sirreal14

Attempting regulatory capture is not “working with safety or morals”, I’d argue it’s the opposite.

> In fairness I’ve seen humans make that mistake

These were (formerly) not the kinds of humans who regularly made these kinds of mistakes.

As a Seattle SWE, I'd say most of my coworkers do hate all the time-wasting AI stuff being shoved down our throats. There are a few evangelical AI boosters I do work with, but I keep catching mistakes in their code that they didn't used to make. Large suites of elegant looking unit tests, but the unit tests include large amounts of code duplicating functionality of the test framework for no reason, and I've even seen unit tests that mock the actual function under test. New features that actually already exist with more sane APIs. Code that is a tangled web of spaghetti. These people largely think AI is improving their speed but then their code isn't making it past code review. I worry about teams with less stringent code review cultures, modifying or improving these systems is going to be a major pain.

This Canadian group (Canadian Centre for Child Protection) is awful. They simultaneously receive tax dollars while also being registered as a lobbyist, meaning Canadians are paying taxes to the government to lobby itself. Last year they lobbied in favor of Bill S-210 [0], which would bring Texas-style age verification of porn to Canada. Their latest campaign is to introduce censorship to Tor, they’re quite proud of this campaign [1] where they’re going after Tor in the popular media and attacking the Tor non-profit’s funding structure. [2] Learning that they upload child abuse images to try to then report take down internet services doesn’t surprise me in the least.

[0] https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/SECU/Brief/B... [1] https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/blog/2025/tor-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/25/tor-netwo...

It absolutely is, but the “joke” is manufacturing consent for considering drug cartels as terrorists, and for considering wars for regime change in Latin America as dealing with terrorism.

Israel is fully dependent on the support it receives from western governments, and it knows that support will vanish if it wages a loud open genocide and brags about it. So no, it's not trivially in their power to kill everyone in Gaza, as Israel would cease to exist if they did that.

AI safetyists have already called for airstriking """rouge""" data centers, don't play coy and pretend that your worldview stops at KYC for infrastructure.

Obviously the government can stop issuing services to a certain ID, but being run on a decentralized computing platform (plan is an Ethereum layer 2 I believe) means that they cannot stop you from interacting with other governments or with third parties.

> I am all for privacy and encrypted communications. Until a legitimate law enforcement....

So you're against encryption then. Simple as that.

> Outsourcing some, or all of that to some VC backed companies, facilitating access for the various intelligence agencies, is what I have a problem with.

I also have a problem with that. We should aim to build systems that are resistant to all attackers, even intelligence agencies. And like Signal, it should be impossible for companies to facilitate access for anyone, including intelligence/law enforcement.

> And a crypto start-up setting out to build a global database of peoples retinas

Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with real criticisms of WorldCoin (Vitalik has a nice critique here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html), because they don't store biometric data, they only store hashes.

What's the worry here? If WorldCoin surpasses their wildly ambitious long term goals, governments won't be able to revoke someones passport for being a dissident anymore? What specific issues do you see with a successful decentralized proof of personhood system?

EDIT: Specifically, what issues does _decentralization_ bring to proof-of-personhood over government run proof of personhood, other than removing the government's ability to un-person someone.

> The while premise of needing a nin-centralized wax of confirming ones identity is, at its core, deeply un-demicratic. As of bow, government issued documentation confirms anyones identiy. These governments can be democratic, and are. Puting a different system in place, controlled by some tech-billionaire-liberitarian, is as dytopian as it gets.

I deeply hate this line of logic. This exact argument was presented against the Signal messaging app in an Op-Ed in the NYT (https://archive.is/tJoem), to quote from it:

> They are a small group of people who govern these powerful tools, and they are not accountable in the way that, say, a democratically elected government is. Whether law enforcement should tap our phones on the condition that a warrant is obtained is, at the very least, worthy of public discussion. Signal has unilaterally decided for us all.

Boo hoo, math makes it so that governments (yes, even democratic ones) can't tap phones, therefore math (and the technologists who code up this math) are evil and anti-democratic.

For all WorldCoin's faults, merely attempting to offer a decentralized alternative (even if it's not a very good one!) to government proof-of-person solutions is not one of them.