Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona
fortune.com
fortune.com
https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona
I definitely recommend reading this primary source before drawing conclusions about the code as most of the secondary reporting is quite low quality.
@dang can this get a second chance?
different people have different tastes. people complain about boring websites, people complain about websites with animations or colors. the only guarantee is that the conversation isnt interesting.
if you are on the side that doesnt like music, animations, whatever, i recommend a combination of noscript and using reader mode.
Blasting music or sound on auto play when you aren't directly navigating to audio or video content is just rude.
It's the same as playing your speaker on the subway.
maybe you are unaware, but you can browse HN without an account, and you can browse previous submissions (years back, even!). its not like i can only see posts made in the last 4 days.
second, i saw the original post because it was posted in this very comment chain we are on, 5 hours ago, by bondarchuk (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137961).
my turn! what is your comment trying to accomplish by cross-examining me about something completely unrelated? what point are you trying to make?
if you think my comment is wrong, you should talk about the contents of the comment, not the age of my account.
Sounds like you're practicing creating AI bots and have modeled the personality after the other rogue ones.
so, what exactly, are you basing your accusation on?
was it me saying "use noscript and reader mode" or maybe "people have different opinions"? or just by nature of having created an account after you created yours?
this sort of accusation is what will drive HN to be a shit community to participate in. just accuse anyone you slightly disagree with as being a bot/ai
im not even sure what your issue, or rezonants issue with me even is! all i said was different people have different opinions, and you two are crawling up my ass about it. lets hope we never have to talk to each other about anything slightly important.
Might I recommend leaving the snark at home and approaching your interactions here with good faith instead of acting like you're the authoritative arbiter of community interactions?
Welcome to Hacker News.
the highest irony, coming from someone who literally cross-examined me and then insulted me rather than engage with my comments at all! can you seriously not see how ridiculous that is?
somehow i am the one who needs to approach interactions in good faith?
lmao. no. you dont get good faith from me. if you want good faith, dont start your conversations with an interrogation and follow it with an insult.
But it didn't make sense why you would do that for this particular post, especially while seeming to assert some kind of authority and familiarity with the cultural norms of the HN community. So I asked you about it, not aiming to negate or reduce your point but rather to learn about why you would use an alt account.
Instead of simply replying that you were in fact new and this was not an alt, rather that you were a long time lurker and a first time poster, you jumped down my throat and the throats of everyone else involved in this thread, being toxic and abrasive in every way possible. Both of my posts here which you think are at odds with each other are in service of encouraging you to check yourself, because you are being unreasonable; not meant as an insult demanding you to clap back. "You must be great at parties" should prompt you to step back and think of what passers by would think of your behavior and demeanor, because I'm giving you a social hint that a lot of people will find that behavior off putting. That statement is not a prompt for you to grow more vitriolic and upset, and continue the behavior I'm trying to point out is not going to serve you well in a social space like this.
but, uh, why are you insulting me? is this an example of "interacting in good faith" that you told me i should be doing?
it would be great if dang or tomhow could chime in on this, and let me know if your comment here is a good example for me to follow!
Please make it actually readable and don't steal my audio!
The differences in proclaimed data retention periods is concerning though. The rest is par for the course for KYC/AML.
When you applied for a bank account for your freelancing business (or startup idea), some people googled you, looked for PEPs (politically exposed persons) in your family, stored photos of your IDs and probably even printed them off, and sent everything in a nice package to some "risk" department. Who knows how that department is handling your data.
The only difference is that Persona is trying to put a front-end on it and selling the process as a SaaS. Look up "KYC/KYB saas" and you'll find hundreds of businesses doing this (including, of course, Persona).
edit: I want to emphasize that this isn't restricted to just business banking. Poor wording on my part. Lots of industries are legally mandated to conduct KYC/IDV. Notaries do it in home sales, your stock brokerage is doing it, employers in regulated industries do it to everyone on payroll. The list is very long. Unfortunately...
The government should take on responsibility for KYC imo, instead of letting 100 vendors come up with their own solutions. But that would probably have some nasty externalities.
My takeaway was that in this case, even an author with a clear and extreme bias against this sort of thing could find only unfortunately-common bad practices rather than deeply nefarious intent. Of course, this is just the front-end code, but this just looks like a KYC platform to me. Most of the secondary reports on this write-up seem to completely ignore section 0x13 and jump to the specific conclusions the author does not draw.
The fact that we've created a system where Discord need and want a KYC platform is a different and quite strange thing, but the KYC platform itself just looks like what it says on the tin.
[1]: https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map...
[2]: https://x.com/Persona_IDV/status/2025048195773198385?s=20
Datadog RUM (browser-intake-datadoghq.com) - real-time user monitoring. every click, every page load - on a FedRAMP platform processing PII and biometrics.
Yet no mention of that in the post. They just assume that they must be sending PII from a FedRAMP site to DataDog. No proof of what data actually does get sent.
Teter Piel (don't want to use the other name) kind of purchased a LOT of influence power via lobbyists. One lobbyist is Sebastian Lurz (also not going to use the real name here; the letter "l" is an in-country humourous take on Lüssel, Lasser and so forth - ex-politicians). The superrich buy influence and worsen the situation for the rest of us. This has to stop. The USA is currently under direct control of them - this also has to stop. I do not buy into Discord's attempt here though - they 100% knew what they were doing. The only reason they respond in this way is because they alienated and scared their user base with their idea to sniff-invade everyone. It was never about protecting kids in the first place - it was to spy.
I find it more concerning that mass surveillance has come to the point where someone can’t safely express their frankly-not-that-controversial opinions without obfuscating the subject’s name.
a simple regex will surface all of the "obfuscated" comments, which can then be sent to some intern analyst to read.
Source for this? This goes against many values of the US, so I'm surprised to see this statement thrown out so nonchalantly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...
Just that it’s a pragmatic approach (no matter how flawed in practice) and concerning that it needs to be done.
I personally experienced it when criticising (turns out quite rightly) the HS2 rail project. The difference in replies on Reddit whether I wrote HS2 or eg |-|S2 or H/S/2 was stark
Real time chat? Great. But entire communities, forums, and wikis moving behind the locked walled of Discord has been a disaster for information discovery.
Don't replace Discord with a similar alternative. Return to open forums and wikis!
We need a safe space from web crawlers and surveillance, and open forums ain't it. (Neither is Discord, but a sufficiently secure alternative might be.)
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/01/overrun-with-ai-slo...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Human-In-The-Loop
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...
Just off the top of my head, I bet a lot of other repos are going through the same.
Weird that the hacker news community wants to stick to it. Yall need to grow up. Because I know you would not use it as a metaphor or hyperbole at work.
Defending it makes you look immature.
And if its not doing it now, it will certainly happen once/if it goes bust.
I saw this coming a mile away when folks started ditching slack for Discord - Slack being problematic because a) it was profit-seeking and would use its leverage over your personal data to seek rent and b) it was antithetical to the open web.
Discord has the exact same two issues so was obviously not a solution.
Why did the internet en masse fall for it again?
This is exactly the reason cited for several non-gaming discords I'm in.
People, do not use discord for conversations with family/friends that you want to have any chance of holding onto, even just a year later.
Discord IMO won because of a killer trio: 1) good comms 2) full history 3) faster UI over bloated Slack.
Discord is a centralised IM + basic forum with commercial polish.
Small communities can't afford site hosting and moderation, FOSS alternatives like Matrix are significantly inferior products. Fandom killed independent wikis, Reddit killed independent forums.
If Discord ever goes down, there will be decentralised services competing and advocating freedom until a new centralised service takes all the users for itself, just like Mastodon and Bluesky.
It won by simply building a vastly superior product during its growth phase.
For gamers, it replaced fragmented, clunky, or paid alternatives (TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Mumble, Skype) with a frictionless, free app that had excellent voice quality and modern UX.
It worked so perfectly for gaming communities that non-gamers inevitably took notice, realizing it was effectively a better, free version of Slack for community building.
But that was the user-acquisition era. Now, we're seeing the classic enshittification phase.
Every other notification badge is an alert trying to sell you something. I still use it, but the product development focus seems to have entirely shifted to selling $9.99/month "blinky bullshit." I understand they have to monetize eventually, but it's exhausting.
Ultimately, it got big because for a few years, it was undeniably the best, cleanest chat client on the market. It was just relentlessly good for the user.
Whether it stays good, or follows down the Microsoft path of turning into a full-on ad-distribution network remains to be seen. But right now, despite all the crap sales, it's still pretty good... (=
That was all nice for a few years, but it was clear it can't got like this for ever - and here we are.
I guess thats changing though, I see Youtubers all over the place now watching these things like a hawk. Referring to the Highguard scandal.
...not here, they never had any. it is good tech, but so is the w80 nuclear warhead, the tiger iv (for its time) and the j-35.
This was undermined by the fact they were also trialling a switch to Persona (the vendor in the story), which did not uphold that guarantee. It was horrific optics to be reassuring people that it was ok because you didn’t save data but also be trialling a switch to a vendor which did save data, which I guess is a lot of the reason this vendor switch was cancelled. (Though it does call into question discord’s judgment that they thought this was a good idea).
Anyway, Persona was also breached which is how the government links were discovered and also probably a part of this decision. This is not to be confused with the breach in November of 5CA, _another_ vendor they used in the initial UK and Australia roll outs. The fact that two vendors were breached in four months is a good example of why this is a bad idea
It might not even send the sensitive data immediately but bundle it with other traffic once it goes online.
No, they’re outsourcing the verification to an external company. Just not this one.
Side note: The verification is only if you want to remove content filters, join adult-themed servers and a couple other features. If you only want to chat with your friends and use voice then no verification is required.
The whole point of this plan is to then gate LGBTQ content behind the age gates, and then criminalize with extremely harsh penalties if teenagers somehow find a way around the age gates.
It's a slow process that's taking years and is slowly eroding our 1A rights, which is precisely how we've ended up in this mess to begin with. They didn't start with "Let's dissolve the Department of Education"--they started with "No Child Left Behind" and "mandatory testing in public schools".
No doubt they'll also age gate anything around women's health, including birthing and abortion information.
Oh, and every last one of these things will be felonies so they can strip away your right to vote in the process.
I'm sure at some point user-generated pornography like cam sites will also be outlawed.
To back this up, you suggest that Bush's Child was part of a larger plan to get rid of education, but this is not an accurate assessment of Bush, Bush was a traditionalist in favor of traditional education, he's not of the Trump ilk, and Child was very much a Bush keystone. The push to eliminate the Dept of Education is 20 years farther down the road and pushed by very different people.
I say this because you should know your enemies, viewing everything as part of an elaborate top-down plan often gets you nowhere.
You are correct that it's not a distinctly organized group, but very loosely organized with people continually carrying the baton forward in the relay race to remove our rights. Each runner is going to be slower or faster than the previous one, but they're still running in the same direction.
A cornerstone of NCLB was to expand the funding for Charter Schools across the United States (rather than fund public education). And while these schools are supposed to be non-religious, a small provision of NCLB allowed parents to choose private, religious options if their schools fell behind (which, given the draconian testing expectations, made it pretty easy).
So maybe the NCLB Act took the long way around to get where we're at today, but it was still always headed in this direction as soon as it offered private schools as a funded alternative to public school, rather than investing in our public schools with our public funds.
On the larger issue of what you're saying, it can be difficult to distill the information down in a way that makes sense when all of it is a very complex web of people and power and ideaologies.
At the end of the day, it took 50 years, but they did succeed in getting rid of Roe vs. Wade eventually. The relentless pursuit of this effort which took 50 years of adaptation and pushing as hard as possible in every area without relenting, even when they hadn't succeeded in every direction, is what made this happen.
I expect no less from these further pushes now that we're over that hump. Maybe these efforts fail today, but they will continue to push where they can until they figure out ways in which they can succeed.
It's quite relentless and those of us whom are on the other side of this definitely need to recognize the threat for what it is. Which, to your statement, makes this so much more dangerous than if it were just a single headed hydra.
What it reminds me of is the situation in Saudi Arabia. The religious elite allows the Saud family to rule all of the politics and economics of the government so as long as the religious elite have the ability to enforce religious law on the population. It's an unholy union of church and state and this marrying of those two in the United States should absolutely fucking terrify everyone.
And now, to my view, it's basically a race. The very well coordinated political opposition laser targeting transgender people as the weak link has to push them back into the closet before too many people know someone trans personally and realize they aren't scary monsters with pointed teeth. They failed with the gays but they were about an order of magnitude larger and so got more exposure.
Reagan chose not to do anything about the AIDS crisis partially because it was a "gay" disease, and the religious right was openly happy and proud that the gays were dying.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/18210995019671...
Today Discord also released a rather comprehensive (and good) recap of the plan so far, their apologies for some of their messaging mistakes, and what comes next: https://discord.com/blog/getting-global-age-assurance-right-...
(Also, from that post most notably mentioned about the global rollout is delayed in light of some of these vendor verification issues and also hoping to rollout a few more features to even further lesson the need for age verification by many users. One such feature being first-class opt-in "spoiler channels", which some servers had been using age restricted channels for that rather than opt-in roles and somewhat more complex role-based permissions.)
https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map...
>Persona performs 269 distinct verification checks, including screening for “adverse media”
im sure everyone assumed this, but its good to know it.
>And the information was openly available. “We didn’t even have to write or perform a single exploit, the entire architecture was just on the doorstep,”
it is kind of scary how often these types of situations are only found out because of wild incompetence. you have to imagine that most similar situations dont suffer from the same incompetence (and thus arent known)
>“At Discord, protecting the privacy and security of our users is a top priority.
please, i wish companies would just stop saying this obvious lie. you know that you dont care. we know that you dont care.
>It’s dystopian that we want people to facedox themselves to everyone to be real online.
.... says the ceo of the company that you have to send your face ("facedox", if you will) to
Ah yes, we only store it for 7 days. During those 7 days, we pass it to Persona, and who knows how long they keep it!
> "Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation"
So now it's not "immediately" but 7 days? I don't know how anyone can trust any statement from these guys.
If a tech company says something to you, and they don't give you the means to verify it on your own, they are lying to you. Do not trust anything they say, ever.
this is the fun part, you can't!
Like ring recently, they just try to see it the thing sticks and that pisses me off. They should have that as a starting point.
The appropriate solution would be to send an RTA header [1] from the servers and the client must check to see if parental controls are enabled on the device or in the application. Not perfect, but likely sufficient to protect small children assuming the account is a child account and the parent enabled parental controls. Teens will always be able to bypass controls whether local or third party. Teens can share porn, warez, movies and more in rated-G video games with one another and small children. Or over SFTP/FTP/P2P/S3/HTTPS. Or a million other ways. Have fun playing whack-a-mole.
And they'll do it again too. They'll find a new partner - one with less baggage - to do the exact same thing and few people will bat an eye.
Only question is who's going to lose the data first, Discord or the subcontractors?
We decided to just meet up in person twice a month and play board games instead.
Yes, I'm making (another) argument in favour of IRC. IRC has optional client-server encryption, and you can set channel modes to only allow encrypted clients access. So that way you at least prevent eavesdropping.
if you expand the scope to a handful of adjacent figures, the catastrophe is truly amazing
And also, Thiel is literally in the Epstein files. Meeting with Russian officials repeatedly on the island. One is said to be his handler so he may just be an asset tasked with destabilizing America.
Oligarchs/y are among my choices, but I have supplanted that with Epstein Class now, to be more accurate to whom I refer
> I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible
(This is a joke in case that wasn't clear)
I'm forever grateful to Thiel for that clip, and to Musk for his crippling Twitter addiction. It was pretty impossible to get regular people to understand that folks like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison are skinwalkers when all they ever see about these people is professionally managed public relations content.
They just think they are eccentric and by the virtue of their wealth they must be smart upstanding humans with a strong character.
By the "greying out" of your comment, I would assume two things: First, the difficulty you describe is not on the past. Second, normies are here in much bigger proportion than a hacker would assume, and they are offended on the behalf of tech billionaires.
Of course I don't think they'd stoop so low as to look at the votes on subjects like this but that's the chilling effect for you and technically they have that ability. And they definitely look at the comments.
People simp for billionaires all over the web, not just on HN. I've never understood it, and I probably never will. But, there are enough of them and their billionaire-defense commentary pops up everywhere. Not to mention the obvious downvote rings that will hit you if you ever insult one of a few key billionaires with large followings. This is widespread behavior and not about wanting to be a startup founder.
Same thing happened in WWII Nazi Germany. This timeline has an eerie similar feeling as the masses line up to the slaughter.
They talk like the dumbest 1850s british aristocrats. They talk as if they are discussing how lazy the Irish are and how that is definitely why they are starving. They have objectively stupid opinions. They believe themselves especially smart as they fire off one or two sentences about high school level philosophy topics, and they somehow find a way to generate wrong answers to questions that really shouldn't even have wrong answers. All the while, they misspell everything because apparently they are outright illiterate too.
Like, they say such utterly stupid things as "Women are too emotional to make good decisions". As if they don't do the things they do for extremely petty reasons.
And yet, still some morons all over the US think they must be geniuses because they fell ass backwards into a literal bubble and came out rich. You can publicly be an absolute moron and the Wealth propaganda in the US is so bad people will still insist you must be magically genius and only pretending to be stupid.
Did they even encrypt their "I'd like to purchase a rape of a little girl please" emails?
Simply having a lot of money makes someone evil? Why? They are obviously all quite competitive in business but the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy. Gates for example is giving away hundreds of billions of dollars. What does it even matter if he's compassionate or not if he's doing that?
"Fuck you" money is fine, we all strive for freedom during our lifetime as humans. "Fuck everyone" money is not a welcome target, imho. That's unelected power. Its easy to not be a billionaire of course: philanthropy. But do most billionaires? They do not. They hold tightly to their power.
"Why does it even matter?" Because many of us do not want to be ruled or governed by these people, who by all indications, are not fond of other humans and see them as a resource to exploit and control. I assure you, I have no envy for these people and their wealth, I am allergic to what it would take to accumulate and maintain it (as a high empathy, high justice sensitivity human). I know what enough is. This is self preservation from a class of predator.
> Where do you guys come up with these ideas?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
https://medium.com/roaring-rivers/are-all-billionaires-socio... | https://archive.today/nX2Fh
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/bil... | https://archive.today/Gb2RF
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellamalmgren/2025/09/09/america... | https://archive.today/nLx78
By thinking.
If philanthropy and normal living expenses (even assuming billionaire living standards) were the only things super-rich people spent money on that's fine. Unfortunately they use it to directly influence politics and society.
Wealth, like celestial bodies, has a gravitational field.
Tell me again how generous billionaires are.
Zuckerberg 2.1%. Ballmer 3.7% Bezos 1.6% Sergey Brin 2.5% Michael Dell 2.6% Ken Griffin 5%
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2025/02/03/ame...
You don't become a billionaire by being moral. Each time you don't do something because it's wrong, you lost opportunity to make more money. You start with smaller things, then your standards slide more and more, until you are a billionaire, and you're so corrupt there isn't anything for you to do except make more money.
Which makes me wonder, how many people went to Epstein's island not because they like diddling kids, but because they needed to network with Epstein to make more money. How many actively participated just to be in his in-group? Not because they enjoyed, they just were so corrupt that they would do anything for business.
They have such clubs in your part of the world no doubt? (Netherlands, IIRC?)
The fostering of circles of trust, backed up with Kompromat, to strengthen elite solidarity, ease insider trading, treat handshakes as binding, and cover up the odd "unfortunate incident" is seemingly as old as time.
#PigGate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggate is loosely related.
I'm calling this out.
That's a personal belief, not everyone sees the world this way. Some of us believe that some things are objective and deontological.
IMHO our move toward too much utilitarianism has created the corrupt conditions we are living in
> I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.
Yeah, scale. Scale is obviously important.
The road to billions of dollars is built on exploitation.
It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers at scale that permits being a billionaire. It is their hard work, not the billionaires.
Now, how much surplus the workers get is primarily the discussion between capitalism, socialism, and communism.
Naturally, capitalists are disinclined in giving ANY of the surplus, and keeping it all for themselves. But when every capitalist does that, thats how we end up with 7 year depression/boom cycles, when the whole economy treats workers poorly.
Well, it's possible for a person to become a billonaire without directly doing this. I think it was said somewhere that Lebron James was one of the first wage billionaires, due to his 20+ years on top of the NBA.
But loosening the statement a little, if the person themselves hasn't its almost certain that the people that have paid them have (in the case of sports athletes, the companies paying for the ads).
Be that as it may, being a wage-slave billionaire still leaves you less exposed to direct first-hand moral dillemas than the CEOs of companies.
It's pretty much "get unbelievably lucky/inherit it" or "be a piece of shit consistently, else you will be out-competed by someone being bigger piece of shit than you.
I don't, for example, think Phil Knight is an immoral person who intentionally did wrong things, though his company certainly has. You don't just become a billionaire and become corrupt, you have a mindset that justifies what you're doing and you conveniently excuse yourself or are unaware because you're dealing with things outside of your scope because a single person can't handle that much authority without delegating to people who will inevitably do corrupt things. PK didn't start out wanting to be a billionaire, he just wanted to sell shoes and maybe become a millionaire.
I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates. I'm more likely to call someone immoral who interacted with him post-conviction than a billionaire, but generally labeling people moral/immoral instead of their actions misses why people do what they do. Very few people want to be considered immoral, but many people don't have an issue excusing immoral actions. Does that make sense?
If you want to get people top stop doing things like this, you have to attack the actions, not the person, because when you say all billionaires are immoral, it gives them nowhere to retreat, it gives them more reason to dig in, because who are you but some seemingly envious person who's made just as many compromises, just at lower levels?
I am not sure about that.
Sex may have played a factor in this. I use the word "may", as I don't know for certain, but I don't buy into the "just to make connections". The superrich don't really need to "make connections" on an island where underage girls party.
on an island where they traffic underage girls and rape them.
What an absolutely gross mischaracterization of what happens there.
I think if you're saying: "These billionaires are bad because they do bad things, and being so rich makes their capacity for harm much worse."
That's not slave morality, at least not necessarily, because the "doing bad things" can probably be expressed using normal classic values. It becomes slave morality when you abbreviate the above to: "These billionaires are bad because it's bad for anybody to be so rich."
Are you just trying make a point outside of what is being said? I'm hearing people saying the first part in many of these responses.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/i-called-everyo...
This regarding Thiel, a man who most recently tried to make a “Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist” meme stick.
Question 2: If a person cannot conceive that the 1st question is an interesting question, with multiple nuances, are they basically an idiot?
We currently legally protect mostly pre-contact civilizations like Sentinelese, so it stands to reason that regardless of what some people choose, other people will forgo transhumanist modifications, and "humanity" will survive regardless of what technology occurs or where your definition ends.
Unless of course the end goal is only a few billionaires get to live with their AI ppowered city states at most using servitors and decraniated as robots.
Evil is just a shorthand.
The only way that wealth gets shared will be unprecedented government coercion or worse.
It sure is fun how the party who screams about "personal responsibility" seems to get very upset if you ask a responsible person to explain themselves and their actions.
They don't really think through anything at all, because the human brain is hyperoptimized to not think, as thinking is energetically expensive, and even with that optimization to drastically reduce energy usage by just not using it, the brain still consumes a significant fraction of a human's energy budget.
We all have this problem. Even if you train for years to think "like a scientist" and critically analyze your beliefs and poke holes in the things you take for granted, you will always be vulnerable to ignoring something you shouldn't and missing something important.
I do get upset that people are so adverse to just doing some rough calculations about things. However, I've recently come to the conclusion that I just enjoy recreational math more than the average person. But I'm frustrated about all the people who sat next to me in math class saying "When will I ever use this?" and now going through their lives with zero literacy in math.
You had a chance to learn! To improve yourself! How could you squander that?! What else were you doing with that time? You were required to go to school for about 16 years, why didn't you just suck it up and make the most of that time?!
It hurts me how willfully ignorant people can be.
Wealth is not taken from our consumers and given to Sam Altman. Sam and his company are creating wealth - increasing the pie.
Of course it benefits everyone while also benefiting them.
Wealth need not be redistributed to improve lives. Just the mere invention of ChatGPT and letting people purchase it and use it is enough to improve people’s lives. Redistribution does not solve any poverty problem other than transfer power.
Sam redistributing money will not sustainably change anything about prosperity or poverty.
I am looking forward to the day where more electricity, electronics, food, and housing are produced thanks to AI; but in the mid-term it feels like an AI bubble pop would do more to bring the price back down.
How much do you think you would have paid for such a tool in 2010? and we are getting it almost for free.
The AI companies are hemorrhaging money. The hardware to run these models is not cheap, nor is the costs for electricity and water to run and cool it.
If AI capability plateaus and ends up as a normal technological development then I agree with you that it will mostly work out for the best. But that's not the scenario I'm worried about and plenty of folks in the industry are warning that's not the most likely path at this point.
But interestingly, people who are against AI tend to also believe that they genuinely can’t replace anyone.
As long as we're in a capitalist society, wealth is certainly zero-sum.
Every technological advancement that made jobs easier just allows corporations to increase their margins or increase the workload. If I automate some of my work and now only need to work 20 hours/week, I don't get 20 more hours/week of free time, I'm just given more work to do.
If someone gets completely automated out of their job, they don't get to relax and enjoy free time. They have to find a new job to pay the bills. With more and more people getting automated out of a job, UBI will become a necessity. We will need to increase taxes on corporations to fund it.
Because south park decided to personally say essentially bad words to paramount using their episodes, the company which gave them a billion dollars.
So they took a billion dollars and they were still consistent with how they've been for decades at this point. All of this is truly remarkable in the particular world we live in.
I have heard so much about Steven Spielberg but I must admit that I don't know much about the man but to me it does feel like you must be correct that he's a good guy, though I do see some controversies of steven spielberg on internet but South park is infamous with controversies as well.
There are 3028 billionaries from Forbes list and many many more almost-billionaires yet we have at most so few good billionaires that you can count them on your fingers.
This is mostly because normal people are not THINKING usually. It requires some event or insight when they begin to question what they see.
There are many ways to go about it, but my own personal favourite one, even though cheesy, is to tell them to watch the old B movie "They Live". Now, the movie is not really grand, has many plot holes, but Roddy made it fun (the kick ass scene with regards to bubblegem); and using glasses to see the thruth is such a powerful meme. People can then begin to question who owns the mass media. Then perhaps they may watch other movies such as Manufacturing consent (is a bit old now and thus dated, and people may find it boring, but I loved Noam's analysis back when his health was in prime condition). It is mostly in the USA where people think the superrich are god-sent. In other parts of the world this worshipping is way less. Or often does not exist; you won't find much love for the average superrich in Denmark or Sweden for instance.
That humanity should survive is a deeper question than it looks. Ask any transhumanist.
It's quite clear that my vision of the future is nothing like theirs.
Wether it be because they're "smarter than us and have completed capitalism" (that's how Gates, Ellison and ironically Trump/Musk are thought of)
or by "divine right" as it used to be with Kings.
It's horribly sobering to realise that, actually, they're just people. Like, pretty ordinary unremarkable people who have access to different information than we do and have been exposed to different things. Rarely are they more than a single standard deviation from the norm in intelligence.
They're people, flawed, egotistical, easily manipulated, easily dragged into thinking weird things, persuadable and unless they're really self-aware: will be surrounded by sycophants that just repeat what they want to hear (because, that feels pretty good) until they have a warped "echo of an echo" understanding of the world.
I wouldn't wish this on anyone, it's terrifying to believe that you would be insulated from all direct criticism while being told that everything you do is the right thing no matter what it is. You can't trust your own fucking reflection in that situation.
But we do that to people, people who have enormous influence over us, and they get confused when we don't like them, and we get confused about how they can be so out of touch and unlikable.
But they're just people.
He was thinking about convergence. You're probably smart enough to be aware of that, so you're deliberately twisting his words.
> folks like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison are skinwalkers
On HN a decade ago this would have been moderated into oblivion. The recent manual un-flagging of poolitical posts by the mods (dang has openly discussed this) has changed the site for the worse.
Discourse is good for society, unless you think that society shouldn't exist, or freedom shouldn't exist...
One "good" thing that came out of that thing.
I think main problem is that many people just think of them as "just a normal person but richer". But no. You don't get to that level of power by staying normal.
Hell, I remember when people pointed at Bill Gates going "see, you can be billionaire that puts their money to good", and while even before PDFiles got posted he had long history of being a piece of shit, now at least that stopped
Discord's entire value proposition was "Hey just click here, no need to pay for a teamspeak server or do peer-to-peer jank." Deeply personal stuff is said and posted in those spaces. Common communication should not be shared like this and we keep falling back to the "tapped my phone line" problem.
The difference between then and now is that for a long time there was no alternative to POTS. You just had to use the phone to call someone. The phone company and whatever government tapping was very hard to get around. But today there are other ways to do near everything if we give up on for-profit centralized services.
I think society keeps flirting with federation and other things similar to that but never quite makes the jump. The twitter exodus went back to a new centralized service like Bluesky that will one day be sold to another deep-pocketed buyer with its own agenda, thus creating this problem again. Sure, now with federation or personal servers, the privacy issue goes back to the server operator, but at least that could be someone you trust, or even you. When currently, neither of those options are possible with things like Discord or Bluesky.
I'm testing moving my friends and gaming group to self-hosted teamspeak or stout or mumble or something like that. I think we'll lose some convenience, but life isn't all about gains. Sometimes you have to sacrifice things for the greater good. I also really want to start moving away from things like reddit, bluesky, HN, etc to federated services and have dipped my toes there quite a bit, but the population isn't there (yet?).
I hope this is a wakeup call that people need, much like the wake-up call the fight against personal encryption was in the 90s. I think we're in a super bad place right now, and its worth discussing the elephant in the room, even to non-techies, and what alternatives there are to the current system. I think people need to get over the convivence of the current system and realize if they want privacy and safety, they may have to migrate to services built with that in mind.
Unfortunately there will be companies that take their money and won’t care. It’ll be up to other companies and consumers to punish them for it. Maybe we need a website that lets you quickly check if you should or shouldn’t use some service based on the investors.
I think the whole "after its code was found tied to U.S. surveillance efforts" part is new and wasn't known before, so feels important to have in the title too. Although most of us probably assumed it was true before too.
New and also should be the big story.
"Butcher cuts ties with supplier when steaks found to be human meat" shouldnt be a story about changing suppliers ...
This makes me feel VERY old.
641A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Retroactive telecom immunity: https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/10/17
The government spying on what you do has been old news for 20 years. Snowden should not have been a shocking revelation to any one but it was, and that was 13 years ago.
Its less of a "assumed it was true" and more of a "oh look another one, not shocking".
The methodology has evolved dramatically in those 20 years, what we've seen from Snowden is almost certainly obsolete in the light of new surveillance tactics. Even as a pessimist myself, I'm still routinely shocked by the lengths that American tech has been bugged.
Salt Typhoon is really the icing on this cake; "lawful" intercept turned against the state that implemented it. There are more twists left in this story no matter how jaded you might feel.
I do not know what this euphemism means. Is this like the modern trend of calling inmates “justice involved individuals”?