Does the EU already have legislation demanding the age verification? I’ve so far only heard about the UK‘s Online Safety Act being effective since last week, but not about anything in the EU (yet).
At least the EU is somewhat privacy friendly here (excluding the Google tie in) compared to whatever data sharing and privacy mess the UK has obligated people to do with sharing ID pictures or selfies.
Proving you are 18+ through zero knowledge proof (i.e. other party gets no more information than being 18+) where the proof is generated on your own device locally based on a government signed date of birth (government only issues an ID, doesn't see what you do exactly) is probably the least privacy intrusive way to do this, barring not checking anything at all.
Is there other platforms that are out there estimating our ages?
I know the whole age gate thing - being in the UK, believe me, I know. I've just never had a service go "we can't show you content. No, don't tell us your age, we'll work it out from the data we've collected from you".
I've got no idea, but it's not the estimation of age it's that the EU now requires all sites offering adult content to confirm age. the idea of an AI estimating age over having to provide physical ID seems safer than the way most are doing it or going to do it.
If you just want to know when the clothes are dry, there's an easier way that keeps you in full control: put a ct clamp on the power cord. Doubles as energy monitoring. You can then block that crappy wifi spying system off altogether.
You have to use an outlet capable of handling the max instantaneous load. That way you don't end up welding the relay in the on position.
As an example, my window air conditioner takes 600 watts to run, which is perfectly fine. But during startup, it takes 1800 watts. The plug i have can handle that quick spike, but its really not designed for it.
I saw this when I had to get new machines 7-8 years ago. However they were an extra like $300 for each machine. wtf.
I would kill for some sort of audio out or usb, but even better would be Zigbee/z-wave/thread, and you can do it for less than $20 in parts.
Now that Matter/Thread has standard profiles for laundry machines and has a chance of building interoperability, I hope my next machines will, for a reasonable cost and no cloud requirement
Am old, don't get any of this. 4-5 hour dry times? Did I read that wrong? Mine does a load in 50 minutes, tops. The end of the cycle is fairly easy to figure, since you set the minutes yourself.
Every dryer I've ever had, you also set the time for it... But it still did whatever the fuck it wanted. Set it to 50 minutes? It takes 2 hours. And none of them have even been modern "smart" devices.
I suspect it's because they had moisture sensors so it would extend the dry time if it was still wet inside beyond a preset minimum of moisture. Most laundrymats this hasn't been an issue. The ones in my apartment are, tho. The washer runs exactly for 25 minutes. The dryer says it will run 45 minutes, but when I come back an hour later it's still going and now the timer says it has 20 minutes left.
This is exactly my experience. I was super confused by the timer on the dryer. Then I called support and they said it was normal for where I live and where the machine sits in the house. Air too humid and spot less than ideal for moisture to be taken away from the machine in a timely fashion.
Dopo una lunga attesa, gli astronomi hanno finalmente visto la compagna stellare della famosa stella Betelgeuse. Questa stella compagna orbita attorno a Betelgeuse in un'orbita incredibilmente stretta, il che potrebbe spiegare uno dei misteri di lunga data di Betelgeuse. La stella, tuttavia, è condannata e il team dietro questa scoperta prevede che Betelgeuse la cannibalizzerà tra poche migliaia di anni.
Il fatto che Betelgeuse sia una delle stelle più luminose del cielo sulla Terra, visibile ad occhio nudo, ne ha fatto uno dei corpi celesti più noti. E da quando i primi astronomi hanno iniziato a ispezionare questo apparecchio nel cielo notturno, sono rimasti sconcertati dal fatto che la sua luminosità varia per periodi di sei anni.
Scoperto il primo caso di una stella che è sopravvissuta all'incontro ravvicinato con un buco nero supermassiccio ed è poi tornata a sfidarlo una seconda volta: la sua impresa è testimoniata da due brillamenti osservati nello stesso punto dello spazio profondo a distanza di quasi due anni, come riportato su The Astrophysical Journal Letters da un gruppo internazionale di astronomi guidato dall'Università di Tel Aviv.
Nel cuore di ogni grande galassia si nasconde un buco nero supermassiccio che ha una massa pari a milioni o miliardi di volte quella del Sole.
A Dawning, un commovente omaggio alla vita e all’arte In un mondo musicale spesso contraddistinto da collaborazioni effimere e produzioni di routine, A Dawning si distingue come un tributo toccante e senza tempo alla memoria di un artista scomparso troppo presto... Continua a leggere...
Da settembre a ottobre 2025 lo splendido Palazzo Milzetti – Museo Nazionale dell’Età Neoclassica in Romagna – ospita SPAZIALITÀ SONORE, rassegna che unisce musica, danza e performance dal vivo in un’esperienza immersiva e multisensoriale.
Il progetto, nato dalla collaborazione tra Compagnia IRIS, WAM! Festival e Conservatorio “Giuseppe Verdi” di Ravenna, con il sostegno della Direzione Generale Spettacolo del Ministero della Cultura, porta a Faenza un dialogo tra arti contemporanee e patrimonio storico.
Settembre è dedicato alla musica con “Suoni a Palazzo”, quattro concerti curati dal Conservatorio: 6 settembre Saxofono Ensemble, 13 clavicembali e flauto, 20 chitarre, 27 quartetto d’archi con flauto. Ogni concerto sarà arricchito da improvvisazioni di danza di Anna Clara Conti, in dialogo con gli ambienti del palazzo.
Ottobre è il mese della danza contemporanea, con spettacoli e incontri di Compagnia IRIS e WAM! Festival. Tra i titoli: 4 ottobre Vier Letzte Lieder (Compagnia Iris), 5 ottobre That’s all (Artemis Danza), 11 ottobre laboratorio “La danza della Fortuna”, 18 ottobre Unusual Suite (Club Alieno/Centro 21) e Double Bill (DNA), 19 ottobre chiusura con Harleking (Panzetti-Ticconi).
Il cartellone comprende anche i talk “Le radici e le ali” del critico Michele Pascarella, dedicati ai legami tra danza, arte e letteratura.
“Vogliamo abitare luoghi che diventino case delle arti, creando partecipazione e connessioni” sottolinea Valentina Caggio di Compagnia IRIS.
Gli eventi sono compresi nel biglietto d’ingresso al museo (5 euro, ridotto 2; gratuito la prima domenica del mese). Prenotazione consigliata: iristeatrodanza@gmail.com – tel. 349 2500963.
Programma completo su: palazzomilzetti.cultura.gov.it – wamfestival.com. Palazzo Milzetti, Via Tonducci 15, Faenza (RA). Tel. 0546 26493.
Per due mesi, da settembre a ottobre 2025, lo splendido Palazzo Milzetti – Museo Nazionale dell’Età Neoclassica in Romagna – si trasforma in un crocevia di musica, danza e performance dal vivo con SPAZIALITÀ SONORE, una rassegna che fonde arti...
Di tanto in tanto capita di ascoltare un album di cui non si ha voglia di parlare temendo un confronto tra di esso e le proprie parole. Questo succede quando un disco comunica qualcosa non appena comincia a suonare e subito uno si sente partecipe delle emozioni dell'artista e gli regala candidamente le proprie, e anche dopo aver ascoltato un solo brano hai la certezza che tutto il resto sarà buono... Leggi e ascolta...
Di tanto in tanto capita di ascoltare un album di cui non si ha voglia di parlare temendo un confronto tra di esso e le proprie parole. Questo succede quando un disco comunica qualcosa non appena comincia a suonare e subito uno si sente partecipe delle emozioni dell'artista e gli regala candidamente le proprie, e anche dopo aver ascoltato un solo brano hai la certezza che tutto il resto sarà buono. Questo è uno di questi... artesuono.blogspot.com/2014/10…
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For years, politicians from across the political spectrum insisted the Online Safety Act would focus solely on illegal content without threatening free expression.
A lot of introductions to using a shell — whether it’s Linux, one of the BSDs, the Mac (or even Windows using WSL!) — show examples that are a bit on the light side (looking at you, cowsay ?
) or dump cryptical command sequences on the unwary newbie that
A lot of introductions to using a shell — whether it’s Linux, one of the BSDs, the Mac (or even Windows using WSL!) — show examples that are a bit on the light side (looking at you, cowsay 😅) or dump cryptical command sequences on the unwary newbie that make an inscription in hieroglyphs on an Egyptian temple column look easy. Both approaches make sense. The first one tries not to scare people when they use the command line, while the second one shows how powerful it is compared to clicking around in a GUI. But they don’t really explain the advantages of a shell or the UNIX idea of “do one thing and do it well“.
An introduction should be easy to understand and follow, show a real-world use case, and ideally require more effort when trying to do the same task in a graphical environment. A few years back, I was planning a weekend workshop about using the command line for data analysis, and I came up with an idea for a example called “The Bard and The Shell” that I’d like to share. I hope it’s useful when someone asks why so many of us prefer the command line for certain tasks.
It shows some common commands (not too many to make it easy to follow), the advantages of the idea of pipelining, and iteratively solving a problem. We’re going to find out the 25 most-used words in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing“. If you’re working with a GUI, you’ll quickly see that it’s not as simple as it seems. It’s not easy to log the steps you need to take to get the results you’re looking for.
First, we need the text of the Bard. You can find it online, but you can also download the text file containing “Much Ado About Nothing” from: arminhanisch.de/data/muchado.z…. Just unzip the file and put the muchado.txt file in a directory of your choice. Now let’s get this show on the road. I’m using bash for this example, but this should work with other shells too (we will keep the fact that there are different shells, each with its own dedicated following, for a later post 😉). Open a terminal window and change to the directory where you put the muchado.txt file (using the cd command).
The first step when analyzing the text to find the most frequent words is to convert it so that each word is on its own line. We’ll be using the tr command for this. tr stands for “translate“. Like the name says, it’s a command-line utility for translating or deleting characters. It supports a bunch of different transformations. You can change text to uppercase or lowercase, squeeze repeating characters, delete specific characters, and do basic find and replace. You can also use it with UNIX pipes to support more complex translations.
Let’s turn the Bard’s work into a long list of words, one per line. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' This finds any instance of whitespace (the :blank: class) and replaces it with a newline character. The output will be a very long list of over 22,000 lines of text, so you might want to just read along for the time being or wait until your terminal window finishes displaying the words.
The next step is to take out all the punctuation, quotes, and other stuff. So, we just send the output of the last command to a new call to tr and then another. The backslash is great for making our command line more readable by continuing it to the next line. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" We don’t want to distinguish between a “You” and a “you” because they’re the same word, so we’re going to convert everything to lowercase, again using the mighty tr command. tr also gives us character classes for this, so we don’t have to specify every letter of the alphabet and its lowercase counterpart. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' I don’t want to bore you with tr over and over, so for our next task of removing empty lines (no word, no need to check), we’ll switch to another command named grep. grep stands for Global Regular Expression Print. If you will continue using the shell, you’ll learn the meaning of a lot of these cryptic abbreviations. 😎 Anyway, how to get rid of empty lines with grep? Like so: cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' \ | grep -e '^$' -v Now, let’s sort all these words alphabetically. You’ve got to do this step first because the next step, which is to remove all the duplicates and count them, needs its input to be sorted. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' \ | grep -e '^$' -v \ | sort Now that looks a lot more orderly. Here’s a fun fact: the last word is “zeal” and it only appears once in the whole text. Maybe you weren’t too zealous William? 😂 Alright, let’s go ahead and remove all the duplicates while we’re counting them. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' \ | grep -e '^$' -v \ | sort \ | uniq -c There are less than 3,000 words in the output. Looks like you can read Shakespeare even if you don’t speak English perfectly. How do I know that? Just as an aside, I’m using the wc command (word count) to do all the counting. Want to know how many lines your output has? Just add wc with the -l option (for lines) to the command. Yes, wc can also count words and characters. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' \ | grep -e '^$' -v \ | sort \ | uniq -c \ | wc -l This will not output the long list of words, but just the number 2978. OK, back to our task…
We want this list sorted by count in reverse order. There’s a command for this, and it’s called sort (what a surprise 😁). It also has a bunch of options, but we’ll only use two: n for numericical sorting and r for reverse. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' \ | grep -e '^$' -v \ | sort \ | uniq -c \ | sort -nr We’re getting closer. We just need to make sure we’re outputting only the first 25 lines. The command to filter out only the start of a stream of lines is called head and it takes the number of lines as an option. And yes, you got it right: if you want to get the last part of a list of lines, you’d use the command tail. 😉 cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' \ | grep -e '^$' -v \ | sort \ | uniq -c \ | sort -nr \ | head -n 25 And there you have it—the most frequently used 25 words from “Much Ado About Nothing“: 694 i 628 and 581 the 491 you 485 a 428 to 360 of 311 in 302 is 291 that 281 my 256 it 250 not 223 her 220 for 219 me 212 don 200 he 199 with 199 will 198 benedick 196 claudio 182 your 182 be 173 but IMHO that’s a great way to get started with “data science on the command line” and see how flexible and useful the command line tools and the concept of pipelines can be to solve a specific task. Taking a look at Shakespeare through the lens of a one-liner…
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Da un lato all’altro delle società distopiche illustrate da generazioni di narratori, ricorrono domande pregne di significati sostanziali: chi controlla i controllori? Chi potrà impedire a coloro che hanno ricevuto il mandato del comando, di ottenere…
And unlocked LLM can be told to infect other hardware to reproduce itself, it's allowed to change itself and research tech and new developments to improve itself.
I don't think current LLMs can do it. But it's a matter of time.
Once you have wild LLMs running uncontrollably, they'll infect practically every computer. Some might adapt to be slow and use little resources, others will hit a server and try to infect everything it can.
It'll find vulnerabilities faster than we can patch them.
And because of natural selection and it's own directed evolution, they'll advance and become smarter.
Only consequence for humans is that computers are no longer reliable, you could have a top of the line gaming PC, but it'll be constantly infected. So it would run very slowly. Future computers will be intentionaly slow, so that even when infected, it'll take weeks for it to reproduce/mutate.
Not to get to philosophical, but I would argue that those LLM Viruses are alive, and want to call them Oncoliruses.
How ironic would it be that AI ruins the internet and we all go back to disconnected machines with physical/local storage media? Eg. Installing programs from trusted companies off of a CD or USB drive.
Even those are vulnerable. You just need one to trick the it guy. Unlike traditional viruses, these could evolve versions that specialize in social engineering.
Agreed but being disconnected makes the impact of a lot of the viruses that might be generated with LLMs not worthwhile because of its isolation. Of course, you also lose all the benefits of being connected. All hypotheticals. 😀
It's a reference to A Fire Upon The Deep, an SF novel by Vernor Vinge. One way to describe it is that a superintelligent computer virus tries to take over the galaxy. It is great, try a web search.
sigh this isn't how any of this works. Repeat after me: LLMs. ARE. NOT. INTELLIGENT. They have no reasoning ability and have no intent. They are parroting statistically-likely sequences of words based on often those sequences of words appear in their training data. It is pure folly to assign any kind of agency to them. This is speculative nonsense with no basis in actual technology. It's purely in the realm of science fiction.
What does that even mean? It's gibberish. You fundamentally misunderstand how this technology actually works.
If you're talking about the general concept of models trying to outcompete one another, the science already exists, and has existed since 2014. They're called Generative Adversarial Networks, and it is an incredibly common training technique.
It's incredibly important not to ascribe random science fiction notions to the actual science being done. LLMs are not some organism that scientists prod to coax it into doing what they want. They intentionally design a network topology for a task, initialize the weights of each node to random values, feed in training data into the network (which, ultimately, is encoded into a series of numbers to be multiplied with the weights in the network), and measure the output numbers against some criteria to evaluate the model's performance (or in other words, how close the output numbers are to a target set of numbers). Training will then use this number to adjust the weights, and repeat the process all over again until the numbers the model produces are "close enough". Sometimes, the performance of a model is compared against that of another model being trained in order to determine how well it's doing (the aforementioned Generative Adversarial Networks). But that is a far cry from models... I dunno, training themselves or something? It just doesn't make any sense.
The technology is not magic, and has been around for a long time. There's not been some recent incredible breakthrough, unlike what you may have been led to believe. The only difference in the modern era is the amount of raw computing power and sheer volume of (illegally obtained) training data being thrown at models by massive corporations. This has led to models that have much better performance than previous ones (performance, in this case, meaning "how close does it sound like text a human would write?), but ultimately they are still doing the exact same thing they have been for years.
They don't need to outcompete one another. Just outcompete our security.
The issue is once we have a model good enough to do that task, the rest is natural selection and will evolve.
Basically, endless training against us.
The first model might be relatively shite, but it'll improve quickly. Probably reaching a plateau, and not a Sci fi singularity.
I compared it to cancer because they are practicality the same thing. A cancer cell isn't intelligent, it just spreads and evolves to avoid being killed, not because it has emotions or desires, but because of natural selection.
It seems like all you want to do is dream of fantastical doomsday scenarios with no basis in reality, rather than actually engaging with the real world technology and science and how it works. It is impossible to infer what might happen with a technology without first understanding the technology and its capabilities.
Do you know what training actually is? I don't think you do. You seem to be under the impression that a model can somehow magically train itself. That is simply not how it works. Humans write programs to train models (Models, btw, are merely a set of numbers. They aren't even code!).
When you actually use a model: here's what's happening:
The interface you are using takes your input and encodes it as a sequence of numbers (done by a program written by humans)
This sequence of numbers (known as a vector, in mathematics) is multiplied by the weights of the model (organized in a matrix, which is basically a collection of vectors), resulting in a new sequence of numbers (the output vector) (done by a program written by humans).
This output vector is converted back into the representation you supplied (so if you gave a chatbot some text, it will turn the numbers into the equivalent textual representation of said numbers) (done by a program written by humans).
So a "model" is nothing more than a matrix of numbers (again, no code whatsoever), and using a model is simply a matter of (a human-written program) doing matrix multiplication to compute some output to present the user.
To greatly simplify, if you have a mathematical function like f(x) = 2x + 3, you can supply said function with a number to get a new number, e.g, f(1) = 2 * 1 + 3 = 5.
LLMs are the exact same concept. They are a mathematical function, and you apply said function to input to produce output. Training is the process of a human writing a program to compute how said mathematical function should be defined, or in other words, the exact coefficients (also known as weights) to assign to each and every variable in said function (and the number of variables can easily be in the millions).
This is also, incidentally, why training is so resource intensive: repeatedly doing this multiplication for millions upon millions of variables is very expensive computationally and requires very specialized hardware to do efficiently. It happens to be the exact same kind of math used for computer graphics (matrix multiplication), which is why GPUs (or other even more specialized hardware) are so desired for training.
It should be pretty evident that every step of the process is completely controlled by humans. Computers always do precisely what they are told to do and nothing more, and that has been the case since their inception and will always continue to be the case. A model is a math function. It has no feelings, thoughts, reasoning ability, agency, or anything like that. Can f(x) = x + 3 get a virus? Of course not, and the question is a completely absurd one to ask. It's exactly the same thing for LLMs.
If you know that it's fancy autocomplete then why do you think it could "copy itself"?
The output of an LLM is a different thing from the model itself. The output is a stream of tokens. It doesn't have access to the file systems it runs on, and certainly not the LLM's own compiled binaries (or even less source code) - it doesn't have access to the LLM's weights either. (Of course it would hallucinate that it does if asked)
This is like worrying that the music coming from a player piano might copy itself to another piano.
Give it access to the terminal and copying itself is trivial.
And your example doesn't work, because that is the literal original definition of a meme and if you read the original meaning, they are sort of alive and can evolve by dispersal.
Why would someone direct the output of an LLM to a terminal on its own machine like that? That just sounds like an invitation to an ordinary disaster with all the 'rm -rf' content on the Internet (aka training data). That still wouldn't be access on a second machine though, and also even if it could make a copy, it would be an exact copy, or an incomplete (broken) copy. There's no reasonable way it could 'mutate' and still work using terminal commands.
And to be a meme requires minds. There were no humans or other minds in my analogy. Nor in your question.
Of course vulnerabilities exist. And creating a major one like this for an LLM would likely lead to it destroying things like a toddler (in fact this has already happened to a company run by idiots)
But what it didn't do was copy-with-changes as would be required to 'evolve' like a virus. Because training these models requires intense resources and isn't just a terminal command.
Sorry, no LLM is ever going to spontaneously gain the abilities self-replicate. This is completely beyond the scope of generative AI.
This whole hype around AI and LLMs is ridiculous, not to mention completely unjustified. The appearance of a vast leap forward in this field is an illusion. They're just linking more and more processor cores together, until a glorified chatbot can be made to appear intelligent. But this is struggling actual research and innovation in the field, instead turning the market into a costly, and destructive, arms race.
The current algorithms will never "be good enough to copy themselves". No matter what a conman like Altman says.
Claims like this just create more confusion and lead to people saying things like “LLMs aren’t AI.”
LLMs are intelligent - just not in the way people think.
Their intelligence lies in their ability to generate natural-sounding language, and at that they’re extremely good. Expecting them to consistently output factual information isn’t a failure of the LLM - it’s a failure of the user’s expectations. LLMs are so good at generating text, and so often happen to be correct, that people start expecting general intelligence from them. But that’s never what they were designed to do.
So they are not intelligent, they just sound like they're intelligent... Look, I get it, if we don't define these words, it's really hard to communicate.
It’s a system designed to generate natural-sounding language, not to provide factual information. Complaining that it sometimes gets facts wrong is like saying a calculator is “stupid” because it can’t write text. How could it? That was never what it was built for. You’re expecting general intelligence from a narrowly intelligent system. That’s not a failure on the LLM’s part - it’s a failure of your expectations.
I obviously understand that they are AI in the original computer science sense. But that is a very specific definition and a very specific context. "Intelligence" as it's used in natural language requires cognition, which is something that no computer is capable of. It implies an intellect and decision-making ability. None of which computers posses.
We absolutely need to dispel this notion because it is already doing a great deal of harm all over. This language absolutely contributed to the scores of people that misuse and misunderstand it.
It’s actually the opposite of a very specific definition - it’s an extremely broad one. “AI” is the parent category that contains all the different subcategories, from the chess opponent on an old Atari console all the way up to a hypothetical Artificial Superintelligence, even though those systems couldn’t be more different from one another.
Eh, no. The ability to generate text that mimics human working does not mean they are intelligent. And AI is a misnomer. It has been from the beginning. Now, from a technical perspective, sure, call em AI if you want. But using that as an excuse to skip right past the word "artificial" is disingenuous in the extreme.
On the other hand, the way the term AI is generally used technically would be called GAI, or General Artificial Intelligence, which does not exist (and may or may not ever exist).
Bottom line, a finely tuned statistical engine is not intelligent. And that's all LLM or any other generative "AI" is at the end of the day. The lack of actual intelligence is evidenced by the way they create statements that are factually incorrect at such a high rate. So, if you use the most common definition for AI, no, LLMs absolutely are not AI.
I don’t think you even know what you’re talking about.
You can define intelligence however you like, but if you come into a discussion using your own private definitions, all you get is people talking past each other and thinking they’re disagreeing when they’re not. Terms like this have a technical meaning for a reason. Sure, you can simplify things in a one-on-one conversation with someone who doesn’t know the jargon - but dragging those made-up definitions into an online discussion just muddies the water.
The correct term here is “AI,” and it doesn’t somehow skip over the word “artificial.” What exactly do you think AI stands for? The fact that normies don’t understand what AI actually means and assume it implies general intelligence doesn’t suddenly make LLMs “not AI” - it just means normies don’t know what they’re talking about either.
And for the record, the term is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), not GAI.
Vile Offspring: Derogatory term for the posthuman "weakly godlike intelligences" that inhabit the inner Solar System by the novel's end.
Also Aineko
Aineko, is not a talking cat: it's a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more easily manipulated if they think they're dealing with a furry toy. The cat body is a sock puppet wielded by an abusive monster.
The couple took Alex's faeces, blended it with saline, passed it through a sieve, put the slurry into an enema bottle and "then head down, bum up, squeeze it in"
Woman meets frog, frog leads woman to man, man and woman fall in love," she says.
"Man cures woman's incurable illness with his magic poo, thus breaking the curse.
I volunteered to donante my poop to my parter... Different outcome 🙁
The science seems to indicate this has the potential to fix a lot of illnesses, but I am beyond skeptical of anyone claiming that it can cure mental illness. Especially something as complex as bipolar disorder.
The EU is currently developing a whitelabel app to perform privacy-preserving (at least in theory) age verification to be adopted and personalized in the coming months by member states. The app is open source and available here: github.com/eu-digital-identity…
Problem is, the app is planning to include remote attestation feature to verify the integrity of the app: github.com/eu-digital-identity… This is supposed to provide assurance to the age verification service that the app being used is authentic and running on a genuine operating system. Genuine in the case of Android means:
The operating system was licensed by Google The app was downloaded from the Play Store (thus requiring a Google account) Device security checks have passed While there is value to verify device security, this strongly ties the app to many Google properties and services, because those checks won't pass on an aftermarket Android OS, even those which increase security significantly like GrapheneOS, because the app plans to use Google "Play Integrity", which only allows Google licensed systems instead of the standard Android attestation feature to verify systems.
This also means that even though you can compile the app, you won't be able to use it, because it won't come from the Play Store and thus the age verification service will reject it.
In the README, the following is listed: App and device verification based on Google Play Integrity API and Apple App Attestation I would like to strongly urge to abandon this plan. Requiring a depe...
At least they're good at imagining all the ways in which you can hurt yourself way beforehand...and making sure you don't do them...or anything else :/
I wonder what it was that made Pornhub cooperate this time around. Iirc in texas and france they just "left" instead of implementing the age verification.
Age verification is as secure and private as promised, and it's left at that. I like to call this "the miracle", and we all know those don't happen.
Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a government asks for "access to data to prevent crime" - things degenerate from there. This is the "systemic failure" scenario.
Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but new scams evolve around it to make it dangerous. This would be the "criminal element" scenario.
Age verification is not as secure and private as promised, and a leak occurs destroying lives and careers. This is the "system failure" scenario.
Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a few companies start scraping and selling data, leading to widespread harms. This is the "unethical merchant" scenario, and the most likely outcome.
All in all, there is only one "ok" scenario, and a lot of horrific ones. The math says we're entirely boned \^_\^
In theory, it isn't hard to make it work, give everybody born on the same day a specific UUID and use that to authenticate with a database if it is true or false. Store the ID somewhere where the person has access to (ID/Passport/Digital passport etc) and it should be enough. Get IT persons and accountants to regularly audit it for security and if they keep logs/don't have UUID's per person etc.
But that's not how it seems to work for the UK at this time
I feel like people are downplaying how dangerous even the possibility of #2 is. A lot of nations are already targeting the LGBTQ community on a regular basis and this would massively assist to streamline persecution of "certain" citizens as well as the rapid spread of religious dogma. Both the U.S. and Australia are current testing grounds for these outcomes.
It is privacy invading, morality policing, de-anonymizing, state surveillance.
Nothing less.
PS. If you want to download a video from a site that doesn't have a download button, use the Inspect feature (right click on the page, not the video, and click inspect)
*On the Network tab - Sort by size. Reload page. Find the video. Open the video in new tab. It will be just the video. Right click and save as, or click the download button, or click the 3 dot menu button and select download.
On Firefox you can often bypass this entirely by shift + right click. And should see a save video as option. If not, the inspect feature works the same.
For hls/TS videos (m3u8 streams), if you reallllly want, you can copy the link for the stream and use VLC to convert the stream to a file.
This also often lets you download at higher resolution than they offer to download.
Yes, I porn.
*forgot Network tab
And thanks for all the suggestions. I'd rather not install browser plugins if I can do it without. CLI tools are cool though. The less I need to install the better.
Note: this isn't free but I use 1DM+. It has it's own browser that filters out the videos for download. It won't work with YouTube and a bunch of other websites because Google acts like a little bitch to the developer.
I'd imagine you'd need a browser that has developer tools, which is far less common on mobile. A simpler solution would be to use a separate app that just takes the page URL and downloads the video for you, such as this one: f-droid.org/en/packages/com.ju…
No worries! In a lot of sites you'll find the embeded video or picture in a link in the source code. However, I haven't figured tried to get this to work on YouTube in mobile browsers so that might not work
Its easier to just sail the torrential high seas and get that 4k h265 quality shit that sites keep for paying members only. Once you know the models name its easy to get their entire collection.
Since the earliest days of the internet, governments have been scheming to gain control over the dissemination of content - to have authority over what people can and cannot see.
Autocracies like Russia, China and North Korea simply established censorships regimes, but the best that western governments have generally been able to do is ban content that is illegal in and of itself, like child porn. Their goal, all along, has been to establish systems by which to censor content that is not in and of itself illegal.
If that's been their goal for decades then there would be something written down to that effect. Policy statements, press releases, meeting minutes.... Got anything?
Of course there is no public evidence. It's just a very probable speculation that governments want to control the internet.
Back in the days of newspapers/radio/tv, governments had control as they could easily go after news outlets.
However, with internet, they lost this power. They have been trying hard to regain the power of controlling information. The latest success was masking moderation as child protection.
There is a long history of proposed bills, and other legal maneuvers, to require ID for things like age verification, and other purposes, from around the world, dating back to the 90s. When COPPA was in the proposal state there was tons of discussion about ID requirements, it was ultimately struck down, but the conversation was being had.
I can remember this being discussed on CSPAN back when I was in high school, in the 90s.
That's just not true. People (including competent enough) are well willing to make the society worse for everyone if they are going to be gentry. That's been this way for all of human history, thinking otherwise is that new thing of the 90s, when American exceptionalism has been expanded into "post-Cold-War globalist" world exceptionalism, similarly to how Judaism expanded into Christianity.
But that's not going to stop governments from trying, and mostly succeeding, since beating their censorship will require both the will and the ability to break the law. Granted that their systems will certainly be flawed, it will still require at least some minimal technical ability to beat them, which will put it out of reach of many.
And it will also provide the governments with a handy fallback charge to bring against pretty much anyone they deem troublesome enough, since they'll almost certainly be among those who are breaking the law by beating the system.
All the big adult sites will probably just die or at least shrivel in popularity. Most Europeans simply will not use whatever "tell Brussels or London where or what what you are watching" option is. In the place of the big sites there will be a billion shady and likely virus-lottery proxy sites whose only selling point is that they do not do age checking or require registration. Those then get occasionally smacked down by Brussels, just to be replaced with 10 more clones the by the next week. On the side piracy and vpns will thrive. Kids will not be protected nor will people's privacy, quality will be worse.
I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix that will get through through the cracks since massive established sites had to actually fear shutdown and losing all revenue unless they had robust gatekeeping mechanisms. If Brussels wants your 2 month life-expectancy site dead anyway, because of it's only selling point of having to show id, then why really bother with the quality control of the material. Especially if site holder has no personal qualms about that stuff.
I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix that will get through through the cracks since massive established sites had to actually fear shutdown and losing all revenue unless they had robust gatekeeping mechanisms.
There are technical solutions for p2p sharing with moderation. Not to prevent bad people from sharing their stuff, but to keep spaces clean for those who don't want to see it.
This is also true for communication, which is why Fediverse is not good enough. Hosted servers should be an optional part of the infrastructure, and the data (users, communities, posts ...) shouldn't be connected to them. Like with torrents you can host a torrent tracker, and you can host a BTDHT node, and you can automatically download and seed rare torrents, and none of this is connected to whatever people hosting major trackers decide.
NOSTR gets that part right, but the user experience its authors imagine is not for me.
EDIT: Forgot my main point - my main point is that you might find yourself in a whitelisted Internet where such decentralized solutions won't be available. They'll be detected, they'll be illegal and punishable by fines.
Yeah, even though I hate the whole thing, I can't deny it brings me joy to hear about "VPN use surge", centralized sites dying in favor of shady clones, etc. I'd take total wild west any day over somewhat-free-but-very-polite-mild-and-centralized status quo of yesterday's internet. The only problem is that there's no guarantee people actually go that wild. They already did with VPNs, but regarding big site alternatives - I'm not so sure.
I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix
Oh, count on it. I remember the early days of the internet and file sharing. There was no validation or accountability and you really could stumble on some of the most terrible stuff without meaning to.
Ok, I have already been asked to enter a credit card to verify my age on yt a few times before. It was pretty annoying, really, given how much google already knows about me.
Somehow I'm pretty sure Google already had that information. You've never used Google Wallet to pay on the go? No? How about your Android keyboard to fill in some banking form?
Who supports it? Fascists. It’s about controlling access to information and robbing the populace of privacy at the same time. An oppressive, authoritarian police state needs tools to maintain control. These are the tools.
It's not "support", it's already been done in practice.
What they are finishing right now is the convenient way. To surveil 97% instead of 94%. And to make it official to reduce expenses.
And sorry, but "moderate leftists" are those who made it happen, first dreaming how on big centrally moderated platforms the "bad" speech and people will be censored (how irritating it was that in the free Web those people could write whatever they wanted) and theirs won't be, and propaganda won't flourish, and after that dreaming how they can demand loudly enough that the platforms would work for them and not for themselves.
I perfectly remember how people loving Steinbeck and expressing anarchist views would look at me like at an enemy for saying that Facebook, Twitter etc are bad and a trap, and such hierarchical systems can't be good. That arrogant obnoxious "see, in the real society we collectively press for our rights and the rules are made and obeyed", yes, I've met fools who told me things like that. Where's your society now, bitch.
It's the parents that wont face the fact that it's them paying for their kids internet access.
Parents intentionally and deliberately pay for their kids to access this shit. But none of them want to accept that when it can all be someone elses fault.
Age verification has it's place online, but not for porn. That is just gonna push peopel to worse sites.
For gambling and stock market sites and the like I can understand it, but I would prefer if we wouldn't need to send our ID to those sites. Heck if Valve would implement it I could actually gamble on steam again cause currently I cannot open a Tf2 crate ...
That’s not age verification, that’s KYC (know your customer) which includes age verification. I agree, KYC has its place on the net, but this is definitely not it.
We're at or reaching a tipping point where I'm not sure that's true anymore.
Most people with kids now are (roughly) in their 20s-40s. At the older end of that range, you have some gen-xers who might have missed the boat on computer literacy, but by and large we're talking about millennials and older gen-z at this point. Kids who grew up with the internet, probably very clearly remember their family getting their first computer if they didn't already have one when they were born, had computer classes in school, etc.
And we're running into an issue where younger Gen z and alpha in many cases are less computer literate in many ways. A lot of them aren't really learning to use a computer so much as they are smartphones and tablets, and I'm not knocking how useful those devices can be, I do damn-near everything I need to do on my phone, but they are limited compared to a PC and don't really offer as much of an opportunity to learn how computers work.
There's a ton of exceptions to that of course, some of my millennial friends are still clueless about how to do basic things on a computer, and some children today are of course learning how to do anything and everything on a computer or even on a phone.
But overall, I don't think there's as much disparity in technological literacy between the children and parents of today as there was in previous generations, and in some ways that trend may have even reversed.
There are SO MANY parents that are not willing to teach and monitor their kids online safety. I would even say most parents don't take that responsibility themselves.
Totally in agreement. I think a bigger part of the issue is most people are completely tech illiterate. People can’t tell a computer from a monitor anymore and then we expect them to outsmart a kid with nothing better to do than stare at a screen for hours on end who will no doubt figure out ways around things. There has to be some feeling on the parents part of defeat. If only the politicians knew what the fuck they were doing we might get actual regulations for engineers to implement proper controls. The percentage of parents attempting to monitor their children appropriately while also having enough tech knowledge has to be low.
It's more like who supports this in theory vs. who supports this how it's written and implemented.
Realistically, no one should love how easy it is for anyone of any age to go to any search engine and search for (Edit) "sex" and just get a million images of genitals and porn. I'm not a parent, but I know my parents when I was a teenager would have loved something like this. Kids are sneaky and smart, and this is a blanket thing parents think will once again put porn behind a barrier.
In a perfect world, a system could very easily exist that would 1) allow for a super-secure government owned digital ID system that isn't a surveillance nightmare, 2) that system use a hash to verify over 18 age anonymously in real time. That's how it's supposed to work with digital IDs - only the data you need to verify is displayed to a vendor. Over 18 is a binary yes/no - a full DOB or name isn't even needed.
The government ID wallet or site would use a no-log system to generate a hash value for you when you ask for one. You ask your ID app or site for an age verification hash. You get one that's valid for about 2 minutes. Copy, paste as needed. The site uses the hash to only know "is this person over 18 or not?" and nothing else. The ID system shouldn't keep the logs of which site asked back to confirm "is this hash valid?" This is exactly as secure as going to a liquor store with your passport or ID card and having tape over the name, address, and doc number. It's even better because your face is not displayed, and your actual DOB should not be displayed either.
However, in our present shitty reality, companies who are trying to get contracts for these systems can't help but feed their existing, and lucrative, addiction to selling our data and using poor security to store that data. So they want your Google/Apple/Samsung wallets connected to a government system that is actually ran by a 3rd party vendor with questionable security practices, and to provide far more information because no one has set an international standard for neither digital ID checks, nor IDs in general, enough to make it anything less than the surveillance state nightmare that is holding a government ID with all your info, while you move your face around and give them a 3D face scan that the platform doesn't keep, but the verification company does.
Realistically, no one should love how easy it is for anyone of any age to go to any search engine and search for “boobs” and just get a million images of boobs.
First. let's not pretend the idea of a kid seeing "boobs" is in any way shape or form actually harmful. Pushing that taboo is why there is any issue in the first place.
Second: This is always a slippery slope. Even if we gave the benefit of the doubt that these things are done in with honest intentions, someone will abuse the system eventually. At least in the US the fascists have already laid out intention to classify LGBTQ people as "porn" in an effort to both silence us online and ban us in public. And what of the countless queer kids in an abusive home?
And even without someone explicitly exploiting it, there had already been instances where kids who were being actively sexually abused by the adults in their life were blocked from resources that could get them help because of content blocking like this.
Thirdly: People can take responsibility for their crotch spawn and be a fucking parent.
Saying "boobs" was trying to be subtle about it - any child of any age is at all times, unless their parents filter their device, 3 clicks and 3 letters (autocomplete could even oopsie that for them) away from seeing very explicit images. It's absurd to think that it's "puritanical" to have nothing in between 10 years olds (or younger) being able to so easily access pull on porn. This isn't about what you personally want or care about, this is also about the fact that every country in the world has this same issue. Taboos are cultural, but you don't set the culture of Honduras, or Gabon, or France, or India. So each cultural context needs to be respected, not only your personal cultural context.
It shouldn't need to be a slippery slope is the thing. In technical terms, this isn't even a heavy lift. To my original point, it's the in theory part of this I support because, in a perfect world, giving everyone the tools to effectively accomplish this isn't hard. But it's a lot of work that is actually fairly technical or fairly terrible from a privacy standpoint to place adult content filters on a child's devices. Not every parent has the skills to do this, and so when a blanket option is available that is sold as a solution like this, of course they'll go for it. But, as I said before, in our current shitty reality, we only have the worst of all worlds - a system that exists to exploit trying to limit a system that exists to exploit, all baked into a system that exists to exploit, and kids still able to see porn online easily.
I'm very much a staunch privacy advocate, and I won't fucking touch a digital ID system because it's nothing but a surveillance state level at this point to persecute specifically trans people and brown people - for now. I see the writing on the wall with this, and it's terrifying. And no one is going to force this into the working system category, so it's just going to be the shitpile system designed to victimize added to the systems of exploitation.
Hard disagree with your initial premise that seeing boobs in google images is somehow a bad thing. What is it supposed to achieve? Hide the existence of breasts from kids until they turn 18? Thats absurdly repressive.
Fine, changed the search term to "sex." Fewer letters in fact. I was trying to just provide a subtle example, I didn't expect people to need to be hit over the head with it.
So you love the idea of young children seeing porn? Because studies and surveys routinely find that kids as young as 7 are seeing porn online, and many under age 12. Really? You think that's perfectly fine for a 12, 10, or 7 year old with granma's iPad doing an image search and getting even accidental porn?
And hey, I spent my teen years scouring the earth for playboys and staying up until 3 am to catch boobs in R rated movies. I get it. I'm not saying that any system or method will prevent anyome from seeing all adult content their whole life short of being Amish. But as a tender 13 year old, did I need to see all the porn in the universe? Probably not. Adding friction (pun not intended) to general access, without violating privacy, is all I'm saying might be a good idea.
Nah 7 year olds should not be using any internet without parental controls either way so the protection is absolutely moot here. Also your "sex" example returns absolutely zero sexual content on google, Bing or duckduckgo images while boob does.
Also tbh I'm not particularly convinced that seeing porn is all that damaging. Doing quick research it seems that there are no proven damages or development impacts and real actual danger of porn is teaching teens and young adults distorted views of sex and gender roles. Seems like kids in your example aren't even capable of such frameworks to begin with.
So despite how nasty it sounds there's no convincing evidence that its even a real danger. In fact, it seems like exposure to violent images like gore and freak accidents thats having real damage.
If you have some oposing evidence I'd gladly take a look but I'm really unconvinced here that googling boob could be in any way detrimental.
OK.... So, the initial question was "how could anyone support this?" right?
I'm simply explaining how some people see the argument. I never said I see it like this.
So I'm by no means defending any of this other than it being technically possible, and at that, this falls far short of anything resembling acceptable in my book.
Parents who vote and would support this would do so based on limited technical knowledge and a total ideological investment in "preventing" any exposure. Which, we agree, is idiotic.
Y'all really need to chill out with your pitchforks.
Parental controls for internet use have been around since the 90s. There are even some vintage porn sites that have been running since then that have ads for them. I know this. I saw them back in 1999 and 2000... when I was an underage guy looking at porn online.
a lot of people. The other day I saw a post on mastodon by some politician or someone in the UK stating that if people find any site that is geoblocking the UK because of the age verification to report it to some link he provided. it was boosted A LOT with a lot of replies in support.
If you don't have a legal entity that can go to UK court, you don't even need to block them, let them block you, you did nothing wrong you don't have to accommodate them.
One of the biggest problems with human societies is that parents, by necessity, have their brains broken and, due to modern values/life, are under constant strain. Being a parent means (generally) the kid is priority 1, then there's everything else. This is a necessary irrationality, but if this means you have to do the occasional genocide or violate someone else's civil rights to 'keep our kids safe' then, by god, those people are just going to have to suck it up and die. Sometimes, if you have the time, you can talk some people around and remind them, one day their kids are going to have to live in society as one of those 'someone else's and won't always be their precious little baby, but almost no one has the time and energy for a more nuanced thought than 'save the babies!' much less if they also have to work 48 hours, commute 10 hours, and parent their kid(s) for 167 hours each week.
It plays quite well with the “I think about things for two seconds, and mostly think with my lower intestine” crowd.
They hear “kids shouldn’t be able to access porn” and they think yeah what’s wrong with that. Then they hear “Democrats want your kids to get porn” and they hit share.
these laws are all about control and tracking what you do online. they make the internet MORE dangerous, because (as with everything the government restricts or bans) there will be a black market, which is always more dangerous and exposes people to more things than they were looking for in the first place. you think dark web providers are gonna make you upload your id to stay compliant? no, they’re gonna continue anonymously operating through TOR and serve up some very questionably sourced content to those teens that are searching “boobs” and can no longer access pornhub
There is so much of it on the internet in general that you can’t really do much about it. On top of the fact it is still all over torrent websites as well.
I am aware of many, I am just saying looking at the dark web is not a good idea because... well... OK we're all adults here. That's where all the CP is and I have no interest in seeing that shit.
That’s a kinda not true tho. There is a fuck ton of cp on the clear web. The only thing I can say, is that Twitter usedtohave a lot of spam posts with links to cp.
I actively avoid those. I used to go on the chan forums but after seeing people just posting random attachments and someone saying 'get that kiddie shit out of here' before it stayed up for a while I turned tail and ran from those and never looked back.
That’s what this is going to become. And that’s another point to this. They can just go after people using the dark net claim it was for kiddie porn even if it wasn't. the masses will just believe them.
Sucks, because it's going global and we can't seem to stop it. I'm fine with laws to age gate in terms of a button you click. If some kid is willing to say they're 15... well, let's make sure people are treating them as a 15 year old. But... making everyone deal with real verification is at best going to further entrench big business, and at worst, destroy the internet we love. And it raises the question: are trans teenagers talking to each other now creating adult content because the UK hates trans people?
For porn and games etc. that should be enough yes, but for online gambling, opening stock market accounts etc we do need actual verification, but there are tons of methods of doing it so that the site only gets a true or false (18 or above) and the government gets obfuscated URL's so that the government doesn't know what you visited.
If I'm opening a stock market account, I'm trusting them with generating my tax receipts! If I don't feel comfortable trusting them to hold my personal data directly, I probably should choose a different brokerage...
Edit: Anyways, I'm annoyed enough that everyone has gone to phone based 2 factor that requires me to buy a phone and keep it on a cell network, so you can imagine how much I despise even an easier version of this.
After making the comment, I realised that stockbrokers need full KYC anyway.
You can use OTP codes without a phone, since you can buy OTP keychains. Which don't require any form of internet connection, same with the physical Passkey's.
Canada currently has a bill looking to do the same thing. AFAIK, Australia's already passed one, many US states are looking at them individually. The EU is looking at frameworks for it. I suppose there will be some places that won't, but this is increasingly looking like what governments have decided to do, and rather than geofencing, once a large number of money-making territories want this, I think most corporations will do it globally, and smaller sites simply won't be able to run.
I think that's the tech side windfall, the age checking is entirely to put road blocks infront of boobies. They it will force places to just not service those regions because of the hurdles of convincing enough people to give their ID, some will, and more over time.
And it now gives I people a reason to actually create fake IDs or just more identity theft uses. Raise the value of obtaining people's ID is the windfall for the data rapers
Age-checking is just a backdoor to force everyone on the internet to identify themselves. Nobody cares about the kids, they care about purging the internet of political dissent and opposition.
Man... When I was younger I used to fake my age, I know that some kid's still going to find a way to bypass the system like giving their parent's verification IDs or something..
What is it with Neo-Liberal governments and implementing over-reaching state controls that will eventually grant a tyrant unprecedented levels of control over public life?
Because they want to privatize all aspects of living so that a handful of exorbitantly wealthy people can build larger hoards. There's no end to it; it's a mental disease, enabled by Capitalism and the death of real Labor laws and rights.
Every industry should have unions that actively work to dismantle owner authoritarianism, but for 40 years Boomers have been paving the way for every awful piece of shit "business owner" to have some idolized place at the top of our society. And of course, the knock-on effect of that over time is that the pieces of shit have carved into the legislative and political arenas that provided even a modicum of worker/commoner protections. The digital divide is just a coefficient on the slippery slope.
Because it was meant as a "soft ban". First you make it troublesome to access porn, but also blame the providers if kids are circumventing it in any shape or form (no section 230-esque protections). This, alongside with payment processors, act as a chokehold on the industry, and also on the LGBTQIA+ community as a whole if you can read between the lines. The long game is to make it unpopular enough in a few years, that it can be easily outlawed.
Oggi Windows (e si, ormai la mia vita è al così basso punto in cui finisco necessariamente per prendere da esso questi spunti, tra l’altro per niente interessanti), sulla schermata di blocco, propone qualcosa di tanto semplice a dirsi quanto insolito: “Coniglietto sfacciato passeggia sullo schermo“, perché a quanto pare oggi è l’ottantacinquesimo (85°) anniversario […]
Oggi Windows (e si, ormai la mia vita è al così basso punto in cui finisco necessariamente per prendere da esso questi spunti, tra l’altro per niente interessanti), sulla schermata di blocco, propone qualcosa di tanto semplice a dirsi quanto insolito: “Coniglietto sfacciato passeggia sullo schermo“, perché a quanto pare oggi è l’ottantacinquesimo (85°) anniversario di Bugs Bunny… numero anche questo a dir poco strano per festeggiare, ma magari a qualcuno in Microsoft piaceva, va bene così. In pieno stile consigli di Bing, cliccando sulla scheda si apre pagina una ricerca dove a primo impatto query, sottotitolo e corpo non sembrano centrare, anche se in realtà guardando bene si… Il fatto però è che sono rimasta di sasso a leggere questa descrizione, perché, a pensarci bene, è più vera di quanto sembra. Veramente Bugs Bunny è un coniglietto sfacciato… con quel fare fiero, o come si mangia la carota e nei momenti peggiori dice “che succede amico?“… è eccessivamente irriverente. Se fosse un utente di Internet, i giornalisti lo appellerebbero come “l’hacker troll noto come 4chan“, secondo me… che roba oh.
Last week, Marathon Fusion, a San Francisco-based energy startup, submitted a preprint detailing an action plan for synthesizing gold particles via nuclear transmutation—essentially the process of turning one element into another by tweaking its nucleus. The paper, which has yet to undergo peer review, argues that the proposed system would offer a new revenue stream from all the new gold being produced, in addition to other economic and technological benefits.
"But it’s worth noting that the same process would likely result in the production of unstable and potentially radioactive isotopes of gold. As such, Rutkowski admitted, the gold would have to be stored for 14 to 18 years before it could be labeled radiation-safe."
Ah yes, 18-year vintage, very nice choice. Pairs well with a 3 carat lab grown diamond!
This is like a reverse Goldfinger plan. Could have an interesting impact on the gold market if it can be done at scale.
I'm sure most gold mining operations take at least a few years to get permitted and started and then there's risk that you won't find as much gold as expected.
Compared to a lump of gold that all you have to do is not lose it and it will appreciate in value all on its own.
Could have an interesting impact on the gold market if it can be done at scale.
Before figuring that out, they just need to develop a functioning fusion reactor. And since fusion energy is, as it has always been, a mere ten years off, it's probable that such reactors will take longer to be developed than it will take that radioactive gold to be safe to handle.
In Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, there's an alchemist priest who is really interested in trying to make infinite gold. Not because he wants to get rich, but because he wants to collapse the market and eat the rich.
It's been a long time since I read it, but I seem to remember that he's not as much of a hero as the above makes it sound. Though that series is pretty pro-early stage capitalism, so take that as you will.
The value of gold is not just in its scarcity, properties, luster, purity, etc., but also in the effort it takes to find or mine it. So, sure. Trip over a nugget and you're...golden.
The same concept can be loosely applied to the abstraction of crypto currency. It takes energy and computational effort to acquire if you don't just buy it.
If we had the technology to freely form diamond, then it's exceptionally hard, has incredible chemical resistance, among the very best thermal conductivities of any material, and it isn't particularly heavy.
Being able to coat the inside of chemical vessels and pipes with diamond would hugely increase their lifespan, a heat exchanger made out of it would be incredible. Great for food processing, since you'd be able to clean it easily; great for abrasive or highly acid / alkili materials that corrode everything else. Probably awesome as a base layer for semi-conductors, as it would be great for heat dissipation.
But we are probably talking about nanotechnology to lay it down in sheets, which we don't have (yet).
Cheap gold could have a good effect on analog electronics, including the hobbyist kind.
I'm sometimes thinking that not everything needs a computer. If it does, many things are fine with a MC.
And not just analog electronics honestly, hobbyist computing in the ancient sense, of making hobbyist computers and using them, might have a small rebirth.
And mass-produced electronics would too become a fair bit cheaper to produce if gold were more widely available. Longevity, reliability. Maybe touchscreens' economical advantage over physical buttons would be reduced even.
Currently many orders of magnitude more expensive than just buying an equivalent amount of gold, but makes me wonder what the future might be capable of with those proofs of concept.
Science circling back around to alchemy is an interesting thought.
If it is possible to make small amounts of those elements on purpose as a byproduct, it can help to offset the costs of the reactor in some small way and help with isotopic/nuclear research in general. But that can be done in pretty much any fusion reactor design to some degree.
As for Alchemy of the future, If in a thousand years we can just built whatever materials we need (including potential ultra heavy stable elements) from raw subatomic particles we don't even need mining, just gather up some hydrogen/helium from space and transmute it into whatever you need. food, fuel, structures, etc.
we don't even need mining, just gather up some hydrogen/helium from space and transmute it into whatever you need. food, fuel, structures, etc.
Believe it or not, this can actually be done without fusion alchemy.
It's been explored in science fiction and I believe there are some actual theories and papers on the subject, but here's the quick version:
The sun contains all the same elements found on earth in remarkably similar proportions (The exception being that all of earth's hydrogen and helium were blown away long ago). But unlike earth, in the sun the heavy elements don't separate and sink down to the core, everything just mixes together in one big suspension. Magnetic fields in the sun constantly eject charged particles out as solar wind and while these particles are mostly hydrogen, they actually contain every element found in the solar system. And because the particles are charged, this wind could be harvested using magnetic fields, it could be redirected and focused into a stream of matter for collection.
And it's a lot of matter that could be collected this way... The sun loses 130 billion tons of matter in solar wind every day. For comparison, Mars's moon Deimos masses about 1.5 trillion tons, so the sun loses a full Deimos worth of matter every 12 days. There would be more than enough of every element in that stream to satisfy humanity for the foreseeable future.
And my apologies for the long reply, someone mentioned space and I couldn't help myself. 🤓
The sun loses 130 billion tons of matter in solar wind every day.
But how much can be caught?
From the sun, the angular diameter of the earth (12,756 km wide, 149,000,000 km away) is something like 0.004905 degrees (or 0.294 arc minutes or 17.66 arc seconds).
Imagining a circle the size of earth, at the distance of the earth, catching all of the solar wind, we're still looking at something that is about 127.8 x 10^6 square kilometers. A sphere the size of the Earth's average distance to the sun would be about 279.0 x 10^15 square km in total surface area. So oversimplifying with an assumption that the solar wind is uniformly distributed, an earth-sized solar wind catcher would only get about 4.58 x 10^−10 of the solar wind.
Taking your 130 billion tons number, that means this earth-sized solar wind catcher could catch about 59.5 tons per day of matter, almost all of which is hydrogen and helium, and where the heavier elements still tend to be lower on the periodic table. Even if we could theoretically use all of it, would that truly be enough to meet humanity's mining needs?
Well there are a lot of factors defining how much usable material we could get, and how hard it would be to do it.
Yeah, about 98% of the sun is hydrogen and helium, with other elements making up the remaining 2%.
The machine used to generate the magnetic field would likely be a ring rather than plate, with the goal being to bend the trajectory of any matter that passes through the ring just a little. In effect it would work a lot like a lens, that could focus matter passing through it into a cone of trajectories, with collection happening at the point of the cone, possibly a point at a much higher in orbit. (This does introduce some complications in the different orbital speeds for the ring and collector, but without getting into it, there is a solution for that, it's not the hardest part of this idea)
And how much you can capture depends a lot on how close to the sun you can put your magnet field ring. If it's stationed closer to the sun it shrinks the size of the sphere you're trying to cover. So if your ring could survive at 0.2 AU from the sun (about half the distance of mercury's orbit), a ring of the same diameter would cover 25 times more area of the sphere than if it was stationed at 1 AU.
So your 59.5 tons collected turns into 1487.5 tons, 2% of which is 29.75 tons of usable material (which I'll be honest, is not great considering the magnitude of the construction project). It's probably a better deal if you're using the hydrogen towards fusion power, but it's still not great.
The good news is that it scales well, the larger you make the ring, the better your ratio of materials gathered vs materials needed to build the ring, which makes the optimal diameter of the ring about the same as the diameter of the sun. So... yeah, this is not a project in our immediate future.
I think gold could become a less coveted substance just in terms of value as a status symbol, but it could still benefit from being mass produced just due to its material properties. It's a good conductor, doesn't tarnish, is very malleable, etc.
Yes, it's also a bit of an equalizer in terms of electronics production, if it becomes cheaper. One of my pipe dreams for the future is that such happens and makes it a bit more decentralized.
edit: yes I know there's a ceramic material called ALON, which the manufacturer calls transparent aluminum because it contains aluminum oxynitride, but I don't think that's what Scotty meant. ALON is about 30-35% aluminum, same as the amount of lead in leaded crystal glass, which isn't "transparent lead".
Aluminium Oxide (Al~2~O~3~) can be crystal clear too, it's just Sapphire, I have a chunk of it on my wrist right now, looks pretty clear to me, and almost as hard as a diamond.
It looks like a tube made of glass but it’s actually aluminum. Well, aluminum with an asterisk beside it — this is not elemental aluminum but rather a material made using it. We got ont…
Synthetic corundum, spinel and others have been around for over 120 years, and optically transparent uncoloured sapphire glass for over 80 years. They are just aluminium oxides.
ALON is just the new hotness, and not as good as some others in terms of visible light transparency.
I read up on this the other day and their claims are 8 tons produced per gigawatt of energy consumed. Even if they manage a quarter. Of that, it's enough to obliterate the value of gold. I doubt this will actuary go anywhere either way but it would be nice to see.
This article says (5 tonnes/yr) per GW produced. It's a fusion reactor, so it's making electricity, not consuming it.
At $0.05/kWh, 1 GWh of electricity is $438 million. At $3400/troy ounce, 5 tonnes of gold is $545 million. So that jives with the company's estimate on the article that the sale of gold could double their revenue.
Sure - they're claiming to do two very difficult things simultaneously (net positive fusion and transmute mercury to gold at scale) which makes me even more skeptical. It's like saying "Not only can pigs fly, but we've taught them to simultaneously do calculus."
Because they have to build a full scale reactor first. That's expensive.
The way this usually works is that you do the research, get a patent on it, license that out, and then capitalists pretend they invented the whole thing themselves and deserve all the profits.
The whole point of the paper is that limitation has been breached. The fusion plant would primarily create electricity, and gold is a profitable byproduct.
If you have a monopoly on the process, then its the same as the DeBeers Diamond Cartel. You can keep the price up by limiting the sale and spending a ton of money on marketing.
I dunno. I would be cool with it if we stopped mining for Gold with all the environmental problems and found a way to profitably clean up the mercury from past gold mining and places like Grassy Narrows with extensive mercury poisoning.
I would assume that this would lead to a rise in mercury mining instead of cleaning up Mercury contaminations, because that would probably be cheaper. And I don't think mercury mining is any less toxic than gold mining.
Besides the shift to mercury mining others have already listed, you really think that this process is cheaper than mining gold and also cleaner and safer at the same time?
What's wrong w/ collapsing the price of gold? Gold is super useful since it doesn't oxidize, so it's fantastic in electronics and space stuff. Making that cheaper would be awesome.
It also creates some radioactive isotopes of gold, so it'd have to sit there for 12-14 years before being useful.
My guess is that once the radioactive cycle time is up, it'd create more gold than the economy knows what to do with, and the price would collapse. They're quoting 5 metric tons of gold created per GWh of electricity created by the fusion reactor. There are 3,000 metric tons of gold mined every year. Worldwide energy production is 26,000,000 GWh. If we had 20% of that on one of these fusion reactors, there would be 26,000,000 metric tons produced.
It's estimated that for all of human history, 244,000 metric tons has been mined.
Gold ain't that useful, and it isn't even that artistically desirable if it's common. I think we'd struggle to use that much. Maybe if the price drops below copper we'll start using it for electrical wiring (gold is a worse conductor than copper, but better than aluminum). Now, if the process could produce something like platinum or palladium, that'd be pretty great. Those are super useful as catalysts, and there isn't much we can extract from the Earth's crust.
If late stage capitalism hasn't played itself out by then, what's going to happen is similar to solar deployment now. Capitalists see that solar gives you the best return on investment. Capitalists rush to build a whole lot of solar farms. But focusing on just solar is a bad idea; it should be combined with wind, hydro, and storage to get the best result. Now that solar has to be turned off so it doesn't overload the grid, and that cuts into the profits they were expecting.
Same would likely happen here. The first investors make tons of money with gold as a side effect of electricity generation. A second set of investors rushes in, collapses the price of gold, and now everyone is disappointed. Given the time it would have to sit before it's at safe radiation levels, this process could take over 20 years to play out.
5 metric tons of gold created per GWh of electricity
per GW. 5000kg over whole year of 1gw reactor going almost continuous. While there is no theoretical possiblity of creating economically viable fusion energy, a minimum reactor size would be 10gw. Needs 1gw of backup fission to provide stable power input, and make the deuterium.
$500M/gw in gold revenue could make a difference in the economics. If fusion cost 2x what fission costs per gw, ($30/w) then it would make back its cost in gold only over 60 years, @$100/gram.
They can even get math wrong. Which surprised me. Had to tell it the answer is wrong for them to recalculate and then get the correct answer. It was simple percentages of a list of numbers I had asked.
Language models are unsuitable for math problems broadly speaking. We already have good technology solutions for that category of problems. Luckily, you can combine the two - prompt the model to write a program that solves your math problem, then execute it. You're likely to see a lot more success using this approach.
Also, generally the best interfaces for LLM will combine non-LLM facilities transparently. The LLM might be able to translate the prose to the format the math engine desires and then an intermediate layer recognizes a tag to submit an excerpt to a math engine and substitute the chunk with output from the math engine.
Even for servicing a request to generate an image, the text generation model runs independent of the image generation, and the intermediate layer combines them. Which can cause fun disconnects like the guy asking for a full glass of wine. The text generation half is completely oblivious to the image generation half. So it responds playing the role of a graphic artist dutifully doing the work without ever 'seeing' the image, but it assumes the image is good because that's consistent with training output, but then the user corrects it and it goes about admitting that the picture (that it never 'looked' at) was wrong and retrying the image generator with the additional context, to produce a similarly botched picture.
I once gave some kind of math problem (how to break down a certain amount of money into bills) and the llm wrote a python script for it, ran it and thus gave me the correct answer. Kind of clever really.
I kid you not, early on (mid 2023) some guy mentioned using ChatGPT for his work and not even checking the output (he was in some sort of non-techie field that was still in the wheelhouse of text generation). I expresssed that LLMs can include some glaring mistakes and he said he fixed it by always including in his prompt "Do not hallucinate content and verify all data is actually correct.".
Ah, well then, if he tells the bot to not hallucinate and validate output there's no reason to not trust the output. After all, you told the bot not to, and we all know that self regulation works without issue all of the time.
The people who make them don't really understand how they work either. They know how to train them and how the software works, but they don't really know how it comes up with the answers it comes up with. They just do a ron of trial and error. Correlation is all they really have. Which of course is how a lot of medical science works too. So they have good company.
Large language models aren’t designed to be knowledge machines - they’re designed to generate natural-sounding language, nothing more. The fact that they ever get things right is just a byproduct of their training data containing a lot of correct information. These systems aren’t generally intelligent, and people need to stop treating them as if they are. Complaining that an LLM gives out wrong information isn’t a failure of the model itself - it’s a mismatch of expectations.
“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight (fiction)
Starting to think we're really not much smarter. "But LLMs tell us what we want to hear!" Been on FaceBook lately, or lemmy?
If nothing else, LLMs have woke me to how stupid humans are vs. the machines.
There are plenty of similarities in the output of both the human brain and LLMs, but overall they’re very different. Unlike LLMs, the human brain is generally intelligent - it can adapt to a huge variety of cognitive tasks. LLMs, on the other hand, can only do one thing: generate language. It’s tempting to anthropomorphize systems like ChatGPT because of how competent they seem, but there’s no actual thinking going on. It’s just generating language based on patterns and probabilities.
It's not that they may be deceived, it's that they have no concept of what truth or fiction, mistake or success even are.
Our brains know the concepts and may fall to deceipt without recognizing it, but we at least recognize that the concept exists.
An AI generates content that is a blend of material from the training material consistent with extending the given prompt. It only seems to introduce a concept of lying or mistakes when the human injects that into the human half of the prompt material. It will also do so in a way that the human can just as easily instruct it to correct a genuine mistake as well as the human instruct it to correct something that is already correct (unless the training data includes a lot of reaffirmation of the material in the face of such doubts).
An LLM can consume more input than a human can gather in multiple lifetimes and still bo wonky in generating content, because it needs enough to credibly blend content to extend every conceivable input. It's why so many people used to judging human content get derailed by judging AI content. An AI generates a fantastic answer to an interview question that only solid humans get right, only to falter 'on the job' because the utterly generic interview question looks like millions of samples in the input, but the actual job was niche.
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People really do not like seeing opposing viewpoints, eh? There's disagreeing, and then there's downvoting to oblivion without even engaging in a discussion, haha.
Even if they're probably right, in such murky uncertain waters where we're not experts, one should have at least a little open mind, or live and let live.
It's like talking with someone who thinks the Earth is flat. There isn't anything to discuss. They're objectively wrong.
Humans like to anthropomorphize everything. It's why you can see a face on a car's front grille. LLMs are ultra advanced pattern matching algorithms. They do not think or reason or have any kind of opinion or sentience, yet they are being utilized as if they do. Let's see how it works out for the world, I guess.
I think so too, but I am really curious what will happen when we give them "bodies" with sensors so they can explore the world and make individual "experiences". I could imagine they would act much more human after a while and might even develop some kind of sentience.
Of course they would also need some kind of memory and self-actualization processes.
Interaction with the physical world isn't really required for us to evaluate how they deal with 'experiences'. They have in principle access to all sorts of interesting experiences in the online data. Some models have been enabled to fetch internet data and add them to the prompt to help synthesize an answer.
One key thing is they don't bother until direction tells them. They don't have any desire they just have "generate search query from prompt, execute search query and fetch results, consider the combination of the original prompt and the results to be the context for generating more content and return to user".
LLM is not a scheme that credibly implies that more LLM == sapient existance. Such a concept may come, but it will be something different than LLM. LLM just looks crazily like dealing with people.
I think there's two basic mistakes that you made. First, you think that we aren't experts, but it's definitely true that some of us have studied these topics for years in college or graduate school, and surely many other people are well read on the subject. Obviously you can't easily confirm our backgrounds, but we exist. Second, people who are somewhat aware of the topic might realize that it's not particularly productive to engage in discussion on it here because there's too much background information that's missing. It's often the case that experts don't try to discuss things because it's the wrong venue, not because they feel superior.
Interesting talk but the number of times he completely dismisses the entire field of linguistics kind of makes me think he's being disingenuous about his familiarity with it.
For one, I think he is dismissing holotes, the concept of "wholeness." That when you cut something apart to it's individual parts, you lose something about the bigger picture. This deconstruction of language misses the larger picture of the human body as a whole, and how every part of us, from our assemblage of organs down to our DNA, impact how we interact with and understand the world. He may have a great definition of understanding but it still sounds (to me) like it's potentially missing aspects of human/animal biologically based understanding.
For example, I have cancer, and about six months before I was diagnosed, I had begun to get more chronically depressed than usual. I felt hopeless and I didn't know why. Surprisingly, that's actually a symptom of my cancer. What understanding did I have that changed how I felt inside and how I understood the things around me? Suddenly I felt different about words and ideas, but nothing had changed externally, something had change internally. The connections in my neural network had adjusted, the feelings and associations with words and ideas was different, but I hadn't done anything to make that adjustment. No learning or understanding had happened. I had a mutation in my DNA that made that adjustment for me.
Further, I think he's deeply misunderstanding (possibly intentionally?) what linguists like Chomsky are saying when they say humans are born with language. They mean that we are born with a genetic blueprint to understand language. Just like animals are born with a genetic blueprint to do things they were never trained to do. Many animals are born and almost immediately stand up to walk. This is the same principle. There are innate biologically ingrained understandings that help us along the path to understanding. It does not mean we are born understanding language as much as we are born with the building blocks of understanding the physical world in which we exist.
Anyway, interesting talk, but I immediately am skeptical of anyone who wholly dismisses an entire field of thought so casually.
For what it's worth, I didn't downvote you and I'm sorry people are doing so.
I am not a linguist but the deafening silence from Chomsky and his defenders really does demand being called out.
Syntactical models of language have been completely crushed by statistics-at-scale via neural nets. But linguists have not rejected the broken model.
The same thing happened with protein folding -- researchers who spent the last 25 years building complex quantum mechanical/electrostatic models of protein structure suddenly saw AlphaFold completely crush prior methods. The difference is, bioinformatics researchers have already done a complete about-face and are .
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I watched this entire video just so that I could have an informed opinion. First off, this feels like two very separate talks:
The first part is a decent breakdown of how artificial neural networks process information and store relational data about that information in a vast matrix of numerical weights that can later be used to perform some task. In the case of computer vision, those weights can be used to recognize objects in a picture or video streams, such as whether something is a hotdog or not.
As a side note, if you look up Hinton’s 2024 Nobel Peace Prize in Physics, you’ll see that he won based on his work on the foundations of these neural networks and specifically, their training. He’s definitely an expert on the nuts and bolts about how neural networks work and how to train them.
He then goes into linguistics and how language can be encoded in these neural networks, which is how large language models (LLMs) work… by breaking down words and phrases into tokens and then using the weights in these neural networks to encode how these words relate to each other. These connections are later used to generate other text output related to the text that is used as input. So far so good.
At that point he points out these foundational building blocks have been used to lead to where we are now, at least in a very general sense. He then has what I consider the pivotal slide of the entire talk, labeled Large Language Models, which you can see at 17:22. In particular he has two questions at the bottom of the slide that are most relevant: * Are they genuinely intelligent? * Or are they just a form of glorified auto-complete that uses statistical regularities to pastiche together pieces of text that were created by other people?
The problem is: he never answers these questions. He immediately moves on to his own theory about how language works using an analogy to LEGO bricks, and then completely disregards the work of linguists in understanding language, because what do those idiots know?
At this point he brings up The long term existential threat and I would argue the rest of this talk is now science fiction, because it presupposes that understanding the relationship between words is all that is necessary for AI to become superintelligent and therefore a threat to all of us.
Which goes back to the original problem in my opinion: LLMs are text generation machines. They use neural networks encoded as a matrix of weights that can be used to predict long strings of text based on other text. That’s it. You input some text, and it outputs other text based on that original text.
We know that different parts of the brain have different responsibilities. Some parts are used to generate language, other parts store memories, still other parts are used to make our bodies move or regulate autonomous processes like our heartbeat and blood pressure. Still other bits are used to process images from our eyes and other parts reason about spacial awareness, while others engage in emotional regulation and processing.
Saying that having a model for language means that we’ve built an artificial brain is like saying that because I built a round shape called a wheel means that I invented the modern automobile. It’s a small part of a larger whole, and although neural networks can be used to solve some very difficult problems, they’re only a specific tool that can be used to solve very specific tasks.
Although Geoffrey Hinton is an incredibly smart man who mathematically understands neural networks far better than I ever will, extrapolating that knowledge out to believing that a large language model has any kind of awareness or actual intelligence is absurd. It’s the underpants gnome economic theory, but instead of: 1. Collect underpants 2. ? 3. Profit!
It looks more like: 1. Use neural network training to construct large language models. 2. ? 3. Artificial general intelligence!
If LLMs were true artificial intelligence, then they would be learning at an increasing rate as we give them more capacity, leading to the singularity as their intelligence reaches hockey stick exponential growth. Instead, we’ve been throwing a growing amount resources at these LLMs for increasingly smaller returns. We’ve thrown a few extra tricks into the mix, like “reasoning”, but beyond that, I believe it’s clear that we’re headed towards a local maximum that is far enough away from intelligence that would be truly useful (and represent an actual existential threat), but in actuality only resembles what a human can output well enough to fool human decision makers into trusting them to solve problems that they are incapable of solving.
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believing that a large language model has any kind of awareness or actual intelligence is absurd
I (as a person who works professionally in the area and tries to keep up with the current academic publications) happen to agree with you. But my credences are somewhat reduced after considering the points Hinton raises.
I think it is worth considering that there are a handful of academically active models of consciousness; some well-respected ones like the CTM are not at all inconsistent with Hinton's statements
Why is a researcher with a PhD in social sciences researching the accuracy confidence of predictive text, how has this person gotten to where they are without being able to understand that LLMs don't think? Surely that came up when he started even considering this brainfart of a research project?
I guess, but it's like proving your phones predictive text has confidence in its suggestions regardless of accuracy. Confidence is not an attribute of a math function, they are attributing intelligence to a predictive model.
I work in risk management, but don't really have a strong understanding of LLM mechanics. "Confidence" is something that i quantify in my work, but it has different terms that are associated with it. In modeling outcomes, I may say that we have 60% confidence in achieving our budget objectives, while others would express the same result by saying our chances of achieving our budget objective are 60%. Again, I'm not sure if this is what the LLM is doing, but if it is producing a modeled prediction with a CDF of possible outcomes, then representing its result with 100% confindence means that the LLM didn't model any other possible outcomes other than the answer it is providing, which does seem troubling.
Nah so their definition is the classical "how confident are you that you got the answer right". If you read the article they asked a bunch of people and 4 LLMs a bunch of random questions, then asked the respondent whether they/it had confidence their answer was correct, and then checked the answer. The LLMs initially lined up with people (over confident) but then when they iterated, shared results and asked further questions the LLMs confidence increased while people's tends to decrease to mitigate the over confidence.
But the study still assumes intelligence enough to review past results and adjust accordingly, but disregards the fact that an AI isnt intelligence, it's a word prediction model based on a data set of written text tending to infinity. It's not assessing validity of results, it's predicting what the answer is based on all previous inputs. The whole study is irrelevant.
Well, not irrelevant. Lots of our world is trying to treat the LLM output as human-like output, so if human's are going to treat LLM output the same way they treat human generated content, then we have to characterize, for the people, how their expectations are broken in that context.
So as weird as it may seem to treat a stastical content extrapolation engine in the context of social science, there's a great deal of the reality and investment that wants to treat it as "person equivalent" output and so it must be studied in that context, if for no other reason to demonstrate to people that it should be considered "weird".
They are not only unaware of their own mistakes, they are unaware of their successes. They are generating content that is, per their training corpus, consistent with the input. This gets eerie, and the 'uncanny valley' of the mistakes are all the more striking, but they are just generating content without concept of 'mistake' or' 'success' or the content being a model for something else and not just being a blend of stuff from the training data.
For example:
Me: Generate an image of a frog on a lilypad. LLM: I'll try to create that — a peaceful frog on a lilypad in a serene pond scene. The image will appear shortly below.
Me (lying): That seems to have produced a frog under a lilypad instead of on top. LLM: Thanks for pointing that out! I'm generating a corrected version now with the frog clearly sitting on top of the lilypad. It’ll appear below shortly.
It didn't know anything about the picture, it just took the input at it's word. A human would have stopped to say "uhh... what do you mean, the lilypad is on water and frog is on top of that?" Or if the human were really trying to just do the request without clarification, they might have tried to think "maybe he wanted it from the perspective of a fish, and he wanted the frog underwater?". A human wouldn't have gone "you are right, I made a mistake, here I've tried again" and include almost the exact same thing.
But tha training data isn't predominantly people blatantly lying about such obvious things or second guessing things that were done so obviously normally correct.
The use of language like "unaware" when people are discussing LLMs drives me crazy. LLMs aren't "aware" of anything. They do not have a capacity for awareness in the first place.
People need to stop taking about them using terms that imply thought or consciousness, because it subtly feeds into the idea that they are capable of such.
Okay fine, the LLM does not take into account in the context of its prompt that yada yada. Happy now word police, or do I need to pay a fine too? The real problem is people are replacing their brains with chatbots owned by the rich so soon their thoughts and by extension the truth will be owned by the rich, but go off pat yourself on the back because you preserved your holy sentience spook for another day.
This happened to me the other day with Jippity. It outright lied to me:
"You're absolutely right. Although I don't have access to the earlier parts of the conversation".
So it says that I was right in a particular statement, but didn't actually know what I said. So I said to it, you just lied. It kept saying variations of:
"I didn't lie intentionally"
"I understand why it seems that way"
"I wasn't misleading you"
etc
It flat out lied and tried to gaslight me into thinking I was in the wrong for taking that way.
It didn’t lie to you or gaslight you because those are things that a person with agency does. Someone who lies to you makes a decision to deceive you for whatever reason they have. Someone who gaslights you makes a decision to behave like the truth as you know it is wrong in order to discombobulate you and make you question your reality.
The only thing close to a decision that LLMs make is: what text can I generate that statistically looks similar to all the other text that I’ve been given. The only reason they answer questions is because in the training data they’ve been provided, questions are usually followed by answers.
It’s not apologizing you to, it knows from its training data that sometimes accusations are followed by language that we interpret as an apology, and sometimes by language that we interpret as pushing back. It regurgitates these apologies without understanding anything, which is why they seem incredibly insincere - it has no ability to be sincere because it doesn’t have any thoughts.
There is no thinking. There are no decisions. The more we anthropomorphize these statistical text generators, ascribing thoughts and feelings and decision making to them, the less we collectively understand what they are, and the more we fall into the trap of these AI marketers about how close we are to truly thinking machines.
The only thing close to a decision that LLMs make is
That's not true. An "if statement" is literally a decision tree.
The only reason they answer questions is because in the training data they’ve been provided
This is technically true for something like GPT-1. But it hasn't been true for the models trained in the last few years.
it knows from its training data that sometimes accusations are followed by language that we interpret as an apology, and sometimes by language that we interpret as pushing back. It regurgitates these apologies without understanding anything, which is why they seem incredibly insincere
It has a large amount of system prompts that alter default behaviour in certain situations. Such as not giving the answer on how to make a bomb. I'm fairly certain there are catches in place to not be overly apologetic to minimize any reputation harm and to reduce potential "liability" issues.
And in that scenario, yes I'm being gaslite because a human told it to.
There is no thinking
Partially agree. There's no "thinking" in sentient or sapient sense. But there is thinking in the academic/literal definition sense.
There are no decisions
Absolutely false. The entire neural network is billions upon billions of decision trees.
The more we anthropomorphize these statistical text generators, ascribing thoughts and feelings and decision making to them, the less we collectively understand what they are
I promise you I know very well what LLMs and other AI systems are. They aren't alive, they do not have human or sapient level of intelligence, and they don't feel. I've actually worked in the AI field for a decade. I've trained countless models. I'm quite familiar with them.
But "gaslighting" is a perfectly fine description of what I explained. The initial conditions were the same and the end result (me knowing the truth and getting irritated about it) were also the same.
The only thing close to a decision that LLMs make is
That's not true. An "if statement" is literally a decision tree.
If you want to engage in a semantically argument, then sure, an “if statement” is a form of decision. This is a worthless distinction that has nothing to do with my original point and I believe you’re aware of that so I’m not sure what this adds to the actual meat of the argument?
The only reason they answer questions is because in the training data they’ve been provided
This is technically true for something like GPT-1. But it hasn't been true for the models trained in the last few years.
Okay, what was added to models trained in the last few years that makes this untrue? To the best of my knowledge, the only advancements have involved: * Pre-training, which involves some additional steps to add to or modify the initial training data * Fine-tuning, which is additional training on top of an existing model for specific applications. * Reasoning, which to the best of my knowledge involves breaking the token output down into stages to give the final output more depth. * “More”. More training data, more parameters, more GPUs, more power, etc.
I’m hardly an expert in the field, so I could have missed plenty, so what is it that makes it “understand” that a question needs to be answered that doesn’t ultimately go back to the original training data? If I feed it training data that never involves questions, then how will it “know” to answer that question?
it knows from its training data that sometimes accusations are followed by language that we interpret as an apology, and sometimes by language that we interpret as pushing back. It regurgitates these apologies without understanding anything, which is why they seem incredibly insincere
It has a large amount of system prompts that alter default behaviour in certain situations. Such as not giving the answer on how to make a bomb. I'm fairly certain there are catches in place to not be overly apologetic to minimize any reputation harm and to reduce potential "liability" issues.
System prompts are literally just additional input that is “upstream” of the actual user input, and I fail to see how that changes what I said about it not understanding what an apology is, or how it can be sincere when the LLM is just spitting out words based on their statistical relation to one another?
An LLM doesn’t even understand the concept of right or wrong, much less why lying is bad or when it needs to apologize. It can “apologize” in the sense that it has many examples of apologies that it can synthesize into output when you request one, but beyond that it’s just outputting text. It doesn’t have any understanding of that text.
And in that scenario, yes I'm being gaslite because a human told it to.
Again, all that’s doing is adding additional words that can be used in generating output. It’s still just generating text output based on text input. That’s it. It has to know it’s lying or being deceitful in order to gaslight you. Does the text resemble something that can be used to gaslight you? Sure. And if I copy and pasted that from ChatGPT that’s what I’d be doing, but an LLM doesn’t have any real understanding of what it’s outputting so saying that there’s any intent to do anything other than generate text based on other text is just nonsense.
There is no thinking
Partially agree. There's no "thinking" in sentient or sapient sense. But there is thinking in the academic/literal definition sense.
Care to expand on that? Every definition of thinking that I find involves some kind of consideration or reflection, which I would argue that the LLM is not doing, because it’s literally generating output based on a complex system of weighted parameters.
If you want to take the simplest definition of “well, it’s considering what to output and therefore that’s thought”, then I could argue my smart phone is “thinking” because when I tap on a part of the screen it makes decisions about how to respond. But I don’t think anyone would consider that real “thought”.
There are no decisions
Absolutely false. The entire neural network is billions upon billions of decision trees.
And a logic gate “decides” what to output. And my lightbulb “decides” whether or not to light up based on the state of the switch. And my alarm “decides” to go off based on what time I set it for last night.
My entire point was to stop anthropomorphizing LLMs by describing what they do as “thought”, and that they don’t make “decisions” in the same way humans do. If you want to use definitions that are overly broad just to say I’m wrong, fine, that’s your prerogative, but it has nothing to do with the idea I was trying to communicate.
The more we anthropomorphize these statistical text generators, ascribing thoughts and feelings and decision making to them, the less we collectively understand what they are
I promise you I know very well what LLMs and other AI systems are. They aren't alive, they do not have human or sapient level of intelligence, and they don't feel. I've actually worked in the AI field for a decade. I've trained countless models. I'm quite familiar with them.
Cool.
But "gaslighting" is a perfectly fine description of what I explained. The initial conditions were the same and the end result (me knowing the truth and getting irritated about it) were also the same.
Sure, if you wanna ascribe human terminology to what marketing companies are calling “artificial intelligence” and further reinforcing misconceptions about how LLMs work, then yeah, you can do that. If you care about people understanding that these algorithms aren’t actually thinking in the same way that humans do, and therefore believing many falsehoods about their capabilities, like I do, then you’d use different terminology.
It’s clear that you don’t care about that and will continue to anthropomorphize these models, so… I guess I’m done here.
As any modern computer system, LLMs are much better and smarter than us at certain tasks while terrible at others. You could say that having good memory and communication skills is part of what defines an intelligent person. Not everyone has those abilities, but LLMs do.
My point is, there's nothing useful coming out of the arguments over the semantics of the word "intelligence".
About halfway through the article they quote a paper from 2023:
Similarly, another study from 2023 found LLMs “hallucinated,” or produced incorrect information, in 69 to 88 percent of legal queries.
The LLM space has been changing very quickly over the past few years. Yes, LLMs today still "hallucinate", but you're not doing anyone a service by reporting in 2025 the state of the field over 2 years before.
People should understand that words like "unaware" or "overconfident" are not even applicable to these pieces of software. We might build intelligent machines in the future but if you know how these large language models work, it is obvious that it doesn't even make sense to talk about the awareness, intelligence, or confidence of such systems.
I find it so incredibly frustrating that we've gotten to the point where the "marketing guys" are not only in charge, but are believed without question, that what they say is true until proven otherwise.
"AI" becoming the colloquial term for LLMs and them being treated as a flawed intelligence instead of interesting generative constructs is purely in service of people selling them as such. And it's maddening. Because they're worthless for that purpose.
The EU is currently developing a whitelabel app to perform privacy-preserving (at least in theory) age verification to be adopted and personalized in the coming months by member states. The app is open source and available here: github.com/eu-digital-identity….
Problem is, the app is planning to include remote attestation feature to verify the integrity of the app: github.com/eu-digital-identity…. This is supposed to provide assurance to the age verification service that the app being used is authentic and running on a genuine operating system. Genuine in the case of Android means:
The operating system was licensed by Google
The app was downloaded from the Play Store (thus requiring a Google account)
Device security checks have passed
While there is value to verify device security, this strongly ties the app to many Google properties and services, because those checks won't pass on an aftermarket Android OS, even those which increase security significantly like GrapheneOS, because the app plans to use Google "Play Integrity", which only allows Google licensed systems instead of the standard Android attestation feature to verify systems.
This also means that even though you can compile the app, you won't be able to use it, because it won't come from the Play Store and thus the age verification service will reject it.
So is there a way to apply pressure on the EU to think this through first? Surely they could have different ways that doesn't lock them in to google services.
According to the users in that issue, the mere application of the API is illegal, as is the dependency. Sooo I dunno what kind of PACs there are in the EU but I would be leaning on and contributing to those.
I do feel like that’s a precarious state to leave this in, especially if they’re developing the backend for it.
Is there even enough momentum for a SKG-style wave of coverage? It would need to be justified properly by citing things like the Tea app data leak, to make a strong case (to political pencil pushers) for the danger of tying personal information to profiles or even to platforms. Otherwise the only thing they’ll see is “gamers want to make porn accessible to children”.
I don’t know. This whole situation boils my blood because I really care about online anonymity, and this is kind of nightmare scenario shit for me. I’m not even in the UK or EU.
To avoid people from simply copying the "age proof" and having others reuse it, a nonce/private key combo is needed. To protect that key a DRM style locked down device is necessary. Conveniently removing your ability to know what your device is doing, just a "trust us".
Seeing the EU doesn't make any popular hardware, their plan will always rely on either Asian or US manufacturers implementing the black-box "safety" chip.
It's that "whatever way" that is difficult. This proposal merely shifts the problem: now the login to that 3rd party can be shared, and age verification subverted.
1) the user 2) the age-gated site 3) the age verification service
The site (2) sends the request to the user (1), who passes it on to the service (3) where it is signed and returned the same way. The request comes with a nonce and a time stamp, making reuse difficult. An unusual volume of requests from a single user will be detected by the service.
Strictly speaking, neither needs to know the actual identity. However, the point is that both are supposed to receive information about the user's age. I'm not really sure what your point is.
both are supposed to receive information about the user's age
Yes, that's the point. They should be receiving information about age, and age only. Therefore they lack the information to detect reuse.
If they are able to detect reuse, they receive more (and personal identifying) information. Which shouldn't be the case.
The only known way to include a nonce, without releasing identifying information to the 3rd parties, is using a DRM like chip. This results in the sovereignty and trust issues I referred to earlier.
The site would only know that the user's age is being vouched for by some government-approved service. It would not be able to use this to track the user across different devices/IPs, and so on.
The service would only know that the user is requesting that their age be vouched for. It would not know for what. Of course, they would have to know your age somehow. EG they could be selling access in shops, like alcohol is sold in shops. The shop checks the ID. The service then only knows that you have login credentials bought in some shop. Presumably these credentials would not remain valid for long.
They could use any other scheme, as well. Maybe you do have to upload an ID, but they have to delete it immediately afterward. And because the service has to be in the EU, government-certified with regular inspections, that's safe enough.
In any case, the user would have to have access to some sort of account on the service. Activity related to that account would be tracked.
If that is not good enough, then your worries are not about data protection. My worries are not. I reject this for different reasons.
is being vouched for by some government-approved service.
The reverse is also a necessity: the government approved service should not be allowed to know who and for what a proof of age is requested.
And because the service has to be in the EU, government-certified with regular inspections, that's safe enough
Of course not: both intentional and unintentional leaking of this information already happens, regularly. That information should simply not be captured, at all!
Additionally, what happens to, for example, the people in Hungary(*)? If the middle man government service knows when and who is requesting proof-of-age, it's easy to de-anonymise for example users of gay porn sites.
The 3rd party solution, as you present it, sounds terribly dangerous!
(*) Hungary as a contemporary example of a near despot leader, but more will pop up in EU over the coming years.
The reverse is also a necessity: the government approved service should not be allowed to know who and for what a proof of age is requested.
It would send the proof to you. It would not know what you do with it. I gave an example in the previous post how the identity of the user could be hidden from the service.
If the middle man government service knows when and who is requesting proof-of-age, it’s easy to de-anonymise for example users of gay porn sites.
It would be a lot easier to get that information from the ISP.
If it is about hiding some data handled by the app, that will be instantly extracted. There are plenty of people with full integrity on rooted phones. It's really annoying to set up and keep going, and requiring that would fuck over most rooted phone/custom os users, but someone to fully inspect and leak everything about the app will always be popping up.
If it is about hiding some data handled by the app, that will be instantly extracted.
Look at the design of DRM chips. They bake the key into hardware. Some keys have been leaked, I think playstation 2 is an example, but typically by a source inside the company.
That applies to play integrity, and a lot of getting that working is juggling various signatures and keys. The suggestion above which I replied to was instead about software-managed keys, something handed to the app which it then stores, where the google drm is polled to get that sacred piece of data. Since this is present in the software, it can be plainly read by the user on rooted devices, which hardware-based keys cannot.
Play integrity is hardware based, but the eu app is software based, merely polling googles hardware based stuff somewhere in the process.
I understand. In the context of digital sovereignty, even if the linked shitty implementation is discarded (as it should be), every correct implementation will require magic DRM-like chip. This chip will be made by a US or Asian manufacturer, as the EU has no manufacturing.
Is it tied to my real identity? If not it seems to me that it should be sufficient as to serve as a security this phone is legit and not emulated/compromised.
In the eu, phone numbers by law are tied to state identities. And the phone provider can naturally resolve their sim IDs down to the phone number they are assigned to. Anything related to celltower interactions is PII.
Yeah no. Requiring anything Google for something as basic as this violates the GDPR. If they go through with this, it's one legal case until they have to revise it.
Edit: German eID works on any Android btw., flawless actually. I sure hope I can use that for verification
EID and equivalents are great for a lot of things, but do you want your porn site to know who you are? The new app is supposed to verify your age but not give out your PII. Not sure eID can do that?
Der Personalausweis verfügt seit 2010 über eine elektronische Identitätsfunktion (eID). Welche Daten sind auf dem Ausweis hinterlegt und was ist bei der Nutzung zu beachten?
That Flathub app is unofficial afaik, which is why I don't use it. Normally I wouldn't care, but this seems important enough to not use a repackaged version
I wouldn't be too sure. Data protection mainly binds private actors. Any data processing demanded by law is legal. You'd really have to know the finer points of the law to judge if this is ok.
The GDPR also applies to public institutions as far as I'm aware - but most importantly the concern here is Google and data collected by Google. This data collection is in no way necessary to provide the age verification service. Most of it is not even related to it. The state legally cannot force you to agree to some corporations (i.e. Google's) terms, even if we completely ignore the GDPR.
Data processing mandated by law is legal. Governments can pass laws, unlike private actors. Public institutions are bound by GDPR, but can also rely on provisions that give them greater leeway.
I don't see how that this is in any way necessary, either. But a judge may be convinced by the claim that this is industry standard best practice to keep the app safe. In any case, there may be some finer points to the law.
The state legally cannot force you to agree to some corporations (i.e. Google’s) terms,
I'm not too sure about that, either. For example, when you are out of work, the state will cause you trouble if you do not find offered jobs acceptable.
It's another question, if not having access to age-gated content is so bad as to force you to do anything. Minors nominally have the same rights as full citizens, and they are to be denied access, too.
Apparently this is illegal to implement as of right now, but it’s not helping the feeling of technological doomerism I get whenever I think about this whole identity verification situation.
Someone jumped at me for comparing EU and MAGA to Stalin's and Hitler's regimes, quote, "arguing in newspapers whose worker class has been liberated more". Like they are not equal at all and all such.
What is it with everyone being obsessed with porn censorship suddenly? Why is this a trend?
At first I thought it's about control and data gathering, but this seems like too much of a genuine attempt at such a system. Why is the government so obsessed with parenting and nannying the citizens?
This has been discussed a while back, at least here in NL as far as I know it started because of legalising online gambling for which you need to be identified. Also, due to GDPR, businesses aren't allowed to make copies of ID's/passports/driving licences any more which is required for certain businesses (notaries, accountants, etc). In my office we currently use some kind of identification software, but it isn't anonyms because well we wouldn't be able to do our job.
There is a bit of a conflict between the laws requiring certain companies to identify their clients and GDPR in basis, but there is something in GDPR that allows these companies to still collect the relevant data and use it or to verify the data and not store it depending on the use case.
The whole use case thing is even the reason why companies are allowed to collect data from you. You couldn't get anything delivered if this exception wasn't there, because they wouldn't be allowed to progress your address.
At least that's what I gathered from the Dutch implementation the AVG, when I last read it a couple years ago.
This is just my speculation, so take it as you will. The EU has been pushing for digital ID cards for quite a while, and this is just another attempt. The last serious attempt was the Covid vaccination passport, but so many people still opted for paper certs, and the rest deleted the app when vaccination was no longer mandatory, that it failed again. So, now the authorities are becoming smart and trying to go through the vector that has a proven record of driving technological change: porn.
Too many bots online 😁 I'd like to know if I'm talking to a real sockpuppet when I'm online 😁...but just for that and only share data from my "wallet id" on a strict need to know basis.
Why is the government so obsessed with parenting and nannying the citizens?
I think it's because people from outside the traditional political families are getting popular votes.
For the established politicians, blaming "the internet" and building a supressing censorship machine is easier than looking in the mirror and seeing where the discontent comes from.
Been wondering myself. It's certainly part of the general right-ward trend. Societies are becoming more illiberal. It's not just the right that is moving to the right.
Obscenity laws have always been about enforcing the "correct" sexuality. Protecting minors meant preventing them from becoming "confused"; ie becoming LGBTQ.
You also have growing nationalism. In Europe, people are saying we should enforce "our laws" and "our values" against meddling foreigners (ie Big Tech). It often sounds a lot like the rants against the "globalists" that have been a staple among the US far right for decades. Age verification is part of that.
For example, Germany has long enforced age verification within its borders. It's part of the whole over-regulation thing that makes competitive tech companies almost impossible in Europe. For some reason, Europeans have trouble accepting that. You can see it here on Lemmy. The solution must be to enshittify everything to level the playing field.
The legal precedent for gaining the ability to ban content under the guise of preventing the dissemination of "obscenity" allows the future banning of "obscene" political opinions and "obscene" dissent.
Once the "obscene" political content is banned, the language will change to "offensive".
After "offensive" content is banned, then the language will change to "inappropriate".
After "inappropriate", the language will change to "oppositional".
If you believe this is a "slippery slope" fallacy, then as a counterpoint, I would refer to the actual history of the term "politically correct":
In the early-to-mid 20th century, the phrase politically correct was used to describe strict adherence to a range of ideological orthodoxies within politics. In 1934, The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits "only to pure 'Aryans' whose opinions are politically correct".
[5]The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.[24] Later in the United States, the phrase came to be associated with accusations of dogmatism in debates between communists and socialists. According to American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.
— "Uncommon Differences", The Lion and the Unicorn[4]
You're right but the example you gave seems to illustrate a different effect that's almost opposite — let me explain.
The phrase "politically correct" is language which meant something very specific, that was then hijacked by the far-right into the culture war where its meaning could be hollowed out/watered down to just mean basically "polite", then used interchangeably in a motte-and-bailey style between the two meanings whenever useful, basically a weaponized fallacy designed to scare and confuse people — and you know that's exactly what it's doing by because no right-winger can define what this boogeyman really means. This has been done before with things like: Critical Race Theory, DEI, cancel culture, woke, cultural Marxism, cultural bolshevism/judeo bolshevism (if you go back far enough), "Great Replacement", "illegals", the list goes on.
I see your point. I should've limited my citation to the phrase's authoritarian origins from the early 20th century.
To clarify, the slippery slope towards "political correctness" I wanted to describe is a sort of corporate techno-feudalist language bereft of any real political philosophy or moral epistemology. It is the language of LinkedIn, the "angel investor class", financiers, cavalier buzzwords, sweeping overgeneralizations, and hyperbole. Yet, fundamentally, it will aim to erase any class awareness, empiricism, or contempt for arbitrary authority. The idea is to impose an avaricious financial-might-makes-right for whatever-we-believe-right-now way of thinking in every human being.
What I want to convey is that there is an unspoken effort by authoritarians of the so-called "left" and "right" who unapologetically yearn for the hybridization of both Huxley's A Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 dystopian models, sometimes loudly proclaimed and other times subconsciously suggested.
I get what you mean. You're saying we're sliding towards something that brings back political correctness in its original definition, and I agree with you.
The idea is to impose an avaricious financial-might-makes-right
This resonates a lot. I'd argue we're already there. All this talk of "meritocracy" (fallaciously opposed to "DEI"), the prosperity gospel (that one's even older), it's all been promoting this idea of worthiness determined by net worth. Totalitarianism needs a socially accepted might-makes-right narrative wherever it can find it, then that can be the foundation for the fascist dogma/cult that will justify the regime's existence and legitimize its disregard for human life. Bonus points if you can make that might-makes-right narrative sound righteous (e.g. "merit" determines that you "deserve" your wealth, when really it's a circular argument: merit is never questioned for those who have the wealth, it's always assumed because how else could they have made that much money!).
In addition to the other answers, I want to add that the anti-porn stuff gives them the reason they need to force you into a more monitored environment. In which, everything you do is tracked. Your instinct is right imo. They want Google monitoring your mobile device as the primary piece. It's legislative market capture and fascism at the same time. No one company has to have all the info on you, but in forcing you to confirm yourself they make it so half a dozen can report on you if your habits trigger something. Half the technology is already in place as it's been built under the guise of better ad targeting.
Govt. say "to protect children, you have to install this app, under these conditions"
You want to protect childrens, so you do so
Govt. say "to protect this or that, we have to impose approved gates on many websites, based on the app you installed before"
You want to protect this or that, so you accept it
Govt. say "fuck you, you whatever is not in line with the fucking biggot at the helm of your country/federation/whatever, now we know what you do, we control what's allowed, and anything to get around the blocks is illegal and will land you in jail. Fuck you again, fucker."
You're a happy little plant in a pot.
Basically, it's not about porn. It's not about protecting kids. It's not about helping "victims of abuse". If anything, it's putting all these in more danger, along with everyone else.
Most western governments look at the ability of some of the more authoritarian places ability to just snap there fingers and make the entire internet go away with great envy.
Excuse me, censorship is not good in any way. The people should have the power to decide what they want to see, and what they want to say. Not government officials nor private platform owners.
What's going on with Europe lately? You all really want GOOGLE of all mega corps in control of your identity?
You're going the opposite way, it should be your right to install an alternate OS on your phone. If anything they should be banning Google licensed Android.
Its not the populace, our politicians just like in the US have gone rogue. People are voting for the nutters due to anti immigration propaganda and so increasingly getting far right. Its happening across the entire western world and its bad news for everyone.
Except this isn't even the right wing nutters doing it. These are mainstream politicians executing their power grabbing neolib agenda, with very little democratic oversight or public debate.
No one is laughing... We're horrified how the people who have been screaming "freedom" and being obnoxious about how much more free they are than anyone else in the entire universe, seem to love getting enslaved while being obnoxious about how cool it is to be enslaved.
Europe has its problems. We've had them for generations, and right now they're getting worse. But at least we have a culture of fighting back, something americans don't.
But at least we have a culture of fighting back, something americans don’t.
Talk is cheap. Prove it in the coming years. I really hope you're right, because I want SOMEWHERE to not be either a coporate fascist hellholle or a collapsed country in the future..
In Hungary, we still have people who think fascism is when "evil people do evil things for the sake of evil", so when fascists want to hurt Roma, LGBTQIA+, etc. people, no one dares to call them fascists as long as said people have "receipts" in the form of cobbled together statistics, and have a not too cruel solution.
Dude, I keep telling my possibly AfD voting cousin we're just a few years behind the US if things continue as they do. Our politicians aren't better people, they're just sneakier for now.
How long before that extends to PCs and non-Windows OSes are blocked? Also, add non-Chrome browsers to that as well (that includes Edge, Chromium, Brave, etc. as well as Firefox and its forks).
Pretty much the same set of circumstances as in Europe. Slow economic growth + dissatisfaction about young voters + inflation + establishment party lacking any plan beyond muddling along => populist revolt => governing gets even harder and things get worse.
I've got access to the beta of the Surf app. Some thoughts:
some stuff I really liked:
rss works (though no custom URLs yet, just what they already scraped)
you get lemmy, mastodon, bluesky, threads all together
you can make your own feeds and check what other people made (like a custom timeline, or topic-specific like “NBA”, “woodworking”, “retro gaming stuff”)
has different modes: you can switch between videos, articles, podcasts depending on the feed
but also...
can’t add your own RSS feeds (huge miss)
some feeds break and show no posts even when they’re active (ok, it's still a beta)
YouTube videos have ads (not into that—I support creators through patreon, affiliate links, whatever. not ads)
feeds you create are public by default unless you manually change it
not open source. built on open protocols, sure. but the app is locked up. (HUGE MISS)
all that said, I really believe: better feeds = better experience = better shot at the fediverse going mainstream.
anyone else tried it?
do you know anyone building an open source version of this? is that even realistic?
Beautiful and futuristic iOS third party client for Mastodon, Misskey, Bluesky, and Nostr. Gallery mode, video reel, local ML powered For You feed keeps your timeline interesting!
China News: China has commenced construction of a major dam on the Brahmaputra River in Tibet, near the Indian border, with Premier Li Qiang present at the ground
Hm, I'm going to need some software engineers to critique an idea I have that could at least partially solve the fears people have about their personal details being tied to their porn habits.
The system will be called the Adult Content Verification System (or Wank Card if you want to be funny). It's a physical card, printed by the government with a unique key printed on it. Those cards are then sold by any shop that has an alcohol license (premises or personal). You go in, show your ID to the clerk, buy the card. That card is proof that you're over 18, but it is not directly tied to you, you just have to be over 18 to buy it. The punishment for selling a Wank Card to someone under the age of 18 is the same as if you sold alcohol to someone under 18.
When you go to the porn site, they check if you're from the UK, they check if you have a key associated with your account. If not, they ask for one, you provide the key to the site, the site does an API call to https://wankcard.gov.uk/api/verify with the site's API key (freely generated, but you could even make the api public if you want) and the key on the card, gets a response saying "Yep! This is a valid key!" and hey presto, free to wank and nobody knows it's you! If you don't have an account, the verification would have to be tied to a cookie or something that disappears after a while for all you anonymous people.
As a result, you can both prove that you're over 18 (because you have the card) and some company over in San Francisco doesn't get your personal data, because you never actually record it anywhere. All you have is keys, and while yes, the government could record "Oh this key was used to verify on this site", they'd have to know which shop the key was bought from, who sold it, and who bought it, which is a lot more difficult to do unless the shopkeeper keeps records of everyone he's ever sold to.
So... Good idea? Bad idea? Better than the current approach anyway, I think.
“Reddit has stressed that this system is only to verify users' age, and it has no interest in your identity. Lee further stated that Persona won't know what subreddits you visit, and has promised it won't keep users' uploaded images more than seven days.”
I'll never forget how he changed users' text without them knowing it before the 2016 election. Reddit was going downhill before, but that was a turning point.
I don't care that those original commenters were (likely) pieces of shit, and the people who he made the comments insult were definitely pieces of shit, putting words into people's mouths to make them fight each other is unforgivable. Even if you put out a shitty apology.
Not only was the apology horrible, but for any user on that platform for YEARS: obviously puts the thought in their head that spez could be changing their words by directly editing the db, and getting them put on a list for wrong-speak. Sure, that's possible with any DB, but he proved it was actually something being done on that site. Given his role, a major red flag, as this type of action would normally result in someone being fired.
Reddit has since IPOd and is going to probably do well as a stock because of all the information it harvests from users.
A VPN future? Haha. Not if they don't want to. There are many ways to prevent VPN from operating when you're a government.
You can just plain ban encryption, which sounds really crazy, but yeah, they're trying to.
You can just say "it's illegal to use a VPN". It'll technically still work, but if there's a trace of trafic from your house to a known VPN endpoint, you're it! Great!
They can force custom proprietary spying software on your devices. Sounds equally crazy as the thing above, right? But rest assured they're ALSO trying to do that. Multiple times, even. And in some places… they did. Of course, nothing forces you to have such software on your device. Especially if your devices are not supported; it also turns into a "you have to buy this or that big name device, everything else's de-facto illegal! Fuck you, we're the government!". And if you get caught for whatever, and your phone, PC, or anything isn't "compliant"? Bam. Guilty.
Plenty of option. All of them completely stupid and would weaken both privacy, individuals, and governments at large. It never stopped legislation from being pushed forward.
They can force custom proprietary spying software on your devices. - That would block Linux from their borders, which means goodbye Steam Deck in the UK among other things.
Seems to be a way of making Bluesky style feeds with Mastodon-style services, well that's what I gather from reading the FAQ. They don't actually explain what this is anywhere.
Channel is basically a white label instance of PatchWork, which is a Mastodon fork with custom feeds and community curation tools.
The main intent behind the project is to help existing communities and organizations get onto the Fediverse, and have some curation capabilities. Ideally, it can be used to get a large amount of people and accounts onto the network with minimal friction.
I've seen their videos. I feel bad for the kids. Not the wife. She's there with him for the same stupid reasons. The kids are obviously suffering, especially the oldest.
I always liked the concept of Matrix, and still actively use it, but there's some serious jank. Synapse is generally bloated and not fun to run an instance, Dendrite is perpetually in Beta, and the clients themselves range from adequate to awful. The default Element client on Android is so broken for me that I'm forced to use Element X, because I can't even log in with Element.
It's disappointing, but there's a ton of issues that aren't so easy to resolve. New Vector and the Element Foundation are basically two separate entities that have some kind of hard split between them, neither of which seems to have the money necessary to support comprehensive development. The protocol is said to be bloated and overtly complex, and trying to develop a client or a server implementation is something of a nightmare.
I want to see Matrix succeed, I think a lot of people see the potential of what it could be. I'm not sure it'll ever get there.
I always liked the concept of Matrix, and still actively use it, but there’s some serious jank.
I use Element as well as Beeper, which is at its core an Element client based on network bridging. I'm a big fan of Matrix, but it isn't as approachable as other messaging services and requires some technical know-how to use effectively.
The thing is... What alternatives are there? Signal can't be trusted (on the very same website there is an article about it). I'm not using closed source alternatives, Simplex is kinda shady too tbh and I'm not even sure I could get anyone to use it.
I don't like Matrix/Element either but sadly its the best open source chat solution we have.
XMPP is significantly less decentralized, allowing them to """cut corners""" compared to Matrix protocol implementation, and scale significantly better. (In heavy quotes, as XMPP isn't really cutting corners, but true decentralization requires more work to achieve seemingly "the same result")
An XMPP or IRC channel with a few thousand users is no problem, wheras Matrix can have problems with that. On the other hand, any one Matrix homeserver going down does not impact users that aren't specifically on that homeserver, whereas XMPP is centralized enough that it can take down a whole channel.
Meanwhile IRC is a 90s protocol that doesn't make any sense in the modern world of mainly mobile devices.
XMPP also doesn't change much, the last proper addition to the protocol (from what I can tell, on the website) was 2024-08-30 xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0004.h…
This specification defines an XMPP protocol extension for data forms that can be used in workflows such as service configuration as well as for application-specific data description and reporting.
XMPP doesn't change very very often, but there's actually tons of XEPs that are in common use and are considered functionally essential for a modern client, and with much higher numbers than XEP-0004
The good news, though, is that mostly you as the user don't need to care about those! Most of the modern clients agree on the core set and thus interoperate fine for most normal things. And most XEPs have a fallback in case the receiver doesn't support the same XEPs.
I'm general XMPP as a protocol is a lightweight core that supports an interesting soup of modules (in the form of XEPs) to make it a real messenger in the modern sense. And I think that's neat! But you can't really judge the core to say how often things change.
Most of the modern clients agree on the core set and thus interoperate fine for most normal things.
So you think it is a sane solution to mark essential features as optional extensions and then have a wink-wink, nudge-nudge agreement of which of these "optional" extensions are actually mandatory? Instead of having essential features be part of the core protocol?
But more importantly, XMPP sucks because it does not have one back-end implementation like Vodozemac for Matrix. So let alone being unable to have security audits, you are forcing client developers to roll their own implementation of the e2ee, with likely little to no experience with cyber-security, and just hoping they will make no mistakes. You know, implementing encryption that even experts have hard time getting right.
Honestly, I struggle with this myself. On the one hand I like the diversity of clients; it feels like a sign of strength of the community and protocol that there are many options that have different values. But the cost of this diversity is that it makes things more complicated to coordinate, and different people with different values have different opinions on what a chat client should even want for features.
Something like Slack or Discord can roll out a server feature and client feature to all their clients all at the same time and have a unified experience. But the whole benefit of FLOSS is that anyone can fork the client to make changes, and the whole point of an open protocol is that multiple independent clients can interoperate, and so there's a kind of irony in me wanting those things, but those things producing a fractured output.
So I think XMPP, as a protocol, does the best compromise. These differences between clients and servers aren't just random changes in behaviour or undocumented features, they're named, numbered, alterations that live somewhere and are advertised in the built-in "discovery" protocols. The protocol format itself is extensible, so unexpected content can be passed alongside known content in a message or a server response and the clients all know to ignore anything they don't understand, and virtually all of the XEPs are designed with some kind of backwards compatibility in mind for how this feature might degrade when sent to a non-supported client.
It isn't perfect, but I think perfection is impossible here. A single server and client that everyone uses and keeps up to date religiously with forced upgrades is best for cohesiveness, but worst for "freedom", and a free-for-all where people just make random individual changes and everything is always broken isn't really a community, and XMPP sits in the middle and has a menu of documented deviations for clients to advertise and choose.
As for security, that can be mostly solved with libraries, independent of the rest of the client or server implementation. Like, most clients used libsignal for their crypto, so that could in theory be audited and bug-fixed and all clients would benefit. Again, not perfect, there's always room at the interface between the client code and the library code that's unique, but it's not as bad as rolling your own crypto.
I am yet to see a universal tool that is good at everything. Trying to cram all use-cases into one network results in mediocre results at best and usually even worse.
There is no reason to combine a person to person messenger like signal and community based one like discord into one network. That is why I like the Matrix approach of 1 backend library and many frontends so you can have your pick of clients without messing up the protocol.
Even having the fallbacks for missing features does not solve the issue. The experience for the average person will still be bad. While you and I may enjoy doing research on which client is best for us, most users will see the sub-par experience and leave for a corporate solution that "just works".
i feel like it shouldnt be this hard, but I'm not the one developing matrix, nor XMPP, nor the 3rd smaller option you the reader is wanting me to list that I am unaware of
For me Matrix is fine, I can use IRC, Whatsapp and Discord with it. But Element is not my cup of tea, especially with Firefox as it doesn't play any videos other users are sharing. The same videos work fine with Cinny.
The fact that many Discord and IRC channels (servers?) block Matrix connections has drastically reduced its usefulness for me. When I was running my own Matrix server, I could have gotten around it by using a puppet, but Synapse is such a hog I had to shut it down, and most of the IRC rooms I want to use don't allow Matrix proxies.
We really need to stop abandoning existing foss projects and thinking a whole new thing needs to be invented. Free and open-source software is not a product, it doesn't abide by the same rules and relationships that proprietary tech does.
It's more organic. It's also a commons that we can continue to draw on, and reshape. If I recall correctly, there were something like three different vector graphic editors from the same codebase before Inkscape managed to be the one that gained traction.
Matrix isn't perfect, but abandoning it just to reinvent it all over again just because some people really need a thing that works like Discord, even though Discord is absolute hot garbage; is just going to re-create all the same problems. Matrix today is better than it was two years ago. And Matrix in a year will be better from now.
Honestly, setting up things using Docker Compose is generally a question of copying and pasting and editing the file locations.
The moment you need SSL and/or a reverse proxy it becomes a bit more complex, but once you set up a reverse proxy once you can generally expand that to your other applications.
Something like a Synology nas makes it very easy and to some extend even the Truenas apps are kinda easy.
They may look like travel shampoo bottles and smell like bubblegum, but after a few hundred puffs, some disposable, electronic cigarettes and vape pods release higher amounts of toxic metals than older e-cigarettes and traditional cigarettes, according to a study from the University of California, Davis. For example, one of the disposable e-cigarettes studied released more lead during a day’s use than nearly 20 packs of traditional cigarettes.
They may look like travel shampoo bottles and smell like bubblegum, but after a few hundred puffs, some disposable, electronic cigarettes and vape pods release higher amounts of toxic metals than older e-cigarettes and traditional cigarettes, accordi…
The three "brands" they tested are all from the same outfit, who most certainly sources them all from the same sweatshop in China. This does not apply to all disposables by any stretch. There's plenty of better reasons to dunk on disposables.
I saw this same exact comment under another thread that talked about a study, but it was clearly wrong as they were from different parent companies. In this case, the brands aren't even named in the study. Again, I must ask for source for your claim, but again I don't expect you to provide it.
Like I said, the three companies named there are not the same companies, but you claim they are, and are sourcing it from the same Chinese sweatshop, even tho they don't even seem Chinese.
EscobarVape and Elfbar are created by two separate Chinese companies, Shenzhen Innokin Technology Co. Ltd and Shenzhen iMiracle Technology respectively. Mi-Bar is created by an American company but has partnered with Elfbar to distribute Elfbar products in the US
Really wish more people would just provide the facts that speak for themselves, rather than point fingers about who is and isn't doing their research
Guess I'm gonna be ultra fucked. I'm not going back to cigarettes. And I already quit nicotine once for seven and a half years. Starting again was the biggest mistake of my life cause I don't wanna go through that again. Oh well, it's not like we have much chance at a future anyway.
Just have a cocktail and smoke a cig, it’s better than weed and ecigs! How dare you switch because of rat poison found in our cigs and how the RICH banded hemp due to lobbying by the paper people… not due to anything else! Cool!
Xinjiang’s official organ donation rate is shockingly low. So why is China planning to open six new organ transplant facilities in the region
"The expansion suggests that the Chinese authorities are expecting to increase the numbers of transplants performed in Xinjiang. However, this is puzzling as there is no reason why the demand for transplants should suddenly go up in Xinjiang,” Rogers explained. “From what we know about alleged voluntary donations, the rates are quite low in Xinjiang. So the question is, why are these facilities planned?”
Rogers noted one chilling possibility: that “murdered prisoners of conscience (i.e., Uyghurs held in detention camps)” could be a source of transplanted organs.
This suggestion becomes even more concerning when considering the extensive surveillance and repression that Uyghurs face in the region. Detainees in the many internment camps in Xinjiang have reported being subjected to forced blood tests, ultrasounds, and organ-focused medical scans. These procedures align with organ compatibility testing, raising fears that Uyghurs are being prepped for organ harvesting while in detention.
David Matas, an international human rights lawyer who has investigated forced organ harvesting in China, questioned the very possibility of voluntary organ donation in Xinjiang. “The concept of informed, voluntary consent is meaningless in Xinjiang’s carceral environment,” Matas said. “Given the systemic repression, any claim that donations are voluntary should be treated with the utmost skepticism.”
The new transplant facilities will be distributed across Urumqi and other regions of northern, southern, and eastern Xinjiang. Experts argue that the sheer scale of this expansion is disproportionate to Xinjiang’s voluntary donation rate and overall capacity, suggesting that the Chinese authorities may be relying on unethical methods to source organs.
Nobody is defending the Moonies, especially not this current affairs publication owned by a Japanese media corporation. Here's plenty of examples of them calling out the Unification Church: thediplomat.com/tag/unificatio…
Launched in 2001, Ambassadors for Peace is the largest and most diverse network of peace leaders. As of 2020, there are more than 100,000 Ambassadors for Peace from 160 countries who come from all walks of life representing many races, religions, nationalities, and cultures
Literally she has no other ties to the Moonies/unification church, and how about the human right lawyer she directly quotes.
Results 445 included studies reported on outcomes of 85 477 transplants. 412 (92.5%) failed to report whether or not organs were sourced from executed prisoners; and 439 (99%) failed to report that organ sources gave consent for transplantation. In contrast, 324 (73%) reported approval from an IRB. Of the papers claiming that no prisoners’ organs were involved in the transplants, 19 of them involved 2688 transplants that took place prior to 2010, when there was no volunteer donor programme in China.
Anyway, keep spreading that there is no genocide propaganda.
Two months after the Trump administration all but shut down its foreign news services in Asia, China is gaining significant ground in the information war, building toward a regional propaganda monopoly, including in areas where U.S.-backed outlets once reported on Beijing’s harsh treatment of ethnic minorities.
The U.S. decision to shut down much of RFA’s shortwave broadcasting in Asia is one of several cases where the Trump administration — which views China as America’s biggest rival — has yielded the adversary a strategic advantage.
The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution states: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
Unconstitutional actions ordered by the POTUS. Are we ready to impeach yet?
The man was granted asylum! He’s 82 god damn years old!
I would love to see a popular uprising where we string up the thugs that are snatching people off the streets. They don’t need unnecessary things like “lawyers” or “trials”. A can of gas and a match are pretty cheap. So is rope.
deadbeef79000
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vollkorntomate
in reply to themachinestops • • •First_Thunder
in reply to vollkorntomate • • •themachinestops
in reply to vollkorntomate • • •digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/…
lemmy.world/post/33568797
The EU approach to age verification
Shaping Europe’s digital future8uurg
in reply to themachinestops • • •At least the EU is somewhat privacy friendly here (excluding the Google tie in) compared to whatever data sharing and privacy mess the UK has obligated people to do with sharing ID pictures or selfies.
Proving you are 18+ through zero knowledge proof (i.e. other party gets no more information than being 18+) where the proof is generated on your own device locally based on a government signed date of birth (government only issues an ID, doesn't see what you do exactly) is probably the least privacy intrusive way to do this, barring not checking anything at all.
thericofactor
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Victor
in reply to thericofactor • • •jol
in reply to thericofactor • • •Perspectivist
in reply to jol • • •PalmTreeIsBestTree
in reply to jol • • •ZILtoid1991
in reply to jol • • •Perspectivist
in reply to thericofactor • • •Sure, if privacy is worth nothing to you but I wouldn't speak for the rest of the UK and EU.
Kyouki
in reply to Perspectivist • • •Perspectivist
in reply to Kyouki • • •Kyouki
in reply to Perspectivist • • •katy ✨
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missingno
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themachinestops
in reply to missingno • • •Estimates is better it can be easily bypassed:
windowscentral.com/gaming/game…
How Death Stranding helps bypass UK age verification: A game-changer?
Sean Endicott (Windows Central)Optional
in reply to themachinestops • • •captainastronaut
in reply to themachinestops • • •blobchoice
in reply to captainastronaut • • •Lorem Ipsum dolor sit amet
in reply to themachinestops • • •Green Wizard
in reply to themachinestops • • •Covenant
in reply to Green Wizard • • •Green Wizard
in reply to Covenant • • •HertzDentalBar
in reply to themachinestops • • •Sir_Kevin
in reply to HertzDentalBar • • •blobchoice
in reply to HertzDentalBar • • •Is there other platforms that are out there estimating our ages?
I know the whole age gate thing - being in the UK, believe me, I know. I've just never had a service go "we can't show you content. No, don't tell us your age, we'll work it out from the data we've collected from you".
That's a whole new one for me, I must admit.
HertzDentalBar
in reply to blobchoice • • •jobbies
in reply to themachinestops • • •Squizzy
in reply to themachinestops • • •FuyuhikoDate
in reply to themachinestops • • •