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No the argument is bad actors will reliably find a way to bypass these systems at an industrial scale while you'll instead snag honest people instead.

Look at the facebook real name policy.


This sounds a lot like the pro-gun rhetoric of bogging down the "good" gun owners but not doing enough to the "bad" gun owners.

It's not really the same. The good guy/bad guy gun rhetoric has deeply racist roots.

But beyond that we can look at places similar things have been rolled out.

Facebook has a real name policy and is overflowing with fraudsters and ai slop

Although I can't figure out how to sign up for a second telegram account with their phone number restriction that hasn't stopped multiple scammers hitting me up every day on the service.

On YouTube, their demographics has ladies in their 30s watching nursery rhyme videos by the millions because mothers give their children their phone.

On social media, scammers tend to take over the accounts of dead people because the deceased don't update their passwords after a data breach. Your ID card policy, however strict, isn't going to stop the most common attack vector

So I don't know what you're trying to solve with id checks: parents hand their logged in devices to their children, scammers raid the accounts of the verified dead, existing systems clearly aren't working and strictly enforcing ineffective security theater isn't going to change this

I'm all for empathizing with the concerns but doing something that doesn't work isn't a solution


On telegram and YouTube, I take your points, thank you.

To be honest, I find many holes the ID method myself and it stems from the free and abundant nature of the internet where anything goes everywhere. If I could take an analogy, it's like we have allowed casinos to be built all around the neighborhood and now have no political will to stop children from entering, though I do concede that it's much easier to stop a child from entering a casino than access to internet. Perhaps China was on to something with the great firewall, though I doubt the efficacy of that method as well.

But back to the use of ID, is there not an argument to be made that doing something is better than nothing? Personally, I would like the banning of algorithmic content and that online peers should only be found through intent and not recommended by the platform, but I digress.


I think it's because there's always a group of nosy busybodies finger-wagging about protecting the children and we have to do decorative theatrics to satiate whatever narratives they've convinced themselves of

This is a group particularly beloved by politicians, because you can pretty much use them as a smokescreen whenever you want to pass authoritarian legislation...

I bet that the Chat Control lobbyist groups are involved to some degree, as they tried to require age verification in Chat Control before it was shot down. They probably haven't given up after that defeat.

I mean look, there's a point where the manufacturers back off and entrust the parents.

Any parent can be reckless and give their children all kinds of things - poison, weapons, pornographic magazines ... at some point the device has enough protective features and it is the parents responsibility.


Digital media use is easier to conceal than weapons. My parents did not protect me from it growing up because they were not responsible, and I was harmed as a result. To this day they still do not realize I was harmed, because I did not tell them and we are not on speaking terms. Trying to be honest would have resulted in further rejection from them. This was on a personality level and I had no way to deal with this as a developing human.

I could not control how my parents were going to raise me, I was only able to play with the hand I was dealt. I hate the idea that parents are sacrosanct and do not share blame in these situations. At the same time, if this is just the family situation you're given and you're handed a device unaware of the implications, who is going to protect you from yourself and others online if your parents won't? Should anyone?


Really like it. For some reason I'd insist on spectrograph instead of qr - artifacts make the medium. The fragile bizarre distortions and loss of the double digitization of analog data - you'd end up with more of an instrument than a format.

Think along these lines https://youtu.be/Z7Zb4rso82M?si=3FYaidCwwVdUhocO

Imagine being able to control where the loss happened in real time with potentiometers


A bit like the ANS synthesiser. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANS_synthesizer

And with sonograms you can do live manipulation like this... https://youtu.be/HT0HH_fc4ZU


Brilliant! I had no idea this existed! Thanks

the problem is there's different ways that people engage with music. Some listen to the lyrics and want to have an emotional connection, some view it as exploratory art, others wear it as an identity, some are just looking for similar sounds ... You need to have a routing system that can match the recommender to the style of engagement.

If you don't have that, you can't solve it.


it's the 40th or so implementation of an old idea but it's the one that was done when the models got good enough to make it useful by someone who goes on podcasts. [1]

Just like youtube was the 40th or so online video site but it's the one that was done by members of the paypal mafia and when enough people had high speed internet.

and that is literally it.

You can do that right now. Go through the 2023 LLM-related product announcements that didn't stick and vibe code it with 2026 models. Slap a cartoon on it, hype the shit out of it and post hard. I'd use a knockoff of "blobby the blobfish".

[1] see https://github.com/simular-ai/Agent-S or https://github.com/trycua/cua or https://github.com/bytebot-ai/bytebot or https://github.com/microsoft/fara or https://github.com/e2b-dev/open-computer-use or https://github.com/777genius/os-ai-computer-use or https://github.com/MrAliHasan/Sophia-AI-Assistant https://github.com/TurixAI/TuriX-CUA https://github.com/iBz-04/raya https://github.com/coasty-ai/open-computer-use https://github.com/OthersideAI/self-operating-computer... I mean there's dozens.


So creating skills/MCP servers itself and basically change its own nature is not a new thing? Clawdbot was the first were it worked really well. So I'm not sure you actually used and experienced it? Cynical comment is what it is.

No it's not a new thing. Agents coding their own mcp servers I saw in the original demo of MCP when it was announced in 2024.

The other thing is part of the plan&act mode paradigm that plandex also started in 2024.

I'm not a cynic, I just follow the scene very closely.

This stuff might be new to you, but it's not new.

There's literally nothing that this thing is doing that I haven't been doing for a few years already

But the other authors didn't go on the Lex Friedman podcast hyping the shit out of their stuff... That's the difference here.

I can do this as well. "This is it! The singularity is here. Use this or get left behind! Everybody rush and use my thing!

So good I was afraid to put it out, scared of how awesome it is!"

I mean brother please...


> This stuff might be new to you, but it's not new.

But it's not new to me, I studied this shit. Maybe don't assume so much.

Clawdbot was the first where it worked as good as it did. Not BabyAGI or all the other stuff we had before. Similar in approach, but clawdbot just worked better. Might be a synthesis between models getting better, having skills and more MCP servers available and clawdbot having enough integrations to make it interesting, but it doesn't matter. The ipod wasn't the first anyway, but it was the one that made it stick. If you like it or not.

> I can do this as well. "This is it! The singularity is here. Use this or get left behind! Everybody rush and use my thing! So good I was afraid to put it out, scared of how awesome it is!"

I think that's a you problem tbh. Just check it out yourself and don't buy in on the hype. Simple. Use whatever makes you happy.


You forget to mention the cult like audience of karpathy and pelican guy.

Whatever pelican guy says becomes the week Show HN theme.


simon's stuff is generally good though.

Never said otherwise, legit a legend

I hate that I understand what "pelican guy" refers to.

Weird for a random guy that I've met a half dozen times at conferences to be setting taste for effectively my whole professional world.

We never know...

[flagged]


I mean, that's a quality of conversation that you can reliably expect in Hacker News.

No disagreement. It just feels like increasingly it’s getting more cynical. It’s probably the case with most online communities but it’s a shame to see it so much here now.

It's not cynical it's explanatory. Someone asked why it's successful and I restricted myself to making factual verifiable claims.

Your explanation was helpful and thanks to you and other commenters I think I understand now. Effectively it is just the stack delivered in a shiny package. Another comment said something to the effect of "all of the existing stuff, productized for normies". Makes sense to me. Thanks!

It’s not explanatory it’s cynical. If you cannot see it I am sorry brother.

mentioned this elsewhere, but https://zoom.earth/ handles that ... (I've got nothing to do with them btw... I just think it's good)

Check out zoom.earth, found it recently. They have an app too.

https://zoom.earth/

Apparently it's by https://neave.com/ who looks like an indy developer out of london (according to this: https://neave.com/legal/privacy/)

Also check https://earth.nullschool.net/ by https://github.com/cambecc


Neave has been around forever they’re great

Good one thanks.

This was like the biggest tech drama of 2007, but mostly because Theil successfully ran the journalism company that reported it out of business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker


While I have no sympathy for Thiel, outing someone against their will is just wrong.

Journalism has to be responsible.

This article is a clusterfuck, no pun intended.


So it's 2007. LGBT groups are trying to protect people from getting fired for being gay and legalize gay marriage.

There's a conservative christian billionaire who is actively funding political groups blocking this.

You, a journalist, working at a tabloid, finds out he's secretly gay. Sound like a story?

There's context to all of these things.


Yes it's a story. But the thing I'm most interested in is... Why? Why does he do that?

Because people mostly behave based on their virtues and principles not on greedy self interest

We all have different ones


An optimistic answer. I like it!

But, like, Peter Thiel genuinely thinks life ought to be harder for gay people? He's a good Christian and thinks gay people will go to hell? I still don't really get it.


No. He supported conservative and christian groups because that's who he is. He founded https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stanford_Review funded by conservative luminary William Kristol. He went on to get a philosophy degree and a JD. He was a clerk and worked for Sullivan and Cromwell, one of the most prominent law firms in the country that defends corporate interests.

He's always worked on the law/capital/property side. The man can't code and has never claimed to be able to.

He's a deeply libertarian conservative christian who happens to get titillated by men.

But that last part is just what he is, it's not really who he is.

Being gay doesn't constrain you to a particular set of beliefs.

There's plenty people active on the right that are all kinds of diverse; hispanic, gay, asian. Look at that recent shooter, a trans person with a history of far right activism with neonazi tattoos who said they were "to the right of hitler" but also, transgendered.

It's really all over the map. Shit's complicated.


Thank you for the explanation. I find the "conservative christian who happens to get titillated by men" hard to grok, but it looks like you're correct.

You mean because a trashy news article outed somebody as gay for clicks? By helping someone else whose sex tape was leaked without their consent?

I’m sure you wouldn’t want your own private life leaked this way.


If journalists were constrained by the consent of every public figure and institution they mention all you'd have is flowery propaganda.

You can see what this would look like already by searching for prnewswire https://news.google.com/publications/CAAqKQgKIiNDQklTRkFnTWF...

Companies pay to place those things and some outfits run them. It'd all look like that.

Anyways, journalist reach out for comment and are supposed to consider the response of the parties involved but that's about it.


Not publishing articles on other people’s sex lives is not “flowery propaganda”. Christ.

That was an awful thing to defend, have a sense of shame and apologise Chris.


No. Finger wag elsewhere. Some journalism looks like TMZ and Business Insider.

You know it’s wrong.

You're litigating something I had no involvement in that happened 20 years ago as if I currently have the moral agency to change the outcome.

I don't know why you're engaging this way but this conversation is definitionally a waste of time.


I’m litigating this conversation - you supported outing somebody and publishing someone else’s sex tape. As an adult human being you know this is wrong. You are mistaken and you know you are mistaken.

No. I support the concept of an open society with an institution of journalism that isn't stultified by powerful forces that seek to control information

Sometimes that's sex tapes and Epstein Island

It's ok. We're not going to resolve things here


I think you believe this stance is standing up to power. But the media is powerful in their own right and nobody needs the details of their sex lives published without their consent- not Peter Thiel, not you, and not me.

Would you then be okay with journalists publishing CSAM images & videos from the Epstein case?

Seriously? Would you be okay with a "journalist" showing the whole world your sextape?

1. I'm not a public figure

2. Sure. Have a great time


1. You don't need to be famous, how do you think blackmail works on non-famous women?

2. freaky


There's a concept of a public figure which also has law definitions.

You're conflation a bunch of things there

I can say, for example, entertainment weekly or the national enquirer is in poor taste but I didn't think they should be chased out of business


What are you trying to say? That any and all invasion of privacy is okay as long as it is in the name journalism?

Who are also active in Republican politics.

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