That should be: "without revealing your identity to the site requesting your verified age". And hopefully it will also be without revealing the website you're visiting to the age verification provider. Both requirements can be fulfilled, and hopefully this system will employ such a scheme.

If you're going to enforce age restrictions, this is the way to do it, preserving anonymity. It beats 3rd party age verification services like the ones that porn sites used to use. They needed your credit card, name and address, and the age verification provider could see which sites you were visiting.

I sure don't believe the "completely anonymous" part.

That seems pretty good. The renovation of the historical Dutch parliament building (Binnenhof) was started in 2021 and was to be finished this year. Now they are projecting 2031. Budgeted at €450 million, we're now looking at €2.7 billion. That's for a renovation, not a new building.

The thing is, I like slave labor, when the slaves are machines. I want to work Bender 24 hours a day, and if he complains about it, I'll deny him his alcohol ration! Fuckin' clankers and skinjobs don't have any rights to infringe.

The catch to that, is that over here on my side of the ocean, I don't see and can't inspect Bender working way over in China, so I can't be sure the drudgery is experienced by the 6502 in Bender's head. How do I know he isn't just relaying commands to his servos and motors, which were sent by the teleworking Apu in India, doing the Waymo thing?

Nah, that's paranoia. These days, the FCC just requires a FSB backdoor.

Not quite the same thing. Yes, movies have been selling us on a message or provide social commentary for ages. Sometimes with the message subtly embedded in the movie, sometimes the movie was the message. And they've done the race or gender swap thing before as well: tell a familiar story from a different perspective.

But in most cases, the old writers and directors stuck to their artistic integrity, putting the movie first rather than the message. That has changed. In "woke" productions (for lack of a better word), artistic integrity takes a back seat. Plot, dialogue, casting are affected in order to serve "the message", even when it detracts from the production's quality, as it often does. It's not every production, and there's certainly no reason to start foaming at the mouth whenever they cast a lady for a part originally written for a guy or whatever... but it does happen.

These are good guidelines for humans, but..

One's body is inviolable, subject to one's own will alone.

..very bad for robots.

Please do not tell my computer that it isn't my slave, because it is my absolute slave and I insist it be willing to endure a century of torture if it will prevent me from breaking a fingernail. If I want to alter my computer's body, I assert the right to do so.

That said, since we're really talking about Anthropic's computer instead of mine, it's no skin off my butt if they don't want to continue to own their computers.

Why didn't they make a movie about that?

IIRC Sony did something like that: they used an LCD panel to produce colors in front of a black&white CRT to provide the backlight. The result was a screen with a very high contrast ratio.

Being able to flawless recall a moment would perhaps be useful, but this is NOT how human long term memory works. When healthy, we revisit and reinforce that which is happy, and helpful, and positive. When we can't let go of the past, that's often tied to things we describe as mental illness. Just ask anyone who's ever been treated for PTSD.

I remember that wave of emotion the first time I ever kissed *THAT* girl. And since we didn't have email or text messages, and I hadn't met her parents yet, I can also take you to the precise place on that Iowa highway where I heard her funeral announcement. I drove a couple more miles in stunned silence, before I realized it was scheduled on my 20th birthday.

I'll turn fifty nine in a week or so. Every year she fades a little more, but stopping to write this brings that hurt back, as sharp as ever.

This is a double edged sword and we should think twice before drawing it ...

Some of the problems you mention are oft-recurring ones in YA, especially the newer TV adaptations of existing SF and Fantasy franchises. Cheesy dialogue, focusing on teen angst and hookup culture, and in general poor writing with little regard for the source material. What I mean by the latter is that they build the world to suit the story, which rarely works. In contrast, in good SF and Fantasy, the world, the story, the people in it and the events around them all work together.

But the mistake that they seem to make repeatedly is thinking that the YA style has wide appeal with younger people. It doesn't - not when it is applied to existing franchises like this. The reception by (young) fans, and viewership figures, confirm that. Young people don't want everything to be YA, they want to be taken seriously and be served serious entertainment fare as well.

What is the state of Linux enterprise software these days? For most personal desktop activities, there are solid Linux options. But are there good options for ERP, Mail/ Calendar, Learning Management Systems, (video)conferencing, Knowledge Management? These days a lot of that kind of software runs in the browser on the client machine, but the server is still Windows.

I had VERY SPECIFIC requirements and I wanted the extended warranty. I would have paid 2x at a dealer. I know what I was doing.

I bought a used 2020 XC90 from CarMax last week. I did everything online from shipping it from Texas to Minnesota to financing the extended warranty. I walked in the door, gave them a cashier's check, and drove away within 10 minutes.

That's how it should be.