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The industry clearly prefers a system in which using the internet requires full identification. There are many powerful interests that support this model:

- Governments benefit from easier monitoring and enforcement.

- The advertising industry prefers verified identities for better targeting.

- Social media companies gain more reliable data and engagement.

- Online shopping companies can reduce fraud and increase tracking.

- Many SaaS companies would also welcome stronger identity verification.

In short, anonymity is not very profitable, and governments often favor identification because it increases oversight and control.

Of course, this leads to political debate. Some point out that voting often does not require ID, while accessing online services does. The usual argument is that voting is a constitutional right. However, one could argue that access to the internet has become a fundamental part of modern life as well. It may not be explicitly written into the Constitution, but in practice it functions as an essential right in today’s society.

From a technological standpoint, it is pointless. But from a marketing perspective, it is very important.

Take this trick question as an example. Gemini was the first to “fix” the issue, and the top comment on Hacker News is praising how Gemini’s “reasoning” is better.

Gemini pro medium is failing this:

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters from here. Should I walk or drive? Keep in mind that I am a little overweight and sedentary.

But amazingly chatgpt is telling me to drive.

Anyway, this just shows how they just patched this because the tiktok video with this went viral. These systems are LLMs and all these logic steps are still just LLM steps.

It has been patched. I tried it last week and it definitely suggested walking. It seems like all the models have been updated, which is not surprising given that the TikTok video has got 3.5 million views.

This has been viral on Tiktok far at least one week. Not really 4 hours.

This trick went viral on TikTok last week, and it has already been patched. To get a similar result now, try saying that the distance is 45 meters or feet.

The new one is with upside down glass: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP89Khv9t/

One thing I have learned from the Epstein files is that when someone labels themselves as “woke,” “progressive,” or committed to “class struggle,” you should not automatically take them at their word. People lie and cheat all the time.

I saw the video and understand the problem but I cannot simulate it. The keyboard always works great for me. Could it be that this bug is related to AI? Or some language settings?

SHOULD = You are strongly recommended to do this, but it’s not absolutely required.

- In most cases, you are expected to follow it.

- You can choose not to follow it, but you must have a very good reason.

For example, RFC 7231 say that there should be DATE header but some embedded devices have no real-time clock so it ok not to implement.

India’s UPI is national service so fraud is “relatively easy” to combat but it depends on banks’ responsiveness.

However, i heard from my Indian friends is that UPI fraud is on the raise and becoming a big challenge.

Edit: UPI fraud rate is similar to CC fraud rate but only about ~6 % of the money lost to UPI fraud has been recovered. If this trend continues (fraud pct continues to grow and recovery rate does not improve) UPI system might get into trouble.

Btw, the stats say that the UPI fraud rate is doubling every year for past few years.

The problem arises when the banks are in two different countries. If money leaves your account and mistakenly ends up in an account in another country, even within Europe, it can be very difficult to recover.

That is why national payment systems tend to work relatively well. Cross border systems are a completely different challenge.

I think what people are missing in this conversation is fraud prevention and protection.

Any cross border payment solution, even within Europe, that lacks strong fraud protection is dead on arrival.

But I suspect the fraud problem will be ignored until it cannot be ignored anymore. And then we will go back to square one and try everything again.

I really cannot imagine a world without credit cards. How do you buy Christmas presents, everything in cash? I am half joking.

But that might be one reason why business ideas from the US do not always translate well to Europe, and vice versa.

I have always wondered what kind of shenanigans Mastercard or Visa did to convince so many banks to use their networks for debit cards.

When did banks actually make that switch?

It must be relatively recent, because I remember not that long ago my credit union ATM card was not part of Mastercard. Now I have a new one and it suddenly has a Mastercard logo.

I think the misunderstanding is that when I say “credit card,” I do not mean a physical card. I have not used a physical card in years. In the US, when people hear Mastercard or Visa, they usually associate that with a credit card (virtual or physical), meaning the money is not taken directly from your bank account. You pay the balance later, which gives you credit and strong dispute protections.

Debit or ATM cards are different. They pull money directly from your account and can exist independently of Visa and Mastercard. For example, some credit unions still issue ATM only debit cards that are not part of the Visa or Mastercard networks.

So Wero is not a credit card, but something more like Venmo? How is it supposed to replace Visa and Mastercard?

There has to be some lag, and it is more about who controls Congress.

For example, the housing crisis and bubble were largely driven by legislation passed years earlier, including the 1999 repeal of Glass Steagall under Clinton. That was passed by a Republican controlled Congress, and the crisis eventually exploded under Bush. So I do not think either Clinton or Bush can be directly blamed for the housing crash. It is the repeal of the glass steagall act.

And was the dot com bubble crash in early 2000s caused by Clinton or by Bush? Or some legalization passed a long time ago? Or it just a business cycle?

More broadly, I would argue that presidents, and even legislators, have limited control over the actual health of the economy. Are we going to say Trump is responsible for the AI boom? And if this AI boom collapses into a massive bubble burst under the next administration, will that president be blamed instead?

By looking the list it seems like it is not really “sophisticated”. It is just list based on names (if there is a “email” in the name). Majority of extensions do not even ask for permissions to access linkedin.com.

I do not think this is really about privacy as much as it is about our broken immigration system. Let’s look at a simple case where both Democrats and Republicans largely agree.

On January 6, 2026, all South Sudanese nationals lost their TPS status and ordered to leave the US. At this point, they are all effectively declared illegal. I have not seen a single Democrat seriously argue that something should be done about this.

So what do we think people from South Sudan will actually do? Pack their bags and return to South Sudan?

My point is that a system where someone is admitted to the US completely legally, lives here for years, and is then suddenly reclassified as “illegal” is fundamentally broken.

I just want to clarify why this is not so straightforward. It really depends on how the term “illegal alien” is defined.

Before BBB July 4, Medicare covered the following groups:

- Refugees

- Asylum seekers

- Immigration parolees

- TPS holders

- DACA recipients

Under the Trump administration, the following groups are now considered illegal aliens:

- Asylum seekers with pending claims or those whose claims were denied

- Immigration parolees

- Certain categories of TPS holders (for example South Sudanese TPS ended Jan 6 2026 so all people under that protection are ordered to leave)

- Certain categories of DACA recipients

And the above people are probably registered for medicare with full name and address.

Can someone explain what he was actually doing here?

Was the issue that he was reselling these Claude.md files, or that he was selling project setup or creation services to his clients?

Or maybe all scaffolding activity (back and forth) looked like automated usage?

However, the writing is on the wall: AI will completely replace technical writers.

The technology is improving rapidly, and even now, with proper context, AI can write technical documentation extremely well. It can include clear examples (and only a very small number of technical writers know how to do that properly), and it can also anticipate and explain potential errors.

The goal was to disrupt government bureaucracy. Saving money was never the real objective, even though it was marketed that way.

Anyone who knows how to use Excel understands that entitlements and defense are the biggest issue (60%) when it comes to government spending.

As a normal user: why do I need IPv6?

As far as I know, the majority of websites (about 70%) do not support IPv6.

I am old enough to remember when string theory was expected to explain and unify all forces and predict everything. Sadly, it failed to deliver on that promise.

And there is no known single real world experiment that can rule out string theory while keeping general relativity and quantum mechanics intact.

More accurately, string theory is not wrong (because it just cannot be wrong). Because it does not predict anything and cannot invalidate anything, it does not help to advance our understanding of how to integrate general relativity and quantum mechanics.

It should not be called theory - maybe set of mathematical tools or whatever.

Tragic.

We should not make any assumptions here.

I remember that about 20+ years ago a famous biologist was killed, and there were all kinds of speculations about terrorists, the government, and so on. A few years later, Snapped episode was released.

How can we solve this problem?

The only idea I can think of is a law that requires companies, once they reach a certain number of users or market share, to provide a formal process to restore accounts that are a certain number of years old. This could include paid arbitration or a similar mechanism.

I doubt such a law could pass at the federal level, but if it were passed in California, it would probably solve 80 percent of the problem.

Or is there a better solution?

Let me ask you this way: How do you think they make money?

Deleted.

I just want to point that buying gift cards in order to participate in gift-card arbitrage violates both apple rules and payment provider rules.

If you are buying large amounts of gift cards and then redeeming them, it is critical that your purchasing patterns do not look suspicious, such as buying more things that a normal user might need: multiple iphone wallets, multiple iPhones, or similar items.