I might be wrong but splashback seems to be a purely American problem. European toilets tend to have a much lower water level (and I’m not even talking about those old-timey poop shelf toilets). In my well over 30 years of using toilets, I barely remember ever getting splashed.

Please don’t do drugs in the shower.

I would argue it’s very dumb to give anyone, including humans, access to weapons of mass destruction.

I would trust Skynet a lot more than an LLM. At least that would be purpose-built for actually calculating likely outcomes.

As @Th4tGuyII@fedia.io said, this experiment didn’t contain any proper reasoning about costs and benefits of using nuclear weapons. It’s just a few glorified autocomplete scripts playing “which word comes next?” over and over again. And in the context of modern warfare, many texts in the training corpus happen to mention nukes so they’re bound to show up at the list of most likely next words eventually.

Yeah, we figured that one out back in… checks notes 1983. There is a reason why WarGames still holds up as an amazing movie even though the technology it depicts is far outdated.

Compared to AGI it is.

The same way the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs are small and cute compared to a modern hydrogen bomb…

If we don’t solve the AI problems we already have, there is no point speculating about AGI because our lives will be unbearable long before it arrives.

I warn about AI. I don’t care about AGI (yet) because we are far from it.

I’m worried about (in no particular order):

• Software companies amassing technical debt because AI-generated code gets used without proper review
• Massive security problems in critical infrastructure, for the exact same reason
• Cost savings being used to make the rich richer while the people who used to do the work are just fired
• Companies forcing AI into every single product even if it doesn’t make sense, just to make their shareholders happy
• Rapidly increasing prices of RAM, SSDs, HDDs, graphics cards and consequently pretty much all electronic devices
• The environmental impact because companies would rather build new power plants than optimize AI for efficiency
• A lack of education about the limitations of current implementations. People tend to feed every question they have into ChatGPT and trust the results even when they’re completely incorrect
• The inherent privacy nightmare that comes from funneling that much data into a centralized service

Nothing about this is small or cute.

I would be totally fine with something that I can supervise and that can run locally on my laptop without cooking it and doubling my energy bill. Also an economy where productivity gains benefit the workers, not the CEO. If I can do the same work in half the time, let me have the rest of the day off at full pay instead of doubling my workload and firing half your staff.

That was probably the best angle to start an in-depth investigation into his dealings with Epstein. Evidence that comes to light during that investigation can still be used for additional charges.

Yeah, certainly because of the Chinese and not because their government actively discourages tourism…

Your tl;dr makes it sound like they found his body, never bothered to recover it and put a „do not enter“ sign in front of the cave.

It’s much worse than that. He was found while he was still alive and over a hundred rescuers tried to get him out until his heart couldn’t handle it anymore and he died after 27 hours. Only then they decided to leave him there, used explosives to collapse the passage to where he was stuck and then blocked all entrances with concrete.

You would need to include the birth date in the certificate. But of course that would have its own privacy implications.

And that’s what I’m trying to say: your “just do X” falls short. It is incredibly hard, maybe impossible, to build a reliable age verification system where neither the websites nor the government can violate your privacy. Even the tiniest mistake can mean that the whole thing comes crashing down. And no, “just trust your government” is not a solution. Even if I trust my current government, the next election could put raging Nazis in power who use every available database to identify and terrorize people they don’t like.

If someone designs a system that satisfies all these requirements and is reviewed by multiple independent security researchers, I’m all for implementing it. But from what I know about government IT projects, it currently looks like every country will implement its own system, each with obvious problems that can be exploited by the average computer science student.

About the part of sending the certificate, how do you say they should check the age? By smoke signs?

The whole point about certificates is that they are signed with an asymmetric cryptographic key so you can verify them on your own. You have a list of root certificates from trusted certificate authorities and when a user sends you a certificate that claims to be issued by the Spanish government, you check the signature with the Spanish root certificate. No need to contact the Spanish government’s server about that specific certificate.

This is exactly how any certificate validation process works today. Otherwise, your web browser would have to talk to a bunch of certificate authorities every time you open an HTTPS connection to a website.

And as a follow up to my previous point, now that I’m at my PC and don’t have to type on my phone:

Even if we made certificates in a way that can’t be shared, for example by locking the private key inside a physical device (like a digital passport), we have solved nothing.

Your certificate would immediately become your digital fingerprint that will be stored with your account (to find duplicates) and can be tracked across websites as soon as a database gets leaked or the sites’ owners sell your data to advertisers (when would that ever happen?). While that fingerprint alone doesn’t say anything about you except your age, it makes it trivial to aggregate your activity across the whole internet. Ever bought something on a site that requires age verification? Congratulations, your certificate is now tied to an address. Shared a selfie somewhere? Your certificate has a face. Even without personal data directly in the certificate, it would be a privacy nightmare and exactly what the EU GDPR tried (and failed) to prevent.

The next step would be to find a mechanism that creates single use certificates every time you need one. But you can’t do that locally, because the certificates still need to be signed (and revocable) by a trusted authority. So maybe you need to send a certificate signing request to a government server every time you sign up for something. That could work for some use cases but requires expensive infrastructure that is never allowed to fail even for a few minutes or it would cause chaos.

… and now I’ve noticed your exact wording, implying that sites would forward the users’ certificates to the authority to be verified. That’s a big no-no. A site may never ever acknowledge to an authority that it has seen a specific certificate. The authority necessarily knows who the owner of that certificate is and even if they don’t tell the website, the authority itself can keep track of every citizen. “On date X, PornHub asked us to verify the age for certificate ABCDEF which we know belongs to John Doe from Somesmalltown” is not something I would want to be stored on a government server.

And this is all still assuming that the infrastructure for this would be implemented according to modern standards without security-critical shortcuts. If you have any hope that will ever happen, I recommend you click through https://media.ccc.de/ and watch some talks about government IT fails. Many are available in English.

Certificates that can’t be tied to a specific person can and will be shared, making them essentially worthless.

We‘ve had that in Germany about 20 years ago. Some websites asked you to verify your age by entering a part of the encoded data on the back of your ID card. It took maybe a few days until lists with valid IDs were all over the internet.

Sure, certificates are marginally more reliable because they can be revoked but at that point, websites need to update their revocation lists close to real time which isn’t practical and still can’t catch every shared cert.

Reliably verifying your identity without revealing too many personal details is an extremely hard problem that has troubled computer scientists for decades.

I think it’s more of a general sentiment against Merz. He pushes for longer work days, fewer public holidays, later retirement, “incentives” for people to still work part-time during retirement, fewer protections for workers overall and worse social security. The guy is massively unpopular so nobody trusts that these statements come from any sensible reasoning.

Nobody cares what Friedrich “we need to treat workers like slaves” Merz thinks.

And now you understand what we Germans feel when Americans ask what our ancestors did during the 1930s and 40s.

He stopped them so early you haven’t even heard of them! /s

Yeah, I got that but I don’t think he would notice the difference. If they do anything, he’ll somehow twist it into an argument. Doesn’t have to make sense for anyone but him, he’ll use any excuse to play with his military toys.

I fear that the only option to prevent WW3 is to finally remove him and his friends from power. No, I don’t know how to actually do that.

The problem is, if China and Russia make a move, that only confirms Trump’s delusion that he must take Greenland before they do.