Great comment from that video: "When cars were banned from Central Park drivers whined and now we can't imagine it any other way." Everything is impossible until it is done.
I see this with new apartment buildings in my small, NIMBY-dominated town.
Building proposed: "It will be too expensive! We need housing for those making 10% of median income, not for those making the median income!"
Building mid-construction: "This building is unbelievably ugly! How could we let this happen to our town?!"
Building completed: "This building is completely vacant! Why did we allow this to be constructed? It's just proof we should never build anything again, it's not needed."
18 months later, building fully occupied, lots of happy residents with mixed incomes: Silence, because they are too busy complaining about all the other buildings.
I heard a similar statement recently, which is that due to the nature of politics, there are decades where nothing is possible, followed by a couple of years where everything is possible, and you spend the former preparing and pushing for the work that will happen in the latter.
The Norwegian Consumer Council published a report last week on commercial exploitation of children and adolescents online which included a warning against technical blocking of digital services. I found their reasoning against age verification in this context to be well informed, and think it is also relevant here:
> There are many ongoing discussions about whether to introduce technical measures to block or remove children and adolescents from certain digital services. In the report, the Norwegian Consumer Council cautions against rushing into such measures, and presents numerous principles that any such solutions must adhere to before potentially being implemented.
>–Age verification may seem like a relatively simple technical solution to a larger problem, but involves significant challenges related to the rights of children and adolescents, including privacy, social and political participation, and the possibility to seek information, says Inger Lise Blyverket.
>–It is also important to note that introducing such measures would require everyone to identify themselves online, which could mean that people over the age limit are exclud
ed. Many adolescents will also likely be able to circumvent such technical barriers.
>Before considering introducing such technical barriers, several criteria must be fulfilled. This includes, among other things, that the use of an age verification system is proportional to the problem one wants to solve, does not lead to the exclusion of vulnerable groups and individuals, and that it safeguards security and privacy.
> It is also important to note that introducing such measures would require everyone to identify themselves online, which could mean that people over the age limit are excluded
This seems like a solvable problem. Imagine there is an age verification authority that people can use to prove their age (upload a drivers' license or something). Websites can issue a cryptographic challenge for age verification that does not include the details of the website. The user then completes the challenge at the verification authority and is issued a token (that does not include the true identity of the user) proving they meet the required criteria. This way, the users' online activity is shielded from the verification authority and the users' true identity is shielded from the website.
Of course, none of this solves the problem of having someone else log in for you but that's a different issue.
What happens when, as a service provider you need to verify users in 190 different countries? That's at least 190 different age verification platforms you might need to integrate with. Probably 50 just for the USA.
These regulations do not necessarily apply only to the major platforms. If you run a phpBB forum in Australia with a few dozen old guys discussing steam trains, you will also be in scope of Australia's proposed regulations; that is a "social media" platform.
It is fine to be sceptical, but I think you should have taken a few minutes to read the method chapter in the study, seeing as that possibly could have eased your doubts. The first sentence cites the previously published design of the study. In the method chapter it is reported to be an "international, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial" with 3533 participants and a mean median follow-up of 3.4 years[0]. The cited article on the study of the trial states that "Participants were enrolled from 418 trial locations across 28 countries." [1]
Seeing as this is a topic where the discussion often derails into a flame war, I thought I'd leave a comment to clarify some things. Please try to avoid interpreting other comments in the worst sense, most people come from a place of good intentions.
While I cannot speak to the specifics of Ireland and Spain, I suspect their position is quite similar to Norway. Norway recognizes Palestine's right to exist based on the borders from before the 4th of June 1967. Even though Hamas controls the Gaza strip today, Norway is not recognizing Hamas as the goverment of Palestine, or is in any way rewarding them for the terror attacks they committed on the 7th of October last year. Currently it is Mahmoud Abbas, the party leader of al Fatah, who is recognized as the president of the palestinian people. Most countries refer to the Palestinian Authority when talking about Palestine and its future.
For a long time, the promise of recognition as reward for a lasting peace has been the strategy used by Norway, but now a Palestinian state is seen as a prerequisite for peace in the Middle East. Prime minister Støre says, among other things, the following about the recognition of Palestine as a state:
>When we recognize Palestine, we can more strongly encourage other countries to support the building of a Palestinian state and we can hold the Palestinian state accountable
>Recognizing a state is not about giving the green light to every policy a state pursues. We will not support a state that uses violence. The Palestinians must see that there is another hope than the path of violence.
It's an interesting theory, to force a two-state solution on Israel by treating it as a fait accompli. It's worth a shot.
They need to use that to put pressure on both sides. Israel has been building settlements outside those 1967 borders. Arguably, that's an even worse violation of international law than the attack on Gaza. The latter is part of a war, where the enemy is routinely putting its own civilians at risk. The former is a pure land grab, lacking any fig leaf to the contrary.
Unwinding that is going to be ugly. Settlers will either become part of Palestine, or be forced to leave. (Which they should, but they'll be rightly angry at the Israeli government.)
On the other hand, Fatah has no idea how to prevent Hamas in Gaza from conducting attacks against Israel. That would make the October 7 attacks an act of war. Countries recognizing Palestine as a country can use that to apply pressure to prevent such a war, but that is also going to be deeply ugly.
Perhaps Fatah could call on its new allies to help police itself, as it tries to establish itself as a first-order country?
I would be deeply grateful to these countries if they could find ways to meaningfully help resolve this conflict -- as opposed to just declaring sides, which sadly is all too often what's happening on the world stage. There's a lot of bad blood and a lot of meddling from outside pushing violence, including both the US and Iran.
Newly independent states electing their resistance movement to government is quite common actually and seldomly a major issue (relatively to pre-independence). In recent history we had FLN in Algeria and ANC in South Africa. In Northern Ireland Sinn Féin just got elected to government without issues, and they are likely to win a major electoral victories in the Republic of Ireland as well, nobody is worried about that.
An independent Palestine will likely have democratic institutions which protects tyrannical movements from misusing their powers. Most resistance movements obey these structures as long as they are fair.
Now if Israel continues their interference (which is very likely) we may expect violence to continue regardless of how the Palestinian government is composed. This happened after Irish independence (which saw British interference in Norther Ireland) despite Sinn Féin not entering government.
i dont think Sinn Fein had quite as radical a worldview tbh
Also,unlike Hamas, Sinn Fein never had the goal of taking over UK or that of establishing a global Khalifate, as Hamas and their Muslim Brotherhood peers do
I’m not sure neither Hamas nor the Muslim Brotherhood want to establish an global Caliphate. Both organizations are explicitly anti-imperialist. I think you are putting them in the same boat as another organization who is explicitly fascist that has this goal, and I suspect many people put them in the same boat for the only reason that they share a religion or ethnicity.
Sinn Féin wanted (and still want) to take over the whole island of Ireland, including Protestant majority areas in Northern Ireland. IRA—Shin Féin’s armed wing—went to civil war because they explicitly didn’t want a two state solution. IRA did numerous terrorist attacks even in England. I’m sure many Protestants in Northern Ireland were also afraid of loosing their state (or country rather), and when they got to keep their country, they promptly used it to oppress Catholics for another 75 years, or until the Good Friday Agreement gave Catholics equal rights. Sinn Féin ultimately cited with the Good Friday Agreement even though it kept the partition. What Sinn Féin ultimately settled for was equal rights. In Palestine, this would translate to the right of return and political and civil rights for Palestinians in Israel.
> so what happens when Palestinians inevitably elect Hamas representatives to parliament and /or presidency ?
They probably will (though Palestine's existing ICC membership and the top leadership of Hamas already having ICC warrants being sought and the ICC investigation continuing would likely have a substantial impact on which Hamas voices even have that opportunity, which eventuality, as much as the potential to embarrass Israel [I don't think they expect any Israeli target to actually see justice] was quite likely a factor in the more moderate Fatah leadership of Palestine joining the ICC and actively seeking their investigations of international crimes in Palestine in the first place.)
But since independence will have been established, they'll have to deliver on boring day to day stuff, without constant Israeli abuses like the cross-border sniping and the vetoing of all-Palestine elections that would include places currently administered by Israeli occupation authorities, etc., etc., etc.
New states formed by regional/ethnic separatist/independence movements often elect the political wing(s) of the group(s) that fought the prior government/occupier if independence is acheived after substantial armed struggle. This is usually far less of a problem than in actually revolutionary regimes that overthrow amd replace a central government, because there is usually less ongoing struggle against those invested in the old regime to justify post-victory war government, providing a pretext for repression and deprioritization of economic progress and QoL improvements for the citizenry.
I raise North Korea as a counterexample. You can apparently be an independent country, totally fail to deliver on the boring stuff, have your people starving for multiple periods, and still blame it all on "them" for at least 70 years.
I also question whether Hamas would recognize some other party winning the West Bank, or accept another party's authority over Gaza, so it might have to be a three state solution, not two state.
And I'm not optimistic that, faced with trying to govern Gaza, Hamas would turn the "wipe Israel off the map" parts of their charter into "eh, that's just talk from the old days".
Worse: Could Israel trust that Hamas would do that? After October 7?
So I think that you are being more optimistic than data warrants.
North Korea is not the result of a country electing the leadership of an independence movement after an armed struggle.
It would also be very bad if. say, an outside power occupied and imposed a totalitarian regime on all or part of Palestine, and continued supporting it for decades.
North Korea is a good counterexample, but it is hardly a relevant comparison (nor is it realistic) to Hamas. The Workers’ Party of Korea was funded after liberation from the Japanese Empire. Though it included many members of the resistance fighters (notably Kim Il Sung) the movement it self was not a direct continuation of the pre-independence resistant movements.
World War 2 is also a weird time in history to gain independence as external forces (particularly the Soviet Union and Western Allies) played a large part of the resistance. If you compare instead with Vietnam, which also was liberated from the Japanese Empire, but was promptly re-colonized by the French, where the same liberation movement that fought the Empire, also fought and won the French, and became the legitimate government of first North Vietnam and finally all of Vietnam. The Communist Party turned out to be a much more functioning government than the South Vietnam Government which had a series of Monarchs, military dictators, western imposed dictators, etc.
Finally I’d like to turn to FLN which is probably the most relevant comparison. FLN consolidated Algeria as a one party state for the first decades after independence, and it took a whole other rebellion for democratic reforms. But the terrorist activities of FLN (which were much more numerous and destructive than Hamas’) almost completely stopped (I don’t remember any post-independence terrorist activities of FLN actually).
I actually think that Hamas’ rule would be far more democratic than FLN’s. Hamas has a wide support among the people in Palestine, and they would easily win a fair and free election. If they would engage in undemocratic activities, it would cost them more then they could gain (granting international recognition [which honestly is unlikely]). All of this would be void though if Israel would continue interfering with an independent Palestine.
> in each Arab household tonight they are discussing how well killing Jews
You can't post dehumanizing generalizations about entire populations on HN, regardless of who you're slurring. Since we've already asked you to stop posting this sort of hellish flamewar comment to Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418627) and you've been doing it repeatedly since then, I've banned the account.
Since this is the point at which we usually get accused of taking a side in the underlying conflict, I suppose I'll point out that (1) these rules apply regardless of which side you're on, and how right you are or feel you are; (2) we've banned accounts for similarly abusive posts coming from the opposite side of the conflict; and (3) there are many other accounts on HN arguing for the same side of the conflict as you, and that's of course fine (as long as they stay within the site guidelines).
I was talking about a pattern of resistance movement becoming legitimate and functioning governments after independence. And how usually their previous atrocities stop as soon as their peoples are free from their former oppressors.
I don’t know why you are talking about this here as a reply. It sounds like you are trying to flamebait me.
> I actually think that Hamas’ rule would be far more democratic than FLN’s. Hamas has a wide support among the people in Palestine, and they would easily win a fair and free election. If they would engage in undemocratic activities, it would cost them more then they could gain (granting international recognition [which honestly is unlikely]). All of this would be void though if Israel would continue interfering with an independent Palestine.
I was responding to this. Its factually untrue as Hamas did win a free and fair election in Gaza (an independent state) and immediately killed all it's political enemies often in gruesome and shocking ways, which is pretty undemocratic. Since their 2005 win, they haven't held an election. They continue to kill and torture political dissidents, or anyone who does something they don't like, without any sort of trial or criminal proceeding. They apparently had a very widespread, mature secret police network that spied on their citizens. Israel only started their blockade 2 years after Hamas won their election when Hamas began attacking Israeli civilians and using Gaza as a base for terror.
There are countless examples of neighboring states that have a huge power imbalance that maintain their democracy (or some semblance thereof) even in the face of alleged aggression from the more powerful entity, which is why I said it's shocking to hear you blame Israel which isn't nearly as aggressive as China is to Taiwan, or Russia to it's neighbors, or the UK was to Ireland, etc. Look at Cuba and the US. Aggressively targeting civilians with suicide bombs, unguided rockets, mortars, etc isn't inevitable when you have a grievance with your neighbor, you can take the advice of pacifists everywhere that "The best revenge is living well". Look no further than Taiwain, Pakistan, various SA countries and the US, etc.
Basically, it's dishonest to claim that Hamas would magically become a better political entity if they were given control of the pre-war-1967 borders. They've shown and said time and again, their only aspiration is the murder of all Jews (everywhere) and control of all of the entire region from the river to the sea. That isn't controversial or flamebait, it's literally what they've said many times. I don't recall the Vietcong calling for the murder of all south Vietnamese citizenry. Nor did the FLN call for a global campaign of murder of all French people. Neither NV, nor the FLN stated that they didn't see their own citizens as worthy of protection. Hamas has called for both a global campaign of terror against Jews everywhere and has stated that the safety of the Gazan citizenry is the responsibility of the UN and not Hamas.
I think it's disingenuous to call someone flamebait for directly responding to your concluding paragraph, but then I looked at the username and realized who I was dealing with.
To respond to everything else you've said in the previous comment: Vietnam is a pretty terrible place to live if you disagree with their government, not sure why you're using it as an example. FLN too was pretty terrible to anyone who disagreed politically with the ruling party. Obviously the ruling government isn't gonna call it's own actions terrorism, but it absolutely extrajudicially attacked and killed people who it found disagreeable. Under your current definition, Hamas is in fact just as functional a government over Gaza as the FLN and Vietnam were/are over their people. To put it another way there's a giant chasm between real functioning government and despotic regime that gives the veneer of legitimacy. The Vietcong were functionally the same before an after their rise to power, so too, the FLN, they just used different labels.
That's not something to aspire to.
This will be my last communique on this thread with you, as usual you've spread a lot of misinformation with impunity, and I don't like to engage with people who don't start from a place of honesty. I wouldn't have responded to the first one either if I had seen who I was talking with.
I find that explaining errors and factual mistakes in LLMs or AI in general as hallucinations to be counter-productive. I don't know if the field has landed on a specific definition of what hallucination is, but I mostly associate it with garbled output from tokens like 'SolidGoldMagicKarp'[0] and 'davidjl'[1].
My understanding is that AI models like GPT have been able to convincingly convey the form of language, but not its meaning. It looks and sounds like how a human would communicate, but the AI is unable to imbue meaning into the words and sentences it produces. My knowledge of this comes from Lex Friedman's episode with Edward Gibson [2].
I think that's the fundamental issue with LLMs at the moment. It has managed to mostly exit the uncanny valley because, as far as most people are concerned, the text produced could just as well have been made by a human. I think this lends some credibility to the text produced by the LLM, because more or less all text ever produced has had a human behind it. This is no longer the case and as such there is bound to be a transitional period where we learn how to deal with this new technology.
BitTorrent's BEP regarding DHT also explains how it works quite clearly. The implementation is based on Kademlia and can be found here: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0005.html
Ohne Makler sponsored the project with 10k USD to make their website render correctly in Ladybird, it was covered in one of the browser update videos last year[0].
I can also recommend getting Consent-o-matic[0]. It automatically completes consent forms on most sites and denies all by default, although this is configurable. It is developed and maintained by the University of Aarhus in Denmark and is my opinion a better alternative to I don't care about cookies and similar extensions. It is also open source!
I recently rented at a place where the owner used Google Nest Wifi to get coverage of the whole property. One of those devices was placed in the window sill in my bedroom and didn't really cause any issues at the start. Until one day it replied to something I said and I found out it had a microphone, because of course it does.
When I found the hardware switch for the microphone the whole base of the device lit up in orange, with no way of turning the LEDs off without turning the microphone back on. The device also started speaking every time I touched it to "gently" remind me that the microphone was turned off while I was putting tape over the lights. I had to 10+ thin strips of duct tape in multiple layers in order to remove most of the light it radiated.
