General opinion I’ve seen online over the past year or two is that the Verge has started following the same downward trend as nearly every other online news source, unfortunately.

I agree, but I think there’s less spaces for that then there used to be, and I don’t think 13 is a particularly unreasonable age for access to still be restricted. It’s probably the older end of when I’d be trying to teach a kid proper online safety and behavior before starting to loosen the reins, but every kid is going to be different. Some would be ready earlier, and others later.

I think we just disagree on where the middle ground might lie, which is probably to be expected on complicated topics like this. Everyone’s going to have their own take.

I definitely wouldn’t be comfortable tossing a hypothetical kid into the deep end, so to speak, at 13.

On top of that, kids are resourceful with a ton of time on their hands. Sufficiently motivated kids will find ways around restrictions (I sure did, locked doors without a deadbolt are not a real lockdown, lol) or friends with less restrictions anyway, and there’s some value to allowing them to think they’re getting away with things and navigating on their own, regardless of whether I as a parent would really be aware of it or not.

It only sounds draconian compared to the completely unsupervised access that I think most of us grew up with.

I had porn at 13. Shock videos shortly after. 4chan at 16. Outside of being able to discover my own media tastes through piracy and late night binges, I struggle to identify a lot of good that came of my unfettered access.

So I am a parent, and while my daughter is still a toddler (3), I’ve thought about it a lot. These plans may not hold as time goes on, but it’s what I’ll be working from at least.

We have an old Android tablet that is “Daddy’s” where I’ve used ADB to remove almost every app from it, and hide the others. It has Disney Plus (some kids shows), Newpipe (set to open right to a playlist of pre-vetted stuff, mostly Sesame Street), and VLC (Mr. Rogers, Muppet Movies and Specials, some Looney Tunes). It only comes out on long trips (car rides more than two hours long), use is always supervised, and we lock the touch controls as much as we can once the content is playing so she can’t stray into other YouTube content or the more grown up stuff on Disney.

I’m already working on a Kodi setup with just content for her on it as well, which is reach-able from the living room TV and will be on the play room TV if it gets one. All of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood is up on archive.org, and she loves it. Wife doesn’t like piracy though, so I can’t just get baby girl’s Disney shows on it and make it a one stop shop.

As she gets older, we may set her up with an old laptop and edutainment games, but it would be entirely offline. Maybe a Minecraft server for her and friends we’ve met IRL. A co-worker runs one for his tween and it seems to do well used that way.

I don’t think we’ll be allowing internet until 12 years old or so. Even if she needs it earlier for school, she’ll start on an isolated network segment to reduce chance of any malware spreading to the whole house. Use will be in a common area of the house where Mom and I can see what she’s into at a glance. It will be filtered with PiHole or whatever the modern equivalent ends up being, to block both ads and inappropriate content. Ad blocker on the device itself with similar settings if possible to help catch any strays.

As she gets older, start teaching media and advertising literacy, as other comments have suggested. As we do that, we slowly scale back the training wheels/filters. Depending on how well we think she’s ready, I can see unattended, still filtered, but somewhat monitored at 14 maybe. Cut the content filters at 15 maybe. Cut the ad filters at 16 maybe. That’s all going to be super-dependent on her own “internet and ad literacy” though.

I want her to get enough of an idea of the unfiltered and ad-ridden internet that it’s not a danger to her, but I do hope she’ll decide to use ad blocking for her own sake.

17 or 18 it’s completely hands off. Can’t protect them forever, and she’ll need to learn one way or another.

My goal is to protect her from creeps, protect her from exposure to stuff she’s too young for, and to make sure she’s prepared for the wider internet hellscape before dropping her in the deep end unsupervised like I was.

I’d be very interested in hearing the experience of any parents who have already been through this.

That was always my assumption of the end game. You have the system prompts, an advertising bias prompt layer over top, then the user prompts.

“Naturally worded” advertising that doesn’t immediately appear to be advertising and searching using natural language always seemed to be the biggest use cases for LLMs to me, considering they can’t be relied on to output accurate info.

People can work around a horrifying amount of mess for a dizzying amount of time before it all comes crumbling down due the wrong thing occurring at the right time.

All of these examples are from finance companies, mostly banks. Not all my stories, these include stuff from friends in the field.

I know a place that had no documentation on access revocation for >30 third party systems.

Another with no Identity and Access Management policy until the pandemic. Service accounts with god level access? Go ahead and set an 8 character password with no expiration date, and never change it after 20+ employees who know it leave.

One place with software that sits installed on computers within reach of the public where every client copy includes a password decryption function in a file that you can copy out of the client install and then just call it from whatever program you write. Yeah, you still need read access to the user database’s password field, but this was software that employees used to interact with bank accounts. With trivially reversible decryption.

That last software was slated to retire over a decade ago, and last I heard was being kept alive by the finance company paying for source code access and maintaining their own edited version themselves. The last time my friend talked about it a year or two ago, the software was just shedding its reliance on Internet Explorer and shifting to Edge.

Some federal processes and laws still require fax communications for various financial shit behind the scenes.

Do what you can to steer out and away, keep your hands off it/don’t perpetuate it, have a threshold for “fuck it, not my problem to fix”, have another threshold for “fuck it, let it burn or they won’t learn”, have a third for “fuck it, I’m running before this eats me”, and always always always cover your ass. In writing, hard copy somewhere you control and work doesn’t.

Ultimately, remember that companies don’t reward heroics. Unless you can quantify your improvements in manager-speak, it won’t even register to them. They don’t give awards out for burning yourself alive to keep the engines running for another day. They give out penalties when your changes result in temporary setbacks during adjustments to the new normal.

There are many, many, many people in management and elsewhere that do not learn until they’ve been bit in the ass (if they are capable of learning at all). If you eliminate the friction before they feel it, they won’t know you’ve done anything at all. You want to look good, that’s how you move up. Let some things fall. Let some things break, especially when you know the fix is relatively easy and no one wants to take responsibility to ok it before SHTF.

A ton of this job is managing people, at least as much as it is managing complex systems. Not to be sociopathic, never forget the people are people, but start looking at corporate interactions and politics like you might look at a complicated system with no or little documentation.

This is part of why ml users get a bad rap. Both of your core statements/assumptions here are false, to a degree that it would be easier to assume bad faith and move on with my life than to type this response up.

So Dessalines’s continued and ongoing banning of any negative talk about China or Russia:

I’m not a particular fan of !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works, but what I see when I look at that community for the past month is mostly a running log of questionable at best bans that lemmy.ml admins, including Dessalines, have handed out.

I picked out some that stand out to me, but please peruse that community and your own instance’s mod logs at your leisure. You should be able to filter the mod logs themselves by action, and I believe by the mod or admin that took the action.

• https://infosec.pub/post/45516756
• https://infosec.pub/post/45465185
• https://infosec.pub/post/45126301
• https://lemmy.cafe/post/33294487
• https://lemmy.cafe/post/32620981

That poster clearly has a bone to pick, and that community does especially, but there is a concerning pattern there as well.

Didn’t your instance just defederate the Germans for their heavy-handed moderation of anything remotely antisemitic?

That is… quite an interpretation of what happened. Anti-semitism is not tolerated on db0. You see it, go report it and tell us what happens. Anti-zionism is not anti-semitism.

From the db0 admin team’s mouths, their take on what happened: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/63525728

Funny enough, they don’t look kindly on Meanwhile on Grad/MoG. And I downvoted that post, voting that I did not want to defed from feddit.

You haven’t been paying attention then. Dessalines, the head admin, regularly instance bans people for speaking about the genocide in China in .ml communities.

Who the hell watched Psycho-Pass and thought it was a good idea?

Thankfully the fediverse is still small enough that blocking people has a noticable effect. On reddit, for every person you block there’s 4 more to take their place.

Uh… uh… It was kind of an… interesting set piece in that awful World War Z movie? They have… a lot of… sand? Um… a third. A third. Shit. The Mossad seem to be a very… effective… organization?

Soft, not as much as a gummy bear though. Closer to a skittles without the hard shell. Or a non-sticky starburst. They pretty much taste like stale sugar.

Why the fuck was a flock enabled camera put in there to begin with? What are they trying to catch that entry/exit coverage wouldn’t?

Does the blue haired one just… not have a name?

Yeah, people seriously underestimate the costs of elder care.

I think lemmy.zip tries not to defederate from anything except pedo instances, but that could be wrong.

Anarchist ones are also blacklisted in a lot of places.

Nope, they’re actually some of the larger servers (which is still pretty small all things considered, lol).

For lemmy, there’s the instance/server I’m commenting from: lemmy.dbzer0.com

It was built by the former head mod db0 of reddit’s /r/piracy, so piracy discussion is cool here too. They’ve also made a decent bunch of software for lemmy servers, like a database/review system for lemmy instances, and a CSAM detection tool.

The instance also tries to handle as many big instance/server decisions as they can democratically (donators/supporters and community members vouched for get to vote, and the rest of the server’s users act as tie-breaker).

Sure. I’ve got a -2 on perception, but I should have advatage right? It’ll be fine.

I swallow the blue button and smash the red pill into dust. Your move, fucker.

Gimme those big ol Jitties