> On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.
If true, there's little problem with just this from a privacy perspective, but that also makes it useless. Someone is going to make a browser extension to bypass/feed it a fake webcam feed.
> Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
However if they ask me to submit my ID to any third party, I'd sooner ditch discord. My default assumption is that this will get leaked, tying everyone's discord account to their real identity publicly. Discord seems to have halfway decent opsec, but I don't trust their "vendor partners" at all. I'll try submitting a fake ID, but if I get banned for it, then so be it.
This would, most likely, go hand in hand with “Discord is no longer allowed on rooted devices” and “Discord desktop is disallowed from client-side effort”, given the necessity of attestation to make it viable on mobile and the near-total absence of third parties taking advantage of the necessary protections on desktop.
I doubt it'd work here though. You know you can just print out a fake ID and show it to the camera. I doubt the app will be able to tell. Attestation doesn't really change this.
If it truly never leaves your device, you'd also be able to use the same fake ID for your entire friend group.
The cynical and best-case take is they don't actually care, and it's just a gesture to show to authorities to prevent further regulation. In which case they wouldn't try especially hard, which is a good thing.
The authorities would need to provide the framework for more intensive regulation, which would end up being expensive and also duplicating the work of the post office’s ID verification service, at which point you’re verging on “federal identity verification service”. Which, yes, really ought to exist — we defer that to banks and cell companies today?! — but I somehow doubt it likely to occur under the current structure.
Perfect enforcement is not required for authoritarians. All they need is to have a threat of punishment, and a questionable process of uploading your ID is more than sufficient for that purpose. Most people will comply in advance.
More groups than authoritarians support online age checks of various sorts, and any for-profit enterprise would far rather externalize the heavy lifting of profitless identity verification to a government agency or contract. Coincidentally, I noticed Discord doesn’t seem to accept ID.me; how curious! If anyone has a larger database of verified ages with online proofs, I’m not sure who it would be.
Yes, this shitty world where we can't control our devices we need to have (as they need to work against us) seems to be inevitable.
But I'm actually happy that these "protections" don't yet exist on desktop (albeit DRM already does).
If something really needs to work against my interest (for greater good), be it a smartcard, not my smartphone and definitely not my PC.
I can highly recommend developing a habit of selecting words you don't understand, opening the context menu, and hitting search. Takes somewhere between 2 and 10 seconds to look up acronyms this way.
Car drivers are always like this, everywhere. Even when I was a little kid, last century, it's a village school, every pupil lives in the same mile or so radius and yet loads of them get picked up in a car.
I now live in a big city but when I walk to the office it's just before school starts, so I see that yeah at first I'm passing kids happily walking with parents but just outside the school it's a jam of idiots who "just quickly" are here to drop the child from a car. The contrast in a few weeks when school is closed will be dramatic, that street is dead, but I bet every one of those parents thinks of it as a "busy road, they ought to do something about that" while not remembering that it's busy because of them.
Really though? Seems to me that the only sub-genre of space science fiction that is surviving relative to others is hard space science fiction. There's an abundance of high quality titles to choose from even (compared to the previous millennium).
Edit: Highlights include Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse, The Three-Body Problem, Children of Time, Pushing Ice (and other titles by Alastair Reynolds), Interstellar (debatable, but it's good), Project Hail Mary, For All Mankind, and many more.
Alpha Centauri is a triple star, even if it is not the kind of three body system depicted in that story (mainly because one of the 3 stars is much smaller than the other 2, so it orbits stably around them like a very big and distant planet).
While the triple star Alpha Centauri does not have mass ratios between its stars that are compatible with the story plot, I think that ignoring this technical detail is a much less serious plot hole than those of the majority of the non-fantastic Hollywood movies, which are supposed to happen in the real world, but they still contain a lot of impossible actions.
Proxima orbits at a great distance from the inner pair of stars, around their center of mass. Proxima is also a small red dwarf star. This layout had to have been well-known by the time the book was written.
This is perhaps similar to the pursuit of "unobtainium" in Avatar.
I don't see how. Yes, protons are made out of quarks. No, this doesn't mean that you can "roll out" proton "like a sheet", and then "etch a circuit" (!!!) on it, quantum or otherwise.
For literature: House of Suns* if you feel like strapping in for a wild ride with nevertheless believable physics. Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse if you're looking for a more "down to Earth" setting. Children of Time if you want an alien experience. Avoid reading summaries of any of these books beforehand. They're best enjoyed going in blind.
I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed to be good TV shows, but I haven't seen them yet.
If you've already read most of the well-known ones, I could give you some recommendations from less well-known authors and self-published authors you probably haven't heard of yet. Though it would help to have some general direction of what you're looking for (military/space opera/other, ftl/aliens?, etc). Allowing for limited FTL handwavyness opens up a lot of space opera titles that elect to otherwise play by hard sci-fi rules.
* Some may recommend "Pushing Ice" over this one for being more "hard" sci-fi, but personally House of Suns was a much more satisfying read.
Alas I think I've read/watched everything on your list. I'll try a useful echo response. I read the two big Arkady Martine books, and much of Ann Leckie's work. I thought they were all pretty good. Martine because the Aztec's in space genre is new to me, and she writes so well about people, Leckie because her galaxy spanning empire of genetically cloned god-kings and spaceships with transferrable personalities is clever and disconcerting.
There's no difference between you advertising something on your website vs. the chatbot that is on your website advertising something. It's something "the company" said either way.
There's generally protections in many jurisdictions against having to honor contracts that are based on obvious errors that should have been obvious to the other party however ("too good to be true"), and other protections against various kinds of fraud - which may also apply here, since this was clearly not done in good faith.
If you have an AI chatbot on your website, I highly recommend communicating to the user clearly that nothing it says constitutes an offer, contract, etc, whatever it may say after. As a company you could be in a legally binding contracts
merely if someone could reasonably believe they entered into a contract with you. Claiming that it was a mistake or that your employee/chatbot messed up may not help. Do not bury the disclaimer in some fine-print either.
Or just remove the chatbot. Generally they mainly piss people off rather than being useful.
There's a difference between the chatbot "advertising" something and an hour-long manipulative conversation getting the chatbot to make up a fake discount code. Based on the OP's comments, if it was a human employee who gave the fake code they could plausibly claim duress.
Think about if this happened in the real world. Like if I ran a book store, I’d expect some scammer to try to schmooze a discount but I’d also expect the staff to say no, refuse service, and call the police if they refused to leave. If the manager eventually said “okay, we’ll give you a discount” ultimately they would likely personally be on the hook for breaking company policy and taking a loss, but I wouldn’t be able to say that my employee didn’t represent my company when that’s their job.
Replacing the employee with a rental robot doesn’t change that: the business is expected to handle training and recover losses due to not following that training under their rental contract. If the robot can’t be trained and the manufacturer won’t indemnify the user for losses, then it’s simply not fit for purpose.
This is the fundamental problem blocking adoption of LLMs in many areas: they can’t reason and prompt injection is an unsolved problem. Until there are some theoretical breakthroughs, they’re unsafe to put into adversarial contexts where their output isn’t closely reviewed by a human who can be held accountable. Companies might be able to avoid paying damages in court if a chatbot is very clearly labeled as not not to be trusted, but that’s most of the market because companies want to lay off customer service reps. There’s very little demand for purely entertainment chatbots, especially since even there you have reputational risks if someone can get it to make a racist joke or something similarly offensive.
If having "an hour-long manipulative conversation" was possible, we have proof that company placed an unsupervised, error prone mechanism instead of real support.
If that "difference" is so obvious to you (and you expect it will break at some point), why don't you demand the company to notice that problem as well? And simply.. not put bogus mechanism in place, at all.
Edit: to be clear. I think company should just cancel and apologize. And then take down that bot, or put better safeguards (good luck with that).
Will the company go out of their way to do right by customers who were led to disadvantageous positions due to the chat bot?
Almost certainly not. So the disclaimer basically ends up becoming a one way get out of jail for free card, which is not what disclaimers are supposed to be.
> Not all types of fundamental research have the same potential for material benefits, or the same cost.
It is hard to gauge this is in advance though. If you were sure what you were gonna find, it wouldn't be much of a discovery. Historically it has sometimes been decades before manufacturing and practical applications caught up to frontier research. For an extreme example, mankind knew of electricity in some form for 2400 years before doing anything practical with it. If all the people who prodded at it instead thought "man I can't imagine what this could be useful for" and found something else to do with their time, we'd live in a very different world.
Our civilization can afford to aim higher than incremental improvements on pixel density for screens on which to spectate people kicking a ball around. Personally I find frontier discoveries to also have much greater entertainment value than sports events and will happily fund them with a tiny fraction of my tax dollars.
> It is hard to gauge this is in advance though. If you were sure what you were gonna find, it wouldn't be much of a discovery.
Virtually all previous particle discoveries were predicted, and then we built devices to find them, eg. the Higgs was predicted in the 1960s. There is no such motivation here. There is no theoretical or significant practical benefit for the FCC, it's basically a jobs program.
There is better frontier research that could use those funds for much better payoffs. For instance, just sticking with particle physics, Wakefield accelerators would be orders of magnitude smaller and cheaper than the LHC while achieving the same energies. We've also never built a muon collider, and so that's largely unexplored territory.
We just don't need another radio frequency particle collider, we've reached the limits of what they can do within a reasonable research budget.
> Virtually all previous particle discoveries were predicted
That's not true at all. To give just few examples.
Electron was not predicted but Thomson found it during first fundamental particle discovered came from cathode‐ray experiments, not from a prior microscopic theory of matte. Remember this was during thr 19th century.
Another one is the muon discovered in 1936 which was detected as "heavy electron" in cosmic rays. it did not fit any clear theoretical need in nuclear physics at the time, leading Rabi to quip “Who ordered that?”
Heck there are many more examples that I will bypass the comment limits if I tried to list them (resonances in particular will be very numerous).
You can of course move the goal target by narrowing what you mean by particle but this is exactly why physicists try to define what they talk about before making an argument.
> There is no such motivation here. There is no theoretical or significant practical benefit for the FCC, it's basically a jobs program.
Really? There is a huge volume of the feasibility study about the physics program of FCC. Are you claiming that it is false. Have you even read it?
> I honestly cannot imagine a better outcome or handling of the situation.
It's the "best outcome" if you're trying to go as fast as possible without breaking any laws or ending up liable for any damage.
German perspective, but if I told people I've been going 30km/h next to a school with poor visibility as children are dropped off around me, I would be met with contempt for that kind of behavior. I'd also at least face some partial civil liability if I hit anyone.
There's certainly better handling of the situation possible, it's just that US traffic laws and attitudes around driving do not encourage it.
I suspect many human drivers would've driven slower, law or no law.
If true, there's little problem with just this from a privacy perspective, but that also makes it useless. Someone is going to make a browser extension to bypass/feed it a fake webcam feed.
> Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
However if they ask me to submit my ID to any third party, I'd sooner ditch discord. My default assumption is that this will get leaked, tying everyone's discord account to their real identity publicly. Discord seems to have halfway decent opsec, but I don't trust their "vendor partners" at all. I'll try submitting a fake ID, but if I get banned for it, then so be it.
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