Hopping on a train alone for a couple of hours has been my default mode of transportation since long before I was 18. Mostly to visit friends so I didn’t have to worry about a place to stay overnight so if you don’t have that, maybe start out with a day trip.
That’s the universal human experience. Listen to every marginally famous person and they will tell you that a single negative comment feels like it weighs more than 100 positive ones. Then factor in that people who disagree feel compelled to voice their opinion while those who agree often silently nod to themselves and move on. So the 100 positive comments are likely representative of 500 people who agree but don’t say anything.
So far, you seem to be doing well. Don’t let a couple of the haters get to you.
Of course, if a pattern appears of many comments criticizing the same thing, then you can think about if there’s something you should change about your behavior. But even then, the change should come from your own realization that you want to change something, not from a desire to appeal to the faceless mass of terminally online weirdos.
From your other posts, I guess you are around 18 and this is your first long-term relationship. If that’s the case, don’t worry too much about it. Don’t expect your first relationship to last forever. Or your second. Or third. Enjoy what you have for as long as it lasts but don’t be afraid to move on when either of you becomes uncomfortable with it. If you treat every relationship as if it must last forever, you won’t recognize the signs if something develops in the wrong direction and you risk locking yourself into something you don’t want, just because you don’t realize that you have other options.
Breakups hurt like hell but they also help you grow. With each one you learn something about yourself, your life goals and what you like and dislike in a partner. I’m in my late 30s now and if you count everything that lasted longer than a year, I’m in my third long-term relationship right now, with a hand full of shorter ones in between. The longest one lasted for about seven years and ended because we figured out that our plans for the future had changed in a way that no longer fit together. Breaking up was the right choice and maybe we should have done it a bit earlier but at the same time, I’m grateful for every single day we had and regret nothing.
So in short: see where the journey goes. Be open-minded either way. Maybe you’ll stay together for another month, another year or another decade. Enjoy each other for as long as you’re both happy but don’t be afraid of ending things when you’re not.
I would argue it’s very dumb to give anyone, including humans, access to weapons of mass destruction.
I would trust Skynet a lot more than an LLM. At least that would be purpose-built for actually calculating likely outcomes.
As @Th4tGuyII@fedia.io said, this experiment didn’t contain any proper reasoning about costs and benefits of using nuclear weapons. It’s just a few glorified autocomplete scripts playing “which word comes next?” over and over again. And in the context of modern warfare, many texts in the training corpus happen to mention nukes so they’re bound to show up at the list of most likely next words eventually.
Yeah, we figured that one out back in… checks notes 1983. There is a reason why WarGames still holds up as an amazing movie even though the technology it depicts is far outdated.
Pretty much that, yes. I remember stopping for a moment and wondering what had just happened. I was of course aware that I had existed before. Who and where I was. At the same time it felt like all that was vague and distant, like suddenly waking up from a dream.
Realistically, it was probably just an unusually intense doorway effect but the fact that I can still remember it so vividly, even decades later, shows how significant it must have felt to 3-year-old me.
When I was about three years old, I walked down the hallway from my room toward the living room. I remember that even in that moment it felt like I had blacked out halfway through and my brain started working a couple of steps from the living room door. Everything before that is blank, yet I have tons of memories from the weeks and months after that event.
That was probably the best angle to start an in-depth investigation into his dealings with Epstein. Evidence that comes to light during that investigation can still be used for additional charges.
Yeah, certainly because of the Chinese and not because their government actively discourages tourism…
It happens all the time. Another famous example is the Azure Window on the island of Gozo, Malta. You might know it from the Dothraki Wedding in the first season of Game of Thrones. It collapsed in March 2017.
Well, even without everything that happened to him, he would have died from old age by now. Might have had a chance to see the rise of home computers and the early internet though.
Until Discord starts classifying anything and everything as adult content, TikTok style. Can’t curse, can’t talk about any form of violence. Good luck talking about most video games when you can’t say “gun”, “kill” or “die”.
If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s probably just a matter of time until someone creates an NSFW loops instancce.
You would need to include the birth date in the certificate. But of course that would have its own privacy implications.
And that’s what I’m trying to say: your “just do X” falls short. It is incredibly hard, maybe impossible, to build a reliable age verification system where neither the websites nor the government can violate your privacy. Even the tiniest mistake can mean that the whole thing comes crashing down. And no, “just trust your government” is not a solution. Even if I trust my current government, the next election could put raging Nazis in power who use every available database to identify and terrorize people they don’t like.
If someone designs a system that satisfies all these requirements and is reviewed by multiple independent security researchers, I’m all for implementing it. But from what I know about government IT projects, it currently looks like every country will implement its own system, each with obvious problems that can be exploited by the average computer science student.
About the part of sending the certificate, how do you say they should check the age? By smoke signs?
The whole point about certificates is that they are signed with an asymmetric cryptographic key so you can verify them on your own. You have a list of root certificates from trusted certificate authorities and when a user sends you a certificate that claims to be issued by the Spanish government, you check the signature with the Spanish root certificate. No need to contact the Spanish government’s server about that specific certificate.
This is exactly how any certificate validation process works today. Otherwise, your web browser would have to talk to a bunch of certificate authorities every time you open an HTTPS connection to a website.
And as a follow up to my previous point, now that I’m at my PC and don’t have to type on my phone:
Even if we made certificates in a way that can’t be shared, for example by locking the private key inside a physical device (like a digital passport), we have solved nothing.
Your certificate would immediately become your digital fingerprint that will be stored with your account (to find duplicates) and can be tracked across websites as soon as a database gets leaked or the sites’ owners sell your data to advertisers (when would that ever happen?). While that fingerprint alone doesn’t say anything about you except your age, it makes it trivial to aggregate your activity across the whole internet. Ever bought something on a site that requires age verification? Congratulations, your certificate is now tied to an address. Shared a selfie somewhere? Your certificate has a face. Even without personal data directly in the certificate, it would be a privacy nightmare and exactly what the EU GDPR tried (and failed) to prevent.
The next step would be to find a mechanism that creates single use certificates every time you need one. But you can’t do that locally, because the certificates still need to be signed (and revocable) by a trusted authority. So maybe you need to send a certificate signing request to a government server every time you sign up for something. That could work for some use cases but requires expensive infrastructure that is never allowed to fail even for a few minutes or it would cause chaos.
… and now I’ve noticed your exact wording, implying that sites would forward the users’ certificates to the authority to be verified. That’s a big no-no. A site may never ever acknowledge to an authority that it has seen a specific certificate. The authority necessarily knows who the owner of that certificate is and even if they don’t tell the website, the authority itself can keep track of every citizen. “On date X, PornHub asked us to verify the age for certificate ABCDEF which we know belongs to John Doe from Somesmalltown” is not something I would want to be stored on a government server.
And this is all still assuming that the infrastructure for this would be implemented according to modern standards without security-critical shortcuts. If you have any hope that will ever happen, I recommend you click through https://media.ccc.de/ and watch some talks about government IT fails. Many are available in English.
Certificates that can’t be tied to a specific person can and will be shared, making them essentially worthless.
We‘ve had that in Germany about 20 years ago. Some websites asked you to verify your age by entering a part of the encoded data on the back of your ID card. It took maybe a few days until lists with valid IDs were all over the internet.
Sure, certificates are marginally more reliable because they can be revoked but at that point, websites need to update their revocation lists close to real time which isn’t practical and still can’t catch every shared cert.
Reliably verifying your identity without revealing too many personal details is an extremely hard problem that has troubled computer scientists for decades.
I have exactly one reason why I own an Xbox One S: Gamestop went out of business in Germany at the exact moment I made plans to buy a cheap 4k BluRay player for my bedroom TV and they sold me one (used) for 60€.
International Women’s Day and start of daylight saving time in the USA. I guess this post is referring to the latter.