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Comment by gnarlouse | Hacker News Reader

i do actually think the general thrust of the idea is good. i also think it's sort of inherently cursed, and has some amount of a predeterminable fate.

if it doesnt take off, it dies.

if it does take off and becomes a relevant currency of some sort, it will need improving. if it needs improving how far are we willing to go? does some alternative system fork off to handle severity of provenance concern?

what happens when AI action becomes indistinguishable from human action? what happens when sticking computers in your head becomes vogue?

if it takes off and fills a small niche, maybe thats the best future.

Like I said, cool idea, but seemingly very cursed from the get go.

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Here's another similar project: https://writetrack.dev/

There's plenty of microbehavioral analysis we can do that is initially effective but will get bypassed (with GANs being the purest way, or something more domain-specific).

You could imagine a livestream that's permanently published somewhere. But the verification of the livestream takes longer than reading the piece itself (and is itself vulnerable to faking).

Personally I think it comes back to something like writing under your real name - staking your reputation - as the most trustworthy indicator. At least people in your circles can trust you.

You can read ahead as to how this would go by looking at the CAPTCHA world, which unbeknownst to a lot of people left behind "click this image" as the actual test a long time ago and does a lot of behavioral analysis of mouse motions and stuff. Which is itself a constant arms race. Which I would still characterize as "advantage attacker" with regard to that aspect of it, CAPTCHAs still have at least some utility more from the other streams they have access to that are harder to fake, e.g., "this IP address is from a rentable service space and thus more likely to be a bot" sorts of checks.

And yet, for a site I use regularly, I keep getting the CAPTCHA, while Claude Code has automated the hell out of my most important interactions with the site using Playwright, and somehow never triggers the CAPTCHA...

This is an arms race, advantage attacker.

That means this basically works, as long as it never gets large enough to attack. Which may suit the author just fine. Not everything has to solve the world's problems. But it won't generalize very far, no.

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