For those who don't live in Berlin. It's drowning in crime. I totally support it. I'd be against it if AfD was in power. But I agree to sacrifice some privacy for security. The current situation is unacceptable.
Alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex, driving and many other things are heavily regulated for children. Should a parent be able to allow his 12yo daughter to drink, smoke or marry 40yo guy? We're living in a society. Social media is just another item in the list.
I’ve seen many people make comparisons between these things and the social media ban, but I actually think they’re quite poor comparisons.
The main concern is around enforcement, which is still TBD for this ban. I assume you mean illicit drugs which are banned for everyone so I’ll skip that as it’s not relevant. For sex/marriage, these are basically not enforced until people notice or they cause a problem so again are not relevant. Driving is an interesting one but I’ll come back to it. The closest comparison here is alcohol and tobacco.
For alcohol and tobacco sales the rule of thumb staff are trained on in Australia is if the customer looks younger than 25 they ask for ID. The customer present their ID, the cashier visually checks the DoB, and the sale goes through. This does not affect the majority of Australians who either do not smoke or drink, or look old enough that no ID check is done. Enforcement for a social media ban would be onerous on all Australians who use social media (I don’t have numbers but I’m sure it’s more more than (smokers ∪ drinkers)) plus the scope for potential abuse or infringement of rights is far greater. Compare this to social media. How would such a ban be enforced? The kids are not stupid, they will find a way around whatever the enforcement mechanism is. So either the enforcement will be a) trivially circumventable to the point where the legislation is completely useless for its ostensible purpose, or b) devolve into an endless cat-and-mouse game trampling Australians’ rights every step of the way. Depending on how eager the Aus gov is to enforce this it could easily extend to VPN bans, destruction of anonymity online, and yet more means to eliminate free speech. These things are all extremely important for a functional society where people, especially vulnerable and marginalised people, can speak up without fear of retaliation. A cashier checking your ID at the shop is nowhere near the top of a slope as steep, nor slippery as this.
Driving is a really interesting comparison here actually. I’m not sure I would be opposed to a social media license. In the same way the purpose of a license is to ensure that road users can do so in a safe manner, maybe something similarly focused on education would be more helpful here than a ban. I’ve actually long blamed a kind of tragedy of the commons for the sorry state of the modern internet. Most users are simply not savvy enough to know better than to use it in all but the dumbest ways, fall for the dumbest scams, and basically allow themselves to be corralled like cattle into the sterile advertiser-friendly pens big tech companies have constructed for them. So in anger I’ve sometime said we should only allow licensed users online. Anyway that’s a bit off topic but a social media license is an interesting concept.
> To be able to generate keys independently of the database
This is a must if you don't want to couple your domain logic and DB. I want to generate a record with an ID inside my domain layer without depending on the DB and doing awkward DB save - DB read.
Google definitely did everything they could to marginalize Firefox, but Firefox's position isn't entirely the making of Google. Mozilla was also busy messing things up, and alienate not only their adhoc users, but many of their diehard fanatics also.
Firefox isn't dying because it's a bad browser or because it has no place on the market. It is dying because of mismanagement, mostly for not knowing what their users really want and need. They have no idea why their current users are using their browser, instead of Chrome. They just go with the stream, and seemingly are content that Google is keeping them on life support.
But it doesn't mean that new browsers will make the same mistakes, or that there is no need for new ones at all.
With that said, I would be lying if I would say that you are completely wrong. I just don't want you to be right, regardless how slim of a chance it is, because the state of internet is not getting any better that way.
Firefox dying is not because it's lacking in any form of quality.
Firefox is dying because mozilla exists only as a tiny sheet of cloth over the dummy that google brings out whenever they need to dismiss antitrust/monopoly concerns.
I‘ve had stuff break because of required kernel updates, software that needed to be patched, hardware breaking and no exact substitute being available, database sizes crossing critical thresholds, … - it‘s definitely less risky to run something that is well understood and no longer getting substantial amounts of updates, but every complex system has known and unknown deficiencies that are just a butterfly’s wingbeat away from being triggered. As long as you‘re on the happy path, everything will look fine. But if something pushes slightly and moves you to the unhappy path, you can find yourself very quickly in a position where you need someone with a deep understanding of some obscure component of the system that is misbehaving - and that someone is unlikely to be the infrastructure team.
My CO2 sensor self calibrates to show 400ppm as outdoor / minimal concentration. I was very upset to find out that it's not correct. In the last 5 years outdoor concentration rose from ~400 to ~420. Guess my kids won't be able to maintain < 500ppm.
