Xpeng, Wayne, aiMotive to name three. Probably many others, who claim to use LIDAR but don’t actually rely on it. Because LIDAR is perceived as a prerequisite for autonomous safety, admitting to not needing it is a bad PR move — for now.
There is a massive technical difference between Vision first but with LiDAR redundancy vs No LiDAR at all that is Tesla approach. Those are not the same architecture. So claiming XPeng, Waymo, or aiMotive validate Tesla is technically misleading.
XPeng system is sensor fusion. It is not camera only. Waymo is even clearer. For them LiDAR is not optional. aiMotive has now started to market camera only, but its experimental, no production deployments.
Xpeng is abandoning sensor fusion. aiMotive has never bothered with sensor fusion. I never mentioned Waymo; unfortunately the AI gods at Apple auto-corrected me typing Wayve, as in Wayve Technologies Ltd.
Tesla FSD is not accurately described as a "no LIDAR at all" approach, if you're attempting to contrast it to other LIDAR-trained systems like aiMotive, Xpeng and Wayve.
A BTU of hydrogen requires more energy to compress to a given pressure than a BTU of natural gas, but hydrogen also has lower viscosity, so less recompression is needed. The point you raise does not rule out hydrogen pipelines.
If it does, then it also rules out long distance transmission of electrical power, as that is even more expensive. And the hydrogen advantage is even greater when one considers one can piggyback storage onto this system, as is done in natural gas pipelines. The electrical system would need additional batteries which are much more expensive per unit of storage capacity.
The PDF you shared actually agrees with my point if you care you to read it. It models the cost for a specific HVDC implementation, but the HVDC line selected is more expensive when transporting just 3% of the energy of the pipeline.
The same capex and opex can support 100x more Wh-km via HVDC, making HVDC at least an order of magnitude cheaper then the H2 pipeline.
What's interesting to me is that this is completely uncontroversial and incontrovertible, so I wonder where your insistence otherwise is?
I'm sorry but you appear to be completely deranged. The paper says nothing of the sort. Let me give the abstract:
"This paper compares the relative cost of long-distance, large-scale energy transmission by electricity, gaseous, and liquid carriers (e-fuels). The results indicate that the cost of electrical transmission per delivered MWh can be up to eight times higher than for hydrogen pipelines, about eleven times higher than for natural gas pipelines, and twenty to fifty times higher than for liquid fuels pipelines. These differences generally hold for shorter distances as well. The higher cost of electrical transmission is primarily because of lower carrying capacity (MW per line) of electrical transmission lines compared to the energy carrying capacity of the pipelines for gaseous and liquid fuels. The differences in the cost of transmission are important but often unrecognized and should be considered as a significant cost component in the analysis of various renewable energy production, distribution, and utilization scenarios."
I'm to read this as supporting your assertion that electrical transmission is several times cheaper??
I highly doubt that hydrogen heating was ever considered. It's usually pushed by the gas lobby (since most hydrogen comes from gas), and Sweden doesn't have a strong gas lobby.
Most of the current energy production in Sweden was built starting 50 years ago, which can be seen in the graph. Since the early 1990s the combination of hydro power and nuclear has had an almost static production rate, and hydro power in particular has been maxed out. Oil was and is still used as the reserve energy, through new plants currently being built are based on natural gas rather than oil. The political statement is that the goal is that bio fuels should be used, but that the mix will be based on the market and the economical viability of different compatible fuels.
The EU will probably wait until the launch of a digital wallet that can do anonymous age verification. Otherwise it won't get enough political support.
It depends on the implementation. The EU's European Digital Identity Wallet will allow users to prove that they are over 18 without sharing any other personal information.
So, that's not anonymous then. Because it allows tracking across multiple accounts, some of which are associated with your name. An unchanging proof of age is pretty much just another name for a government ID number.
Not necessarily. In theory, the attestation that someone is of age can be provided by a central service. The central service does not need the website account information to provide a non-fungible certificate, that you show to your service that has no way of knowing who you are from the certificate. All it needs to ensure is the certificate is used only once per account.
You can then prevent certificate forging by forwarding a cryptographic hash of the requester identity (generated by the website client), which will be included in the cert body so the website can verify the attestation was generated for this specific request, and it cannot be randomly reused.
Of course this doesn't solve the problem of using your grandma's id to bypass age restrictions, but I think that problem is worth the cost of privacy gains from corporations not validating IDs directly and screwing up like Discord's vendor did here.
Either the certificate is the same every time and therefore it's an identifier.
Or the certificate isn't the same every time and therefore you can generate a whole bunch of them and give them out for $2 apiece.
Or the certificate isn't the same every time and also isn't anonymous so they can trace who's doing that.
You don't have to reuse the same certificate for several requests. You can get a new one for every request, for every person who is asked to verify their age and pays you $2, and if they're actually anonymous, there's no way to know you did this. Is a rate limit part of the proposal? Can I only sign up to one adult service per week?
Unless you meant the requester's real identity, in which case... we're back to not anonymous.
I did, except for this bit that you added in an edit:
> You don't have to reuse the same certificate for several requests. You can get a new one for every request, for every person who is asked to verify their age and pays you $2, and if they're actually anonymous, there's no way to know you did this. Is a rate limit part of the proposal? Can I only sign up to one adult service per week?
This is trivially easy to detect at the attestation service. If someone is trying to repeatedly (and programmatically) use the same personal ID to generate attestations for different request IDs in a short time frame, you can throttle them, flag them, revoke their cert, whatever.
Again, the service host and request id is part of the certification request, so you can easily separate a legitimate signup for multiple different websites from suspicious multi-signups to the same service for the same govt id.
So the government can tell I'm signing up for pornhub i.e. not anonymous. Also pornhub would need a government approval to operate or they'd just block their requests (and possibly arrest me for using an illegal service). I'd think we'd want service providers to also be anonymous without requiring government approval.
Grandpa isn't interested in Discord, so you can open a second account using his Proof of Age. Maybe a third account, using Uncle Ned's. And a fourth account, using...
I think I'm fine with that tradeoff between effectiveness of age gating vs privacy gains of not having IDs sent over to corporations. To me, identity theft by targeting large stores of government IDs, is orders of magnitude worse than a teenager accessing NSFW channels every now and then.
I'm not defending age verification's existence in the first place btw, I don't think it's a good idea without secure protocols of central attestation for such things. But of course, governments aren't interested in solving the harder more valuable problem, they're interested in shifting the responsibility to corporations while crying foul.
“Linkability is especially problematic because untrusted entities, such as attribute providers and relying parties acting together, can correlate and link auxiliary information to the same user, thereby breaching privacy and enabling tracking, profiling, or de-anonymisation.” [1]
That’s assuming EUDI never gets breached — but if Google and every major tech company has been, it’s only a matter of time, but this will have way more personal info ....
I've been using discord for 5 years and never upload my ID … And I don't want discord (or any other company) to know my age, or any other identification ...
For sure, but with the EU system you'd just give discord an expiring certificate that proves you're over 18. They can leak that all they want, it's worthless otherwise. Right now you have to upload your actual ID which is obviously extremely dangerous if leaked. So yes, even though there are obvious problems that you mentioned, the EU implementation is better.
Again, for sure and I agree with you - but we're talking about institutions that already have our IDs in some form or another, so just asking them to issue a certificate that says "yeah this user is actually over 18" seems like a no brainer functionality on top of an existing system. Like obviously our government office has a copy of my passport and ID card, but if those leak then we have a much bigger problem as a country.
> we're talking about institutions that already have our IDs in some form or another
The issue isn’t who already has our IDs, it’s that EUDI introduces new auxiliary information (public keys, signatures, revocation identifiers) that create globally unique, linkable identifiers.
Even if the same institutions issue the wallet, each transaction generates additional personal data that can be misused for tracking and profiling, far beyond the data already stored in government registries.
Right, and I'm firmly in the camp that everything on the internet should be both anonymous and accessible to anyone from anywhere.
But clearly this isn't the way the internet is going. As much as I hate it, it seems inevitable that globally every government is introducing at least a requirement for websites to check the age of their users.
So right now this can be done(here in the UK anyway) either by scanning your ID with a 3rd party provider who "promises" to delete it straight away, or by linking your bank account(yes, I'm definitely going to do that to go on pornhub, 100%). Both methods have the problems you mentioned + the additional risk of leaking my personal details because they are getting more info than they need to fulfil their legal obligations.
But if the government could just issue me an expiring cert that says "yep, this user is 18", without any of my other data on it.....then that's vastly preferable to having to scan my passport or driving licence to browse reddit or discord or whatever? Like yeah, maybe someone could still track it somehow(don't see how if every certificate has a unique ID and doesn't contain any identifiable info other than "yep this is a valid certificate and yes the user is over 18", but let's just say they can), but at least my IDs are not at risk of being leaked anywhere.
That is not true, EUDI is a security problem instead of a solution. It is trivial to correlate the info and there is a critical path where a breach would expose even more.
Best security: Don't collect. Nothing comes close, no even the best ZK setup.
Also, as a European citizen I really don't want it. Ironically governments aren't mature enough for that.
You're describing a CBDC, not a coin. Why isn't it being done? Because commercial banks are vehemently against that. The current administration in particular will never go against the big banks.
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