A digital ID, like someone said below. But people (in the UK at least) go mental about that, despite the government already having all the information anyway. Creating a easy way to securely share that information with a 3rd party for online verification is apparently the work of the devil.
In the real world you turn up in person with a passport, or maybe use snail mail as a way to verify an address which is hard to fake.
Online we have to pretend it is still the internet of the 90s where it's all just chill people having a fun time using their handle...
It doesn't have to be exclusively digital. You can be psuedoanonymous using some form of key as verification. To get a key, you have to present your ID in person at, for example, the social security office or local DOL.
All the key does is attest that "this person is over X years old" with no other identifying information associated with it.
I think blending in person & digital together is going to be the best way forward. Like going to the store and buying alcohol. I have little privacy risk from the cashier glancing at my ID for a second to check my birth date.
But that would require the government to set up the system that lets you present your ID and get a key. They haven't done that, so it's not valid to blame businesses for not using it.
The problem with e-ID is its focused on identity verification, not just age verification and that's where the problem lies.
We still need the ability to be psuedoanonymous online. We should be able to verify age without divulging any identifying information to the service requesting age verification.
An e-ID registry could work on a sort of public/private key system so long as the services requesting informatino from the registry only receives a yes or no of "is this person old enough" and no further information.
I'm obviously not going to show my id to Zuckerberg's website or any porn sites, casinos because I don't trust those bastards. They're also not the police, so they lack the proper autoritah to request my an id.
I mean I dislike JD Vance as much as the next guy, but I don't see how it's unreasonable to appeal to the federal government for assistance in dealing with international legal issues. That's very much in the government's remit.
You do when the fine is more than double your annual revenue in the foreign nation, has international and geopolitical implications, impacts many other US businesses, could harm foreign relations, and will harm regular US citizens.
That's exactly the type of thing the Executive Branch is supposed to deal with.
Executive branch is supposed to deal with other countries' laws and courts? Does it also hold for European executive branches and American laws? I don't want to even imagine a world that works like this.
> Does it also hold for European executive branches and American laws?
Yes, if a US law is overreaching and directly impacting people in the EU. That is literally how the world works in practice so I'm not sure what to tell you.
CLOUD act is overreaching and impacting people in the EU. What EU governments are doing is avoiding US-based cloud services for critical applications, because it's an US law, not a European one
Thank they should act like it and respect the laws of the countries.
If you run to the US executive to assert US understanding of law onto other countries you are geopolitical important, however, as a tool for the US national interest not as a true international company. A true international company would serve their customers in their legal systems. Fight the laws there, try to make them better, but don't strongarm them with other country forces. They are a sovereign country.
When a country is trying to impose extra-territorial laws, then it goes beyond enforcing their sovereignty, and it is completely reasonable for the affected to request diplomatic intervention.
Whataboutism. What do you expect Cloudflare to do about the US imposing extraterritorial laws? How is that in any way relevant to their dilemma at hand?
"Whataboutism" is being overused to the point of meaninglessness. It describes deflecting criticism by raising an unrelated issue. I did not do that. I did not avoid a question or dodge the criticism. I just pointed out an irony.
It would be nice if we had an international agreement on how to apply sovereignity on the internet without infinging on sovereignity of other countries. US would be in a great position to initiate this if the current administration had any understanding of what "international agreement", "sovereignity" or "other countries" means.
Well the law is surely addressing European/Italian citizens and business. If you serve them from the US and target Italians for financial gain, you are no longer extraterritorial because you operate there as a business.
Italy has authority over what Italian companies or subsidiaries are allowed to do, and they have authority over any operations that foreign companies have within Italy and any dealings that foreign companies have with Italians or others in Italy. They do not have authority over foreign companies operating in foreign countries serving foreign customers, just because that company also does business in Italy. That is extraterritorial, and is what this law is requiring by demanding that Cloudflare remove DNS entries worldwide.
They have all right to sanction or restrict a company which has a legal footprint in their territory.
When you are incorporating as a company in a country you are subject to their laws. Period. If that includes rules how you act worldwide, than that is a part of it.
Do not get me wrong, restricting free speech or apply IP law outside your territory is IMHO not right for a country to do.
This is objectively false. You're telling me ASML isn't geopolitically important? That TSMC isn't geopolitically important? We are likely to enter a war for the latter within the next decade.
Why would Italy pick Cloudflare over Bunny.net or even CDNetworks if Cloudflare can't follow their laws? Today US tech products sell well in Europe because of the past 80 years of positive relationships. So Cloudflare is the obvious choice over CDNetworks, but for how long will it be like that?
When the risks are too high, then exit the market. When you do business in a market, adhere to the laws there.
It is however the business of governments to foster harmonized (globalized) markets. But the US has killed so many regulations and collaborations in the last year, that there is little hope that this will improve any time soon. They do not want globalization anymore but American first. Reactions of other countries will be higher fines, more regulation and higher entry barriers.
> When the risks are too high, then exit the market. When you do business in a market, adhere to the laws there.
And when you want help to improve your terms of trade, you can petition your government to assist.
> It is however the business of governments to foster harmonized (globalized) markets.
It is the business of governments to further the interests and wishes of their people.
> But the US has killed so many regulations and collaborations in the last year, that there is little hope that this will improve any time soon.
Is Italy's actions here fostering "harmonized (globalized) markets", I wonder?
> They do not want globalization anymore but American first.
If globalization is what Americans want, then that is what their government should be accommodating. If it's not, then the government should not.
Even if "the experts" think something is right or wrong, even if some economic factor or other might objectively improve with a particular policy, it should be up to the people to decide. Self-determination is one of the most fundamental human rights there is, too often ignored by the ruling class.
Well first off, generally if you are arrested in another country you would in fact call your government. Most people do this, and it'd be foolish not to. If you get sued for a large amount of money or defrauded or face any number of other issues, also reasonable to call your government.
Anyway, not a great comparison because you're talking about legal regulations governing speech on the internet. This isn't a jaywalking ticket, it's a deeply complex regulatory issue involving politics, law and international relations. It's also an issue that the current administration has shown interest in, so if you're an affected American business it would be pretty foolish not to seek help there.
> If they so choose to dissolve their teeth and decimate their guy bacteria, who am I to intervene?
In this case, I'm the American taxpayer who is paying for all of this food, and, perhaps more importantly, paying for all of the medical treatment they receive because of the consequences of these choices.
When your consumption is being paid for by other people, it's perfectly reasonable for those people to put limits on your choices, especially when they're footing the bill for the consequences of any bad choices you make too. We're a wealthy country and shouldn't let people starve, but you don't need ice cream or Coke or Pringles not to starve.
Sure it's not a cure-all, but for the overwhelming majority of people who are obese, being thin and not lifting weights would be an improvement health-wise.
If the alternative to using Ozempic is eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly, then sure, the latter is better, but the target population for it is people who have spent many years not eating healthy or exercising and who are unlikely to start in the near future.
2025: My first full year of running my own business, and things really went well. Also had my second child, a beautiful daughter who is currently not sleeping well at night. I am so tired. I lost my dog suddenly - he was my first dog and my companion for nine years. I love that guy so much.
> But when they do that, Draft One erases the initial draft, and with it any evidence of what portions of the report were written by AI and what portions were written by an officer. That means that if an officer is caught lying on the stand – as shown by a contradiction between their courtroom testimony and their earlier police report – they could point to the contradictory parts of their report and say, “the AI wrote that."
This seems solvable by passing a law that makes the officer legally responsible for the report as if he had written it. He doesn't get to use this excuse in the courtroom and it gets stricken from the record if he tries. That honestly seems like a better solution than storing the original AI-generated version, because that can reinforce the view that AI wrote it to jurors, even if the officer reviewed it and decided it was correct at the time.
Yeah this seems like an obvious solution, which axon ought to be on board with since it protects them.
When juniors use the excuse “oh Claude wrote that” in a PR, I tell them if the PR has their name on it, they wrote it - and their PRs are part of their performance review. This is no different
I own a business and am constantly using working on using AI in every part of it, both for actual time savings and also as my very practical eval. On the "can this successfully be used to do work that I do or pay someone else to do more quickly/cheaply/etc." eval, I can confirm that models are progressing nicely!
I work in construction. Gpt-5.2 is the first model that has been able to make a quantity takeoff for concrete and rebar from a set of drawings. I've been testing this since o1.
This is just semantics. You can say they don't understand, but I'm sitting here with Nano Banana Pro creating infographics, and it's doing as good of a job as my human designer does with the same kinds of instructions. Does it matter if that's understanding or not?
semantics: the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning.
> You can say they don't understand, but I'm sitting here with Nano Banana Pro creating infographics, and it's doing as good of a job as my human designer does with the same kinds of instructions. Does it matter if that's understanding or not?
Understanding, when used in its unqualified form, implies people possessing same. As such, it is a metaphysical property unique to people and defined wholly therein.
Excel "understands" well-formed spreadsheets by performing specified calculations. But who defines those spreadsheets? And who determines the result to be "right?"
Nano Banana Pro "understands" instructions to generate images. But who defines those instructions? And who determines the result to be "right?"
"This is just semantics" is a set phrase in English and it means that the issue being discussed is merely about definitions of words, and not about the substance (the object level).
And generally the point is that it does not matter whether we call what they do "understanding" or not. It will have the same kind of consequences in the end, economic and otherwise.
This is basically the number one hangup that people have about AI systems, all the way back since Turing's time.
The consequences will come from AI's ability to produce certain types of artifacts and perform certain types of transformations of bits. That's all we need for all the scifi stuff to happen. Turing realized this very quickly, and his famous Turing test is exactly about making this point. It's not an engineering kind of test. It's a thought experiment trying to prove that it does not matter whether it's just "simulated understanding". A simulated cake is useless, I can't eat it. But simulated understanding can have real world effects of the exact same sort as real understanding.
> "This is just semantics" is a set phrase in English and it means that the issue being discussed is merely about definitions of words, and not about the substance (the object level).
I understand the general use of the phrase and used same as an entryway to broach a deeper discussion regarding "understanding."
> And generally the point is that it does not matter whether we call what they do "understanding" or not. It will have the same kind of consequences in the end, economic and otherwise.
To me, when the stakes are significant enough to already see the economic impacts of this technology, it is important for people to know where understanding resides. It exists exclusively within oneself.
> A simulated cake is useless, I can't eat it. But simulated understanding can have real world effects of the exact same sort as real understanding.
I agree with you in part. Simulated understanding absolutely can have real world effects when it is presented and accepted as real understanding. When simulated understanding is known to be unrelated to real understanding and treated as such, its impact can be mitigated. To wit, few believe parrots understand the sounds they reproduce.
Your view on parrots is wrong ! Parakeet don't understand but some parrots are exceptionally intelligent.
Africans grey parrots, do understand the words they use, they don't merely reproduce them. Once mature they have the intelligence (and temperament) of a 4 to 6 years old child.
> Africans grey parrots, do understand the words they use, they don't merely reproduce them. Once mature they have the intelligence (and temperament) of a 4 to 6 years old child.
I did not realize I could discuss with an African grey parrot the shared experience of how difficult it was to learn how to tie my shoelaces and what the feeling was like to go to a place every day (school) which was not my home.
You can, of course, define understanding as a metaphysical property that only people have. If you then try to use that definition to determine whether a machine understands, you'll have a clear answer for yourself. The whole operation, however, does not lead to much understanding of anything.
>> Understanding, when used in its unqualified form, implies people possessing same.
> You can, of course, define understanding as a metaphysical property that only people have.
This is not what I said.
What I said was unqualified use of "understanding" implies understanding people possess. Thus it being a metaphysical property by definition and existing strictly within a person.
Many other entities possess their own form of understanding. Most would agree mammals do. Some would say any living creature does.
I would make the case that every program compiler (C, C#, C++, D, Java, Kotlin, Pascal, etc.) possesses understanding of a particular sort.
All of the aforementioned examples differ from the kind of understanding people possess.
I have always found writing documentation to be incredibly helpful for clarifying my thinking. It prevents me from doing mental hand-waving around details, and often times writing down a process that I have done a thousand times is the thing that makes me realize how I can cut steps or improve it.
I'm now in the process of trying to hand off chunks of the work I do to run my business to AI (both to save time but also just as my very broad, practical eval). It really is all about documentation. I buy small e-commerce brands, and they're simple enough that current SOTA models have more than enough intelligence to take a first pass at listings + financials to determine whether I should take a call with the seller. To make that work, though, I've got a prompt that's currently at six pages that is just every single thing I look when evaluating a business codified.
Using that has really convinced me that people are overrating the importance of intelligence in LLMs in terms of driving real economic value. Most work is like my evaluations - it requires intelligence, but there's a ceiling to how much you need. Someone with 150 IQ points wouldn't do any better at this task than someone with 100 IQ points.
Instead, I think what's going to drive actual change is the scaffolding that lets LLMs take on increasing numbers of tasks. My big issue right now is that I have to go to the listing page for a business that's for sale, screenshot the page, download the files, upload that all to ChatGPT and then give it the prompt. I'm still waiting for a web browsing agent that can handle all of that for me, so I can automate the full flow and just get an analysis of each listing sent to me without having to do anything.
I could (I mean in theory - practically, I'm not technically proficient enough to do so), and in fact one of the most promising web browsing agents I've tested is director.ai, which just writes Stagehand code on the fly to achieve the objectives you give it. Unfortunately it can't be invoked via API yet, so doesn't work for my use case.
Honestly, it takes such a relatively small amount of time that it makes sense to just do it myself until there's an agent that can easily handle it; I'm really only spending time trying to automate it now as a test of AI capabilities. If I actually wanted to get it automated tomorrow, the most time-efficient way to do that would just be to involve a VA from somewhere cheap for the work I'm doing.
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