The way I see it, they are two types of ("technical") peoples:
The ones that loves the technicity, the challenge of building something, putting complex things together, the puzzle part of creating something.
The ones that wants to have stuff build to use them, were coding was just a mean to an end. (DHH mentioned in his podcast with Lex Fridman, that he is more in this category)
For the later, AI is the perfect tool that could come around, removing that barrier that was stopping them to achieve their needs (which you appear to be part of, I'm saying this without no jugement)
The writer of the blog post is in the former category.
Lots of dead comments here. I wonder what happened (the links I tested appears to work so it's not the reason. The posts appears to respect HN guidelines too, at least there are no insults or bad comments)..
I built something similar on top of Cloudflare’s Browser Run service. It’s a code pen-like tool for generating PDF docs with HTML and CSS. https://htmlcsspdf.ben2.com/
It seems that age verification (much like chat control) is getting more and more inevitable.
Instead of arguing on the bad this brings, we should push our authorities to enforce mechanism that still respect the anonymity of a person.
France's "France Identité" started to implement an approach that respect anonymity by using what they call a "double anonymity: a principle that ensures that neither the adult site nor the age-appropriate provider can know who is accessing what. Using advanced cryptographic technologies—digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs—the system generates proof of age without revealing identity or browsing history."
(source: https://entrevue.fr/en/police-justice/verification-dage-sur-...)
French's state should already have these informations from us (as a French citizen) so asking them to provide a certificate that guarantee my age seems like an obvious choice, and giving that digital certificate to any site without having to tell the issuer where I'm going is, I think, the best solution for the worst project.
(There a lot of news about this, but mostly in French. If you are curious:
Thank you for these links. Reading about pancognitivism and self sustaining closure is showing how complex the notion of consciousness can be, how its definition can vary from person to person. It also show how easy it can be for LLMs to give the illusion of consciousness when this is not clearly defined.
At first, I thought I had wrongly explained myself, so I checked what I wrote. Maybe it wasn't clear but I'm not looking for consciousness in the LLM era, but more about the philosophical research on what defines consciousness and the parallels that can be done with the LLMs era (parallels not in the sense of similitude, but in the sense of things that would appear similar but are not).
In a more generic and simple example, LLMs are good at producing language that resonates with us, and because of that, could be believed they have thoughts (they can write things like "I think you should .."), even thought they are not capable of thoughts, and are only producing the next logical word one after the other.
In the same sense, it would be interesting to read about philosophers that tried to define what consciousness is (or is not) and their age isn't relevant to today's LLM era. The connection can be done by the reader on what consciousness is, and what LLM is not, in the same vein as what thought and language is between our species and LLMs.
I have studied philosophy and human history for decades. While there is much to be said, you will not find a more relevant summary than I have provided.
Like discussions of “atoms” or “electricity” before modernity, there is nothing that can even articulate the concerns beyond those obvious things everyone “wonders” about.
I agree with you here, this is an odd reaction to a non-problem.
A real-life scenario would be to refuse your snail mail because someone added an extra line in your address.
The only plausible reason would be to avoid polluting the data (like faking the ref= for marketing purpose) but that would assume you are already tracking the ref value for other services, so in a way, you either need it or not, but you can't have both.
If you don't actively track query strings, having them or not has no impact.
France is currently working on a solution that provides age verification using double anonymity.
The "France Identité" use the identity card of the holder and generates a cryptographic proof of the age. The website wanting to check the age of the holder request the cryptographic proof, validates it against France's public key without querying government websites (that way, the government won't know you are trying to access pornhub).
This is, I believe, I concrete and working solution to age verification without having to provide any sensitive information to any website that will surely loose it in an breach.
So your whole point is the *hypothetical* "what if Bluesky turns bad".
And just with that hypothetical, you scratch the whole effort Bluesky is currently doing to offer an open protocol ? Which is the opposite of almost (Mastodon) all other social networks ?
Come on..
It honestly feel like this was written by someone being paid by a competitor, just to discredit the service.
Of course they will provide an infrastructure to ease users on to creating and using their service, they can't just provide an empty shell just for the pure purpose of decoupling the protocol and the service. You can't blame them for that (well, you can apparently..)
Author is from Nostr and many of them love to hate on Bluesky and ATProto. They've gone as far as to maintain a sustained attack on the PLC, going on a year now. The continuously submit "valid" operations (technically, but not actually), which contain chunked images base64 encoded. Perhaps to bloat the database? Not really sure what the goal is here (assuming it's just a different bad apple from the Nostr crew)
> "Stack Overflow was multiplayer. A million developers contributing solutions that benefited everyone. We replaced it with a billion isolated sessions that benefit no one else".
The ones that loves the technicity, the challenge of building something, putting complex things together, the puzzle part of creating something.
The ones that wants to have stuff build to use them, were coding was just a mean to an end. (DHH mentioned in his podcast with Lex Fridman, that he is more in this category)
For the later, AI is the perfect tool that could come around, removing that barrier that was stopping them to achieve their needs (which you appear to be part of, I'm saying this without no jugement)
The writer of the blog post is in the former category.
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