If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different, the timing would be all over the place, the age limits and the methods to provide ID as well. But they are not.
>If it was organic the wording and the definitions in these legislations would be wildly different
organic, one at a time, "hey, i wonder if other places considered this, how did they word it?" that's not collusion.
don't imagine you know better than aware, organic people who read the newspaper and actually have more life experience and tempered emotion than you do.
humans are "young" for about 20 years, parents are parents to young children for about 20 years, and smartphones have been around for about 20 years. the time seems ripe for those with life experience to draw some conclusions.
Yes, people in government famously don't know anyone else in government anywhere else and never communicate with one another or read the same research or look at what other countries are doing.
Is there a precedent where this happened organically and the same similarities were in place in that many legislations around the world inside of half a year?
That was openly coordinated beginning with the Montreal Protocol. Those things work top to bottom with international accords in the beginning and don't suddenly pop up left and right inside of much less than a year. Getting a ban on lead in fuel took ages with Europe implementing it a decade later.
These kind of laws usually take many years to hone down just right and talk to all parties involved. Unless some lobby group presents a finished piece of work that just has to be waved through, like with the Citigroup scandal.
People have been talking about social media bans for quite some time, this isn't something that just showed up out of the blue. It's a problem that's been worsening for years.
Then you had the Covid years where kids ended up spending a lot of time on phones and tablets, hence social media, and everyone is seeing the myriad of problems coming out of it.
Sometimes it's not a vast global conspiracy, sometimes things just suck. Also, sometimes things suck and particular groups use it to get their way, that still doesn't diminish the thing that sucks.
Correlation does not imply causation. Your invented and evidence-less conspiracy theory is an insult to intelligence. I suspect you are seeing something that isn't there to account for an unspoken bias front and center in your mind.
People use the word "conspiracy theory" as a shield against their own ignorance.
"If I don't know about it, if it sounds 'spooky' to me, it must be because it's a conspiracy theory, and therefore it is wrong," is essentially what runs through their minds.
The reality is that top-down legislation is the norm rather than the exception, and there is plenty of evidence. It's not written by Joe on the street. It's not organic. It is top-down and imposed. This is what @kdheiwns rightly observes here, and in other fields like how all of a sudden every car manufacturer just up and decided simultaneously that it was a good thing to install spyware into all of their cars.
If you're proud of incuriousness, you'll never see evidence. I think I should be looking for evidence of the push being organic. I don't see it pushed anywhere but from the top down, even at sometimes heavy political costs to the incumbent leaders who are pushing it.
You should always be asking who politicians are serving. You seem to comfortable with thinking that they must be serving some part of the electorate without actually needing to identify that part. A lot of people think social media is bad for teenagers. There are a lot of things that are bad for teenagers that we aren't making any particular, coordinated effort to ban.
Anyone who is interested in connecting an identity with every computer on the internet, like a tamper proof license plate for computers. Just ask local law enforcement.
There has been a growing awareness for the possibilities of foreign states to manipulate social media and other platforms with fake personas. So any kind of counter intelligence would be interested as well.
There have been numerous incidents of politicians trying to go after critical posts using defamation laws. Often enough the investigations find a dead end when the account can't be connected with an ID.
Religious advocacy groups have been more and more aggressive in trying to censor the internet, e.g. this Australian one that boasted having pushed Mastercard and Visa to enforce age verification https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...
So the list of suspects is actually long.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very broad lobbying campaign that very easily finds local interest groups to help them meet the right law makers.
Do you not see how this comment is actually counterproductive to the point you’re arguing? The long list of suspects, most of them being totally independent of each other is evidence of this not being orchestrated by some central group.
The fact that a bunch of seemingly disparate actors are behaving in a highly coordinated manner is evidence against central orchestration? What an absurd suggestion.
You are assuming without evidence that they are coordinated, then using that to infer central orchestration, and then using that inferred central organization to support coordination.
When there is something that aligns with the interests of several disparate groups it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.
> You are assuming without evidence that they are coordinated
The evidence is the highly abnormal behavior. The alignment of interests is a red herring.
> it is common for them to all support that something with the need for some central organization.
Sure, as is frequently seen with the conferences and administrative bodies surrounding treaties and the like. Would you care to point out this central organizing body that a bunch of people posting here appear mysteriously determined to deny the existence of?
What exactly is your position? First you object to an alleged lack of evidence on my part, then turn around and seemingly attempt to justify the observed behavior with the argument that coordination in the open is normal and expected. So do you acknowledge the presence of what appears to be centralized coordination in this instance or not?
> The evidence is the highly abnormal behavior. The alignment of interests is a red herring.
This is labelling the behavior as abnormal, and then basing your conclusions on it.
Are you unaware that there’s been decades of reporting on social media impact on children? It’s covered issues from bullying, anorexia, toxicity, attention issues, sleep issues, focus issues to name a few of the topics ? These are separate from CSAM, grooming, stalking, revenge porn and NCII.
What counter evidence is there against you, AnonymousPlanet, and gslepak being the same person? You're all seemingly acting in a highly coordinated manner. Would it be reasonable for me to assume you're all one person? Because a suspicious similarity seems to be the only reasoning any of you are providing for these laws being centrally orchestrated.
So if I don't answer your question, you use the fact I didn't answer against me and if I do answer, you use the fact I answered against me as well. It's hard to take your non constructive way of arguing serious. Have a nice day.
This is a very strange response. Am I not allowed to criticize the answer you provide when it doesn't actually answer the question?
For example, if I asked you who killed JFK and you responded with "It could have been Oswald acting alone or the mafia or the KGB or the CIA or Fidel Castro or a misfire from Secret Service...", you didn't actually answer the question, you just gave a list of potential answers. One of those answers could be right, but the way you provided so many answers shows that you can't actually answer the question with any degree of certainty. You effectively answered "what's 2 + 2" with "something between 2 and 10". I'm not going to respond with it's not "2+2 is not 8 because..."
They answered your question sufficiently. Have you ever done what you're asking of others here, btw?
Some questions aren't easy to just answer, even if the answer is known to the person being asked. Some topics are supressed rather well. If you're already acting like someone who is more interested in derailing conversations than having an honest discussion, it's unlikely you'll get the exact list of names of those primarily responsible for driving this push to KYC access to online services. Especially on a website that's heavily moderated and basically a battleground.
>Have you ever done what you're asking of others here, btw?
What question do you want me to answer that isn't some loaded rhetorical question along the lines of "What is your motivation for denying the obvious?"
And yet, it is all part of a script. The future, without naming names, without knowing names, without pointing fingers, can somehow still be known and seen. So is that a conspiracy? Even if it looks like many disparate groups, clearly there is a central script, and if there's a central script, there must be a central author of that script.
You, AnonymousPlanet, and fc417fc802 are all responding to me in very similar ways and yet I'm not accusing you of reading from the same script or being puppeteered by the same person/group. This is because I can recognize that people can have the same thought process without any active collaboration. And yet I would have just as much evidence to make those accusations as the evidence that you provided here that all these laws have the same shady origin.
I don't recall off the top of my head but in past HN threads the global lobbyists for this were named with evidence.
It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
> It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.
Lobbyists don’t lobby just to lobby, they lobby on behalf of someone paying them. So this doesn’t actually answer the question, it just shifts it to “Who is behind the lobbyists?”
It doesn't matter what you answer, slg will always try to use the way you answered to argue against you, not the substance. This person seems to be only interested in derailing the conversation.
You're decrying this supposed issue, that multiple countries are all copying one another for legislation. You've repeated this multiple times in these comments.
And yet, after all this, you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you. If someone really cares they should get informed.
> you're not interested enough to remember who's behind this important issue for you
You're demanding that others spoon feed you peer reviewed evidence that water is wet. As you say, if you really care you should expend the effort to inform yourself. I myself have no need at present for the hazily remembered details. The only thing at issue in the here and now was the absurd claim that there's no centralized lobbying effort involved.
> if you really care you should expend the effort to inform yourself.
I don't care. Unlike you, I am sufficiently informed about how legislatures around the world operate to know that coordination of this nature is common, anodine, and the way they have enshrined a global economy that has unlocked unfathomable wealth.
> And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That just capitalism.
Yes, you are right, it must be "capitalism" at fault. The sort of capitalism where nobody asks for the product, nobody wants the product, and yet somehow the product is the only choice you have.
It's very noticeable that this is the part of my comment you responded to and not the question of who is behind all this. That is why people consider this stuff conspiracy theories. You aren't analyzing the various parties and what motivates them. You're just seeing a result you don't understand and jumping to the conclusion that it's only possible if there is some unknown shadowy group behind it all. If anyone here is trying to create a "shield against their own ignorance"...
There's no requirement to name specific parties in order to make observations. Regardless of motivation it's clear from past examples that laws simply do not form across international borders in this manner. The lobbying is plain as day.
Comments like this don’t make you folks sound less like “conspiracy theorists”. It’s also a tone that tells me that you aren’t going to approach anything I say in good faith so there is no point in me trying to engage with you on the topic anymore.
It's so aggravating to have to have arguments about whether some coordinated political push is happening due to money being spent. Literally every coordinated political push, at least ones with any success, is consciously planned and lobbied for, even the ones that I support.
I don't get pretending that no one is behind it. There are definitely people sitting in conference rooms in front of whiteboards trying to come up with ideas on how to do it most effectively. But people compartmentalize so hard, some people in that room would call you a conspiracy theorist for pointing out the meeting that they are currently attending. "I just do social media for a nonprofit. No, there's nothing wrong with us getting 90% of our funding from the US government, you're just a cynic. What evidence is there that we are working on their behalf? Do you think social media is good for teenagers?!"
I'm not trying to sound like anything. I've engaged with you in good faith, articulating my view and inquiring as to why you are denying what appears obvious to me. In response you've accused me of bad faith and explicitly refused to engage.
I cannot help that water seems wet to me but if it seems dry to you I am willing to hear you out.
Seeing how surprisingly similar the wording and definitions are in every case, in even far flung societies, can send you a shiver down the spine. It's like someone gained unfettered world wide write access to legislation.
It's also interesting how Windows 11 with it's hard dependency on TPM hardware just happens to be in place at the right time. And how a certain former Microsoft employee just happened to start working on a similar solution for Linux before this all started https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
Looking up words on the fly by just holding your finger on them.
If the book is not written in your native language or you like to read books with unusual vocabulary (e.g. historical books), it's an absolute delight. So far, a concise dictionary like Oxford has worked the best for me, while Wiktionary or similar always came short.
The other is heft and handiness. If you read anything that is larger than a small notebook, an e-book is much more practical. You also don't have to hold it open all the time.
For actually serious work, it's a stark difference if your proprietary and security relevant code is sent abroad to a foreign, possibly future hostile country, or is sent to some data center around the corner. It doesn't even need to be defence related.
AFAIK all these companies have SOTA or near-SOTA models available under enterprise licenses. AI companies are not interested in your secret sauce, they are trying to capture the SDLC wholesale.
I’m not sure what you are implying by “enterprise license”, but if you think it provides any meaningful protection against malicious US government actors, you really need to read and internalize the US CLOUD Act.
On a related note, I really need to try some local models (probably starting with qwen), since, at least in 2026, the Chinese models are way better at protecting democracy and free speech than the US models.
If an American company, let's say a company that writes software for power stations, would use the services of a French or Chinese AI company under such enterprise licenses, how long would you think it would take until someone, in Congress e.g., would interfere?
What if they learned that half of the American small and medium sized companies would have started pouring all their business information into such a service?
That doesn't address the concern. Google isn't interested in violating 1st and 4th amendment rights of people who criticize the government... but they do anyway (or more correctly assist the government in doing so).
The part about refactoring is very interesting and reassuring. I sometimes think I'm holding it wrong when I end up refactoring most of the agent's code towards our "opinionated" style, even after laying it out in md files. Thank you very much for this insight.
Thanks! In our limited experience, Claude does not focus that much on guardrails and code quality when building a feature - but can be pretty focused on code quality and architecture when asked to do just that. So, one a few hours to iterate a feature, a few hours to refactor. Rinse and repeat.
Clickable paths is the unique feature of iTerm2 I use the most. It's called sematic history, for some reason, and converts a UNIX environment into something like an IDE. I let it trigger a bash script that opens my editor when I click a path in, e.g., a stack trace or in the output of a sequence of piped commands.
The developers of Kitty, Ghostty etc. are too much mouse haters to even acknowledge the possibility of this feature, so I'm stuck with iTerm2.
This is a very well researched essay regarding the solar panel industry in China and Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoCoPmtNRJo I really recommend watching / reading sober assessments like this.
It is a rational assessment of realities when it comes to high end production. Not every industrial environment can produce every kind of industry. At some point the costs are too high to overcome the difference.
That is a very popular opinion and I've held it too for a very long time. Until I read an issue [1] of The Economist in 2020 and did some digging afterwards.
Turns out, the real moat of any successful car industry so far wasn't brand recognition, lobbyists, tariffs, or the pleasing sound of a shutting car door. It's the combustion engine itself. Or rather the industry you're embedded in that provides the metallurgy and chemistry to reliably produce high quality engine blocks and seals. Because your engine needs to withstand high pressures and temperatures that go from below freezing all the way up to way over 2000K. And you also need the know how and experience to build all of that together.
None of that can be exfiltrated as a zip file or wished into existence by party officials.
The EV sidesteps all of that in one go. Now it's all down to who has the best batteries and who can do high quality assembly real cheap. Both points go to China.
Why? The same reason: The surrounding industry. It's what you get from doing (even simple) electronics for decades, cultivating a competitive industry for assembly and high quality battery cells.
The only hope for the incumbents was hydrogen instead of batteries because this again is engineering and seals.
The alternative would have been to become really good at batteries themselves. However, Europe's best chance to get there, Bosch, decided in 2018 not to go that way [2].
Once you let all of that sink in, you realise the inevitability of the current situation.
And they knew. All this time they knew. The rest was song and dance for politicians and shareholders.
If the platform, power train, manufacturing is commoditized, shouldn’t that in theory be great news for existing brands with consumer trust and design competence?
That's the current hope. But do you know who also had consumer trust and design competence? Telefunken, AEG, Braun, Grundig, Blaupunkt, Loewe ... How many products of those brands are produced in Europe today, if at all? None of them had a moat as deep as the combustion engine.
I agree with some of your points, they make sense, but China has been building combustion engines too, for a very long time which is why I don't think that sidestepping the technology with EV was the main reason for their success
They had been trying to for decades but were never able to make even remotely competitive combustion engines. Nothing that would get VW, Toyota or Ford in trouble. The article I posted is sadly paywalled, but it's basically about exactly that.
What does it mean "remotely competitive combustion engines"?
China has been building ICEs for decades, that's for sure, and if they had not been anywhere to remotely competitive people wouldn't be buying them and therefore OEMs wouldn't be producing them, no? But they do. And still do.
The last notable example is [1] twin turbo-charged 4.0 V8 from GWM reportedly delivering 450kW and 800Nm of torque. You can't build such an engine without the very deep expertise in materials, mechanics, chemistry, and everything it takes to manufacture such a beast.
GWM builds traditional gasoline and diesel engines too but then you have other similar OEMs like Geely, BYD, MG, Chery which have been doing the same.
And then you find out that China builds their own diesel engines too but for heavy machinery like trucks, vessels, tractors, ... [2]
So, I see no evidence that they are not capable in manufacturing ICEs. Quite the contrary. Reason why we don't see it in European or American markets, or have not so far, is of a different kind and not competitiveness.
Their wikipedia lists many engine models, all of which seem to be either small industrial engines or engines for range extenders only. This does not sound like a portfolio that can compete with the legacy OEMs but it does explain how they ship so many units.
The reasonable approach to EVs becoming economically feasible would have been to cut through the noise and treat it as an add-on to the existing portfolio without compromising the core competence: internal combustion engines.
This they knew.
Dieselgate put them in a hopeless position in the discussion around all encompassing electrification demanded by the governent plus the greedy, short sited pressure from markets.
This led to massive (and forced) investments rushing out electric models nobody asked for by the dozens.
Compromising quality and a sound growth strategy along the way.
The worst possible timing for Dieselgate to hit - steering a whole country and all industry-related countries into an existential crisis.
It is delusional to think german car manufacturers will be anywhere near competitive in the much simpler EV mass(!)market - so thinking to order a whole industry, which is built around a way different technolocal foundation, to just make electric cars from now on without really looking into a viable charging infrastructure is still beyond me.
Plus ICE cars won’t be going away anytime soon and very few have the balls to call this out.
WHY?! Dieselgate would have been the perfect time for VW to justify abandoning ICE, especially diesel, and shift to fully electric. But no, they just doubled down on ICE and diesel engines. You can't fix stupid.
Of course, in practice, VW couldn't have done that due to it being run by ICE unions who want to keep their jobs at all cost. Maybe they could have spun off the EV business into a new car brand without the shackles of the unions tying them down to dated tech.
It's not just the unions wanting to keep ICEs which are far from dated plus absolutely necessary to keep and further develop.
A monolithic EV-only approach simply isn't feasible since not everyone can switch to an EV - above all, the current state of charging infrastructure is lightyears behind.
Ditching ICEs is the worst thing that could happen. It's really just common sense that happens to be unpopular.
My experience is less than two years old. I have the impression that those who defend it have a UI taste that is stuck in the 2000s. The same people who also point at UIs that are barely usable and ugly from a modern perspective like Windows 2000 and say "this was the pinnacle of UI".
Perhaps it's that well-known psychological effect where people self-report higher productivity when using an interface they find more visually appealing, whereas studying them proves the opposite is true.
Just a few examples of what makes Windows 2000 barely usable for me (and pretty much anyone who grew up with later UIs):
No central place to search for software, files, or settings. You have to dig through layers of menu trees like an idiot.
No visual preview to find the right open window. You have to alt-tab through a list of windows like an idiot.
No way of separating windows into work spaces / desktops (whatever you might call them). You have to either constantly kill windows or work your way through layers of them. The point above doesn't help with that.
This one has less to do with Windows 2000 but was part of the state of the art of the time for software: Walls of icons and buttons and not even a way to group them. Sometimes the entire window is just one wall of tiles sometimes there's the tool bar of doom at the top.
On top of lacking usability, Windows 2000 is ugly. Mostly because all main UI elements like buttons are visually thrust into your face by faux 3d elevation. This had it's place at the time when most of your users would not have had experience with computer UIs in the first place. With those users UI designers back then felt they needed to overemphasize visual cues from the real world. Nowadays you can show the user just a box or something that looks like a link (because people are used to browsers now). Maybe give a cue by changing the emphasis on hover.
The other reason that comes to mind why Windows 2000 is so ugly is colors. Again, this is due to its time and the capabilities of graphics cards back then that mostly didn't allow more subtle color differences.
I'm just using Windows 2000 as pars pro toto here. Pretty much all graphical UIs back then were lacking modern usability features and UI sensibilities, regardless of OS.
> Perhaps it's that well-known psychological effect where people self-report higher productivity when using an interface they find more visually appealing, whereas studying them proves the opposite is true.
You have your slightly condescending explanation for why we disagree and I have mine. Let me give you a hint quoting Douglas Adams:
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
edited for tone
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