I can prove all contributions to stagex are by humans because we all belong to a 25 year old web of trust with 5444 endorser keys including most redhat, debian, ubuntu, and fedora maintainers, with all of our own maintainer keys in smartcards we tap to sign every review and commit, and we do background checks on every new maintainer.

I am completely serious. We have always had a working proof of human system called Web of Trust and while everyone loves to hate on PGP (in spite of it using modern ECC crypto these days) it is the only widely deployed spec that solves this problem.

https://kron.fi/en/posts/stagex-web-of-trust/

Fatalism will also not fix anything. But I suppose death comes for us all, yes? Why do anything at all?

I guess I could just curl up into fetal position and watch the world go by. But that's no fun. Why not dream big and shoot for the moon with kooky goals like, say, having an underground, community-supported internet where things are falling less to shit?

Belief in inevitability is a choice (except for maybe dying, I guess).

It’s certainly winnable with some legislative tweaks. These systems are all designed by humans, we can just change them.

Of course, we’d need a significant change of direction in leadership, but it’s happened many times before. French Revolution seems highly relevant

Human verification technology absolutely exists. Give it some time and people who sell ai today are going to shoehorn it everywhere as the solution to the problem they are busy creating now.

It’s where THIS internet is headed. The future may involve a lot more of them I think.

Nothing like throwing in the towel before a battle is ever fought. Let's just sigh and wearily march on to our world of AI slop and ever higher bug counts and latency delays while we wait for the five different phone homes and compilations through a billion different LLM's for every silly command.

Technology won’t save us, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be promoting ethics.

Magical human verification technology is called "your own private forum" in conjunction with "invite your friends"

IDK. I sort of like the idea that now instead of dead internet theory being a joke, that it’ll be a well known fact that a minority of people are not real and there is no point in engaging… I look forward to Social 3… where people have to meet face to face.

Even if it is impossible to win, I am still feeling bad about it.

And at this point it is more about how large space will be usable and how much will be bot-controlled wasteland. I prefer spaces important for me to survive.

To feel something. To resist something bad. To stand for what is right.

Do those sentiments mean nothing to you?

>There's no magical human verification technology coming to save us.

Except for the one Sam Altman is building.

That's why I stopped brushing my teeth, I can't clean every crevice perfectly so what's the point?

I am actively building non-magical human verification technology that doesn't require you uploading your retinal scans or ID to billionaires or incompetent outsourcing firms.

Negative sentiment towards technological destiny detected in human agent.

> You'll never win this battle, so why waste feelings and energy on it?

Cool. The attitude of a bully. Thanks for the contribution!

I assume we're heading to a place where keyboards will all have biometric sensors on every key and measure weight fluctuations in keystrokes, actually.