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Very interesting, I've thought in a completely different direction, towards human verification. "IRL KYC for friends" or something

I always hit problems with it though. Let's say I can find someone I trust. Maybe it's me. Say I only enter online spaces, at least with intent of discussion, with those I've met in real life. Well, at some point, someone I've met face to face would be incentivized to maybe share a link to their friend's concert. Perhaps there's a free guest list spot in it for them if the show sells out. Or maybe it's all gravy, but eventually:

I want to expand the network we've created together, and it means trusting someone else to bring in people to the online space I've never met in real life. This could again be fine for a long time, but won't someone eventually be incentivized (especially if this practice were common) to promote this supplement, promote that politician...?

(recognize astroturfing is different from the impending slop tsunami but both feel to be in the same stadium)


Proof of human is the natural first stop.

Your solution shares its essence with a club, a WhatsApp group or interest group.

It works, but you will still be at the mercy of the large communities and economies of thought that the members are a part of.

That is the broader environment you are a part of.

Everyone from FAANG firms, governments to game companies struggle to identify real people from bots.

If your platform is global, then you have to contend with users from different legal regimes and jurisdictions.

The issue is that verification is logistically expensive, ends up infringing on rights, legally complex and on top of all that - error prone.

To top it off - If proof of life ends up gatekeeping any form of value, you will set up incentives to break verification.


>read one news article about a story once a day in a newspaper and maybe once more in the evening news. In between you could think about it, talk about it with other people you know in real life

The bit about having processing time and the social check and balance has been missing from my perspective. Thank you.


The very very very lovely executives at Intuit (thank you for your contribution to society boize) have a good plan for calling their TurboTax help line: you don't spell your name to the robot, you don't talk to a human.

(unless saying "no" / "agent" etc. the fifteen time would've been the trick! Sure, my name can be "O K"...

(I would def love this system if I worked there though, just surprising it didn't have an offramp along the way... maybe they did but everyone used it)


"That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was On Purpose."

I knew that one time I needed a free Sam's Club membership for one thing and they kept on dropping me...


Never would have found that. Poked around, interesting:

"In response to your completely valid request, and in line with the boycott of the US dollar, we have closed our USDT wallet. Please use Bitcoin or Solana instead."

https://xcancel.com/ExplosiveMediaa/status/20419442863300406...


(not parent)

Something's been bothering me, and it's how little control our leadership has over what comes across their screens.

1 - We've read the reputable reporting on the troll farms.

2 - We haven't seen reporting that the problem is fixed.

3 - We know our politicians are on social media.

Presumably, every single day, American politicians see at least one post from someone pretending to be their constituent. How are they avoiding conscious, if not subconscious, influence?


Interesting, little different than this other site I saw on HN this week:

https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code


In the very same comments sometimes, those frustrating geniuses

Inside of me are two wolves. One that’s like “F Apple” and another that is like “Are they going to do an M5 ultra or…?”

We can appreciate their hardware achievements and at the same time condemn them for their monopolistic anti-user decisions.

There it is--pretty much that.

Adults can hold 2 thoughts in their head at their same time.

Paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald? "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

Holding contradictory ideas isn't the laudable skill. Any uncritical person can believe conflicting things without being troubled by them. The genius is holding such ideas in disbelief long enough to let evidence alter or evict them.


I agree that holding inconsistent thoughts is not desirable. I don't think the thoughts in this case need to be contradictory and many times are not. I, personally, admire the HW they design and the polish that Apple delivers, while hating how closed their platform is. Am I contradicting myself?

I did not know F. Scott Fitzgerald was the source of the phrase, TIL. I just picked it up somewhere and paraphrased it since I thought it applies here.


Yes, indeed, complaining about them even though they're brilliant (tough love?) as I just did

all five letters of that answer are in your username :)

So that narrows it down to about 300 possibilities. https://gist.github.com/jes/bbdad4c6e54ffa120f62cd443ded8d8f

Plausible candidates include "asset", "enemy", "homes", "mates", "moats", "money", "nasty", "state", "stunt".


Awesome

(467 on macOS Sequoia it seems)


Are you thinking of a single five letter word, two words of three and two letters, or an entire sentence that only uses 5 distinct letters?

Consider being less cryptic, for the sake of those with English as a fourth language.


(also a non-native speaker here, mildly annoyed by the obscure joke from GP)

Wordplay are exactly the kind of stuff that LLMs excel at, so I asked Gemini flash, and I got

> snarky play on words by suggesting that the answer to AnthonyMouse's question is "Money."

> Here is the breakdown of how they arrived at that:

> The Username: AnthonyMouse

> The Letters: The word "Money" can be formed using the letters found in M-o-n-t-h-o-n-y M-o-u-s-e

(Gemini's answer is actually longer, I just kept the interesting bit)

Amusingly, this answer exhibits a similar problem to the "how many r in raspberry" problem (it forgets how to spell correctly), since

AnthonyMouse != M-o-n-t-h-o-n-y M-o-u-s-e

But it seems that it got to the correct answer (or an incorrect but plausible :) ) despite that


LLMs give you the boring (i.e. statistically probable) answer. You could probably get it to say "money" almost regardless of what the original question was because it's so generic. It might even say that for a name without all the right letters.

Let's save a tree and ask bash:

$ grep ^.....$ /usr/share/dict/words|grep -i ^[AnthonyMouse]*$

From the more than 300 possibilities we can then consider the context. We're talking about Microsoft here, and the problem suggests we're the sort of people who expect anagrams to have secret meaning, so we should prefer an answer implying some kind of conspiracy or kabbalistic nonsense. The obvious candidates are therefore mason and Satan. Between these, Satan would require reusing a letter the candidate set only has once, and one of the other words on the list was stone. We can form two five letter words if we're allowed to reuse letters and thereby get stone mason.

This is the most irrefutable possible proof that we're being pointed to a masonic conspiracy rather than Microsoft's usual popular association with the antichrist.


>it's so generic.

Can only be one root of all evil, I suppose :)


Thanks for doing the legwork :) my b

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47735828


Sorry, that was yesterday's HN Wordle! (that's the New York Times-acquired wordplay game Wordle, quite the popular wordplay game--just joking that I created a word game of my own)

Useless reflection to ignore below (forewarned!)

I hesitated to post; in the end, the value of the comment was so low, I expected non-wordplay-fans to scroll past and lose nothing, so I left it in the hopes at least one person would find the answer themselves and be pleased about it.

thanks


No drama, I don't mind a puzzle or oblique reference. I'm also a grandparent and spend too much time on pointing out that what one person is thinking of isn't always the same as what another is, and that there's often yet another way of looking at a statement.

I liked your comment, I guessed the word, and had fun pointing out ambiguities at play.


:D u gr8

I'm guessing they're thinking of the word 'money'.

yeah, but, .. Barrett Strong or Flying Lizards money?

was only dumb for a month or few, now that it's max blacked out as best it can be I can redirect my focus... and be annoyed by the STUPID hiding bottom menus like in Photos.

Literally ZERO times did I complain I was missing seven pixels of "real estate", thanks Apple, love the extra tap to see what I need

(to be clear, only sign on iOS 26, NOT macOS 26)


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