Earlier quoted context omitted.
When talking about government surveillance, people often ask some version of 'well, if you're not doing anything wrong, what are you afraid of?'. My response is always, 'It's not that I don't trust our current government, I don't trust all future governments that come after this one'. I hope given the recent events of having some hired thugs rifle through government databases (including the OPM, which supposedly has…
Why would people distrust governments more than companies? I never understood that part.
Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball
121–130 of 165 posts
Re: Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the government has more power over you. Thus, they deserve more scrutiny and suspicion.
Except the ostensible motive of the government is to serve its people, whereas the company’s motive is either those of the people who control the company or profit. Even then, if the government is weak than the ‘more power over you’ is simply false. Maybe the magnitude of the power is more for a government, but companies apply their power with much more frequency.
> the ostensible motive of the government is to serve its people
Your conclusion doesn't seem to match your usage of "ostensible". Yes, /democratic/ governments claim to serve its people, but do not necessarily do so. You should always be suspicious and critical of your government in an effort to ensure that the stated goal and actions are aligned. You should always be treating your government as adversarial. In fact, if you read a lot of the writings of people influential to the founding of the US you'll find that they were explicitly trying to design a system where they say its biggest adversary was itself.But also, there are plenty of governments that do not even pretend to serve its people. They are completely self-serving and transparent about that fact. You never know when one is going to turn into the other but often going from ostensibly benevolent to explicitly malevolent is relatively mild, but gaining back freedom usually requires a lot of bloodshed. There's always exceptions, but this is common. The wort part is that people frequently vote in the malevolent leaders. Democracies can turn into autocracies without spilling a single drop of blood. I'm unaware of the reverse ever happening.
Re: Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball
#123Re: Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it the case that companies are hiding in the government's shadow? Who enables a government to exert power over its people?
> Who enables a government to exert power over its people? Mostly the police and military, not the companies.
Re: Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball
#125Biometrics are not a viable solution to the sybil problem. The more biometric tech converges on the ability to get a cryptographic hash of one's body, the further it retreats from the kind of thing that a layperson will trust. You end up with a root of trust that It needs to be the kind of thing that lets Alice assert that this key goes with Bob just after she shook Bob's hand in meatspace. Something where, in order…
I won't dispute that PGP key signing parties coupled with government ID work very well for certain very specific usecases such as validating distro maintainers.
However for more mainstream and widespread uses that never occurred, what about work on the tooling? I've yet to see a web of trust implementation that really felt like it was properly generalized, scalable, and intuitive to interact with.
Case in point, if you wanted to implement a distributed code auditing solution on top of git and signed commits, what library would you use for the web of trust graph calculations? And would key signing parties be a usable root of trust for that with the current state of the software ecosystem? My personal view is that both of those things are woefully lacking.
Re: Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
When talking about government surveillance, people often ask some version of 'well, if you're not doing anything wrong, what are you afraid of?'. My response is always, 'It's not that I don't trust our current government, I don't trust all future governments that come after this one'. I hope given the recent events of having some hired thugs rifle through government databases (including the OPM, which supposedly has…
I mean, I dont want the private details of my life exposed, illegal or not. Who does
Re: Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can only assume that you don’t work in financial technology if you believe that KYC is a solved problem. Proving authenticity in an increasingly diasporic society is difficult. We should seek to either reduce or embrace entropy in the design of our systems. You either want systems which prove there are no Sybil attacks, or you manufacture halls of mirrors. This is a continuous battle, there’s no panacea here, even…
It depends what you mean by solved. Banks tend not to over engineer things. KYC can be seen as a 3 sided trade off: cost of KYC infra/process/etc, lost revenue from denied business and fines from regulators. They (the banks) don’t really care about the social goals of KYC, they just try to best optimize for expected value in the trade offs. The regulators understand this, and are basically fine with it. They have the…
One of the more important goals isn't to directly stop fraud but instead to provide tools that give end users results that scale with the amount of effort invested. The level of risk should be a tradeoff that the end user is able to make.
Current solutions mostly allow for that but certainly have some rough edges.
Re: Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the government has more power over you. Thus, they deserve more scrutiny and suspicion.
Except the ostensible motive of the government is to serve its people, whereas the company’s motive is either those of the people who control the company or profit. Even then, if the government is weak than the ‘more power over you’ is simply false. Maybe the magnitude of the power is more for a government, but companies apply their power with much more frequency.
That's a very load-bearing word there.
Re: Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball
#129Even if you 100% believe in your heart that Altman would never do anything negative with these scans that doesn't mean someone else won't if/when they get access to them. People may trusted 23andMe with their genetic data but now no one knows who will end up owning it and why the buyer believes buying the data is profitable. https://wydaily.com/latest/regional-national/2025/05/08/23an...
It's kind of different in that with 23andMe they know your name and genetic data. With Worldcoin you don't give your name and they just get a photo of your eyes.
Re: Sam Altman Wants Your Eyeball
#130I'm an ophthalmologist. I look at irises all day. People's irises change over the course of their life. Sometimes dramatically if they have some kind of pathology. Are they updating their model periodically? What keeps someone from getting locked out of their crypto gains if they develop an iris nevus or have cataract surgery or start on flomax?
Thanks for this interesting point of view. However, it may makes sense to consider whether the gap you point to can be reduced significantly with AI, by training it separately with aging eye data using existing medical data independent from the general iris pool. I have no idea how realistic that would be personally.