Which shouldn't be bannable imo. Rate throttle is a more reasonable response. But Anthropic didn't reply to the author, so we don't even know if it's the real reason they got banned.
I mean, what a country should do it put a law in effect. If you ban a user, the user can submit a request with their government issued ID and you must give an exact reason why they were banned. The company can keep this record in encrypted form for 10 years.
Failure to give the exact reason will lead to a $100,000 fine for the first offense and increase from there up to suspension of operations privileges in said country.
"But, but, but hackers/spammers will abuse this". For one, boo fucking hoo. For two, just add to the bill "Fraudulent use of law to bypass system restrictions is a criminal offense".
This puts companies in a position where they must be able to justify their actual actions, and it also puts scammers at risk if they abuse the system.
It worked until it didn’t. That’s how it goes. Peace is always hard work and irrational actors (in terms of: well being of people, not necessarily aspirations of empire) can muck everything up.
Economical co-dependency is a good tool for increasing the price of going to war and making it irrational. It’s also not a zero sum game and tends to profit both sides. However, it can suck if you do it with non-democratic regimes and autocratic rulers who trample human rights.
So between France, Germany, Poland and all the other EU members it‘s keeping the continent at peace and generally does not suck because it‘s between broadly democratic nations. It also benefits each one massively and makes things possible like a common electric grid that increases reliability in general. So nearly all upside.
I do think economic cooperation with the Soviet Union and later Russia - much, much more limited than between EU members - was helpful in cooling tensions and making the world a bit safer, sure, but Russia has clearly behaved in a way that makes that no longer a good idea.
It also works the other way around and I am pretty sure that was what Russia was betting on - with Europe's dependence on Russian energy, Europe would not react strongly to Russia's invasion.
China is usually seen (I think broadly correctly) as more of a rational actor than Russia. Russia is much more run for the benefit of a weird dictator than run as a country.
Europe was a bit customer for Russia energy, and Russia invaded an EU neighbor nonetheless. After which it stopped being the customer. So it seems like that incentive didn't really work.
I think that was raincole's point. I guess we can't account for Russia or the US making decisions that are completely counter to the benefit of their people.
Russia did have a big incentive to not antagonize Europe.
But sadly they have a political system that doesn't reflect what is best for the ordinary person. So those incentives can be ignored by those making the decisions.
> I believe that the main reason for SO's decline starting around 2018 was that most of the core technical questions had been answered
I believe that the rise of SO was mostly a miracle. A once-in-an-era thing. The evidence is all the other Stack Exchange sites. They all have the same UI and the same moderation model. If SO has some secret sauce they have it too. But most of them were pretty dead and never became an enormous corpus.
In the past two decades, we've seen the less-tech-savvy middle managers who devalued anything done on computer. They seemed to believe that doing graphic design or digital painting was just pressing a few buttons on the keyboard and the computer would do the job for you. These people were constantly mocked among online communities.
In programmers' world, you have seen people who said "how hard it could be? It's just adding a new button/changing the font/whatever..."
And strangely, in the end those tech muggles were the insightful ones.
Yes. My father never uses GPS at all. He memorized all the main roads in our city.
It's amazing to see how he navigates the city. But however amazing it is, he's only correct perhaps 95 times out of 100. And the number will only go down as he gets older. Meanwhile he has the 99.99% correct answer right in the front panel.
But if everyone follows this advice, then everything just gets overwhelmed by "hustlers" (and their "shameless spam"), and collectively we're now all worse off because of it. It just turns into yet another tragedy of the commons situation.
I say this as someone who received a lot of great feedback and had some interesting interactions after posting about a project of mine using "Show HN" a few years ago. I didn't need to spam anything to get the attention, but I admit maybe I just got very lucky, or maybe there were just fewer posts to "compete" with at the time (this was before the recent write-everything-with-AI-and-launch-it-out-there craze).
Finally, I'm not making any moral judgments here, and if someone feels they need to do this to get the attention they want, then who am I to tell you otherwise. But we should be aware of what we're giving up when we overall tend to behave in such a way, even if it's the inevitable outcome.
Protecting the kids and fighting terror. Anything that can't be argued against is always used as a justification of people in power who don't want to incite a riot.
Politicians, CEOs, Lawyers it's standard practice because it's so effective.
I think the whole idea of holding a platform responsible for what users do is extremely unethical. Especially in this case, it's not even Meta's platform. It's Roblox. Meta's providing the hardware and app store here.
If the laws make Meta somehow possibly responsible for child abuse happening on Roblox, and the legal team protects them from this, I think the legal team is on the ethical side.
> Holding Meta accountable includes holding its lawyers accountable
> Sattizahn also testified how, after his research on Meta’s VR platform uncovered children under the age of 10 in Germany being propositioned for “sex acts, nude photos, and other acts that no child should ever be exposed to,” Meta’s in-house lawyers demanded the erasure of any and all evidence of this finding. When asked by Senator Josh Hawley how often she’d witnessed an underage user being exposed to inappropriate sexual content on Meta VR, Savage replied, “every time I use the headset.” The permissiveness by the company that Savage and Sattizahn testified to is mirrored by the more recently unsealed court documents, which included that Meta maintained a 17-strike policy for sex trafficking accounts — removing predators only after they were caught attempting to traffic people 17 separate times. Meta’s own internal documents called this threshold “very, very, very high.”
> On October 23, 2025, a judge in a separate case validated what the whistleblowers and court documents had described. Invoking the rarely used crime-fraud exception to pierce Meta’s attorney-client privilege, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Yvonne Williams found Meta’s lawyers had coached researchers to hide, block, and sanitize studies on teen mental-health harm in order to shield the company from liability. Judge Williams determined there was probable cause that these communications were “fundamentally inconsistent with the basic premises of the adversary system.” [emphasis mine]
> Meta’s in-house lawyers demanded the erasure of any and all evidence of this finding. When asked by Senator Josh Hawley how often she’d witnessed an underage user being exposed to inappropriate sexual content on Meta VR, Savage replied, “every time I use the headset.”
We need brutal, public executions for people like this.
Even the products got eventually shut down I still don't think the money was necessarily 'burned.' Most buildings eventually fell or got destructed so were all the resources spent on construction burned? But whether a product actually helped the users is a question too nuance to ask.
Dollar is the exception because the US is the exception (partially from luck, partially from its inherited geographical advantage), not the other way around.
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