To be honest, other than the argument of “everything is political,” I get where The Verge is coming from.

When I was a kid about ten years ago, it felt like EVs were uncontroversial and just the next logical step for cars. I don’t remember nearly the same levels of backlash. People in my family on both sides of the political spectrum didn’t really care too much one way or the other on them.

Now it feels much more scrutinized, both by people on the right who don’t typically care about environmental issues, and some leftists who want transit instead. And that scrutiny tends to be pretty harshly worded.

Maybe it’s down to factors like the costs of EVs. They’re damn expensive so I could see why people would get more frustrated at them. Though how they’re “woke” escapes me.

yeah, OK, I didn’t realize QAnon had outright financial scams out of it. Wow.

(Found this research on one particular scam - helps put it into perspective. Linking for anyone else who might be unaware)

Yeah, that’s fair - but I suspect if it is anyone not super elderly, or just anyone not bumbling their way into it unintentionally, they may be more likely to be aware of your actions - and that’s bound to create some very nasty conflict that you might be no better off if you get into.

As the other commenters pointed out though - for certain classes like the elderly, and maybe anyone else not-at-all technically savvy, it might make sense. I’m sorta responding assuming intent of the person to get to QAnon, and assuming they might know enough to find they can access it on other networks but not home.

Yeah, another commenter made the point of very elderly people, which admittedly I might not have the best perspective on needing to handle. They would probably not notice, and it would probably not create any real issues.

My reaction was more if you tried to do this to a normal, younger to middle aged person - where I would suspect if the filtering were to come to light, it could create some very nasty conflict. But also in that case I’d suspect anyone trying to reach QAnon material is more likely intentionally trying to get to it, versus some 80-something who might have one Q moron in their Facebook feed that sends them somewhere no one ought to go.

OK, I guess that’s a valid edge case. Still, I’d be wary of how that would really work out - if they were to become aware that you were filtering the internet, I would suspect that could lead to some really bad conflict.

Though, for the very elderly, yeah they probably wouldn’t notice. There’s some nuance there I didn’t think about.

I mean, that would be kinda crazy, and I also don’t think it would do any good to try and filter them. Like, you’ve got conspiracy-driven right wingers under your domain - no matter what way you spin it, you’re dealing with shitty people. You’re either going to bring them to a fever pitch in an argument over you blocking their internet access, or you’re going to give them access and have to deal with them perpetuating their harmful views to you and all around them.

If you’re at that point, better to consider whether or not you really want those people in your lives.

If you’re in a situation where you can’t cut those people off, what do you expect to achieve other than a different form of conflict by inhibiting their internet access? If you’re going to be quiet about doing it and hope they don’t understand, is it really healthy to be pulling those strings and manipulating like that? Hell, I’m not even sure it would be ethical, I feel like that kind of manipulation would be really shitty to do, even to shitty people and their shitty views.

EDIT: I’m of course assuming the adults need “protection” because there’s no path to just, like, discussing things healthily. If there’s a healthy way to discuss… that should really be the preference.

sorry for the potentially dumb remark but… couldn’t you just avoid navigating to QAnon websites? I’ve never had an issue unintentionally navigating to one. It also seems like this repo owner is quite opinionated and trying to create a “no bad sites” filter list, which… honestly, you can control your own destiny with web browsing.

if this is to protect kids on your network, I think it’s probably a good idea to have a broader conversation with them about evaluating sources, tell them about media bias checking sites, and just generally educating them on red flags to distrust. This will probably serve them much better than trying to block right wing sites, especially since plenty of normal websites have harmful right wing content. YouTube in particular disseminates extremely misleading and harmful material via ads (lots of anti-trans hate speech).

In any case, I can’t find another repo - if you need the filter still, maybe you could fork the list yourself, and remove anything that you don’t find objectionable? (again, I feel like this is an example of why to not rely on a third party to block websites based off opinion/politics)

Fully agree.

So I mean, if this was in lieu of data collection and tracking, this is what more of the software world should actually do. Running platforms isn’t free, and making the user the product is a malicious and unsustainable solution.

That said, I certainly wouldn’t pay Twitter - I think I’d rather donate to a Mastodon instance, or pay for some other private alternative. Musk is awful for so many reasons, holds way too much power, and deserves no money of mine.

I read the article, and stand by my statement - “AI” does not apply to self driving cars the same way as robotics use by law enforcement. These are two separate categories of problems where I don’t see how some unified frustration at AI or robotics applies.

Self driving cars have issues because the machine learning algorithms used to train them are not sufficient to navigate the complexities of roads, and there is no human fallback. (See: autopilot)

Robotics use by law enforcement has issues because it removes a human factor to enforcement, which has concerns of whether any deadly force is ever justified when used (does a suspect pose a danger to any officer if there is no human contact?), and worries of dehumanization exist here, as well as other factors like data collection. These aren’t even self driving mostly, from what I understand law enforcement remote pilots them.

these are separate problem spaces and aren’t deadly in the same ways, aren’t unattractive in the same ways, and should be treated and analyzed as distinct problems. by reducing to “AI” and “robots” you create a problem that makes sense only to the technically uninclined, and blurs any meaningful discussion about the precisions of each issue.

This just feels like non-technical fear mongering. Frankly, the term “AI” is just way too overused for any of this to be useful - Autopilot, manufacturing robots, and ChatGPT are all distinct systems that have their own concerns, tradeoffs, regulatory issues, etc. and trying to lump them together reduces the capacity for discussion down to a single (not very useful, imo) take

editing for clarity: I’m for discussion of more regulation and caution, but conflating tons of disparate technologies still imo muddies the waters of public discussion

I own both products and use both, I think either were good and worth the money, but either are inaccessible to most kids. No chance in hell I would’ve gotten a $200 backpack during high school or college.