Side question: why would having a male or female mascot be "a message in itself"? Why do people want to see a message, and especially a $currentDayPolitics one, in every single thing? A mascot can be a cute mascot without having to represent anything more than exactly that.

Just as a random example: Let's say some OG founder of a project had a cute dog named Laila, and the project makes this dog its mascot. Why should that be a problem, AT ALL?

And what's even worse, if you think this "everything has a message and we have to be super careful what the message is" thing through, the conclusion is: No project ever again can have a solely male or female mascot. Which is of course absurd.

And this whole "we need to send the RIGHT message" thing falls apart with time anyway, because what the right message is, WILL change over time. You're not at the end of all human enlightenment.

He's making a general point about "regardless of how something is presented to you, at the end of the day you have to look at the actual information, and if there is some truth in it, then it would be illogical to dismiss it".

Wait but under that assumption - LLMs being good enough - wouldn't the maintainer also be able to leverage LLMs to speed up the review?

Often feels to me like the current stance of arguments is missing something.

> it can recognize you across visits and build a behavioral profile under your pseudonym

is the default Discord experience for users with an account, long before age verification entered the chat.

So I wouldn’t give anything on 3k stars at all.

Using a government issued eID system. The EU is going to rollout eID in a way that a site can just ask “is this person > age xy?”. The answer is cryptographically secure in the sense that this person really is this age, but no other information about you has to be known by the site owner.

Which is the actual correct way to do it.

I don’t understand why all the sites go crazy with flawed age verification schemes right now, instead of waiting a until the eID rollout is done.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that it’s only the correct way if the implementation doesn’t give away to your government on which sites you browse… Which I believe is correctly done in the upcoming EU eID but I could be wrong about it.

I’m asking you: Why not? The internet is not even a typical human lifespan old. It’s crazy young on a large scale. Why would anyone assume that it will (and has to) stay the way it is today?

There are so many downsides of the current web. Slob everywhere (even long before AI) because of all sorts of people trying to exploit it for money.

I welcome a change. An internet with less ads, more genuine information. If AI will lead to this next phase of the internet, so be it. And this phase won’t be the last either.

Absolutely but this is not “recent” knowledge. This is known in neuro sciences for at least a decade.

My biggest hope is many western countries that see a decline in education results since the 90s/00s will finally start to reform education and use scienctific knowledge as a bases for how to structure it.

If you can - it’s German, maybe there’s some Auto translation available these days - watch Manfred Spitzer’s talk about “Digitale Demenz” (digital dementia). It’s eye opening!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5EKy0x55L4 Actual talk starts at 14:53.

There are so many things where short-term only thinking is counter-productive. It swallows money, creates frustration and leaves an overall net-negative to society and the world.

Just one example would be city planning. Repairing a road? What else is there like fiber cables, maybe some tram tracks, and so on, long term planning would be to acquire a holistic picture and to plan one timespan where everything is done fast but with quality. It’s a few months construction, after that everything is fine for years or even a few decades to come. But what you see instead is one part of the state that manages fiber cables doing there own thing, another part that manages street quality do their own thing. So the street has a construction site for a year (for just improving one part) then a few months nothing then another year of construction again, nothing, construction and soon you have over a decade of constant on and off construction work on this one street. Something that could’ve been done in 6-12 months once and be done, if planned correctly and with long term and holistic picture in mind.

And this is just one example. The world is full of stuff like this. Short term might be a good thing for very specific types of projects, but I hard disagree that short term is overall better in any way.

In my opinion this shortterm thinking is a huge negative factor of modern societies. Because not everything is a tech startup where things change super fast.

I never read any discussion about the obvious question: Who guarantees that enabling Privacy-Preserving Ad Measurement will keep all the other tracking away from me? No one! I've never read anything at all about the thought process behind this.

As you said, with current (EU) law and regulations, it's just one more data point.

So it's worth nothing.