baltakatei

Hard mode: set time zone to UTC (or Reykjavik; it’s the same) and force yourself to add/subtract offset hours every time you want to know local time. Also, this forces you to track when exactly daylight saving time starts and stops.

Benefit: you know when space probe stuff happens because they’re almost always timestamped UTC. Also, playing Eve Online becomes slightly easier.

deleted by creator

They vaguely wonder who “Vetinari”, “Weatherwax”, “Ogg”, and “Otto Chriek” were.

“On one hand those trans kids give me the creeps. On the other, I get to call high school girls hot without consequences!”

But… the market! Think of my investments!

By having your computer shipped to you, mostly.

And the highway is littered with potholes.

Does it act as a dumb monitor? Can all smart TV features be permanently disabled?

Theoretically, it’s possible for the user to authenticate their age without either the site or service knowing the user’s identity. Quick and dirty example:

There’s a thing called a ring signature that allows one to prove that one of a large number of people digitally signed something. Let’s say a million people all have private keys whose corresponding public keys are registered to a database after they flashed their state ID at a post office or something to prove they are ≥18 years of age. So, John Smith uses his private key plus all 1 million public keys to sign a statement that he sends to a server saying he’s ≥18. The server then takes all 1 million public keys plus the signed message John provided and verifies that his signature is among the 1 million but cannot calculate which exact public key belongs to John. The verification process requires all 1 million public keys as input; you cannot, for example, try an omit each public key one-by-one to see which causes the verification process to fail.

Currently, there is ongoing research on how to make compact ring signatures since they can be very large the more public keys are involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature

That said, even if you had scalable compact ring signature technology, I’d be more worried about advertiser deänonymization efforts once a user has logged in that check browser canvas size, IP address, user agent, font availability, etc. See https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Also, ring signatures for age verification don’t actually verify age, just that someone proved their age at some point in the past to the owner of the public key database; just like an adult can log into YouTube on behalf of their children and let the children go to town, John could give anyone access to his private key regardless of age.

“Hey, Uncle, can I use your age tokens to do my research homework? The rich kids all get to use the entire Internet because their uncles let them ride their age credentials. Thanks!”

seconds from disaster

“You are reading at college level.”

Translation: “You are baseline literate.”

The only peaceful way I see wealth being redistributed is if Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg were to use regulatory capture to reform government in order to raise their own taxes. Such a scale of philanthropy hasn’t been seen since the robber barons Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller donated to build libraries and improve public education. Had those Guilded Age monopolists also used their wealth to compel the US’s legislative branch to raise taxes, bolster anti-trust laws, and prevent the acceptance of consumer welfare doctrine over plain anti-monopoly policy, then I’d argue their donations to improve public education would have gone much farther.

That said, plenty of non-peaceful ways exist much like there are many ways for an iceberg to flip over.