Dropsafe – Dropsafe

For the moment, sanity holds, but for how long? And did the towers of watching glassRise on England’s mountains green?And did the silent, sleepless eyesSurvey each field and lane unseen? And was the cloud of data drawnAcross each hill and village fair?And did the Party’s hidden handMove dark beneath England’s bright air? Bring me my

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I have a 2018-era MacMini with 64Gb of RAM + negligible GPU, running a 35 billion parameter model and I’m getting 4 tokens per second out of it; tell me again how we aren’t going to be running AIs locally at home?

2026/03/07 07:47:55 GMT

Models are simply fuzzy compressions of all of the pages in the internet & elsewhere, starting with Wikipedia. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, JPEGs were exotic, took ages to create and they looked like shit. Nowadays they are baseline. Who here remembers* FITS, TGA & TIFF? This is where we are now with AI.

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Fediverse reactions

Ofcom’s [attempted] browbeating of Canada-based online depression forum into compliance with Online Safety Act “Age Verification”

2026/03/06 12:06:01 GMT

This Reddit post; it’s the UK that loses out: “It’s an old-school internet forum from late 1990s, still chugging alone today. I started getting email from Ofcom around November 2025 and now have multiple letters. I’ve repeatedly told them I’m from Canada, I’m not based in the UK. Eventually, I blocked all UK IP addresses

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Fediverse reactions

“JUST A LINK CAN LEAVE A TRACE” | UK Counter-Terrorism Police are feeding teenagers with horrific, emotional anti-social-media fearmongering that may end in multiple tragedy

2026/03/06 10:17:43 GMT

“I ONLY SHARED A LINK…” Working in Facebook’s Trust & Safety team taught me many things, including: when someone’s at risk of online coercion & extortion (financial, sexual, political) one thing that you DO NOT do, is throw fuel on the fire. With that in mind, let’s watch this UK Terrorism Police video, circulating on

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Fediverse reactions

Journalists! Why you should not bother wasting your/everyone’s time covering “Age Verification” on Linux: The “Tug of War” Theory of Open Source

2026/03/04 11:56:21 GMT

tl;dr: the “project” of open source age verification will inevitably implode — probably messily — and waste everyone’s time whilst also reifying narrative of “support” for an approach to user safety that will not deliver its purported benefits. Here I explain why it will fail from the perspective of ~40 years of free software and

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TikTok incapable of delivering both user privacy and user safety, retains capability to surveil user communications

2026/03/04 09:14:39 GMT

Nothing to do with it being Chinese, then? “TikTok told the BBC it believed end-to-end encryption prevented police and safety teams from being able to read direct messages if they needed to. It confirmed its approach to the BBC in a briefing about security at its London office – saying it wanted to protect users,

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Fediverse reactions

“Governments should halt plans to roll out age checks on online services until privacy and security concerns are addressed, hundreds of academics said today”

2026/03/03 11:12:38 GMT

https://csa-scientist-open-letter.org/ageverif-Feb2026 Article: https://www.politico.eu/article/age-check-social-media-scientist-warning Archived at https://archive.ph/EADuL Via:

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Fediverse reactions

Social Media Bans are like the “Peanut Allergy” Bans of the 1990s/2000s: they will unnecessarily create a generation who cannot cope with the digital environment

2026/03/02 11:01:18 GMT

If you forcibly isolate an entire generation from influences that they are bound to encounter later in life, you are doing them harm by preventing them learning early how to cope. “If we are going to eliminate peanuts, and another child is allergic to hazelnuts, and another child is allergic to milk, and another child

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“The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all”| Taylor Lorenz | …Age Verification is Digital ID via the back door

2026/03/02 09:08:45 GMT

Age-verification systems require collecting sensitive data to support the biometric information. In no time, the internet will become a fully surveilled digital panopticon https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/02/ban-children-social-media-biometic-data-surveilled

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age verification

Fediverse reactions

If you read 1 thing about Social Media Bans this week, it should be Rod Wilson’s magisterial letter to the WSJ; extract, text & link below

2026/02/28 18:14:12 GMT

“Bans feel decisive, but they avoid the harder truth: The digital environment isn’t temporary, and adolescence can’t be postponed until it becomes convenient for adults. We aren’t raising children for a world without algorithms. We are raising them for a world shaped by artificial intelligence, public visibility and constant comparison. Removing access doesn’t build resilience,

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