This seems like a lazy snipe. They clearly state that they receive only an age verification result and none of the personal data. It would take collusion from both sides to silently enable transfer of user data while publicly stating that they don't.
I have used these KYC services before. There is the option to get access to all user data - but unless there is evidence to the contrary, we have to take their word for it, for now.
No fucking way I’m sending my biometric data to some sleazy foreign company I know nothing about. The fact that “Yoti” is separate from Anthropic doesnt suddenly make this less gross.
As much as I hate the cookie banner, it is this requirement that forced companies to disclose the massive amounts of tracking they are using when anyone visits their site.
The Conduit® Thinkerface® Pro Band will contain a small 90B dense local model that pre-screens your Conduit® NeuroTokens® stream for compliance against the Conduit® Acceptable Usage Policy applicable for your region and subscription tier.
If non-compliance is detected you'll be promptly notified via a small current applied to the Conduit® ThinkRight® Human Training Electrodes embedded within your band. Intensity and duration are dynamically adjusted until compliance is restored.
Even better, because this all happens on-device before your Conduit® NeuroTokens® are sent to the Conduit® NeuroServer®, non-compliant thoughts don't count towards your Conduit® Daily Thinking Allowance or expend credits from your Conduit® Additional Thinking Purchase Plan.
Yeah, this whole area of UX scares me. Silent speech techniques could strike a balance, but it seems obvious it wont stop there - consider what a state actor would do if they could skip interrogation altogether?
Unfortunately I think this is inevitable because as a species we perform a steady march toward collective desires for items of science fiction, so start your adversarial double-think practice now.
Is it really collective desire or are these products being pushed upon us? And why does it always have to be the dystopic "destroying human nature and society as we know it" science fiction and not the utopic "everyone lived happily ever after" science fiction? Or does it just feel that way to me?
Based on the HN “realists” I routinely see in comments, I expect it will go something like this:
I’m generally pro-privacy, but here’s the hard truth: at my startup, we disabled keyboard input in our app Slopgen and switched the default to Conduit Thought Input™, and only 2% of users bothered to navigate the 17 submenus and submit their SSN and face scan to re-enable typing. Yep, 2%, that’s all.
DAUs only decreased by ≈11%, but our ARR is already up 170% thanks to our AdThink™ revenue sharing agreement, and only 1% of users argued with our Fin.ai bot for the 45 minutes needed give a thumbs down feedback about the change.
Let’s face it: talk is cheap but users *want* these features, revealed preference *always* tells the real story. Better get used to it now or get left behind.
For a utopia to exist, everything has to go right. Dystopias are almost all modelled on some existing facet of human behaviour. Naturally one state is unstable as it requires practically complete co-operation in most cases while the other one is stable as it usually exists as some sort of undesirable equilibrium between competing forces.
Desire is probably the wrong word, fixation is more accurate. Like the skiing advice that you shouldn't look at things (trees) that you want to avoid.
As for Utopias/Dystopias, I don't know how to answer that without waxing poetic about ideas like chaos being the natural order, or beauty being in the eye of the beholder, <insert other platitude>.
I understand the rationale behind this, but can't help feeling that this is a downward spiral. The software industry has always been a hard place to build and sustain a career because of the pace of change. With these tools, the pressure to increase output is going to grow, jobs are going to be axed - so software devs need to work harder to stay relevant. Weren't these tools supposed to make our lives easier?!
That’s only true if companies give some of the productivity gains back to the employee, but most companies don’t do that. They keep the profits purely for themselves. There are some exceptions.
There's only one way to eat an elephant: one bite at time. Putting some energy into organizing, even if only on the level of deliberately building solidarity with your coworkers and never mentioning the word "union", can and will pay dividends to somebody down the road -- possibly even you -- and also has immediate benefits in that it feels better than looking over your shoulder all the time.
Of cause there are some who see boost in productivity and other advantages of AI, but I'm questioning the current AI models ability to produce code (and text). If all the promises were true, we'd see an increase in code quality, but we mostly don't. AI tools do help find interesting bugs code bases like Curl, but commercial vendors doesn't seem to be delivering any fast or better than before. In fact some, like Microsoft, seems to produce worse code now.
If there's this huge productivity boost what is it being spend on? I know, many have been laid off, but that's not universally true. So we have a productivity boost that doesn't really deliver anything and overall quality a lot of products/code/writing/communication is going down, yet we spend an ungodly amount of money on datacenters... for what, just spinning the wheels?
Choosing speed today is going to cost you tomorrow. Leaning on these tools degrades your actual abilities. You are making yourself less valuable to future employers. So while it might be in the best interest of the company to force you to work faster it is in your own best interest to resist that.
I'm not convinced jobs will be axed in the long-term - All the big tech companies frequently staff teams on projects that basically go nowhere to spread bets on multiple projects in case one has legs. Once LLMs reach the point of commoditization and drop in price, it seems like the natural next step is more teams with smaller structures to spread bets even more. A 5 person team that is LLM-assisted is going to move faster and be more cohesive than an 10 person team that ends up stepping all over each other.
>Weren't these tools supposed to make our lives easier?
In a late stage capitalism market economy, their only actual requirements were to make profit for the shareholders and VCs.
If that means making our lives harder, firing most of us, making us stupider, being addictive, being used for surveillance to sell us shit or control us, or even being used to kill people, all of those are fine, if they fulfil that requirement.
The current hype cycle is about measurers getting fired. But as far as I can tell there is no new product using AI to track performance going around. What exactly is AI doing to replace the measurers?
Yeah, I get that, but if you were going to edit some AI slop and pass it off as some high brow opinion piece, at least ensure it makes some sense? WTF is this crap?
Unrelated to the content of this submission, but trying to visit this link in Firefox takes me into an endless recaptcha loop, whereas visiting in Chrome took me to the site without any captcha.
Sorry to hear that! You must be using an unapproved browser.
Please contact your nearest Cloudflare ChildProtect™ agency to request a one year license to browse the internet. You will be asked to provide a government ID card or equivalent.
Wondering what sort of plugins you've got on the Firefox side. If they're stripping out headers, for instance, it's a good way to make yourself look like a bot.
I've only got "Firefox Multi-Account Containers" and "Privacy Badger". I tried reloading with Privacy Badger disabled, still the same behaviour. Works in Safari and Chrome with no issues at all!
I have used these KYC services before. There is the option to get access to all user data - but unless there is evidence to the contrary, we have to take their word for it, for now.
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