<tin-foil-hat> ultimately, i think the endgame is to require government ID in order to access internet services in general, a la ender's game. </tin-foil-hat>
Funnily enough, when the Philippines did this, it was decried as a violation of human rights [1]. But usually, media are so silent on such things I'd call them complicit. One already cannot so much as rent a hotel room anywhere in the EU without showing government ID.
I'm in NL and had my wallet fall out of my pocket once at one of the bigger train stations. I realized within ~5 minutes, and basically as soon as I realized got a call from an anonymous number. It was the police, who had found my wallet with my ID in it and were calling me to inform me about it. Luckily I was still at the station and could just meet them and got my wallet back.
I couldn't help but feel extremely creeped out, and my girlfriend still to this day doesn't understand why I felt uneasy about it. "But you got your wallet back!", she says. "Of course the police know your number!". Having 0 privacy has been completely normalized, and I'm afraid we're far too late to do anything about it.
To be fair, your phone number has never been considered private information. You can open any phone book and find that info. They likely just looked up your name in the population register.
yup, and this gives the ability to look up per-citizen location data.
sidebar: i've been trying to raise awareness about "joint communications and sensing" wherever i can lately; many companies involved in 6G standardization (esp. nokia) want the 6G network to use mmWave radio to create realtime 3d environment mappings, aka a "digital twin" of the physical world, aka a surveillance state's wet dream.
Not only rent, but in Spain there is a central database where your details are sucked in real time when you rent a room or a car, and no oversight how this data is used.
Walk into a coffee shop. Look at the wifi password, usually a sign near the register. Log onto the wifi network using the wifi password. Browse in peace.
Is this sort of flow normal elsewhere? It's certainly normal where I live.
I'd walk to a local library and use their wifi. Or walk to a local McDonalds and use their wifi. Or walk to a friend's/family's house and use their wifi. Or...
I'm in the US. I do have government ID, but I don't recall showing it to my network providers. Certainly, some telcos want a social security number to run credit; but that's often avoidable. I'm pretty sure could also wander down to an electronics store (maybe a grocery/drug store too) and pick up a prepaid cell phone with internet access, pay for it with cash, and get that going without government id in the US. It's a bit of a hike to get to the electronics store from where I live, but I can get part of the way there with the bus that takes cash too.
my partner teaches high school math and regularly gets answers with calculus symbols (none of the students have taken any calculus). these students aren't putting a single iota of thought into the answers they're getting back from these tools.
To me this is the bigger problem. Using LLMs is going to happen and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. So it's important to make people understand how to use them, and to find ways to test that students still understand the underlying concepts.
I'm in a 100%-online grad school but they proctor major exams through local testing centers, and every class is at least 50% based on one or more major exams. It's a good way to let people use LLMs, because they're available, and trying to stop it is a fool's errand, while requiring people to understand the underlying concepts in order to pass.
i think it would be interesting to allow each Ojisan to be in charge of distribution. some would freely hand out their cards to any who ask, while some might be more "stingy", awarding cards only to youth who impressed them. the game designer could periodically restock the Ojisan's supply and each generation of cards could be mechanically rebalanced to reflect the observed rarity.
Zig is friendly for soft-transitions because the compiler can compile C code. you can use Zig tooling for a C codebase, and then slowly add Zig code where it makes the most sense.
ahh, ideally i'd say learning them in any order is fine but unfortunately since the zig ecosystem is not mature yet that means you'll find yourself using C libraries from zig fairly often.
so, yes, i agree learning zig is a great idea for new independent projects but (at the current stage) be prepared to also learn at least enough about C to use C libraries (return type conventions, raw enums, c-style strings, inflexible allocators).
I think it is still useful to learn C, however. For personal projects you could use Zig, but it is still good to know C. C is like the lingua franca of programming languages, and some assembly (if you care about optimization, for example).
on the flipside -- avoiding unhealthy things, especially environmental health factors like carcinogens and microplastics, often requires a certain level of wealth.
The "wellness" industry is a way to scam rich people. You want to believe you can spend your money to opt out of environmental toxins by shopping at Erewhon. But you're still going to be exposed to all of this stuff unless you live in a hermetically sealed bubble and never leave. Or if you get rid of toxins in your area, an action which affects everyone.
The hard truth is that pollution and environmental toxins affect everyone present in that environment. Taxes and government regulation are going to do far more for the wealthy than individual changes in shopping habits.
my version of this was "do convenient linux distros and binary package managers rot the mind?" after setting up a freebsd box with everything built from source and everything configured by hand. then again from building an arch-based Linux system from the wiki. you learn a lot from doing things by hand... but eventually you need to get stuff done.
> In short, the advent of super-intelligent AI would be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. The real risk with AI isn’t malice, but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours we’re in trouble. You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green-energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let’s not place humanity in the position of those ants.
