"Components" means in this case the phone and the sticker.

What are you on about with this? Last news post 2013?

If AI constantly refined its own output, sure, unless it hits a wall eventually or starts spewing bullshit because of some quirk of training. But I doubt it could learn to summarise better without external input, just like a compiler won't produce a more optimised version of itself without human development work.

TBH, age verification services exist. If it becomes law, integrating them shouldn't be more difficult than integrating a OIDC login. So everyone should be able to do it. Depending on these services, you might not even need to give a name, or, because they are separate entities, don't give your name to the platform using them. Other parts of regulation are more difficult. Like these "upload filters" that need to figure out if something shared via a service is violating any copyright before it is made available.

I think you're missing some key points. Any file hosting service, no matter what, will have to deal with CSAM as long as people are able to upload to it. No matter what. This is an inescapable fact of hosting and the internet in general. Because CSAM is so ubiquitous and constant, one can only do so much to moderate any services, whether they're a large corporation are someone with a server in their closet. All of the larger platforms like 'meta', google, etc., mostly outsource that moderation to workers in developing countries so they don't have to also provide mental health counselling, but that's another story. The reason they own their own hardware is because the hosting services can and will disable your account and take down your servers if there's even a whiff of CSAM. Since it's a constant threat, it's better to own your own hardware and host everything from your closet so you don't have to eat the downtime and wait for some poor bastard in Nigeria to look through your logs and reinstate your account (not sure how that works exactly though).

Anytime I consider making the jump, I make my peace with everything and then the price hits...no way

(Premise - suppose I accept that there is such a definable thing as capitalism) I'm not sure why you feel the need to state this in a discussion that already assumes it as a necessary precondition of, but, uh, you do you. People blaming capitalism for everything then build a country that imports grain, while before them and after them it’s among the largest exporters on the planet (if we combine Russia and Ukraine for the “after” metric, no pun intended). ...what? What does this have to do with literally anything, much less my comment about innovation/competition? Even setting aside the wild-assed assumptions you're making about me criticizing capitalism means I 'blame [it] for everything', this tirade you've launched into, presumably about Ukraine and the USSR, has no bearing on anything even tangentially related to this conversation. People praising capitalism create conditions in which there’s no reason to praise it. Like, it’s competitive - they kill competitiveness with patents, IP, very complex legal systems. It’s self-regulating and self-optimizing - they make regulations and do bailouts preventing sick companies from dying, make laws after their interests, then reactively make regulations to make conditions with them existing bearable, which have a side effect of killing smaller companies. Please allow me to reiterate: ...what? Capitalists didn't build literally any of those things, governments did, and capitalists have been trying to escape, subvert, or dismantle those systems at every turn, so this... vain, confusing attempt to pin a medal on capitalism's chest for restraining itself is not only wrong, it fails to understand basic facts about history. It's the opposite of self-regulating because it actively seeks to dismantle regulations (environmental, labor, wage, etc), and the only thing it optimizes for is the wealth of oligarchs, and maybe if they're lucky, there will be a few crumbs left over for their simps. That’s the problem, both “socialist” and “capitalist” ideal systems ignore ape power dynamics. I'm going to go ahead an assume that 'the problem' has more to do with assuming that complex interacting systems can be simplified to 'ape (or any other animal's) power dynamics' than with failing to let the richest people just do whatever they want. Such systems should be designed on top of the fact that jungle law is always allowed So we should just be cool with everybody being poor so Jeff Bezos or whoever can upgrade his megayacht to a gigayacht or whatever? Let me say this in the politest way I know how: LOL no. Also, do you remember when I said this? ‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires’ is wearing kinda thin You know, right before you went on this very long-winded, surreal, barely-coherent ramble? Did you imagine I would be convinced by literally any of it when all it amounts to is one giant, extraneous, tedious equivalent of 'Won't someone please think of the billionaires?' Simp harder and I bet maybe you can get a crumb or two yourself.