If you want “papers, please” every time you back out of your driveway or go beyond your government-assigned oblast, then your suggestion is the digital version of the physical authoritarian nightmare that was imposed by totalitarianist regimes throughout history.
People have a right to complete anonymity, and should be able to go across the majority of the Internet just as they can go across most of the country.
That’s what you are missing.
Don’t get me wrong, I am also in favour of a single government ID, but in terms of combatting identity fraud, accessing public resources like single-payer healthcare, and making it easier for a person to prove their identity to authorities or employers.
It should not be used as a pass card for fundamental rights that normally would have zero government involvement.
I walk out my front door in the UK and I am not anonymous. Every transaction I make either identifies me through bank, railway or other id, or quite simply by my face standing in front of the coffee seller. My walk down the road is observed by neighbours and postmen.
Should my government arrest me without cause or trample on my free speech rights, I get that’s a problem but I am not sure why being anonymous helps. Having rights upheld by the courts helps, well trained police who respect the law helps.
I am honestly open to debate on this but I do find the “what if Hitler took over government where would we be” to be a problematic argument not a final answer.
> Should my government arrest me without cause or trample on my free speech rights, I get that’s a problem but I am not sure why being anonymous helps. Having rights upheld by the courts helps, well trained police who respect the law helps.
You're suggesting the same government that would violate your rights would then help prevent it? I don't follow. Any power structure (tiered or not) was wiped away by authoritarians, historically. They will not be helping in the worst case. Ideological capture (corruption) has already started eroding at UK rights and that took a much less overt effort. America has had a robust 3-branch system (executive, legislative, judiciary) corrupted by a singular cult of personality. THAT was highly unlikely to happen, but here we are.
With this being said, I do predict that anonymity on the web is going to be phased out. It will result in all sorts of changes to cultural norms across western nations that largely will curtail rights. I dread it.
Shouldn't we try tracing IP addresses and fining organizations for letting the traffic through or originating the traffic first? Seems a lot simpler.
Sorry maybe I should be clearer - the problem of tyrannical governments is not solved by being anonymous online, or indeed any technology that makes it hard for government to do the tyrannical things. Safety lies in an engaged citizenry that reacts to fundamental threats. The protests against the ICE in Minnesota being an example.
>>> It will result in all sorts of changes to cultural norms across western nations
I quite agree - but I (hope / think) that the benefits can outweighs the downsides if done well. Those nations that do it well will I believe find a rocket like boost to society and industry perhaps akin to post 1945 world. Those who don’t will fall behind.
> Every transaction I make either identifies me through bank, railway or other id, or quite simply by my face standing in front of the coffee seller. My walk down the road is observed by neighbours and postmen.
Are these the government? Is the bank the government? Is the rail company the government?
No? Then you have answered your own question.
A silo of identification between you and a service provider that uses the provider’s own tooling is still anonymity from government authoritarianism.
The fact that nearly all of these silos are leaky IRL - with the government eager to punch howitzer-sized holes through them for even more access - is not the point. It is a citizen-hostile flaw that needs patching through loophole-proof legislation, not an ID system that would violently eradicate any remaining separation of government from capitalism.
Remember: when government and capitalism rides in the same cart, it is called corporatism, and is the basis of Fascism. Which is what is happening to America.
The problem here is that pretty much every part of modern life has been government and capitalism riding in the same cart - from cities installing electric power stations 100 years ago, to roads and inventions like the transistor and internet itself was government and private capital working towards common goals.
The issue is we want “good” government and “good” corporate behaviour but not the bad. And knowing the difference especially ahead of time requires engaged citizenry, lots of feedback mechanisms that are not overwritten by corruption and noise in the mechanism (ie primaries materringnmore than elections is a feedback mechanism fail in my book)
> The problem here is that pretty much every part of modern life has been government and capitalism riding in the same cart - from cities installing electric power stations 100 years ago, to roads and inventions like the transistor and internet itself was government and private capital working towards common goals.
And here is your argument’s fatal flaw: mistaking public works, that benefits the commons and society as a whole, with government tracking.
Just a sec - you said:
“”” Remember: when government and capitalism rides in the same cart, it is called corporatism, and is the basis of Fascism. ”””
The implication being when gov and big business get together bad things do happen. My point is they can happen yes, but also same players can make good things happen - it depends on the players (and regulatory and reporting and voting and and and )
Government tracking can be good - tracking covid cases good, tracking criminals planning robberies good. It it can also be bad.
This is imo why this is such hard problem - there is no clear answers only something we want sensible courts to (quickly) decide upon based on good laws.
> Just a sec - you said: “”” Remember: when government and capitalism rides in the same cart, it is called corporatism, and is the basis of Fascism. ”””
>The implication being when gov and big business get together bad things do happen. My point is they can happen yes, but also same players can make good things happen - it depends on the players (and regulatory and reporting and voting and and and )
I think you need to go back and take some elementary courses on economics and how governments operate.
Public works are not “government and corporations in the same cart”. If that’s what you are coming to, that only demonstrates your ignorance bleeding out all over the place.
Taking a 2024 report on bot loads on the Internet is like taking a 1950s Car & Driver article for modern vehicle stats.
That’s how fast the landscape is changing.
And remember: while the report might have been released in 2024, it takes time to conduct research and publish. A good chunk of its data was likely from 2023 and earlier.
One of the biggest problems with this story is Karen phoning back and asking him to stop the fax.
Sorry, but faxes don’t work like this.
A fax takes in the entire transmission over the phone line, ends the call, and then - IF it has been set up to do so, instead of just storing the fax - it prints it out.
Which means that Karen had every ability to tell her fax to stop the print job herself. A fax is not like a printer, where the sender has the ability to tell the printer to pause or cancel the job. Once the fax starts printing, that original communication - the phone call with the fax transmission - has long since ended.
And if this fax machine can retrieve faxes from a fax server elsewhere on the network or on the Internet, that communications disconnect is even more severe.
Which makes me very suspicious of the entire story.
> It runs a 1.5Ghz Celeron processor with completely passive cooling (the whole computer is a heatsink),
The whole case is the heatsink. The exterior case, and not the SSD or the mainboard or the RAM or any of the other parts; only the case.
“Computer” is the case + everything inside of it.
This irritates me just as much as when people say “my body is sweating”. Like, NO. It’s not your body that’s doing that, it’s your skin. Your internal organs aren’t sweating to cool you off, only your skin is. Your body as a whole might be overheating, it might be sending the signals to your brain to start the cooling process, but it is your skin that is actually doing the cooling. That’s your skin’s job. It’s the only organ who can do that job.
People have children when they have economically vibrant lives that allow them to live comfortably, with sufficient energy left over after employment to raise said children.
People have children when they see a future for those children to inherit, when they can see a place in the future for their children to occupy.
People have children when they have hope and optimism, when they see their family unit benefitting more with children than without.
Put women into an environment that denies them all three of these, and despite many to most of them wishing for children at some point in their lives, most will go through extreme lengths to avoid having them.
It’s why, for example, many younger climate scientists are also forgoing children… because the emerging, pre-publish data that is not yet accessible to the public at large is absolutely horrifying, and they simply don’t want to curse their own offspring with the future that the data says we are hurtling towards.
> The article's central premise is based on a false assumption, which is that people taking UBI will be idle. There is no significant evidence to support that claim.
Absolutely true. Even meta-analyses of all UBI experiments to date - encompassing tens of thousands of adults - shows an increase in labour participation, not a decrease.
And if formal, capitalistic, profit-based jobs are no longer available, what barrier do we have against creating social jobs that need doing? Just because the Parasite Class cannot extract obscene amounts of wealth from those jobs doesn’t mean they don’t need doing. It just means there is no profit angle to have in doing them.
If I had no worries about my needs, I would love to work on open-source projects. Failing that, it would be ecosystem restoration or bioremediation. All jobs that can be free of government and capitalism, but which desperately needs bodies to yeet ant the issues at hand.
In any two-way communication, the onus is also on the other person to ask for clarification on anything which is suspiciously out of character or wildly out of left field.
In this case, the onus was on Perry to ask, “gays, as in gay people?”, and things could have gotten cleared up long before offence was taken.
Because there are just too many damn homophones in the English language. To take offence at one without confirmation is just stupid.
> The magic number to remember is the "Just Noticeable Difference" (JND). For dE00, JND is around 2.0. Below that, people struggle to tell two colours apart. Below 1.0, basically no one can.
Except for a tetrachromat. Specifically, a strong tetrachromat that has both four colour channels in the brain and a different frequency on the fourth cone.
Who are, admittedly, hella rare. Apparently there are less than a few dozen confirmed world-wide.
> admittedly, hella rare. Apparently there are less than a few dozen confirmed world-wide
What's actually hella rare is tests for tetrachromacy. Given the total number of people who have ever taken such a test, I think it's reasonable to assume there are significantly more than a few dozen actual tetrachromats out there.
It's theoretically related to color blindness, so you'd expect it to be as common. But the problem is even if your eye has the extra primary, your brain may not have developed the ability to "see" it. They had to test quite a few people with the proper genetic background before they finally found one.
That's fair but even colour blindness is mostly undiagnosed in practice - even with the comparatively high prevalence & awareness, actual figures for colour blindness are still grounded in speculative extrapolation.
I think it fundamentally comes down to whether your sense anomaly represents a significant disability. Colour blindness is a disability, but not one that's significant for the vast majority of people who suffer from it - I've worked with multiple colour blind graphic designers & they were good at their job. There's very little impetus to even seek diagnosis - if they weren't working in a colour-focused industry I suspect they may not have ever realised they had a disability at all.
Tetrachromacy then is an even harder case because it's not a disability at all. The impetus to seek "diagnosis" is zero. Also, even though as you mention there's technically multiple ways of detecting the various factors that need to coexist in tetrachromacy (i.e. (1) sensory testing, (2) physical presence of extra primaries, (3) neurological processing pathways), the latter two are either not directly detectable or never directly tested for - even in speculative cases of people having a 4th primary, the number of primaries present is generally hypothesised via some other avenue like testing for anomalous trichromacy. Ultimately we're heavily relying on direct sensory testing which is almost nonexistent in the general population. There's no way to accurately speculate on how prevalent it might be.
And the eye cones not are sharp filter, they overlap ranges with mid-low sensibility. That must be nought to someone with Tetrachromacy to percibe something different on a RGB screen.
> More precisely, she had an additional cone type L′, intermediate between M and L in its responsivity, and showed 3 dimensional (M, L′, and L components) color discrimination for wavelengths 546–670 nm (to which the fourth type, S, is insensitive).
Source: Wikipedia
Is that so? Our color perception is weird. It's one dimension split in three overlapping sectors. Adding a fourth sector may add information that makes it easier to distinguish colors.
Something I think about often is an oliver sacks book about an ethnic group that has a particularly high rate of true monochromacy. And the people with no color perception at all are particularly adept at spotting certain plants based on some characteristic of their leaves that is obscured by color. So even removing information can change perception in surprising ways.
OTOH sacks seems to have fabricated a lot of shit over the years so who knows if this is even real. Another thing I think about a lot now.
We do have four sectors, 3 color perception and then the brightness perception that is used in the dark. In mid darkness you get a mix of all of those, although the fourth is not really perceived as a color so it can be a bit hard to use.
Brightness is another dimension, not a "sector" (as I dubbed it) on the color spectrum. But it would be equal for all subjects in a test, so it can't add information.
Thanks to a genetic variation I have a variation that may be similarly useful. I aced the JND test without contacts and with adaptive white balance enabled, and I already know from playing I Love Hue that my fidelity and velocity improves when I have stereo vision.
It turns out that my left and right eyes are skewed apart along a magenta/cyan axis. Left is more cyan, right is more magenta. It’s not as strong an effect as 3d glasses, maybe no more than a 1-2% light gel, and under normal circumstances I mostly don’t notice it unless I’m doing color matching work.
If I try to do color matching with one eye, it’s boringly fine - 0.0022 JND, same as everyone else above. I’ll get some things slightly wrong as usual, in patterns that make sense for the hue shift.
But when I use both eyes, the binocular process that leads to 3d vision also locks on to color differentials as well as spatial, and synthesizes imaginary color gradients out of flat surfaces diagonally from contrasting corner edges. It’s not a problem for writing on paper or anything, but if you give me a grid of flat paint chips I can order them by hue because their gradient depths are wrong — like, the whole sort by hue in 2d grid thing is just “equalize the difference vector intensity across the vector field” and that’s a nice relaxing thing to do, right? In essence, it’s sort of like MIMO 3x2 vs. normal vision’s 3x1 or tetrachromacy’s 4x1.
I know this isn’t true 4x1 tetrachromacy because I discovered, through the video game Intake (in which I reached 10th place on the world leaderboard), that my ability to snap-differentiate color is considerably more error prone when the two colors are the exact hues of magenta-cyan that my eyes differ by. Which makes sense: those would be my lowest fidelity colors, because they have the least distance from the differential centerline, so trying to figure out which eye to use causes little stutters in my color parsing and more frequent errors in outcome. If it was “the same tetrachromatic in both eyes” I wouldn’t have trouble telling magenta and cyan apart, because I’d have a fourth receptor with which to detect R/B vs G/B shifts easily by their B/T difference.
I’m not sure if this is a normal circumstance or not, but since my vision is extremely bizarre (-5 left, +2 right) and I can function and drive without eye correction due to forming partial stereo depth out of blurry hue fields from the left eye and telescopic light fields from the right, I think that growing up without eye correction forced my brain to use hue matching to stabilize my visual field in the absence of the usual higher-fidelity “both eyes have the same focal plane” convenience that most people have. And my depth perception remains to this day extremely flawed; it works, enough that I can drive with absolute precision, but I can’t catch a thrown object for crap and I occasionally parse 2d shapes with contrast interplay as 3d shapes and then realize a moment later that there is no 3d shape there — painted lines on a particularly damaged bit of road might at first blink read as a curb — b/c my depth perception was formed by prioritizing hue and contrast at a reflexive level.
There’s probably a formula somewhere that I could use to calculate the theoretical boost in hue SNR by modeling two towers, each with tri-frequency radio receivers with slightly offset frequencies, and then calculating the net boost effect of frequency trilateration across a spectrum for radio signals of different frequencies. Someday I hope learn enough about radio to document that and prove where my nodes of worsened acuity are! Not that it much matters, but what a fun test it would be.
I have somewhat similar left/right near/far difference but because I am older, my focusable range is limited and I use contacts with what’s called monovision - one eye is for close vision and one eye is for far vision. Because my eyes are naturally almost the same (one contact is 0 and the other +0.25) I don’t need contacts for driving - I have natural monovision. But the gap in clear vision is at my computer monitor distance, so I have computer glasses that reverse the monovision.
They had to pull their version of string interpolation in 2024 because they couldn’t make it work.
C# has had string interpolation since 2015.
2015.
And it’s gotten a hell of a lot slicker and easier to use in the meantime.
Don’t get me wrong, you WANT Java if your app needs to remain up and running for years on end with tens of thousands of actions a second. There is a damn good reason, for example, why Azureus/BiglyBT is written in Java, after all… it remains up and running with absolutely crushing loads long after other torrent clients go titsup.
But “modern”??
Sorry, that is all sorts of hilariously wrong. From where I stand, “modern” Java feels a lot like C#… circa 2012.
People have a right to complete anonymity, and should be able to go across the majority of the Internet just as they can go across most of the country.
That’s what you are missing.
Don’t get me wrong, I am also in favour of a single government ID, but in terms of combatting identity fraud, accessing public resources like single-payer healthcare, and making it easier for a person to prove their identity to authorities or employers.
It should not be used as a pass card for fundamental rights that normally would have zero government involvement.
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