A COVERED
USER.
(note that there is no public display of positive votes on HN)
HN doesn't have push notifications, autoplay, infinite scroll, or like counts.
"Addictive feed" is poorly defined.
---
Edit: The harmful nature of social media is something that HN has recognized for well over a decade. There is a feature "noprocrast" to help manage this if you do have this problem.
7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features
Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
I'd personally consider it infinite scroll as you can scroll through as many pages of stories as you want. There's only the slight friction of having to click the 'next page' button every now and then. In an app like Instagram or whatever, you'd also have the friction of swiping your thumb on the screen to see more. They seem pretty identical to me.
The summary and justification sections help set the intent of the bill, but they don't define the law itself.
Those uses are:
Section two of this bill adds a new Article 45-A to General Business Law
to require addictive social media platforms which feature predatory
features such as algorithmic feeds, push notifications, autoplay, infi-
nite scroll, and/or like counts as a significant part of the provision
of their service to post warning labels for all users upon access to the
platform. The bill features a series of specific exemptions for certain
types of notifications that fall beyond the scope of the bill (i.e.
those explicitly requested by a user or which are deployed for civic
communication). More broadly, the bill also exempts any feature which is
determined by the Attorney General via regulation to be offered for a
valid purpose unrelated to prolonging use of the addictive social media
platform.
...
... Additionally, as this bill covers only social media
platforms that deploy addictive features such as algorithmic feeds, push
notifications, autoplay, infinite scroll, and like counts, any platform
not wishing to display a warning label could simply limit their use of
these features.
The text of the law, however, does not define "algorithmic feed" (sorting by date post could be considered "an algorithm" by some).
"[S]uch as algorithmic feeds" in the description and justification remains undefined in the text of the bill itself.
I don't see how "Addictive feed" is circularly defined. The definition given is [1]:
> "Addictive feed" shall mean a website, online service, online
application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which
multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users of a website,
online service, online application, or mobile application, either
concurrently or sequentially, are recommended, selected, or prioritized
for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information
associated with the user or the user's device, unless any of the
following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another:
> (a) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on
information that is not persistently associated with the user or user's
device, and does not concern the user's previous interactions with media
generated or shared by other users;
> (b) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on
user-selected privacy or accessibility settings, or technical
information concerning the user's device;
> (c) the user expressly and unambiguously requested the specific media,
media by the author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed
to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed
to, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized
for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated
with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible
under this subdivision;
> (d) the user expressly and unambiguously requested that specific
media, media by a specified author, creator, or poster of media the user
has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user
has subscribed to pursuant to paragraph (c) of this subdivision, be
blocked, prioritized or deprioritized for display, provided that the
media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in
whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the
user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (e) the media are direct and private communications;
> (f) the media are recommended, selected, or prioritized only in
response to a specific search inquiry by the user;
(> g) the media recommended, selected, or prioritized for display is
exclusively next in a pre-existing sequence from the same author,
creator, poster, or source; or
> (h) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is necessary to
comply with the provisions of this article and any regulations
promulgated pursuant to this article.
Ahh... thank you. That's a different part of the already established legislation and wasn't part of this one (which is why I couldn't find it at first glance - I was looking at 1520 and this is 1500). It was referencing it and saying it was itself.
That does clear it up.
With that definition in mind, to answer the question "does HN need to have this label?" ...
... "unless any of the following conditions are met" ...
and it would appear that under (a) that the prioritization or selection of articles displayed is not associated with a user or a user's device, nor does it concern the user's previous interactions with media generated by others...
So my layman's read of this is that "No, Hacker News does not fall into the definition of an addictive feed."
If you consider "feeds" to be the home page, ask hn, etc. then afaik content is determined by user submission after spam/abuse filtering, and all users see the same content. Article position is largely determined by user votes, with some ageing. Again, everyone sees the same ordering (unless they choose to hid le articles).
Hard to see how this can be interpreted as "algorithmic".
It's hard to see it as anything but algorithmic considering that an algorithm is deciding what you see. It doesn't matter if everyone is also seeing the same thing.
By the definitional you are using pretty much every feed presented on a website is an algorithmic feed, making the term "algorithmic feed" useless since it could simply be replaced with "feed".
What "algorithmic feed" means in most discussion and publications is a feed that is personalized for the individual users based on their known or inferred interests and their past interactions.
The algorithm that is deciding what you see is simply <things submitted by other humans> + <voting on those things by other humans>. There's no per-user content customisation and profiling to drive engagement. And hn has an optional "no procrastination" feature that is provided to mitigate excessive engagement.
"The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.
"Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action."
Pretty obvious and vague overview. Obviously the weights are the important part that is missing.
I don't know why you're trying to argue that this isn't an algorithmically driven social news feed website with an addictive homepage. It's exactly what the NY state law is targeting.
Meta's profit has increased almost 2x since 2023. Meta makes money from advertisers spending money on Meta. So the profit growth from Meta does very much come from the real economy
In a video I watched recently there was a breakdown of how much a plumbing company had to spend on "marketing" (aka: Google ads placement, Facebook/Instagram) to attract customers and their per-click pay was about 60 USD, they were spending around 16-18k USD per month on online ads to keep the business afloat.
I had no idea that physical small businesses like that needed to spend so much on marketing just to be found.
Its worse if you get bombarded with negative reviews, which is why stuff like yelp holding you hostage is so bad. If you own an independent business outside of marketing, your reputation is everything. Especially now that anyone can blast your name because they didnt like how you said shiboleth or whatever.
So if you have a zillion negative yelp reviews, which you have no idea where they came from, since there's more negative reviews than you've ever had customers, but they want your money to hide them. ;)
Have to seems like a strong phrase. I found my last plumber and window guy on a facebook neighborhood group. Local ads for general services can be quite expensive, but doing some marketing through local groups only costs your time. I can see how driving business though clicks is attractive, but I'd be surprised if there was no alternative.
Have to if you want to scale the business, if you are a sole trader doing small gigs it's probably very achievable to only use local groups. If you rely on people searching for "plumbers in <X> city" while running a small business with some 5-10 folks I don't think you'd get enough work.
You don't want to use a plumber that has scaled their business. That means that they're sending out a new hire to do your plumbing rather than the plumber that originally built the company's reputation.
The best plumbers spend $0 on advertising. They've got enough business through repeat customers and word of mouth to keep their small set of plumbers busy, and they're expanding slowly enough to properly train apprentices and ensure quality.
When I needed an emergency water heater I asked my boss who manages a few of his rental properties. When I needed a new roof I asked one of Facebook/Reddit/Nextdoor. I’d always favor word of mouth recommendations vs advertising.
I don’t think this is true, but I also don’t know anybody way to verify it either way. Enthusiast forums were always a better source, although native ads can mess that up.
But, even if ads are a necessary evil, they are definitely overhead (in the sense that they don’t actually accomplish anything, just influence the decision as to what should be done). Maybe we can define some sort of ad-efficiency metric for an economy; what percentage of the money is spent influencing decisions, what percentage is spent actually implementing the decisions…
Nah I don't think the directories need to be reviewed (except for listings for things that don't actually exist.) Just show the listings in lexicographic order like how phone books worked.
We already have the law as the meta norm. Let law enforcement do its job.
I have a theory that Meta execs was so focused on the Metaverse that the Ai team succeeded thanks to the lack of supervision and interference from above - there was probably a board discussion between 2019 and 2022 about firing them all and just focusing up the Metaverse stuff becuase they were dead weight on the core mission of colonizing the Metaverse.
Turns out the Ai team was the lifeboat to save the drowning Metaverse.
In my experience success of a project is inversely proportional to executive attention. The best thing seniour leaders can do is to get out of the way.
And yet their quaterly and annual reports dont mention it at all till 2022 and the team are now being "helped out" by new $100mil talent.
There is an amazing team there that did the work, I am just saying it wasnt the visionaries vision that made that happen - and if it was they certainly wouldnt have let the Ai team publish or opensource their work.
Meta is also a great example of AI leading to higher user engagement today.
Reels isn't powered by Transformers per se (likely more of a complex mix of ML techniques), but it is powered by honest-to-goodness SOTA AI/ML running on leading-edge Nvidia GPUs.
I think, because they're so impressive, people assume Transformers = AI/ML, when there's plenty of other hyperscale AI/ML products on the market today.
What if a lot of that advertising is from AI companies that are likely to fail in any downturn - didn't advertising drop fairly sharply during at the end of the dot-com bubble?
I live next to a main road in London. As technology progresses, cars have gotten quieter, but for some reason motorcycles feel like they're becoming louder.
When I go read a book in the park, it's all very nice and quiet until a motorcycle arrives
When I want to sleep with the window open, if I hear any noise it's due to these motorbikes doing races at night.
If I was dictator for a year and didn't have policing resources to enforce noise control, I would just ban non-electric motorbikes
It's a defamation case. Journalist David Bendels posted a doctored picture of politician Nancy Faeser holding up a sign saying, "Ich hasse die Meinungsfreiheit" ("I hate freedom of speech"). Faeser filed criminal charges against Bendels for "üble Nachrede und Verleumdung" (defamation).
Bendels was sentenced to a 7 months suspended sentence and a fine of 1500 Euros, has to remove the image and apologize to Faeser. Bendels will appeal the decision.
I'm going to guess that this will be overturned on appeal. Every country has stupid courts that make bad decisions. I think this is kind of an edge case between satire and defamation, since Bendels is ostensibly a real journalist who reports on real facts—it seems odd to me that he would publish doctored pictures. Still, I think this will lean towards satire in the end, since I don't think most reasonable people would assume the picture of Faeser was real.
Having to clarify satire ruins its point. In a case against a man who creatd a fake Facebook page of his police department and was subsequently raided, the Onion submitted this amicus brief: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/2022...
It's really quite interesting to read at some point, but I believe that nobody should have to "clarify it was doctored". Because that image was also very obviously fake - it's literally a meme template, and nobody should be prosecuted for that. I do have to question your judgement if you believe that is real.
I honestly don't really understand how it is not obvious, so I question if those decisions are made in bad faith. It's literally a meme template, and that's somehow not obvious?
I'm not speaking from a legal standpoint, I'm speaking from a common sense moral one. We cannot cater to the most mentally challenged in society to make sure they cannot harm themselves.
Satire is entirely ruined once you put a /s behind it. Let me quote the Onion here -
The court’s decision suggests
that parodists are in the clear only if they pop the bal-
loon in advance by warning their audience that their
parody is not true. But some forms of comedy don’t
work unless the comedian is able to tell the joke with
a straight face. Parody is the quintessential example.
Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of
their target in order to exaggerate or implode it—and
by doing so demonstrate the target’s illogic or absurd-
ity.
Put simply, for parody to work, it has to plausibly
mimic the original.
The Online Safety Act in the UK has been discussed here before and it is part of a general trend to prevent "harmful" speech including specifically "legal but harmful speech".
After the man posted the image, Robert Habeck (the politician in question) made a criminal complaint. When the Criminal Police investigated the case, they found additional evidence against the man, which prompted the search. His house was not searched for calling Habeck an idiot, but calling him an idiot triggered the investigation, which triggered the search.
>The politician in question has filed more than 700 criminal complaints about what people have said about him
I'm not sure why that matters in the context of this discussion. He is free to file as many criminal complaints as he wants, no? Living in a free society means that idiots can do idiotic things like filing 700 criminal complaints.
>The problem is that merely insulting someone can be a crime at all
I disagree that this is a problem per se. Pretty much all jurisdictions across the world have laws like that. It really depends on how exactly the law is implemented.
In fact, American libel and defamation laws are, in some ways, more problematic than many European ones simply because of how the legal system works. If you are sued in a place with no SLAPP laws, the mere lawsuit can be so expensive that it can have a chilling effect on free speech, even if the defendant ultimately wins the case.
(I do agree that laws singling out politicians are stupid.)
It's kind of analogous to the old taxi drivers who took pride in having a sixth sense knowing which route to take you, vs uber drivers who just blindly follow their navigation
Some of them might have had a really good mental map; but the majority would just take inefficient routes (and charge you some random price that they put into their counter) — plenty of reasons to dislike Uber but having a pre-set price, vetted/rated drivers, and clear routing for a taxi service is a massive plus in my opinion.
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