ineptech

Unless I'm missing something, what I'm describing satisfies both of these (unless one or both parties are malicious).

I'm not suggesting that people actually authenticate to Pornhub using Login.gov's oauth, they would continue to auth (or not) as they do now. Login.gov can issue a token saying, in essence, "A user authenticated to me, and that user over 21, but I'm not going to identify them, I'll just give you a random GUID so this token will be unique".

edit to add more details, since I'm thinking it through: the token would need to include the issue date and be signed obviously, and would be ephemeral. Properly implemented, it could be done entirely in the browser (Firefox would have a "age verification provider" pull-down) in way that's transparent to the user and both private and secure. And since you have to be 18 to get a credit card, essentially any service you pay for with a credit card in your own name ought to be able to attest your age, even if it hasn't done KYC or scanned a government ID.

Would it not be reasonable and safe and private to implement age verification through login.gov? An Oauth implementation that knows your identity and age can produce a verifiable token that attests your age but not identity. The only way your identity would leak would be if both the porn site and the oauth retain the tokens (which they would both claim not to do else no one would use this), and the attacker gets access to both.

I know it's unlikely to happen because of America's (misguided IMO) extreme distaste for digital government ID, but it seems like the current solution (people uploading pictures of their driver's license to porn websites) is worse in every possible way.

What's the seductive-but-wrong part of EA? As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the opposition to it boils down to "Maybe you shouldn't donate money to pet shelters when people are dying of preventable diseases" vs "But donating money to pet shelters feels better!"

The article presumably omits mention of Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" because it also does a raft of other controversial[0] and broadly unpopular[1] things that are much more impactful than, and completely unrelated to, the subject of the essay.

0: kick 7M people off Medicaid, hire 10K new ICE officers, tax university endowments, subsidize fossil fuels, etc https://apnews.com/article/big-beautiful-bill-trump-tax-cuts...

1: "Voters 53 - 27 percent oppose the legislation, with 20 percent not offering an opinion" https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3924

Agreed, just saw the remaster in a theater and it holds up surprisingly well. What seemed like glaring inaccuracies in 1995 now seem like whimsical visualizations and over the top silliness. Except of course "It's got a 28.8 bps modem".

The other thing I noticed was that it is chock-full of gender non-conformity. Not in the plot, but visually - almost every hacker character wears androgynous clothing or makeup or something along those lines. The over-representation of trans people in computer security is a common trope now and I wonder if Hackers was the first time that was depicted in media.

Hah, thanks! Haven't touched it in a long time, almost forgot about the username.

Relatedly, there was a major controversy at work recently over the propriety of adding something like this to a lengthy email discussion:

> Since this is a long thread and we're including a wider audience, I thought I'd add Copilot's summary...

Someone called them out for it, several others defended it. It was brought up in one team's retro and the opinions were divided and very contentious, ranging from, "the summary helped make sure everyone had the same understanding and the person who did it was being conscientious" to "the summary was a pointless distraction and including it was an embarrassing admission of incompetence."

Some people wanted to adopt a practice of not posting summaries in the future but we couldn't agree and had to table it.

It's funny that Business Insider seems to have gotten on board just in time for D&D's enshittification. For those who don't follow it, D&D was purchased a few years ago by Hasbro and is being aggressively transformed from the old model you may be familiar with (buy a couple books for rules and basics, then get together with your friends and use your imagination for the rest) to a new one built heavily around subscription services.

Of course, you can still play D&D without those services, but it sure seems like the paid model is becoming the norm and will be most peoples' first experience with role-playing: a bunch of online strangers logging into the Hasbro D&D app, forking over an extra $7.99 to unlock the good subclasses, and then giving the DM (who they are paying by the hour) a 2-star rating because he only has the free-tier battle maps unlocked.

> Messages are expected to be written across several coherent English sentences, neatly organized into paragraphs, finally with some sort of signature. In the programming world we refer to this as boilerplate.

"This HTTP call has no message body and therefore no content, and can thus be ignored" he said confidently, not noticing the status code. The verbiage is where you find out useful information, like whether the speaker is on your side and whether they understand the problem the same way as you and whether they're dumb. It's not as if the reason we didn't adopt bullet-points-only ten years ago is that it required better AI.

More generally, I submit that when faced with a long email thread, skim reading is superior to LLM summaries in all cases (except maybe the one where the reader is too inexperienced to do it well). It's faster, captures more detail, and (probably most important) avoids the problem of the people on the thread coming away with subtly different understandings of the conversation.

Landlords are easy to hate in the way that people complain about Microsoft or their power utility or whatever, but the specific meme you're talking about (that they take no risk and live extravagantly without contributing anything) seems to have gotten very prominent relatively recently.

Some of the specific complaints are wrong (landlords do take risk and some of them don't make much money) but the general sentiment is fair, in the sense that they get more return for less risk than they used to historically. It seems like an unavoidable response to rising inequality caused by capital getting most of the productivity gains over the last 40-odd years.

Aside from maintaining the building, what landlords are doing is renting access to capital, same as a bank loan.

Ask yourself: what's the difference between the SEC saying, "We declare that Facebook broke a securities law and shall now be fined $1M" and Trump saying, "I decree that the SEC declare that Facebook broke a securities law and shall now be fined $1M"? Either of those could be true or false. Either could be politically motivated. Either could hold up in court or be struck down. So what's the difference?

One[0] answer is, the former was vetted by someone knowledgeable and (at least allegedly) non-partisan who had the power to stop it if it was wrong. That's it. If the president really wants to fine Facebook he can - he can replace the SEC Director with the "My Pillow" guy if he wants, who can replace SEC employees with randomly chosen members MAGA types until the desired fine is eventually issued - but at least going through the bureaucracy confers the possibility of impartial and informed oversight. Vesting the power with the president directly doesn't do that; presidents are biased and partisan by design.

0: Another answer is the SEC has been granted the power to do that by Congress and the president has not; but I get that people on the "unitary executive" train disregard this, and

When Congress passes a law saying, "create an agency that sets rules about air pollution, whose director is appointed by the president", the constitution demands that the executive branch do exactly that. Interpreting that to mean "The president personally sets rules about air pollution, using an agency if he likes" is unconstitutional and I think the vast majority of both parties agreed on this for most of the last hundred years.

> DEHP is a compound added to plastics (like vinyl tape) to make them more flexible. It’s used in hundreds of household products, which means lots of people who bathe in Dr. Bronner’s Useless Fluid think it will kill them.

I get the joke (that people who use Dr. Bronner's soap are probably uninformed hippies) but am confused by the "Useless" part. I've used that soap and thought it seemed fine. Is it a known fact, or factoid, or meme, among smart people that Dr. Bronner's is ineffective?

> AI will seep into all areas of the economy and society; we will expect everything to be smart.

I fear this is correct, but with "smart" in the sense of smart TVs. In economic terms, TVs are amazing compared to just a few years ago - more pixels, much cheaper, more functionality - but in practice they spy on you and take ten seconds to turn on and show unskippable ads. This is purely a social (legal, economic, etc) problem as opposed to a technical one, and its solution (if we ever find one) would be likewise. So it's frightening to see someone with as much power over the outcome say something like this:

> In particular, it does seem like the balance of power between capital and labor could easily get messed up, and this may require early intervention. We are open to strange-sounding ideas like giving some “compute budget” to enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI, but we can also see a lot of ways where just relentlessly driving the cost of intelligence as low as possible has the desired effect.

When capital has control of an industry, but voluntarily gives little pieces of it out to labor so that they can "share" the profit, I think we all know how that turns out. It does seem possible that AGI really will get built and really will seep into everything and really will create a ton of economic value. But getting from there to the part where it improves everyone's lives is a social problem, akin to the problem of smart TVs, and I can't imagine a worse plan to solve that problem than leaving it up to the capitalist that owns the AGIs.

What was the impressive and profitable part? The article makes him sound like a script kiddie who dicked around with some DDoS networks and formed a couple LLCs but didn't end up accomplishing much (either entrepreneurially or illegally). Not saying that makes him a terrible person, but in generation ago terms, he sounds less like a founding l0pht member and more like a Rusty n Edie's subscriber.

What's more worrying is whether the access can realistically be revoked. As a general rule, when a security even rises to the level of root access to internal systems, you don't even try to remove them - you just rebuild the affected VMs from scratch because it's the only way to be sure the attacker didn't leave anything behind. For the systems we're talking about, payment processing stuff at Treasury and Social Security and so forth, one wonders if they can even be rebuilt on a reasonable timeframe?

> No to both, because nobody at SBA or USPS could permissibly do those things.

I don't see why. A specific person at the SBA is empowered to approve or deny the loan, and that person works for someone who works for someone who works for the president, right? I assume we both agree that Trump could likely get the loan approved indirectly, by ordering the SBA administrator to get it done and replacing him if he refuses. What's the difference between that, and Trump accomplishing the same thing faster via executive order, "As president I have reviewed this loan and all relevant regulations and determine that it is approved"?

For me and (despite what you say) conventional wisdom, the difference is that the SBA is empowered by statute to loan money and the president isn't. Under your interpretation, I don't think there is a difference and he really could do that. What would stop him? At least in the case of the SEC, someone might plausibly argue that he had broken a law, but I believe the criteria the SBA uses to approve loans are departmental regulations, which by your reasoning ought to be subject to the same presidential whims.

edit- I just realized that I used firing earlier as an example - "If the statute of the Dept of XYZ and says the president can fire its governing board but only on weekends, then he has to wait til Saturday" - which is probably why you brought up Myers. I don't really disagree with Myers (or Seila for that matter), but I also don't think it's very relevant to the larger question of whether creating an agency to do X is tantamount to empowering the president to personally do X.

Thanks for responding at length, though your derisive tone isn't winning you any converts. Is it your position then that the president can legally wield any power described in any legislation? If not, what can't he do? Can he, for example, raise and lower interest rates over the objection of the Fed? Approve an IPO that the SEC rejected? Lend money to his supporters through the SBA and deny loan applications from his adversaries? Refuse to deliver Hunter Biden's mail? If not, why not? I'm not trying to play gotcha here, but it seems like your position is that he can do these things.

> once so established, the president has the power to decide how they’re operated.

This is the third time I've seen someone pushing this line of thinking on HN in as many days and I'd like to know more about where it's coming from. Can you cite any source that supports it and justifies it?

FWIW, the conventional wisdom is that the independent agencies really are independent, and the president's control over them is exactly what is stipulated in the legislation that created them. If the statute of the Dept of XYZ and says the president can fire its governing board but only on weekends, then he has to wait til Saturday, period end of story. The idea that the president can interfere with the independent agencies because they're part of the executive branch was, AFAICT, invented out of whole cloth in the last couple of years, and has no constitutional support at all. So I'm curious to hear more about what this new theory is and how far it extends. In particular, if the president can decide to cancel NIH grants because the NIH is under the executive branch, what keeps him from raising and lowering interest rates?

edit to add: to be clear, the president does have a great deal of power over most of the independent agencies; in most cases he hires and fires their leaders. But he has that power because Congress specifically granted it, not because the executive branch is his personal fiefdom. If he wants to, say, get a pharmaceutical drug approved, he has to direct HHS to direct the FDA to do that in the usual way, not just decree it. This has little to do with thwarting his power and lots to do with effective and efficient governance.

In most cases the law that created the agency spells out exactly what control the president has, and AFAIK presidents still have to follow the law like everyone else. Is there any real justification for this, beyond the general notion that FDR once got away with something similar so maybe Trump should too?

I understand you're arguing this, I'm asking where this meme came from. Independent agencies have been around for more than a century and AFAICT the idea that there's something constitutionally unsavory about them is very new. Whence came this idea? Is it something you personally invented that the rest of the right doesn't subscribe to, or are others advocating it, and if so could you refer me to what arguments they're using to justify it?

That doesn't mean it's subject to the whims of the president. When Congress creates independent agencies, they lay out exactly how the president has oversight (usually by hiring and firing the director and/or board).

I remember you pushing this idea (that the independence of independent executive agencies are unconstitutional, or unaccountable, or similar) heavily in a thread a couple days ago. Where is it coming from? AFAIK virtually everyone on both sides has agreed that the independence of these agencies was a Really Good Thing for the last hundred years.

They're created by Congress but administratively part of the executive branch, as described in the first two paragraphs of the linked wiki article, and they're independent so they can be insulated from politics and regulate effectively.

You make this sound trivial, but I did this (not with a blog per se, but with a silly one-shot parody website I made for fun) and the first time it got posted on HN it exceeded my hosts bandwidth limits in the first hour despite only having a handful of images. Unless you never write anything popular, you at least need a static host like github pages or a cdn or something behind it.

I think the truth is in the middle: people took what they wanted from the study in the 40s, and people are taking what they want from the updated study as well. Worse, the topic seems to be popular enough that it's being used as seo spam now. At this point, if someone with a deep understanding of both wolf behavior and human behavior were to review all available data, think deeply on the subject, draw meaningful and valuable insights, and write a popular essay conveying them, I don't know how I'd find it among all the dross.

I guess it has a life of its own now. Seems like a good example of the semiotics concept of the signifier becoming disconnected from the signified: a heated debate over the finer points of wolf pack social dynamics being carried out by people with no particular knowledge of or interest in wolves.

Well put, but the countermeme ("Hey did you hear that the alpha wolf thing was bullshit?") seems to be as popular or moreso than what it's displacing. I did some light googling yesterday to see if I could find any references of "alpha wolf" before the 40s, and all I could find was page after page of articles exactly like TFA.

I think the same reasoning applies - it is vague and easy to apply and people want it to be true - just for different people.

This sounds like Scott Alexander's "Fashion explained with cellular automata" article, which was neat but probably not what OP was referring to and certainly not related to TFA in any way I can see. Still a good read tho.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/

Have the details been published anywhere? I looked briefly and only see stuff describing it in general and saying it is yet to be released.