Core to the problem is that Roblox’s social media features allow pedophiles to efficiently target hundreds of children, with no up-front screening to prevent them from joining the platform.
For example, in 2018, prior to Roblox going public, a 29-year-old was caught by police with 175 hours of video footage of him grooming and engaging in explicit behavior with 150 minors using online platforms, namely Roblox.
Media and non-profit exposés from 2020 to July 2024 revealed digital strip clubs, red light districts, sex parties and child predators lurking on Roblox. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation in 2024 labeled Roblox “a tool for sexual predators, a threat for childrens’ safety”.
Numerous criminal indictments from 2019-2024 allege that sexual predators groomed children in-game, ranging from 8-14 years old, then kidnapped, raped or traded sexual content with them.
Following years of scandals, we performed our own checks to see if the platform had cleaned up its act. As a test, we attempted to set up an account under the name ‘Jeffrey Epstein’…only to see the name was taken, along with 900+ variations.
Many were Jeffrey Epstein fan accounts, including “JeffEpsteinSupporter” which had earned multiple badges for spending time in kid’s games. Other Jeff Epstein accounts had the usernames “@igruum_minors” [I groom minors], and “@RavpeTinyK1dsJE” [rape tiny kids].
We attempted to set up a Roblox account under the name of another notorious pedophile to see if Roblox had any up-front pedophile screening: Earl Brian Bradley was indicted on 471 charges of molesting, raping and exploiting 103 children. The username was taken, along with multiple variants like earlbrianbradley69.
After we found a username, we listed our age as “under 13” to see if children are being exposed to adult content. By merely plugging ‘adult’ into the Roblox search bar, we found a group called “Adult Studios” with 3,334 members openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors.
We tracked some of the members of “Adult Studios” and easily found 38 Roblox groups – one with 103,000 members – openly soliciting sexual favors and trading child pornography.
The chatrooms trading in child pornography had no age restrictions. Roblox reports that 21% of its users are under the age of 9, a number that is likely underestimated given that Roblox has no age verification aside from users seeking 17+ experiences.
Registered as a child, we were also able to access games like “Escape to Epstein Island” and “Diddy Party”. We found over 600 “Diddy” games, including “Survive Diddy” and “Run From Diddy Simulator”.
Since September 2nd, 2024, third-party monitor ‘Moderation For Dummies’ has reported ~12,400 erotic roleplay accounts on Roblox. These include everything from “rape/forceful sex fetishes” to underage users “willing to do anything for Robux”.
Users seeking sexual experiences on Roblox are so pervasive that there are thousands of Roblox sex videos on porn sites, inviting users of unknown ages to make explicit content on the platform.
We tested out Roblox’s experiences to see what else kids were being exposed to. We quickly encountered images of male genitalia and hate speech in Roblox’s “school simulator” game, which had registered 28.9 million visits with no age restrictions.
But....your ISP also has to procure a router from somewhere. Or are they just going to slap a sticker that says "verizon" on it and say it was made in the USA now?
They'll get a special government exemption, in return for accepting additional voluntary government oversight or some other under the table favour system.
this is basically saying "you cant do anything unless i allow you to (and i might for a price)" in contrast to when government should just say "these are the things that you cant do, anything else is ok".
>>for anyone that doesn't do competitive multiplayer gaming
Turns out, a lot of people do exactly that. Hundreds of millions of people play CoD, Fortnite, Battlefield, Apex and many many other games which won't work on Linux at all.
I think the state of gaming on Linux is absolutely incredible - what used to be a very esotheric and "roll of the dice" process 20 years ago now is extremely simple and it mostly just works. But when I play games with friends every week it's almost never a game that would work on Linux.
In reality when these experiments were conducted the frog simply jumped out as soon as the temperature started to raise, frogs will not sit there in slowly boiling water and just die without trying to escape way before the water becomes dangerous.
Sadly most of us are hopeless lobster boiled by greater powers. Unlike the crabs through you still can save the other lobsters by refraining to eat them.
I am yet to find any "blue collar worker" who would do this properly and actually give me an invoice or (god forbid) would take a bank transfer to a company account or maybe even a card payment. Literally every single person I have ever interacted with for fixing my house was like "mate it's cash only or the taxman is going to get me".
Recently I even needed my rims redone on my car, went to a big autoshop in my town, the owner came out with me to look at the car and went "mate it's going to be £500, cash only, you know how it is with the taxes. Or I can give you an invoice but it's going to be £600".
I literally turned around and left. Yes, they are crooks and fraudsters - but in my experience it's completely normalized. If you can get away with it, they will do it, and since everyone seems to be getting away with it, they do exactly that.
This is a bit surprising to me, but I've only ever rented in Europe. In the US, though, it's common to get discounted pricing for paying cash, usually 2-3% reduction in price as that's what they pay for card processing, otherwise anyone will take a card and everything is done with free estimates in writing up front, signed contracts, and payment due on completion. I can't imagine what you're describing in this thread happening in the US, that's a great way to get sued into oblivion as a tradesman.
I literally just had my roof repaired recently, by a reputable(by all accounts) company, it was recommended to me, good reviews on checkatrader......not cheap work either, about £3000. I asked the guy if I can pay by bank transfer and if he can give me an invoice - he said yes and yes. The work was done really well, so I had no issues - until I had to pay, the bank transfer was fine, but turns out it was to his...partner's private account? And the invoice came from a completely different email and was just a word document with "Invoice" and "roof repair- £3000" - that's it. No address, no nothing.
I wish this was a singular occurance, but every trader I ever worked with behaves like this. They are all allergic to paying tax on the money they make.
>> plumber or electrician can easily earn more than a researcher with PhD, with much shorter studies, better job security and more options for starting a business.
And every single plumber and electrician I know is completely worn out(physically) by the time they hit 50. Both are these are incredibly demanding on the body, more than most people imagine. So they get to that point where they actually can't move and they need double knee replacements before they even hit retirement, and suddenly can't work anymore. Some of them try to hire people, but that's hard and not everyone is built for it - so actually (at least in my experience) you go from being very well off to practically destitute, because like someone else pointed out - people in these professions are typically cash only to avoid taxes, they spend it, they don't put it in retirement funds to avoid having to explain the source of income, and they get to a point where they can't work and don't have any income.
It looks like a great option compared to someone who just got their PhD, sure. But long term I'm not sure if that's such a great option.
> It looks like a great option compared to someone who just got their PhD, sure. But long term I'm not sure if that's such a great option.
Why? I am sure we can agree that SWE domain has its own set of disadvantages, no?
Many people I know have been burnt out in their 30s on their jobs and are unable to continue with the same capacity in their 40s, not to even mention 50s, and later ages. What company wants to hire a 40+ or 50+ year-old SWE? Not many. I am not sure how is that any better than being physically worn out? Physically worn out you can organize work, and hire other people to work for you, but when you're mentally worn out there's not much you can do really.
Avoiding the burnt-out syndrome trap alone isn't enough. You can also easily become unemployable because (1) you're either not good enough for hi-profile jobs demanding maybe 95th percentile skills on the market, (2) you cannot work 50-hour long weeks under high stress continuously because of social and existential aspects of your life (family), or (3) you're simply over-qualified for many other jobs on the market so there's a real risk attached to employing you.
Being a plumber or electrician OTOH does not bear these type of costs or risks so, with things put into a ~20 year context, and given the today's picture of the market, I am also not really sure I would favor SWE over being a plumber or electrician or carpenter.
Many of those folks over here where I live earn 6 figures, and mind that this is only what they report (!), the actual figure is likely 2x as much since the preferred way of paying for the bill is cash (without invoice).
OTOH to break into the 6 figures territory as a SWE over here you need to become a recognizable domain expert - for me it took ~15 years to build the expertise other people believe I am exceptionally good at, and are therefore willing to pay for it. This is far from being easy and there's only of handful such people (in my area) since it takes an unreasonable amount of time and stubbornness to reach that point, barring some other factors of course too.
SWE domain might have been lucrative ~15 years ago but the dynamics in SWE changed dramatically in the last ~20 years. And as we see now with the AI, the change seems not to be declining.
I think that for some reason you took my critique of being a plumber or electrician as an endorsement of being a software engineer, and it's not entirely clear to me why.
Maybe I mistook your position but that's not what my intent was. I just wanted to paint the picture from the other side too, and perhaps spark a discussion too. That's all.
>> We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job.
Unless RTX9000 with 16PB of ram needed to run basic Gemini2077 model costs more than a house, but a brain jar with electrodes is cheaper than that. Then the economic incentives will shift the other way.
No I don't think so. We can already create LLMs that are highly efficient and infinitely more knowledgeable than any single human being, completely tuned to the task, without ego or distractions, and they are cheap enough that you can run tens of them in parallel for a few hundred dollars per month. They are also way faster than any human being. And we're three/ four years in this. Imagine 50 years from now.
That's the whole point though - I can't, and I don't think anyone can. Right now the LLMs are just getting bigger and bigger, we're bruteforcing the way out of their stupidity by giving them bigger and bigger datasets - unless something fundamental changes soon that tech has an actual dead end. Hence my (joke-ish) prediction that you'll eventually need a 16PB GPU to run a basic gemini model, and such a thing will always be very expensive no matter how much our tech advances(especially since we are already hitting some technical limits). Human brains won't get any more expensive with time - they already contain all the hardware they are ever going to get - but what might get cheaper is the plumbing to make them "run" and interact with other systems.
Yeah, well, we have a very different view on this- and I know there are two diametrically opposed camps, and I am in the awe-struck one. LLMs are getting bigger and bigger and they're getting much smarter, and all in the space of a few years. They went from making up erratic articles about unicorns to writing complex PRs in codebases of millions of lines of code, solving math olympics level problems, speaking fluently in tens or hundreds of languages and exhibiting a breadth of knowledge than no human being possesses. Considering their size, they are monstrously efficient compared to the human brain. But anyway, this is a matter for a different discussion.
We can already grow brain organoids cheaply and easily enough to be a YouTuber's long-running series, so even if biological somehow gets cheaper than silicon, it still isn't going to be a revived complete human brain from someone who died 50 years earlier and probably retired 20 years before that.
I mean, imagine someone who got themselves cryonically preserved in 1976 getting either revived or uploaded today: what job would they be able to get? Almost no office job is the same now as then; manufacturing involves very different tools and a lot of CNC and robotic arms; agriculture is only getting more automated and we've had cow-milking robots for 20-30 years; cars may have changed the least in usage if not safety, performance, and power source; I suppose that leaves gardening… well, except for robot lawnmowers, anyone who can hire a gardener can probably afford a robo-mower?
Tldr is that for some very limited tasks it might still be preferable to use a human mind, especially if you can run it at 1000x cognitive speed. Or.....it might not. It's sci-fi at this point.
It shouldn't remind you of that, my point is there's little economic use for uploads like this: if thinking meat is cheaper than thinking silicon, train some fresh thinking meat with an electrode array or whatever; if thinking silicon is cheaper, train some fresh thinking silicon.
Non-economic use, that's different of course. Digital afterlife and so on, but as a consumer, not a supplier of anything.
It's the other way around, while initially it will only be available to elites and prisoners (if you are innocently convicted for life, the digitized brain can set the record straight and provide another life, some will take that option, others wont).
As the technology improves, it will be mostly just for the rich and less for prisoners, and as costs fall further there will even be financial pressure for the rest of the population to "go digital": insurance on digitized lifeforms will be much cheaper, replacement robot body parts, replacement electronics, versus expensive healthcare.
Look up the fraction of GDP in developed nations that goes to healthcare and insurance. People will be shamed by the economy as if they are uppity for hanging on to their slow, expensive to feed and maintain meatbag bodies.
That doesn't mean you have to like the fact that you're dying. But make peace with the fact that you too, will die - it's one of the very few universal truths of life. I see so many people living like they are going to live forever - world would be a better place if more people realized that this isn't true, and your time on earth is limited.
God I hate this argument so much - it's just such an obviously incorrect statement which is always hard to win against because then the other side will always say "well what if you live in Novosibirsk and it's -60C outside, WHAT THEN CYCLISTS" - well nothing, if you live there then yeah I guess it doesn't work. But if you live in London, Paris, Warsaw, Barcelona, Talin or Stockholm it just doesn't hold water , and these are places that get very hot, very cold, get plenty of rain, snow and wind. It's like that old thing about beetles being too heavy to fly but also they can't read so they don't care - somehow cyclists in these places just get on their bikes and get to work and carry stuff and stay dry or cold or warm and it's fine, despite what the internet thinks.
I’m with you. As someone who cycles every day, just put the right clothes on when the weather calls for it, and if you need to buy a sofa, then rent an hourly car for ten bucks.
I've been to Copenhagen in the dead of winter with snow on the ground and my mind was blown by how many bikes there were on the streets. It really is an adaptable activity.
I believe they prioritise clearing snow/ice from the cycle lanes.
Personally, I enjoy cycling on snow as it's often not that slippery and due to the cold, I'll usually have a fair amount of clothing to act as padding for if I do come off. Black ice is worse as the rest of the road may be fine, so you go fast until suddenly you're sliding down the road.
I like Windows. Windows 11 gets on my nerves a lot but fundamentally I think it's a great system if you're a software developer or if you play video games(and I do both). I also have to use MacOS as part of my work and I don't understand how anyone uses it daily, it's like it's made by someone who never actually has to use it themselves. But I imagine it's a matter of personal preference to an extent.
I don't really mind Windows that much for non-development use, once you disable all the bloat. But for development... It seems obviously a distant third behind Linux and Mac, and I don't think I've ever heard any developer say otherwise. And I say this as someone who is forced to use it at work, so it's not out of ignorance (thank god for WSL).
But that's why I ask what kind of development you do, because I suppose there are areas where Windows really is a good option.
Visual Studio(the proper one, not Code) really has no rival. I'm a C++ low level engine developer and the kind of debugging I can do in VS, I don't know if any other IDE that allows that level of control and overview of every part of the system. I've tried
Raider and Xcode and neither comes close to the functionality of VS.
I was forced to use Windows recently for a year between late 2023-2024. Windows itself is fine. It’s the hardware that sucks with it still being forced to be on x86. The heat, the bad battery life, the fan noise, etc.
On the Mac side, either way I spent all of my day in VSCode and the browser - we use GSuite - Zoom and Slack. It wouldn’t make that much of a different either way.
The only integrations I use between my work Mac and my personal Apple life are my iPad for a second screen, shared subset of passwords. I have a separate Apple Account for my work computer and I share work related passwords.
https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
To quote just a section of the report:
Core to the problem is that Roblox’s social media features allow pedophiles to efficiently target hundreds of children, with no up-front screening to prevent them from joining the platform.
For example, in 2018, prior to Roblox going public, a 29-year-old was caught by police with 175 hours of video footage of him grooming and engaging in explicit behavior with 150 minors using online platforms, namely Roblox.
Media and non-profit exposés from 2020 to July 2024 revealed digital strip clubs, red light districts, sex parties and child predators lurking on Roblox. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation in 2024 labeled Roblox “a tool for sexual predators, a threat for childrens’ safety”.
Numerous criminal indictments from 2019-2024 allege that sexual predators groomed children in-game, ranging from 8-14 years old, then kidnapped, raped or traded sexual content with them.
Following years of scandals, we performed our own checks to see if the platform had cleaned up its act. As a test, we attempted to set up an account under the name ‘Jeffrey Epstein’…only to see the name was taken, along with 900+ variations.
Many were Jeffrey Epstein fan accounts, including “JeffEpsteinSupporter” which had earned multiple badges for spending time in kid’s games. Other Jeff Epstein accounts had the usernames “@igruum_minors” [I groom minors], and “@RavpeTinyK1dsJE” [rape tiny kids].
We attempted to set up a Roblox account under the name of another notorious pedophile to see if Roblox had any up-front pedophile screening: Earl Brian Bradley was indicted on 471 charges of molesting, raping and exploiting 103 children. The username was taken, along with multiple variants like earlbrianbradley69.
After we found a username, we listed our age as “under 13” to see if children are being exposed to adult content. By merely plugging ‘adult’ into the Roblox search bar, we found a group called “Adult Studios” with 3,334 members openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors. We tracked some of the members of “Adult Studios” and easily found 38 Roblox groups – one with 103,000 members – openly soliciting sexual favors and trading child pornography.
The chatrooms trading in child pornography had no age restrictions. Roblox reports that 21% of its users are under the age of 9, a number that is likely underestimated given that Roblox has no age verification aside from users seeking 17+ experiences.
Registered as a child, we were also able to access games like “Escape to Epstein Island” and “Diddy Party”. We found over 600 “Diddy” games, including “Survive Diddy” and “Run From Diddy Simulator”.
Since September 2nd, 2024, third-party monitor ‘Moderation For Dummies’ has reported ~12,400 erotic roleplay accounts on Roblox. These include everything from “rape/forceful sex fetishes” to underage users “willing to do anything for Robux”.
Users seeking sexual experiences on Roblox are so pervasive that there are thousands of Roblox sex videos on porn sites, inviting users of unknown ages to make explicit content on the platform.
We tested out Roblox’s experiences to see what else kids were being exposed to. We quickly encountered images of male genitalia and hate speech in Roblox’s “school simulator” game, which had registered 28.9 million visits with no age restrictions.
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