Feels like one of these things that's been known for decades in the general form: tools that take cognitive load off your working memory (a calculator, writing) free your brain up for higher level thinking make you "smarter", whereas tools that take the higher level tasks off you and load up your working memory (hypertext, AI) make you "stupider".
tracking down the relevant text from a reference is loading your working memory and, i would argue, inhibiting your ability to form semantic links as a consequence.
John Stuart Mill recognised over 150 years ago that free speech was only free if it was honest, good faith, polite discourse. Allowing it to descend into lies and ad hominems only benefits the elite who have the greatest resources to shout down dissent, in which case it's not really free if you're setting it up to favour one side. Not unsurprising Boomers would prefer the system that benefits them.
And every time someone voices your/his very reasonable point a whole group of people invoke near solipsism and "But WHOSE truth" the people making this statement are usually either boosters for obvious liars (who complained about community notes and other annotation tools) or are are weaponized pendants (outside the areas they personally rely on for income) to the point of understanding nothing.
I guess we should attempt nothing and just embrace 60% of people being convinced there is no facts or evidence for a universe older than 6k years (not to attack religion), lets just embrace the impossibility of knowing.
It's all just weaponized mendacious stupidity where people ignore history and people completely forget about relying on doing bank transactions or the fact that we have working chain of custody processes/systems.
You got suckered by the marketing. Google's "zero knowledge" approach requires devices locked down with remote attestation, which prohibits end users from running their own code (when interacting with websites that prevent it, which as time goes on under this plan will be everywhere). The only actual difference here is that this is Google's desired approach to destroying anonymity and personal computing.
Because true “zero knowledge” proofs are actually useless for age gating purposes.
Conceptually, if a proof was truly zero knowledge and there were no restrictions on generating it, there would also be nothing stopping someone from launching a website where you clicked a button and were given a free token generated from their ID. If it was truly a zero knowledge proof it would be impossible to revoke the ID that generated it, so there is no disincentive to freely share IDs.
So every real world “zero knowledge” proof eventually restricts something. Some require you to request your tokens from a government entity. Others try to do hardware attention chains so theoretically you can’t generate them outside of the approved means.
But the hacker fantasy of truly zero knowledge proofs is impossible because 1 hour after launch there would be a dozen “Show HN” posts with vibe coded websites that dispense zero knowledge tokens.
It's also unclear what they'd even be useful for to begin with.
You need some kind of proof system if you need a central authority to certify something, but why is that required? The parents know the age of their kids. They don't need the government to certify that to them. And then the parents can get the kids a device that allows them to set age restrictions.
Whether those restrictions are imposed by the device on content it displays (which is the correct way to do it) or by the device telling the service the approximate age of the user (which needlessly leaks information), you don't actually need a central authority to certify anything to begin with because either way it's just a configuration setting in the child's device.
> But the hacker fantasy of truly zero knowledge proofs is impossible because 1 hour after launch there would be a dozen “Show HN” posts with vibe coded websites that dispense zero knowledge tokens.
If I recall correctly, there exist variant cryptographic protocols that let you impersonate a user who provides such a service: that is, the token confers, or can be used to construct something that confers greater privileges in other contexts.
> can be used to construct something that confers greater privileges in other contexts
Then this wouldn't be zero knowledge, as it would convey whatever other greater information is available in that other context.
Are you perhaps thinking of the ecash double spending protocols? Where by double spending the same token to two different receivers, you leak enough information for your bank to recover your identity? That wouldn't be applicable here since each token would only be used once, there would just be many generated to share.
If you count Podcasts as RSS then surely RSS is more popular than ever. I can imagine that if Apple bundled a hypertext version of the Podcasts app it would be similarly popular. But they won't because it would compete with their own News+ subscriptions.
The problem with "cleaning the data" is it sometimes strips away so much context as to give you a misleading impression. Rory Stewart once said it took him 40 hours to fully understand a piece of legislation he was voting on, yet was expected by the whips to vote on multiple pieces of legislation every week, but most people wave an MP's voting record around like they 100% understood and agree with everything they voted on, despite it being mathematically impossible. If they'd voted differently would it have changed the outcome? Was it even a binding motion? Most of the real debate in the UK Parliament happens beforehand anyway and the government will withdraw any votes they know they're going to lose before it even gets into the chamber so the real rebellions don't even get recorded on theyworkforyou.
>> HN commenters are not legislators
> That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.
To steel man, there's a commenting pattern where if someone doesn't like a high-level idea they demand answers to a dozen specifics that, if it were a legitimate proposal going through a legislature, could take hundreds of people months or years of committees, reports & consultations to decide on all the answers to, but if someone can't come up with an answer on the spot in HN then that's taken as proof that the idea is unworkable.
I’m just going to paste a section of my comment above to you
> I’m not trying to gish gallop you here - the point isn’t to cherry pick any specific example it’s that advertising isn’t just a billboard or a sponsored VPN segment in a YT video.
There's been rules around what constitutes advertising or product placement on TV for decades, didn't seem to be such an insurmountable issue first time around.
Backups, illicit and otherwise do happen, far easier for digital archives than for paper ones. There is a version of Murphy's law for data that probably should go something like 'the data you want to get rid of lasts forever and the data you want to keep evaporates at the first inconvenience'.
You can minimise the risk, but there's a point at which you have to accept that liberal democracy functions around these institutions so dismantling them creates the kind of vacuum that fascism thrives in, which is why Libertarianism has never worked.
That's not inconsistency in the rules, that's inconsistency in what being the mayor means. In Sheffield it means you show up wearing funny clothes every so often, in Greater Manchester it means you have a full-time job, a large budget, and actual responsibilities.
For our American brethren, it's like the difference between being the Mayor of NYC vs the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade King.
It's actually the role of Police and Crime Commissioner that prevents them from being an MP simultaneously. In Greater Manchester (and London) the PCC role is combined with that of Mayor, but it isn't in most other city regions.
There's not much actual difference in the mayoral aspect of the roles - Jarvis was the Mayor of the South Yorkshire Combined Authority, not simply the mayor of Sheffield City Council.
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