Ask Lemmy

With many jurisdictions introducing age verification laws for various things on the internet, a lot of questions have come up about implementation and privacy. I haven't seen anyone come up with a real working example of how to implement it technically/cryptographically that don't have any major flaws.

Setting aside the ethics of age verification and whether or not it's a good idea - is it technically possible to accurately verify someone's age while respecting their privacy and if so how?

For an implementation to work, it should:

• Let the service know that the user is an adult by providing a verifiable proof of adulthood (eg. A proof that's signed by a trusted authority/government)
• Not let the service know any other information about the user besides what they already learn through http or TCP/IP
• Not let a government or age verification authority know whenever a user is accessing 18+ content
• Make it difficult or impossible for a child to fake a proof of adulthood, eg. By downloading an already verified anonymous signing key shared by an adult, etc.
• Be simple enough to implement that non-technical people can do it without difficulty and without purchasing bespoke hardware
• Ideally not requiring any long term storage of personal information by a government or verification authority that could be compromised in a data breach

I think the first two points are fairly simple (lots of possible implementations with zero-knowledge proofs and anonymous signing keys, credentials with partial disclosure, authenticating with a trusted age verification system, etc. etc.)

The rest of the points are the difficult ones. Some children will circumvent any system (eg. By getting an adult to log in for them) but a working system should deter most children and require more than a quick download or a web search for instructions on how to circumvent.

The last point might already be a lost cause depending on your government, so unfortunately it's probably not as important.

I want to check the growth rate of these wonderful platforms—especially active users, server count, number of posts, and comments etc.

It is objectively a lot more male than Reddit or other social media. Reddit has many issues, but lack of women is not one of them.

Childlore is folklore passed directly between children, without the input of adults.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childlore

Stuff I can think of off the top of my head are paper fortune tellers, summoning Bloody Mary/the candyman, the cool S, parody songs like "Jingle bells Batman Smells" and "Joy to the world, the teacher's dead" etc.

This stuff has intrigued me since, well since I was a kid. I always wondered where they came from. I never saw adults doing that stuff, so I figured another kid had to have come up with it.

I know the question sounds a little ridiculous, but I've heard similar stories where people know each other for a week or even a day, but still fall in love and build strong bonds.

I've just realized that in some countries in the EU you have to opt in to be able to donate organs in case of death. In others it's the default and they offer opting out.

I see that as an automatic opt in from my POV.

Are there any other such simple things we should be opting in for in Romania, or the EU in general?

I'll start: If you're Romanian you should choose an ONG to redirect 3.5% of your tax to, otherwise it goes to the semi-corrupt government.

I feel more bored nowadays...

I think it's called this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_figure

I almost forgot about it until I saw it in some anime then it triggered my memories. I remember when I was a kid, my mom played that string thingy with me... she said kids of her days played that because there weren't much games/toys to play with...

I don't remember if this was a gendered thing tho... I kinda felt like it was something that is more "for girls"... or maybe because it was mom that played it with me... idk...

Now I mostly don't remember how it works anymore...

One that comes to mind is Breaking Bad. It's pretty easy to hate Walt by the end even if we like seeing him on screen and what he does.

I'm a software developer in Germany and work for a small company.

I've always liked the job, but I'm getting annoyed recently about the ideas for certain people.....

My boss (who has some level of dev experience) uses "vibe coding" (as far as I know, this means less human review and letting an LLM produce huge code changes in very short time) as a positive word like "We could probably vibe-code this feature easily".

Someone from management (also with some software development experience) makes internal workshops about how to use some self-built open-code thing with "memory" and advanced thinking strategies + planning + whatever that is connected to many MCP servers, a vector DB, has "skills", a higher token limit, etc. Surprisingly, the people visiting the workshops (also many developers, but not only) usually end up being convinced by it and that it improved their efficiency a lot and writing that they will use it and that it changed their perspective.

Our internal slack channels contain more and more AI-written posts, which makes me think: Thank you for throwing this wall of text on me and n other people. Now, n people need to extract the relevant information, so you are able to "save time" not writing the text yourself. Nice!!!

I see Microsoft announcing that 30% of code is written by AI which is advertisement in my opinion and an attempt to pressure companies to subscribe to OpenAI. Now, my company seems to not even target that, but target the 100%????

To be clear: I see some potential for AI in software development. Auto-completions, location a bug in a code base, writing prototypes, etc. "Copilot" is actually a good word, because it describes the person next to the pilot. I don't think, the technology is ready for what they are attempting (being the pilot). I saw the studies questioning how much the benefit of AI actually is.

For sure, one could say "You are just a developer fearing to lose their job / lose what they like to do" and maybe, that's partially true... AI has brought a lot of change. But I also don't want to deal with a code base that was mainly written by non-humans in case the non-humans fail to fix the problem......

My current strategy is "I use AI how and when ->I<- think that it's useful", but I'm not sure how much longer that will work..

Similar experiences here? What do you suggest? (And no, I'm currently not planning to leave. Not bad enough yet...).

There's a comedian that currently kinda looks like this guy did around 2006. The wife and I think the comedian showed up on @ftermidnight (when it was still on) at some point.

Similar hair and facial structure, iirc a quirky kind of humor.

We're drunk and having no luck. Any help?

Edit: the guy we're thinking of is younger than the pic and has brown hair.

...are some questions posted here so out of place that they feel like made up with AI? Or made to train AI? Don't get me wrong, I love the genuine discussions here and I do engage, but some questions are just too... Forced? I'd love to give an example, but I won't, because I don't intend to out anybody. ^^

Google sponsors open source software through the Google Summer of Code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code

Some projects that benefit include:

• Open Street Map

• Organic Maps

• VLC

• LibreOffice

• Gimp

• Debian

Why do they do that? Google is one of the world's largest corporations.

Isn't this... very suspicious.... ? Is their goal simply to fuck with Adobe and Microsoft executives?

Is 'Melissanthe' an actual Greek personal name or it was invented by a Greek poet?

I suffer from body dysmorphia and as I am worse I'm finding that I cannot use technology any more as I can see my face reflect on the devices screen. Are there any screen protectors that will stop the reflection or reduce it?

People only want to hear nothing but the good things, all of the time. Even if you're not posting anything politically or any news that'd bring anyone down. There's a video I saw, since deleted, about a man who posted on Facebook. He posted numerously uplifting news about his life, new girlfriend, new job and a brighter future. He got likes, support and comments reflecting this.

But, life has its turns and one by one, the man's life fell apart where he was losing everything and was documenting it on his Facebook. Lost his girlfriend, not to death but to cheating, lost his job and everything. The likes and all that support pretty much dwindled to near nothingness. Almost as if the man was left in a worse off state.

I believed the point of the video was to demonstrate how artificial engagement is on social media. I'm pretty positive that this very thing has had to have happened to several dozen others over the years. People only seem to just want to read things to feel good about themselves, even at the expense of another's downturns.

To an extent, I understand that too, because the news to me is just designed to project nothing but bad news all of the time that is neverending bullshit, the ratio of good and bad news is completely unbalanced. But, I kinda argue that you can avoid a lot of the news by just simply not tuning in to spare your sanity.

There are and there's plenty of them too just to cover this base, of people who do nothing but complain all of the time about anything and it can be exhausting to read their daily bitching.

I can relate though to the video because I've even had close friends just blow off even legitimate concerns I've brought up about where I'm at, only to tell me things that simply don't help. It almost defeats the purpose of engaging at all not just in social media, but socializing as a whole.

I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.

You know like the classic hitman, criminal, or secret agent, etc. trying to present as a normal suburban family.

If yes, what rules would you like to see, keeping it to a more professional theme / spectator friendly / entertaining style? I already have something in mind, as I began playing in 2001 at age 14 in my first year of high school, 12 years later was the first player selected on a USA Team for a world championship event using one of my less preferred ball types and rule sets, and gained experience with the sport across 7 countries with different styles / ball types. With enough interest, I'd love to use this as a way to create a new community, finding one representative per country.