> In my 30’s, I exercised to look good. In my 50’s, to stay fit. In my 70’s, to stay ambulatory. In my 80’s, to avoid assisted living. Now in my 90’s, I’m just doing it out of pure defiance
Hydroxychloroquine is definitely different from most of the bogus medical stuff going around.
When hydroxychloroquine was first proposed for COVID there was actually reason to think it might help. It is known to interfere with one of the mechanisms that COVID uses to enter cell membranes. The FDA in the US and equivalent regulators in many other countries gave it an emergency use authorization.
A few months later with more data it was found that it had some bad side effects and that it wasn't actually useful against COVID (most of the time COVID used a mechanism other than the one that hydroxychloroquine interfered with to enter cells).
The data plans on some embedded modems are quite different from consumer plans. They are specifically designed for customers who have a large number of devices but only need a small amount of bandwidth on each device.
These plans might have a very low fixed monthly cost but only include a small data allowance, say 100 KB/month. That's plenty for something like a blood pressure monitor that uploads your results to your doctor or insurance company.
If you are lucky that's a hard cap and the data plan cuts off for the rest of the month when you hit it.
If you are unlucky that plan includes additional data that is very expensive. I've heard numbers like $10 for each additional 100 KB.
I definitely recall reading news articles about people who have repurposed a SIM from some device and using it for their internet access, figuring that company would not notice, and using it to watch movies and download large files.
Then the company gets their bill from their wireless service provider, and it turns out that on the long list of line items showing the cost for each modem, a single say $35 000 item really stands out when all the others are $1.
If you are lucky the company merely asks you to pay that, and if you refuse they take you to civil court where you will lose. (That's what happened in the articles I remember reading, which is how they came to the public's attention).
If you unlucky what you did also falls under your jurisdiction's "theft of services" criminal law. Worse, the amount is likely above the maximum for misdemeanor theft of services so it would be felony theft of services.
Through what technical or legal mechanism is the company identifying or locating you - assuming you never logged in or associated the product with your identity?
What law is preventing Best Buy from telling TVManufacturer that a credit card with these last 4 digits bought the TV with this exact serial number?
And once the SIM connects near your house, what is preventing the phone company from telling TVManufacturer the rough location of the SIM, especially after that SIM is found to have used too much data?
Then use some commercially available ad database to figure out that the person typically near this location with these last four digits is 15155.
That's just a guess, but there is enough fingerprinting that they will know with pretty high certainty it is you. Whether all this is admissible in civil court, idk.
Anecdotally, you may want to avoid Best Buy either way. There's a chance the TV box contains just rocks, no TV, and that they refuse to refund your purchase.
> What law is preventing Best Buy from telling TVManufacturer
No law: reality and PCI standards prevent this. And of course, the manufacturer could get a subpoena after enough process. This also assumes the TV was purchased with a credit card and not cash.
> And once the SIM connects near your house
> what is preventing the phone company from telling
Again: reality and the fact that corporations aren't cooperative. A rough location doesn't help identify someone in any urban environment. Corporations are not the FBI or FCC on a fox hunt.
Can you cite a single case where this has happened on behalf of a corporation? These are public record, of course.
> The issue I'm trying to sound the horn on is that the current push for AF in the US and EU has nothing to do with kids. I think you could put together a working group on ZKPs and Age Verification, write up a paper and run experiments, and when you bring it to the lawmakers they're gonna say something to the tune of:
The EU is currently doing large-scale field tries of the EU Digital Identity Wallet, which they have been working on for several years. It uses ZKPs for age verification. They expect to roll it out to the public near the end of 2026.
I appreciate the mention - i had not yet heard of this EU DIW thing. That said, I can't find any resources on it that mention the use of ZKPs. Could you share a link?
Ya got me. Nevermind that the DSA (which I have read, in part) and the DIW (new to me) are different things, and that one does not mention the other [0]. Also the DSA is happening now while the Wallet thing isn't rolled out.
There are actual discussions about VPN regulation in relation to AV in the US [1]. The UK's OSA [2] is blatant about the need to violate encryption. Australia's OSA [3] has also come under criticism for precisely the things I'm talking about. Is it a stretch to extend this reasoning to the EU's incredibly similar legislation? Honk my nose if you must but I don't think so.
Here's the thing - I don't want you to listen to me, or anyone else on the internet, as an 'expert'. Verify your information personally, even when you trust it.
I haven't investigated selection sort. You have me curious though. Is that a step down from bubble sort? If so, maybe it's just as well I figured out bubble.
Selection sort is arguably the easiest sort, and arguably the easiest to see that it is correct. Given an array a with n elements A[0], A[1], ..., A[n-1], let the notation A[x:y] mean the set {A[x], A[x+1], ..., A[y]}.
for i = 0 to n-1
find an index j in A of the smallest member of A[i:n-1]
swap A[i] with A[j]
I think that selection sort is easy to understand and easier to see that it is correct because it can be separated into a two array version. Given input array A and an empty array B, do this:
while A is not empty
find a smallest element of A
append that to B
The in place version earlier is essentially that, just storing B and A together in one array.
That is something most non-programmers could easily come up with for physical sorting. For instance you have a row of books on a shelf that are in random order, and you want to move them to another shelf and have them sorted by author's last name.
1. Scan the first row to find the book that should come before all the rest on that row.
2. Move it to the end of the books on the second row.
3. Repeat until all the books have been moved.
Selection sort is in a sense just a computer implementation of a procedure that ordinary people have a good chance of coming up with when they need to sort physical items.
Selection sort performs better than bubble sort on random data. They are both O(n^2) but selection sort will perform fewer writes.
If you deal with data that is mostly already sorted though then bubble sort with early stopping is O(n) and wins.
With bubble sort I can't think of a two array version that makes it easier to understand. I also don't think many ordinary people would come up with bubble sort when sorting say their bookshelf.
There's also insertion sort. The two array version would be
while A is not empty
take the first element of A
insert that into B keeping B sorted
In bookshelf form
1. Pick a book from the first row.
2. Find where that belongs in alphabetical order in the second row and put it there.
3. Repeat until you run out of books on the first row.
I think this is what most ordinary people who don't come up with selection sort would come up with.
The two array form can be converted to in place the same as selection sort.
Insertion sort is, like the others O(n^2). Like selection sort it is faster than bubble sort on random data. Unlike selection sort whose runtime is about the same no matter how the data is ordered, it is fast on almost sorted data.
Here's all three (bubble, selection, insertion) illustrated by folk dancers:
First, that is wrong because Venn diagrams don't work the way you think they do.
Second, even if they did work they way they think they do it would still be wrong. :-)
Venn diagrams show all possible inclusion/exclusion relations between the sets they are showing. A Venn diagram of two sets is always two circles that partly overlap.
Even if the way they worked is that you could omit regions that are empty and redraw the remaining regions to be circular, it doesn't help because ending up with a single circle with both sets in it would mean you are asserting the the two sets are equal.
That is clearly false because pretty much everyone can name someone who likes to annoy people by being loud and obnoxious but does not ride a motorcycle.
> "Everyone must prove their age online now" creates a trail of identity that kills anonymous speech dead.
That depends on the implementation. Do it the wrong way, like many countries or US states, and that is a problem.
Do it right, like the EU is doing in their Digital Identity Wallet project, which is currently undergoing large scale field trials, and the site you prove age to gets no information other than that you are old enough, and your government gets no information about what sites you have proved age to or when you have done so.
Not really. Either you have freedom of speech or you have restricted speech. The more restriction, the less freedom you have.
> the site you prove age to gets no information other than that you are old enough, and your government gets no information about what sites you have proved age to or when you have done so.
As long as the broker in the middle can be trusted, cannot be extorted by government power or private wealth... in other words: unpossible.
In the system the EU is using you are the broker in the middle.
Briefly, your government issues you a digital copy of your identity documents cryptographically bound to a hardware security module that you provide. For the first iteration this will be the security module in your smartphone. Later iterations will support standalone smart cards and plug in security modules like YubiKeys.
If you wish to prove your age to a site a cryptographic protocol takes place between you and the site which demonstrates to the site that you have a government issued identity document that is bound to a hardware security module, and that you have that module, and that the module is unlocked, and that the identity document says that your age is above the site's minimum age requirement.
No information is transmitted to the site from the identity document other than the age is above the threshold. There is also nothing transmitted that identities the particular hardware security module.
Doing it right like the EU? You mean like the EU, scan everything that is sent through anybody's phone in the name of protecting the children?
> the site you prove age to gets no information other than that you are old enough, and your government gets no information about what sites
That is the case for now. What happens when the lobbies get in there and decide that this info is actually very valuable and that they should have the right to know who is visiting their client's websites and apps, will the anonymity remain? I think not.
And what about the defense industry who in the name of fighting terrorism will demand that users that identify themselves on "suspicious" sites now need to have their data recorded?
The issue is that once everyone is using this system, then it's very easy for any government to come and start expanding the scope of the data recorded and as always under the cover of good intentions.
This is how it goes:
- In 2025, they record nothing
- In 2026, they start logging IP addresses and passing along suspicious log ins to the cops
- In 2030 they start recording more and more data until all anonymity is gone
I wouldn't touch the EU's identity wallet with a 10 foot pole and I certainly wouldn't use anything that the EU is doing now as a benchmark considering what happened with the Chat control law recently.
The EU is very double edged though. It has great projects, undoubtedly. For example GDPR was a gigantic step forward, even if many people here, who are US-centric mostly, don't want to hear that. But on the other hand the EU also has loads of shit that members and lobbies try to push, like for example chat control.
Let's hope that this project you mention works out, if indeed it works like you describe.
> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?
The purpose of an assignment is to give the student problems that can be solved by applying the knowledge and techniques they were taught in class, so that the student can gain experience using that knowledge and those techniques and demonstrate that they have done so to the teacher.
before you can work on unique problems, you need to learn to solve problems that have already been solved. the problem then is that if a problem has already been solved, AI has been trained with the solution and is able to reproduce it.
think about it this way: any question or task you give to a student that is similar to a question or task that you gave students a year earlier, can be solved by applying the solutions collected from the previous year. and if that is the case, then a machine can solve those tasks too.
the amount of effort needed to design questions and tasks so that a machine can not solve them is way to big to be realistic for any subjects that are not novel. which is everything you learn in school.
Yes, it is feasible. The EU has been working on it for a while as part of the EU Digital Identity Wallet project. Parts of it, including zero knowledge age verification, are undergoing large field trials in several countries.
Briefly, here's how it works.
• Your government can issue you a digital copy of government identity documents. This copy is cryptographically bound to a key that it stores in a hardware security module that you provide.
In the reference implementation and the implementations undergoing field testing the supported hardware security modules are the security modules in Apple mobile devices and in many Android devices. They plan to support more, such as stand alone smart cards and external security keys like YubiKeys.
• There's a zero knowledge protocol that lets you demonstrate to a website that (1) you have a digital copy of a government ID document that is bound to the hardware security module of your device and that you were able to unlock that hardware security module, and (2) that ID document says your birthday is far enough in the past that you meet the site's age requirement.
> In my 30’s, I exercised to look good. In my 50’s, to stay fit. In my 70’s, to stay ambulatory. In my 80’s, to avoid assisted living. Now in my 90’s, I’m just doing it out of pure defiance
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