Not sure what the Gruber thing is about. I guess I lack context. But on ZKP, I will agree but add this:

The only authority that can be trusted to do age verification is the government.

You know, those people who give you birth certificates, passports, SSNs, driver's licenses, etc.

The idea that parental supervision here is sufficient has been shown to be wholly inadequate. I'm sorry but that train has sailed. Age verification is coming. It's just a question of who does it and what form it takes.

Take Youtube, for example. I think it should work like this:

1. If you're not of sufficient age, you simply don't see comments. At all;

2. Minors shouldn't see ads. At all;

3. Videos deemed to have age-restricted content should be visible;

4. If you're not logged in, you're treated as an age-restricted user; and

5. Viewing via a VPN means you need age verification regardless of your country of origin.

It's not perfect. It doesn't have to be.

We are rapidly becoming a world where every person is one inscrutable LLM decision from having their life ruined with no recourse.

This type of incident isn't new and is only going to get worse. The problem is our governments are doing absolutely nothing about it. I'll give two examples:

1. Hertz implemented a system where they falsely reported cars as being stolen. People were arrested and went to jail for rental cars that were sitting in the Hertz lot. Hertz ultimately had to pay $168 million in a settlement [1]. That's insufficient. If I, as an ordinary citizen, make a false police report that somebody stole my car I can be criminally charged. And rightly so. People should go to jail for this and it will continue until they do. These fines and settlements are just the cost of doing business; and

2. The UK government contracted Fujitsu to produce a new system for their post offices. That system was allowed to produce criminal charges for fraud that were completely false. People committed suicide over this. This went on for what? A decade or more? But resuted in a parliamentary inquiry and settlements. It's known as the British Post Office scandal [2]. Again, people should go to jail for this.

The choice we as a society face is whether to have automation improve all of our lives by raising everyone's standard of living and allowing us to do less work and less menial work or do we allow automation to further suppress wages so the Epstein class can be slightly more wealthy.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

> Per the reddit thread, they just got hacked yesterday.

There are constant hacks of companies. Most of them don't get covered. So there's that. But it's also how it's framed. It's an "Iranian cyberattack". Interesting.

Couldn't an equally valid headline be "Lax security results in Stryker getting hacked"? Probably (just guessing).

It's a bit like all the stories about the Chinese stealing IP and jobs. Ok, let's assume those claims are true and have been for decades. So why do companies keep offshoring there knowing this will happen? At what point do you blame short-term cost-cutting by bonus-hunting executives?

My point is that the media is playing along and you're going to get a lot of "Iran = bad" stories because of it.

No.

I'm saying that the media suddenly covering stories like this isn't a coincidence. The media is a tool of the state to manufacture consent. Media literacy goes beyond just looking at the facts in a story. It's also what's not mentioned, how is it presented, what stories are written, what stories aren't and, most importantly, why.

All social media companies manufacture consent for American foreign policy. Pretty much all American media does the same.

I find all this particularly funny because our media does the exact thing we accuse the likes of Chinese media doing it. We just pretend it doesn't happen here or are oblivious to it.

There was a time when there was less restraint with what prosecuting a war looked like. The Mongols famously wiped out the Khwarazmian Empire after the Sultan killed their traders.

But given the growth in destructive power, particularly with the advent of the nuclear age, it became necessary to establish some rules or norms for war and I'm referring specifically to the Geneva Conventions [1]. Conventions here cover that wounded people and civilians aren't military targets. So it's not my opinion or Iran's opinion that matters.

The question then is do we live in an interntional rules-based order or not? The US and Israel have ignored the rules-based order in favor of "might is right" politics.

As for tech firms, I'm sorry but a company like Palantir has made itself a valid military target [2][3]. And if you work there, you are really no different from the Reaper Drone pilot who fires Hellfire missiles at, say, a wedding procession [4].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions

[2]: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

[3]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/palantir...

[4]: https://aoav.org.uk/2014/drone-strike-yemen/