This point of view has more to do with your information diet than it does with reality. Companies un-merge and spin out all the time, for many reasons. Mergers and acquisitions are more interesting because they are often associated with a growth story. We like success.
Aswath Damodaran, who teaches corporate finance at NYU Stern, has a bunch of great talks and content about this where he discusses how companies should act their age. When older companies that are no longer paying dividends are moving into a divestiture phase, they restructure and split up. What we are seeing with some of these big tech companies is that they are transitioning from an exciting growth story into an extractive dividend story in a way that's becoming harmful to consumers. That's why we're talking about breaking them up, and thats the line their management will have to walk if they want to maximize the value of the firm to shareholders through the decline.
This is true, I'd go much further than the OP here and say the barrier for merger should be MUCH higher than the barrier for spin-out or split.
There's no shortage of obvious problems that can arise from concentration of influence and control over a market. So just try to prevent it. Trade some max efficiency for redundancy + anti-corruption/pro-competition/pro-consumer market forces.
The real benefit of a merged company is that where the two original companies were competing in the same market, it would be illegal for them to collude to set the same prices as eachother.
However, when merged, they can do exactly that - which allows them to extract more profits.
Rather than denying mergers, I suggest merged companies have an extra sales tax for ever on all goods they sell where they used to be competing - with the size of that tax set by the regulator to estimate the benefit they get.
Merged companies are more able to compete. Combining duplicate corporate structures let them save on costs, etc.
It's not a strictly bad thing - iirc spirit? Airlines? Wanted to merge with someone, got denied, and went bankrupt anyway, depriving people of any competition at all.
Companies that have massive startup costs (Automakers, Airlines) are harder to replace. This is a failure of the system we are in. Seems like the free market cannot properly evaluate value when all the cash is going into nonsense like Bitcoin, NFT and now a lot of the AI.
Allegiant is an old Airline that has had a lot of problems. Breeze is new but both are starting super small and are not planning to really cover Spirits extended network anytime soon. The result of Spirit dying is alot of that prior investment in second tier cities/airports is just gone for the forseeable future. The potential value that could have generated will now not come to pass.
>Poorly run companies are supposed to go bankrupt, that’s the feedback loop keeping management in check.
The problem that is occuring in my opinion is that Spirit is a symptom of a greater problem. The "K shaped" economy is not only segregating groups of people into haves and have nots, its extending into regions of the country. Losing major airlines access is the precursor to entire regions declining, and ultimately dying completly. If the AI robot world comes to fruition maybe many humans just have no economic value at all.
To be fair, Spirit suffered from multiple reasons and a merger with Frontier may have just delayed the inevitable.
Note: I was very emotionally invested in Spirit because they made possible many fascinating trips that wouldn't have happened so my take may be biased. I can only think of a handful of companies that clearly positively impacted my life and Spirit was one of them.
1. Post COVID, the structural costs went up: pilots, flight attendants, suppliers demanded more money. Spirit paid decently well, had decent benefits from what I heard. When you are Spirit...to attract good people you gotta pay. It really showed in their operations, they had 0 crashes during their 34 years and had notable excellence in their maintenace operations. People thought they flew rickety junk planes. The reality was that they had a stellar run.
2. Pratt & Whitney GTF issues: Spirit actually had quite a young Airbus only fleet. Great for lowering costs through fuel/maintenance savings, customers enjoy the newest best planes...the downside is that if a major issue comes out, it could spread across the entire fleet. Thats exatly what happened: They leased brand new planes and then a serious engine issue occured that forced grounding of many new planes for 1+years....while they are still paying the leases on those planes.
3. The bigger competitors are really just credit card companies that fly planes as a hobby on the side. That gave them the financial ability to siphon off customers by introducing a barebones tier. Spirit customers aren't really the type to play the credit card points game so they couldn't copy what the big guys do and despite travel increasing after COVID, people decided to pay a bit more to not have the barebones experience.
4. Spirit was in the process of revamping their entire offering to better compete. More simple tiers with things baked in and less extreme customization that they used to offer. Makes sense: 9$ fares were gone for good so maybe they could compete as a solid basic tier. They did not move fast enough to turn things around. Its a bummer because it looks like they had an interesting plan after the second bankruptcy but we never got to see it fully play out.
5. The final nail in the coffin: The Iran war took out any remaining breathing room. They were just coming out of their second bankruptcy. I personally feel they had a viable plan to try and turn things around but the Trump admin just let them die without really trying. From my understanding(and I could be wrong) Trump pulled some nonsense where he wanted like 90% of the airline for peanuts, they would support ICE transport operations etc. The owners of the debt obviously said no and that was the end of that. Great job losing 17k employees their livelihood. Since this is a tenure based industry, many end up starting from scratch at another airline. A emergency merger or something would have had better consequences for the employees. Will be interesting to see how this affects the midterms since Spirit was based in Dania Beach, FL (Miami area)
The idea behind a Frontier + Spirit merger makes sense. The airlines combining together can cover a greater network, Spirit was getting rid of its poor leases through bankruptcy and maybe they could have been a major airline in the low end. The argument against is that Frontier is not doing too well either so should you really combine bad + bad?
The whole problem of monopolies is that they can set the monopoly tax as high as they want. There is no real upper limit. What you suggest will
1) make monopolies legal
2) set a floor for the monopoly tax (whilst excessive company profits are bad, obviously companies MUST make a profit, and hence whatever this governor sets as extra tax must be added to the costs for customers. Profit = good (even if you are a communist), only excessive profits or profiteering are bad. Otherwise, after a short while, no more company, no more goods, no more service. No exceptions, not even under different systems. Or in other words: communist companies must make profits too, and just ask some older Russians, even if that means making a profit at the expense of employees)
This seems to me like it would be by far the worst of all worlds. This would mean lots of monopolies, with the specific purpose of making life more expensive.
Conglomerates may not be as nimble and agile as single-focus companies, but they are uniquely more resilient to economic shock events, and branches being "unprofitable" for a time can be supported by others.
Unfortunately, MBA beancounter/neoliberal extremism aka "throw out everything not the core business" has become the norm... and so, with Covid, Ukraine and Trump's tariff and Iran wars, we got a ton of "single focus" companies that are struggling hard, and with everything deemed "not the core business" including internal IT, cleaning etc. sourced out, many a corporation has become internally enshittified.
Conglomerates aren't a strictly optimal form of organization. They are more resilient, but they are also massively bureaucratic and can lose their focus. They may also be able to exert a disproportionate amount of leverage on vendors and suppliers.
I'm not saying infinitely asset-light companies are strictly superior either.
I'm saying there's no silver bullet or free lunch here.
If you look at it from one layer above, capital markets that enable the continuous recycling of corporate structures into smaller or larger as needed are more resilient than those in which company structures are ossified.
Of course not every deal is for the better. But no M&A isn't good either. Speaking as a former Wall St M&A banker.
Objectively no. For example carbon taxes or other environmental taxes have been proposed by free market advocates since the 70s and never been implemented (from the left you see advocacy for environmentalism but not related to taxation)
Also if we had enough taxes, the wealth inequality would not be ramping up to great depression levels and basic necessities like healthcare and housing would not be catastrophically related to bankruptcies in america.
If you are a worker, specially one in the upper middle class range of salaries, then yes. You are being over taxed. But that is simply because those below you have nothing to contribute and the system refuses to tax those above you appropriately. You are a local maximum in a system that is not globally efficient, so you have too much tax, the country doesnt
Vague assertions with no evidence don't really help the discussion. If someone is going to assert such a strong claim like "We have more than enough taxes on working people and not enough on the wealthiest classes.", they really need to at least define what they mean by "working people" and "wealthiest classes" and then give some evidence to show that "taxes are disproportionately applied" between these groups. (You say it was a "truthful comment" but how can you even be sure you are interpeting the comment the way the original poster meant?)
(In general, whether people agree or disagree with an assertion I would hope they wouldn't downvote something as long as the person contributes enough to the discussion that the reader can understand what they are asserting and can check for themselves if the evidence they give supports or doesn't support the assertion.)
Wealth inequality in the US is so bad that the statement is true with pretty much any reasonable interpretation.
The top quantiles of the population (10%, 1%, 0.1%, billionaires) are paying less taxes than they should in a fair system; and that statement becomes increasingly illustrative of the situation the smaller and richer the quantile you choose is.
The fact that wealth inequality is _accellerating_ should be enough to tell you that the taxation system is unfair towards the poorer end.
> This point of view has more to do with your information diet than it does with reality. Companies un-merge and spin out all the time, for many reasons.
That’s condescending and wrong. Mergers and acquisitions are hundreds of times more common than spinoffs.
IBM is more than 100 years old, has defined a huge part of how we think about computers, made plenty of its employees and workers of the wider field rich, has sold many businesses it considered distracting, and is still worth $200B+. Anyone saying "IBM" in the sense of "stagnant failure" is delusional.
Not to mention they are still at the forefront of materials science and industrial design, and just so happen to manufacture bespoke CPU & server platforms that run circles around all the hyperscalers...
>What we are seeing with some of these big tech companies is that they are transitioning from an exciting growth story into an extractive dividend story in a way that's becoming harmful to consumers.
Alphabet is rolling out autonomous driving vehicles in many cities around the USA, potentially getting rid of the need to drive a car in 90% of today's use cases.
How is this not still an exciting growth story? My kids might never need to drive a vehicle, even though we live in a car dependent suburb.
Some cute tech projects do not justify a massive monopoly. Google is financing Waymo using the ~300 billion dollar it extracts annually from consumers via ad spending. I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.
A product/service that can drastically reduce the top cause of injury and death, as well as give safe mobility to so many who do not currently have it is not a "cute tech project".
>I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.
Alphabet's entire revenue divided by the total amount of goods and services sold is miniscule, so I don't see how it could be mathematically possible to pay substantially less on anything you buy.
>and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.
This is the free market sorting out self-driving cars.
Self-driving cars are an absurdly inefficient way to reduce traffic deaths that exists only because it makes substantially more money for shareholders than the alternatives. You are being witheld a good and cheap solution now for the promise of a worse and expensive solution some time in the future. All the while people keep dying.
Oh, and what's this "those who don't have it" bullshit? If anything, turning driving into a subscription service will mean mobility becomes harder for many people, as dirt-cheap used cars slowly stop being available. As for people who can't drive for whatever reason, they already have taxi apps. And don't think for a second that self-driving taxis will be cheaper in the long term than regular ones, only the margins will go up.
I prefer to live in reality, where American suburbs are nowhere near dense enough for public transport to pencil out, plus there is no political will from the voters for it. No one is tearing up existing roads and replatting all the detached single family homes to more dense housing.
Waymo is a real solution to reducing injuries from distracted and drunk drivers, as well as reducing insurance costs. Obviously, if Waymo is the only game in town, then prices will be high but hopefully there will be competition. Owning a car 24/7 along with space to store it and insure it is not necessarily always cheaper than renting it per trip.
A robotic car can be utilized for far more hours per day amortizing its costs over far more trips making each trip cost less. Which, if there is competition, should result in lower prices.
> I prefer to live in reality, where American suburbs are nowhere near dense enough for public transport to pencil out, plus there is no political will from the voters for it. No one is tearing up existing roads and replatting all the detached single family homes to more dense housing.
Car Country was designed by the US car lobby. Political will of the voters? Oh yeah sure, now a century into it that’s also not palatable for home owners and the like.
> Oh, and what's this "those who don't have it" bullshit? If anything, turning driving into a subscription service will mean mobility becomes harder for many people, as dirt-cheap used cars slowly stop being available.
Too many people are in the "You Will Own Nothing And You Will Be Happy" camp.
Apparently the thought of lifelong indenture is a plus to these people :-/
You mean public transport? I live in a country with one of the best public transport systems in the world. I enjoy it, but please don't fool yourself into thinking that it is cheap. It is not, very much NOT. All the big Czech cities spend between 25 and 35 per cent of their municipal budgets on public transport, and those are mostly already mature systems where the most expensive work like laying track is already amortized. New trams and buses, repairs, drivers wages, electricity, nothing is cheap nowadays.
Sure, an American city can decide to build a new tram or subway system from scratch, but don't promise anyone that it is going to be cheap. It won't, doubly so if the mayors stipulate high wages for the workers, like NYC does.
And even the best public transport system fails at the peripheries, where density of the population drops under a limit of viability. Then you have two buses a day even here in CZ.
Compared to every person owning their own car, but now it has a bunch of extra sensors and a cloud subscription? And the city still needs to build and maintain the roads.
Or a bunch of robotaxis, which reduce the up-front cost and amount of parking needed, but the operational and infrastructure costs remain.
I am not excited about my transportation becoming a subscription service, likely through regulatory capture. It will almost certainly mean less freedom of choice for me.
I am a fan of kids being able to roam freely because we don’t have to worry about people in their huge pickup trucks and SUVs looking down at their phone mowing down people and not even noticing.
It will certainly mean more freedom for those who don’t want or can’t use a giant vehicle to move around.
I trust automated vehicles with cameras and LIDAR to do a much better job of avoiding collisions.
what i personally find most insightful about this website is how the techbro culture will do anything except consider the needs of the many. why bother with good transit when we can automate cars? why bother with copyright when we can just steal content at a scale that few can comprehend.
The “needs”, or rather revealed preferences of many, is to live in detached single family homes on minimum 3,000 sq ft lots, with space for personal car storage.
There is no way public transit works in that kind of non dense living arrangement.
Do you have data to show Americans want to live in Manhattan/Tokyo style or even European style 4 story apartment/shared wall buildings?
Population trends in the US show me the suburbs are far more popular, at least among those who end up having children.
People in the US don’t magically “want” giant pickup trucks and pedestrian killing SUVs. They want cheap and practical vehicles, neither of which are available in large quantities. Notice how the advertising for pickups works? Straight, white, rural men in jeans telling you how your expensive pickup can drive off road? And then you read the manual and warranty where that exact usage is either forbidden or discouraged.
Same with the suburbs. Those we designed and pushed by the car lobby and the US made it illegal or very unprofitable to build any alternatives
Where is your data showing that people “prefer” this?
My data is the far lower prices for equivalent sized townhouses (homes that share walls) compared to detached single family houses, the increasing volumes of larger vehicles sold over smaller vehicles, and higher proportions of children in suburban areas compared to urban areas.
People like space, people like choosing who to share space with, and people like feeling more powerful (sitting higher up in bigger vehicles).
In my area, Zillow shows sold home prices for comparable townhomes vs detached SFH at roughly 30% lower price per square foot. People are willing to pay a couple hundred thousand dollars to not share walls.
>Those we designed and pushed by the car lobby and the US made it illegal or very unprofitable to build any alternatives
The US (federal government) didn't make it illegal or unprofitable to build more dense housing.
Local city and county level voters made it illegal and unprofitable, because more dense housing means poorer people, and poorer people means schools with kids who have poorer parents, which typically means a peer group that may not perform as well.
I think it's the hierarchies of agents summarizing each others' summaries before presenting a final answer to the user. The principal agent has the full context from all its workers, but when it distills this down to a message to the user it summarizes it into a mess of confident jargon that pertains to a conversation the user wasn't a part of and never saw.
Very cool interface and reminiscent of figma/excalidraw in the way they provide an infinite 2d canvas for shapes and figures. Most tools of these types tend to implement layers as well, which might be loosely analogous to multiple desktops and could be a neat interface element to explore. The impetus for layering in a drawing tool is very different from the impetus for doing such in a desktop windowing tool.
The 3d demos are similar to what you experience when using a VR headset with desktop emulation software. I ran experiments with that for several months and while the concepts were interesting, context switching in a simulated physical space was actually a lot slower than alt+tabbing between things.
I played with XR UX years back. Three quick thoughts.
I liked a hierarchy of context switching devices. Open tabs, windows, workspaces, for me are distracting clutter, scaled by some distance metric. Having to physically carry a laptop to elsewhere in a room had "I've left work for home" nicely strong context switching vibes. Followed by resumable-but-not-currently-live VMs/workspaces, etc, down to, well, gazing at a different window. So variety in costs and benefits.
I wanted a drawing-like experience for a laptop keyboard, eyes-on-screen hands-on-tablet, so kbd as touch surface (and 3D tracking above it), with the screen showing, in faint shallow-3D offset, hand position and a dynamic kbd UI. Meh. But shallow-3D UI, something 3D one can live with all day without VAC eyestrain, seemed intriguing but little explored.
With current AI, even with small 1080p laptop/HMD viewports encouraging manual packing, I'd be tempted to try escaping the whole decades-long "how do I arrange windows" mess, and tool up a personal-assistant-like "knowing what you're currently up to, here's a screens/canvases/workspaces/windows tasteful layout for that, arranged in ways you've liked".
In an age of malicious agentic AI, this level of access is negligent. A lack of engineering controls preventing this from happening at all means that a simple phishing or supply chain attack could easily have resulted in the same outcome or worse.
This sort of conversion gets coverage every once in a while and it's been neat to see old frames getting chopped onto new electric drivetrains. I spoke with one of the people interviewed in this article[1] a couple years back about converting an old truck I have sitting around into an EV.
The Model 3 approach takes their unified rear axle (motor,axle,wheels) and mounts it into an existing frame. Then you just need to find a place to stuff the batteries, retrofit some high-voltage electronics, and you're off to the races. One of the drawbacks of that approach is that it changes the stance of the vehicle, but for this Mustang that doesn't seem to matter much - it still looks classic.
Other converters either go for the high end with a model S and fit the motor into a traditional drivetrain for a sleeper build, or they go for the low end and take an old forklift motor and batteries and build what is effectively a street-legal golf cart. Prices range from $5-100k depending on your level of DIY and how dangerous of a classic car you want on the other side of the process.
sounds like a good opportunity to bring back "letters of marque." These were less about authorizing ships to fight back against pirates, and more about authorizing private to your army to find and capture pirate vessels with the expectation that they would be allowed to keep whatever loot they captured. sounds like we're taking a step in that direction as the Internet is being identified as Lawless as the sea.
It says something about modern Congress that when one of the powers explicitly granted to Congress became relevant for the first time in 100 years, their first instinct was to delegate it away to the President.
For the skeptics here, this is the exponent thats driving the development of datacenters in space. The data has utility but it will be stuck in orbit. Space-based storage and processing makes a lot more sense when you consider that getting all that data to ground is challenging now, and will soon be impossible.
Yes, the original film for moon explorer has been stuck in orbit around the moon for decades. The world had a large network of satellite communications, and there was Arciebeo, but if it's not done here ... A few microwave dishes on all the NSF buildings should easily take are of it. Oh we had those ... But... What about streaming tape? Just ask Uncle Vint.
We are missing accessible cryptographic infrastructure for human identity verification.
For age verification specifically, the only information that services need proof of is that the users age is above a certain threshold. i.e. that the user is 14 years or older. But in order to make this determination, we see services asking for government ID (which many 14-year-olds do not have), or for invasive face scans. These methods provide far more data than necessary.
What the service needs to "prove" in this case is three things:
1. that the user meets the age predicate
2. that the identity used to meet the age predicate is validated by some authority
3. that the identity is not being reused across many accounts
All the technologies exist for this, we just haven't put them together usefully. Zero knowledge proofs, like Groth16 or STARKs allow for statements about data to be validated externally without revealing the data itself. These are difficult for engineers to use, let alone consumers. Big opportunity for someone to build an authority here.
>We are missing accessible cryptographic infrastructure for human identity verification.
like most proposed solutions, this just seems overcomplicated. we don't need "accessible cryptographic infrastructure for human identity". society has had age-restricted products forever. just piggy-back on that infrastructure.
1) government makes a database of valid "over 18" unique identifiers (UUIDs)
2) government provides tokens with a unique identifier on it to various stores that already sell age-restricted products (e.g. gas stations, liquor stores)
3) people buy a token from the store, only having to show their ID to the store clerk that they already show their ID to for smokes (no peter thiel required)
4) website accepts the token and queries the government database and sees "yep, over 18"
easy. all the laws are in place already. all the infrastructure is in place. no need for fancy zero-knowledge proofs or on-device whatevers.
The government will want some way to uncover who bought the token. They'll probably require the store to record the ID and pretend like since it's a private entity doing it, that it isn't a 4A violation. Then as soon as the token is used for something illegal they'll follow the chain of custody of the token and find out who bought it.
No matter what the actual mechanism is, I guarantee they will insist on something like that.
if the goal is to "protect children", or just generally make parts of the internet age-gated, my proposal is 100% fine.
if the goal is "surveil everyone using the internet", yes, very obviously my proposal would not be selected, and you will have to upload your id to various 3rd-party id verifiers.
I think something like your proposal actually sounds the most logical. I just think they will bolt on chain of custody tracking to it, while promising it will only be used for finding "terrorists" or something.
Yes, while I was reading the article I couldn't help but think about notaries public. Seems like something like that would be government's go-to for this if they weren't quite so overfed on tech industry contributions that lead them down the path of AI solutions.
I'm not sure that's the right answer here, but I think it ticks a lot boxes for the state.
The nice thing about something bolted on like that is that it is not an essential feature of the core design and has no bearing on the original goal. It can be removed or reformed. The same isn't true of the approaches we are heading towards now.
What you’re describing is infrastructure that doesn’t necessarily exist right now for use online, and has all the privacy problems described. Why should I have to share more than required?
it has none of the privacy problems described, and 95% of the infrastructure exists right now (have you ever purchased smokes or alcohol?)
to go on tiktok, you enter a UUID once onto your account, and thats it. the only person that sees your id card is the store clerk that glances at the birth date and says "yep, over 18" when you are buying the "age token" or whatever you want to call it. no copies of your id are made, it cant be hacked, theres no electronics involved at all. its just like buying smokes. theres no tie between your id and the "age token" UUID you received.
theres no fanciness to it, either. itd be dead simple, low-tech, cheap to implement, quick to roll out. all of the enforcement laws already exist.
>Why should I have to share more than required?
you shouldnt. having to prove age to use the internet is super dumb. but thats the way the winds are blowing apparently. if im gonna have to prove my age to use the internet, id much rather show my id to the same guy i buy smokes from (and already show my id to) than upload my id to a bunch of random services.
The problem with this scheme is that it's exactly as protective as requiring someone to tick a "I'm of legal age" tickbox in the software they wish to access. Anyone who is of legal age can buy UUIDs and pass them around to folks who are not.
Having said that, I think having an "I'm of legal age" tickbox goes quite far enough.
For the ultra-controlling, setting up a "kid's account" using the tools already provided in mainstream OS's [0][1] is a fine option.
>The problem with this scheme is that it's exactly as protective as requiring someone to tick a "I'm of legal age" tickbox in the software they wish to access.
no, it is exactly as protective as the protections for purchasing alcohol or buying smokes or other controlled substances/products.
buying smokes/alcohol when underage is obviously harder than "click this box". (did you ever try to buy smokes/alcohol when underage? you cant just go up to the clerk at the store when you are 14 and say "trust me bro, im 18/19/21".)
>Anyone who is of legal age can buy UUIDs and pass them around to folks who are not.
same for smoking and alcohol. i could go to the store right now and buy smokes, then hand them to my 10 year old.
we have laws already in place to punish selling smokes/alcohol to underagers, and laws for consuming smokes/alcohol when underage. we can apply those laws to your internet-age-token.
most people seem fine with the current trade-off for smokes/alcohol. i see no reason why tiktok needs to be treated as more dangerous than either.
>Having said that, I think having an "I'm of legal age" tickbox goes quite far enough.
i agree with this and everything you said afterwards. id rather not have any of it.
> no, it is exactly as protective as the protections for purchasing alcohol or buying smokes...
Right. That's exactly as protective as that tickbox. [0] As I mentioned, any of-age person can distribute those UUIDs to people who are not of-age. Unlike with the proposed ID-collection-and-retention schemes (that are authoritarian's wet dreams) the vendor of the UUID is not responsible for ensuring that that UUID is not later used by someone who is not of-age.
If you were to -say- make alcohol vendors liable for the actions of of-age people who pass on alcohol to not-of-age people, then you'd see serious attempts to control distribution.
[0] Don't forget the existence of preexisting parental controls in every major OS. IME, this is a hurdle that's at least as difficult to surmount as the ID check done in non-chain convenience stores.
>Right. That's exactly as protective as that tickbox. [0]
no, it isn't, for reasons already mentioned but i will say it again for clarity:
- a 14 year old can click "im of age" on a checkbox.
- a 14 year old cannot go into a gas station and buy smokes. they will be declined.
>As I mentioned, any of-age person can distribute those UUIDs to people who are not of-age.
again... same with smokes and alcohol! but we are okay with how smokes and alcohol are regulated right now.
tiktok is not worse than a bottle of vodka. we are okay with how vodka is regulated. tiktok does not need even more strict age-verification than vodka.
it is not perfect, but it is absolutely more stringent than a checkbox. if you still doubt me, please send one of your 12-14 year old family members to buy a pack of smokes or a bottle of vodka at the nearest store. i will wait for your report.
Your hypothetical 14-year-old needs to first be able to bypass the parental controls that come with every modern OS. You keep ignoring that.
(Also, like, did you ever go to college? Live in a dorm or apartment with underage students? It was super common for of-age people to buy and distribute booze to substantially underage students. Everyone knew it was happening all the damn time.)
> they are obviously not liable if i buy something legitimately, go home, and feed it to my kid. in that case, i am liable...
And if you changed up the rules to make them liable, you'd see serious attempts at controlling distribution.
What has been the state of the art in parental controls for quite some time is like the current regulatory regime for booze and tobacco. The single thing that needs to change to make it exactly the same would be to make it substantially illegal for US-based publishers to not tag the porn/violence/etc that they publish with age-restriction tags. [0]
What's being proposed and is currently implemented by several big-name sites is even more invasive.
> we are okay with how smokes and alcohol works right now.
I'm not. Either booze and tobacco need to be made into Schedule I substances, or their regulation needs to become much more lax. But I recognize that my opinion on the topic is considered to be somewhat out-of-the-ordinary.
[0] This might already be the law of the land right now. I haven't bothered to check.
>Your hypothetical 14-year-old needs to first be able to bypass the parental controls that come with every modern OS. You keep ignoring that.
because they dont matter. parental controls exist today but have been deemed ineffective for the age verification conversation, for whatever stupid reason. so we are stuck trying to figure something else out. do i wish we could just use the existing basic parental controls instead of whatever the hell we are going to end up with? obviously!
the easiest "something else" is to piggy-back on existing age-restriction regulations (i.e. smokes, alcohol, gambling) because they have broad (obviously not ubiquitous, but broad) support. we have decades of experience with them.
and, to that end, you create a little token and you show your id to the store clerk to buy it. the "protect the children" people are satisfied (its the same process everything else age-restricted!), and i dont need to send my id to a peter thiel company. it preserves privacy, it re-uses existing laws, it re-uses existing infrastructure, etc.
> ...but have been deemed ineffective for the age verification conversation, for whatever stupid reason.
Consider that such arguments (just like the arguments of Prohibitionists that resulted in the rise to power of Organized Crime) are made in a varied combination of ignorance and bad faith, and that we should loudly reject them in the strongest possible terms.
To be clear, I'm asserting that the claim that preexisting parental controls are insufficient is an argument made in ignorance and bad faith, not your assertion that the argument is being made.
>Consider that such arguments [...] we should loudly reject them in the strongest possible terms.
me and you can yell into the void all we want. and i will continue to do so!
but, age verification is already here. so while i continue to yell about how stupid it is, i am also going to propose options that i feel like are less bad than what is being actively rolled out right now.
> ...i am also going to propose options that i feel like are less bad than what is being actively rolled out right now.
As I mentioned, what you propose is exactly as useful and protective as what we have now. What we have now has been roundly rejected by the authoritarians pushing this expansion of power and influence. Your time and energy are better spent resisting the expansion, rather than suggesting alternatives that those authoritarians will never accept (and tacitly accepting their premise in the process).
It's very rare to run into anyone under 18 living in a college dorm. There are a few 17 year olds, even fewer younger than that. Sure there are high schoolers taking classes, but as full-time residential students? Not many.
I mostly agree but unless these UUID age tokens are of limited life, it's more like buying the kid an unlimited amount of vodka and cigarettes with one action. If the tokens were good for one use, or a short time period, it would be more workable.
> or make them good for 1 month, but sold in 12-packs.
...if these tokens are as protective as you claim they are, why would it be important for them to expire?
Would you also advocate for the token issued by authoritarians' preferred "send a video of yourself [0] and/or your government-issued photo ID [1] to some random third-party for-profit company" check to frequently expire? If not, what's up with the discrepancy?
[0] Or of someone physically near you who is of-age
you seem really eager to catch me in some sort of "aha gotcha!" scenario so that you can... what? feel good about winning a hackernews argument? you are trying to argue with someone who largely shares the exact same views as you. the only difference between us is that im offering up alternatives and you are hoping that if you yell loud enough that everyone will forget about age verification.
age verification is already being rolled out. so we can either suck it up and try advocate for less shitty versions, or we can bicker amongst ourselves while id/video-based age verification continues to be implemented everywhere.
>...if these tokens are as protective as you claim they are, why would it be important for them to expire?
read above for the conversation that occurred.
>Would you also advocate for the token issued by authoritarians' preferred "send a video of yourself [0] and/or your government-issued photo ID [1] to some random third-party for-profit company" check to frequently expire? If not, what's up with the discrepancy?
a) no, obviously not, because i dont advocate for video or id-based age verification.
b) i know that you know this, and are just pretending to be ignorant for some weird ass reason: various age verification implementations have different risks and benefits.
for some implementations, users are forced to give up significant amounts of privacy in favor of increased accuracy. other implementations give up less privacy, at the risk of reduced accuracy. look at discords implementation for a recent example (it was easier to spoof the client-side verification than the server-side id-based one. more privacy, less accuracy). this type of balancing act is not new. we do the same balancing act with alcohol, smoking, gambling, healthcare, security, development, etc.
so, when looking at potential mitigations for less-accurate methods, while maintaining the same level of privacy, a sensible option is to make the UUIDs time-bound which will limit the time an illicit token is valid. this makes much less sense for id/video-based verification, because they have higher accuracy than my version (paid for by giving up your privacy).
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something you said earlier: "Your time and energy are better spent resisting the expansion,".
so, go do that. find the people that are really pushing for age verification, and argue with them. instead of replying to me, use that time to call your state representative or something. im not your opponent here. if it were up to me, we wouldnt have age verification in the first place. you already know that my stance is anti-age verification!
my proposal is not perfect. i dont like age verification. you can have the karma from this argument, its cool, you can "win". what more do you want me to say?
So was "REAL ID", and that took ~fifteen years to bring all the holdouts to heel. It wasn't till the start of the COVID disaster that FedGov could make compliance a condition of receiving enough essential Federal funds to force the remaining objectors to comply.
Compliance with bad plans is not automatically mandatory.
> what more do you want me to say?
It'd be great if you'd stop accepting the premise of authoritarians and reject the publicly-stated premise that motivates these systems. While it may not be clear to folks at the moment, they are no less bad than the systems that help -say- Texas law enforcement track down Texan women and doctors who are in violation of the Texas abortion ban.
I don't give a shit if you say that you do stop accepting the publicly-stated premise. [0] I just hope that one day in the not too distant future you do.
[0] I would -in fact- not believe you if you said you did in reply to this comment.
> Compliance with bad plans is not automatically mandatory.
To put a really fine point on this: every entity that rolls over and compiles with these "age verification" plans has put up less of a fight than 4chan.
When 4chan is one of the heroes, you know that something rotten is going on.
A significant obstacle to adoption is that cryptographic research aims for a perfect system that overshadows simpler, less private approaches. For instance, it does not seem that one should really need unlinkability across sessions. If that's the case, a simple range proof for a commitment encoding the birth year is sufficient to prove eligibility for age, where the commitment is static and signed by a trusted third party to actually encode the correct year.
I agree. I've been researching a lot of this tech lately as a part of a C2PA / content authenticity project and it's clear that the math are outrunning practicality in a lot of cases.
As it is we're seeing companies capture IDs and face scans and it's incredibly invasive relative to the need - "prove your birth year is in range". Getting hung up on unlinkable sessions is missing the forest for the trees.
At this point I think the challenge has less to do with the crypto primitives and more to do with building infrastructure that hides 100% of the complexity of identity validation from users. My state already has a gov't ID that can be added to an apple wallet. Extending that to support proofs about identity without requiring users to unmask huge amounts of personal information would be valuable in its own right.
Even if the problem is perfectly solved to anonymize the ID linked to the age, you still have the issue that you need an ID to exercise your first amendment right. 1A applies to all people, not just citizens, and it's considered racist in a large part of the US to force someone to possess an ID to prove you are a citizen (to vote) let alone a person (who is >= 18y/o) w/ 1A rights.
Your crypto nerd dream is vulnerable to the fact that someone under 18 can just ask someone over 18 to make an account for them. All age verification is broken in this way.
There is a similar problem for people using apps like Ubereats to work illegally by buying an account from someone else. However much verification you put in, you don't know who is pressing the buttons on the screen unless you make the process very invasive.
You seem to have missed requirement #3 -> tracking and identifying reuse.
An 18-year-old creating an account for a 12-year-old is a legal issue, not a service provider issue. How does a gas station keep a 21-year-old from buying beer for a bunch of high school students? Generally they don't, because that's the cops' job. But if they have knowledge that the 21-yo is buying booze for children, they deny custom to the 21-yo. This is simple.
> How does a gas station keep a 21-year-old from buying beer for a bunch of high school students?
They don't? Teenagers can easily get their hands on alcohol... you just need to know the right person at school who has a cool older brother. If their older brother is really cool they can get weed too!
The police absolutely do not have the time to investigate the crime of making a discord account for someone.
In general, any government already has your information, and it's naive to think that they don't; if you pay taxes, have ever had a passport, etc. they already have all identifying information that they could need. For services, or for the government knowing what you do (which services you visit), then a zero-knowledge proof would work in this case.
Maybe code is free, but code isn't all that goes into building software. Minimally, you have design, code, integrate, test, document, launch.
Claude is going to help mostly with code, much less with design. It might help to accelerate integration, if the application is simple enough and the environment is good enough. The fact is, going cross-platform native trebles effort in areas that Claude does not yet have a useful impact.
That's just a harness diff. A few more iterations of bootstrapping and the harness will be able to do the whole lifecycle.
The disturbing fact is that AI is simply smarter than us by a stupendous margin. Anything you do that involves thinking can be done better by the AI. We are obsolete when it comes to being smart.
I was in denial about this for a couple years, but I understand now.
At 16k tokens/s why bother routing? We're talking about multiple orders of magnitude faster and cheaper execution.
Abundance supports different strategies. One approach: Set a deadline for a response, send the turn to every AI that could possibly answer, and when the deadline arrives, cancel any request that hasn't yet completed. You know a priori which models have the highest quality in aggregate. Pick that one.
The best coding model won’t be the best roleplay one which won’t be the best at tool use. It depends what you want to do in order to pick the best model.
I’ll go ahead and say they’re wrong (source: building and maintaining llm client with llama.cpp integrated & 40+ 3p models via http)
I desperately want there to be differentiation. Reality has shown over and over again it doesn’t matter. Even if you do same query across X models and then some form of consensus, the improvements on benchmarks are marginal and UX is worse (more time, more expensive, final answer is muddied and bound by the quality of the best model)
There is the pre-training, where you passively read stuff from the web.
From there you go to RL training, where humans are grading model responses, or the AI is writing code to try to pass tests and learning how to get the tests to pass, etc. The RL phase is pretty important because it's not passive, and it can focus on the weaker areas of the model too, so you can actually train on a larger dataset than the sum of recorded human knowledge.
Aswath Damodaran, who teaches corporate finance at NYU Stern, has a bunch of great talks and content about this where he discusses how companies should act their age. When older companies that are no longer paying dividends are moving into a divestiture phase, they restructure and split up. What we are seeing with some of these big tech companies is that they are transitioning from an exciting growth story into an extractive dividend story in a way that's becoming harmful to consumers. That's why we're talking about breaking them up, and thats the line their management will have to walk if they want to maximize the value of the firm to shareholders through the decline.
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