life is billions of years old.

life will find a way.

god is a set of mathematical statements or at least that’s how to interpret it in a modern sense, 2000 years ago these views didn’t exist so they just called it “the metaphysical realm” but it’s not made of atoms, no.

same for alcohol

The problem is that it leaves a paper trail.

Grace also knows what number n got verified, and the identity of the user n. Later, the website can ask the age-verifying service who user n actually was. It requires that the age-verifying service cooperates with the website, though, but this could be mandated by law, which would create a single point of (privacy) failure.

PS: i love your writing style. It’s so simple and clear :)

Cryptography is a really complicated subject. You managed to express it very easily understandable.

Yeah a small false-positive rate will have to be accepted. This is the same like you can’t fully prevent minors from getting access to alcohol. Consider that their older sibling can buy it for them (at an increased price, ofc).

What matters is to keep the rate of false positives reasonably small, i’d say.

See my comment in this thread involving drawing a piece of paper from a box in real life. Since nobody knows which piece of paper you draw from a box, if many people do this at the same time, it’s impossible to establish an one-to-one mapping between age-verifying tokens and people’s identities.

I doubt this doesn’t actually leave a paper trail.

At some point, you send that nonce to an age-verifier service. So they can keep track of it, and if the 18+ website you visited at some point later wants to know your identity, they can ask the age-verifier service who asked for that nonce to be signed.

This involves that two organizations are corrupt, however: both the 18+ website and the age-verifying service. Law could mandate that they both cooperate, however, thus creating a single point of (privacy) failure.

I still believe it is doable, however. Check my other comment involving a piece of paper that is drawn from a box. My method relies on the fact that the age-verifying service doesn’t actually know which code they gave you, just that they gave you one. For digital services, seevices can always keep track of their input/output, which is not always possible in real life.

It is doable, i think. Consider:

You go to your local library. They verify you’re above the age limit (like they do at supermarkets when you try to buy alcohol: either look you in the face and recognize you’re clearly old enough, or have to show them some kind of id, details vary.)

You pick a code (put your hand in a box and draw a piece of paper at random). Nobody knows what code you picked except you. If lots of people do this at the same time, it’s impossible to accurately map codes to people’s identity.

You scan the code (like QR code) with your social media app that you use, and it associates the code with your account. Now everybody knows you have a valid code associated to your account, but nobody knows your identity.

(The code could work something like a cryptographic signature, where you can show that you have a valid code without actually revealing the code, so others can’t simply copy it. That’s a technical detail that you need to leave to the programmers to accurately understand.)

the thing with the moon landing (or spaceflight in general) is that it’s very easy to verify for other countries since many of the satellites send a radio signal all the time and you can actually receive that radio signal from other sides of the world. this way, you know where satellites are (if they want to be discovered). so, we know Yuri Gagarin made it to space because of the radio signal, and the same would likely be true for the moon landings (although i actually hadn’t checked so far).

can we have fediverse mirroring of xiaohongshu?

in my opinion the civil war around 1800 did not actually abolish slavery. it just made slavery more efficient.

instead of killing your slaves through hard work (which means you have to buy new ones) you can just work them longer if they live longer, i.e. that’s why working conditions improved. at the same time, slavery got renamed into “prison labor”. it’s essentially the same thing.

It’s crazy how 13% of the world population dominate the social media discourse so much that i basically see no other people’s opinion ever.

yeah same. also i don’t drink alcohol anymore but it would be nice to have more places to hang out.

yeah :)

you’re right

it is said that once every thousand years a buddha awakens spontaneously who understands the world intuitively, without being taught …

ok, these two images explain a lot, thanks :D

yeah, the second one looks waay more comfy than the first one to me. and also i get your intention of wearing a complete, matching suit, like, stuff matches together. that’s better than just wearing random individual unmatching items.

the way i do it is to select all my clothing that i have/own depending on color schemes. almost all my clothing is green/brown/red, (the brown being similar to the second picture) so it all automatically matches because it all has a certain vibe to it.

Also note that script is historically mostly used for communication over large distances and times.

Historical scriptures (such as the bible) got transported across half the globe and copied and passed down for more than a thousand years. The scripture transcends both space and time.

If you only want to communicate with your neighbour, you don’t need a lingua franca. Lingua franca is exclusively for writing down, and communicating over very large distances (such as the internet). In that case, no pronounciation is needed. So it is possible to have an abstract sign language that doesn’t even have a standardized pronounciation.

This might sound absurd at first, if you never thought about it, until you realize that is how a lot of our information is already transported. There are a lot of sketches and visualizations of important data that are graphics, plots, charts, drawings, and such, that don’t have a standardized pronounciation. The information is transported visually.

everything you said is true because chinese script is not based on pronounciation, but on (highly abstracted) images. these icons are universal because the concepts they represent are universal.

yep that is definitely happening. development is a slow progress.

mathematics or cartoons work great for communicating ideas to people who don’t speak the same language you do.

essentially, all languages are made up. we therefore need to focus more on universal languages that are the same everywhere. mathematics are one example, but surprisingly, so are comics. many of the emotions displayed there are widespread and close to universal.