I see plenty of people around me living a life without work, or doing only a little work on their own terms, who are not in jail or dead, and often seem pretty happy. You have options. But no one is going to hand them to you on a platter. Capitalist societies have created an utterly unprecedented standard of living, not for the ultra wealthy, but for the masses. And social democracies have taken the edge off capitalism by ensuring a minimum standard of living that is still pretty good, to those who cannot provide for themselves. But screw you if you demand others to provide you with a living, instead of working for it yourself.

With that said, things did get out of control. Regulatory oversight is a joke, and so is antitrust regulation (or the enforcement of it). Companies becoming too large for our own good, and private wealth growing so large that they can simply buy politicians, legislators and governments. That's nothing new, but one would hope that we learned from past mistakes, and taken measures against that.

Though in all of this, the machines are merely tools, none of this happened because of the machines. Social media and AI made control easier, but before that people were controlled by other means. In my own country, there is not much variety of opinion on television, and almost all of the national and regional newspapers (as well as a TV channel) have fallen in the hands of 2 wealthy families, and it shows: variety in opinion has given way to a sameness, across publications that used to span the spectrum from left to right. And it's not just the ultra rich pulling the strings; here in Europe, politicians seem to be withdrawing within a class of their own, with their own agenda. People increasingly voting for radical right parties is not because people have become more right wing, or because they have been unduly influenced by AI or social media, but because they have become disillusioned with the mainstream politicians.

Except not to you. You're confusing data minimization (the website doesn't get your name from the token) with unlinkability (nobody can connect your activity to your identity). The *token itself* doesn't reveal your identity, but it leaks data in a wide variety of ways.

Even if you browse via a proxy, if the authorization service gets a token directly from your phone, it has now correlated your phone with your proxy-browsed history. A very common means to do secure authentication these days is SIM-based wireless PKI, wheren it has now connected you to your phone number. To governments, it offers a broad range of brand new vectors to correlate you to an identity if you, say, mention you had an abortion or criticize your local strongman leader, since they control the backend infrastructure that establishes the connection between the token and the identity. And not just at signup time every real-world digital credential must be able to be revoked if the phone is lost or stolen, or credentials expire or are revoked. So how does how does the open-source app prove a credential is still valid without "phoning home"? If the app checks a revocation status list, then ISPs, CDNs, or state security services can correlate the exact millisecond of queries to the revocation server with the submission of a verification token to a platform - each time it's submitted. Assuming that they can't just get it with more direct means than timing attacks.

Also, you cannot just "read the code". The frontend is open source, but what is being done on the backend is not. You have no clue what logging polciies, database schemas, operational security, etc the "designated national issuers" or servers handling the credential revocation are using, and what government intrusion has been forced on them. I'd feel a more comfortable if it were all happening from Brussels but handing it over to individual states, some of which at any given point will be authoritarian, is just handing them an easy new vector to unmask people.

As for your "Such systems are implemented in many different ways by member states for other purposes already." - yes, for filing taxes, healthcare, online baking, etc - things that you intend to do and must do under your legal identity. Not for anonymous conversations on the internet. Your argument basically reverts to "But people already do things non-anoymously on the internet , which reinforces my point that yes, this taking something from the "anonymous" category and putting it into the "easily unmasked" category.

If you think this won't be abused, I cannot help you. Not even just abused from a criminal or extrajudicial perspective, but even from a civil one, because orders to unmask someone can be subpoenaed.

It's standard here in Iceland. *Everything* verifies via the phone, using the same authorization mechanism (SIM-based wireless PKI). The service sends out a special-coded SMS, which gets intercepted and routed to a SIM that has cryptographic applet flashed into it, which triggers a system-level authorization popup for you to confirm (the popup displays a verification code which was included by the site, so you see the same code on both the site and your popup), and which you can then confirm (with your PIN) or reject.

It absolutely happens "within hours of each other" when (A) some news comes up on the topic, and (B) all you have to do is type into a box, "Find a vulnerability in this software". This isn't a situation where bug-hunting is a weeks or months-long process that takes all your effort.

I'll repeat: LLMs don't just on their own decide to go off and look for bugs to report.

"Member states run it through issuers they designate,"

Say goodbye to online anonymity then.

LLMs have certainly made people get really into conspiracy theories. *eyeroll*

The LLMs didn't just off on their own decide to look for hypervisor bugs. Users told it to look for hypervisor bugs. The timing means that multiple users did so at roughly the same time - probably in response to some news of some sort.

TIL.

Suicide at age 52. Shame. :(

...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.

It’s ironic that the abortionists actually think they’re going to have a voice in the debate 50 years from now when 28% of GenZ isn’t speaking and never had a chance.

When all the conservative pro-life group has to do is nothing to birth an authentic discussion and breathe new life into the debate, you tell me who’s “winning” here. When the depressed hypergamist who can’t find Mr. Right because she’s still assuming her Insta-standards didn’t disqualify 99% of humanity has more of a relationship with her SSRI dealer and the door to door boxed whine salesman, it’s telling a story. With a predictable ending for an ideology marching its own ass down a dead-end road.

The reasonable middle-ground, will have a say again. Or there won’t be anything to abort except the future.

Close your fucking legs until you’re ready to be one then. You don’t WANT the responsibility and accountability to act as an adult if it happens? Then stop acting like an adult and stop fucking like one. Plenty of men have learned to walk away because women cannot be accountable. They want EVERY abuse and excuse legalized to dismiss accountability.

Accountability hates to be reminded of the adult fact that adoption was and still is the natural alternative, long before abortions were invented.

”Tough shit. I already aborted it. Without your consent. Because I can. Deal with it.”

Don’t try and pretend that men cannot be affected by this legalized arrogance.

Oh yeah. When a man who was looking forward to being a father finds out she decided to abuse her "right" to not inform him and abort his future away, it's JUST like jerking off. Sure.

Fifty million abortions on this planet. Every single year. Year after year. There hasn't been an insect, bacteria, disease, natural disaster, or even human conflict that has even come close to that death toll, and likely never will.

It's ironic the species that defined genocide, defines the fuck out of it.

It makes sense to teach them about AI, what it is good for and what not to use it for. Just like how we learned how to use a calculator in primary school, after we learned manual multiplication and long division. A lesson for AI could be to ask students to write an essay, and teach them how to use AI to do research, let it help to give structure to their text, how to check sources and accuracy, and so on. It would be used as a tool a few times, to teach them about the tool, after they learn how to go about such things without using AI.

Aka you told it to drive out of control.

They told it to take a friggin' test.