I've read most of the posts from that blog and shortness is boz's style without hesitations. Try looking for your examples in the another articles, the topic of each article typically overlaps with few other topics.
I've thought about this a lot. But my conclusion is that many times the base idea is valuable but the author spends time using examples and different use cases to show you the effectiveness of the idea and a wider range of uses.
Of course this isn't always true but it's true quite often.
Take one random example - Spark: The Revolutionary Science of Exercise and the Brain.
The idea is in the title. You don't need to read more than that to benefit from the idea. But all the different varieties of benefit and pathways and studies the author sites are still valuable.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
idea is also in the title,and it displays so many different scenarios of people engaging with specialized fields and interacting with them in ways that relate to their past experiences.
Let's not pretend that the Jews just appeared there. 800k Jews were kicked out of middle eastern countries. If we rewind the clock shouldn't those Jews also get their Middle East land back? Or did they not terrorize enough people and hijack enough airplanes to qualify?
Source: I was born in Baghdad. Father and other relatives were tortured and murdered there.
Sorry that happened to your family. The Zionist project has killed a lot of innocents.
> 800k Jews were kicked out of middle eastern countries
As a result of the creation of Israel.
As for Jews killed or terrorized into leaving Baghdad: Israeli historian Avi Schliem (whose family fled Baghdad to Israel after the Baghdad bombings) says Iraqi Zionists were responsible for some of those bombings in his latest book.
Finally, should Jews who had their lands stolen in the name of Zionism have their lands back? In a just world, yes.
Can you send a link or explain how this can be done?
As a not super tech savvy parent I find it impossible to keep my son off screens. He always finds a workaround. So I'm a fan of age verification especially after reading The Anxious Generation, despite all the hate it gets from hacker news.
Age verification actually gets almost no hate. Society-wide surveillance gets a lot; age verification just happens to be the "think of the children" excuse to shoe-horn in the society-wide surveillance. As OP described, if the age verification is implemented as a "zero-knowledge proof" then we have age verification without society-wide surveillance and nobody is complaining.
Not OP and I don't claim a cryptographically secure solution. However https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223051 is as good as the controls around other age-restricted products IRL: alcohol, tobacco, and adult magazines. And it preserves anonymity.
He’s talking about zero knowledge proofs - it’s a neat use of graph coloring where you send an encrypted proof that a graph can be colored with three colors and no neighbors with the same color. The verifier makes a challenge to prove two nodes don’t have the same color, and the prover provides a key to decrypted just those two nodes. This process is repeated a number of times (with new colored graphs) until the verifier approaches certainty that the prover will always be able to show all nodes have neighbors with different colors.
This coloring problem is NP complete and somehow the thing the prover is proving is encoded in the graph structure. At the end of the day, the only thing the verifier is sure of is that the prover can make the three colored graph, 1 bit that corresponds to the thing the verifier wants to know (eg - does the prover have a token that can show they are over 18).
For simple yes/no questions ("Is over 18?", "Is US resident?") then you should look back to David Chaum's blind signatures and the work that came out of that back in the 90s. The math is super-simple to understand and there are a ton of even easier metaphors with envelopes and carbon paper that you can use to explain to your grandmother. Once you get someone to grok blind signatures it is easy to lead them to zero-knowledge proofs.
This is far from the best way to do it, but this is a much easier to understand example of how it could be done without having to read about math:
There's a type of token called a JWT that's really common nowadays, which is composed of 3 parts: Metadata describing encryption for the third part, the actual base64-encoded data, and the encrypted signature. The second part would include "is over 18" and "expiration date" to limit reuse/abuse, and is trivially decoded by anyone to confirm there's no personal information in there.
You'd get this token from your government site and copy/paste it into the site needing verification. The government site would provide a standard public key that can be used with the third part of the JWT to confirm it hasn't been tampered with (verification is built-in to JWT libraries). There would only be one public key that rarely changes, allowing the site to cache it, preventing the government site from correlating users based on timestamps - they never see the JWT from the other site (verification is done locally), and the other site would only need to pull the public key once for however many thousands of people use it.
...that said technical issues aside, I kinda feel like this would be the most acceptable version simply because it doesn't require the average user to trust the math - they could go to a JWT-decoding website and look at it themselves.
How would you prevent the token from being used by a different person than it was issued to? This is the online equivalent of getting your older cousin to buy you alcohol from the store using their own valid ID
I don’t get the analogy. I keep my house keys out of the hands of people I don’t want in. In this case, the age verification is being circumvented by someone simply asking another person to perform it on their behalf.
I guess the practical answer is that it’s impossible because there’s always the option to have an adult perform the verification and then hand over the device to the minor
Yes, the analogy is the burglar getting into the house by asking you to open your door for them. Adults are permitted to decide such a thing, because they know the risks and are expected to be able to reason about that. When an adult has decided, then there is no problem, as far as age verification is concerned. We have regulations when adults are in fact not able to decide such a thing "correctly".
We already have penalties for adults mistreating children by exposing them to dangerous things, but this is orthogonal to age verification.
Mostly because online process can scale a lot further and faster. An older cousin can only walk into a store to buy so much alcohol but a stolen token can be reused a million times in a second.
I mean one sided criticism that doesn't account for the damage done to kids by having no online limits, and assuming everyone in the world is as tech savvy as they are.
I rode a bicycle from Canada to Mexico (in about a month) with a close friend. We bought a book called Bicycling the Pacific Coast (before smart phones).
I had a cheap $150 univega bike and my friend had a $3000 cannondale. His broke mine didn't :)
We were amateurs. We hitchhiked to a bike shop near San Francisco to fix it. Had some saddle bags with our tent and sleeping bag, clothes and water.
It's very doable. Hardest part is just showing up.
America, definitely doable. He's got that cart and he's going through civilization as much as possible, so long as you do time it reasonably there shouldn't be any major problems. Darian Gap, though, wow! Likewise, the Bering Straight.
I watch in foreign language without subtitles or with foreign language subtitles. I use language reactor so the translation is right there, on mouse hover. It also allows you to quickly rewind the scene, so you can watch and hear same dialog multiple times. That helps a lot too.
Also, I happily watch dubbings. Dubbings are easier to understand then original shows. Imo, it is fully ok to watch Nordic show in Spanish. Or an American show I have already seen, but this time in Spanish.
I used languagereactor.com for learning spanish for a while (a browser extensions that supplements netflix for language learning). It allows a second subtitle track, shows word translations on hover over the subtitle, and bookmark words to your vocab database with a single click. I exported the vocab after a few days into Anki to learn them. It is a bit finicky to setup and learn the tool, but overall good motivator to keep learning.
After about 6 months I became proficient enough to drop the extension and just watch now in plain spanish audio and - depending on the content - spanish subtitles.
Hebrew is a very niche language, so it won't fix the core problem that there is no hebrew-native content.
Forgive the basic questions, but you were using Spanish original videos, with first-order Spanish subtitles already available, then adding second (English?) subtitles via language reactor?
I ask because I went down this path a little to help my German learning, but struggled to find the right combination of videos at the right level with the right subtitles available. (I was trying to use free apps/services though).
You can have any subtitle track be "blurry" in language reactor and only show it on keypress or mouse hover. Depending on your learning level, listening comprehension etc. you might not need a first or second subtitle, or configure the subtitle to be "blurry" by default.
Having 2 subtitles is only helpful in the beginning, where you do not understand entire sentences or sentence constructs sometimes, but you want to understand that entire sentence to continue to follow the storyline (and continue to be engaged). Very quickly I switched to having only the spanish subtitle and lookup individual words.
IIRC, Languagereactor also enables all the subtitles (netflix somehow filters the list of available subtitles based on the country you are in). But I should add that I am actually living in spain, so all the content has spanish subtitles available (and english, which I used as a reference instead of german).
They could also consider making manual youtube playlists and setting up a media computer with something like TubeArchivist. Selfhosting youtube is the only actually useful thing in my "homelab".
I'm only mentioning this because for years I've been making music playlists and archiving them. When you come back to them on youtube a few years later a few songs are always gone/ unavailable. Some of my favorite songs don't exist on yt anymore
YouTube does a really good job at making playlists on the fly. Choosing the first song on YouTube will get you a playlist of somewhat similar songs. It took me a while to get used to relative to Spotify but now I much prefer the YT method.
I don't think any of those items have had the significance and decisiveness of social media, or have been controlled by billionaires who have corrupted the election systems.
Social media seems far more dangerous and harder to control because of the power it grants its "friends". It'll be much harder to moderate than anything else you mentioned.
As someone who's considered taking my company public (not a tech company) it's nice to see easier listing requirements on this exchange than the big ones.
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