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Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona

fortune.com

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Re: Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona

#241

Post by nozzlegear »

edgyquant wrote: post #199
amingilani wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it feels pragmatic. I find it more concerning that mass surveillance has come to the point where someone can’t safely express their frankly-not-that-controversial opinions without obfuscating the subject’s name.

It hasn’t come to that though, you can freely express that persons point with no repercussions outside of maybe not getting a check one day from the person you hate

Beyond just the concept of thought crime, one of the themes in Orwell's 1984 was that the government could arbitrarily decide that a thing you've done could be punished at any time. You didn't need to break a law to be punished by Big Brother, you just had to be a thorn in its side. In our world, the government/Palantir/ICE collecting the identities of people who criticize them is the kind of infrastructure that makes that arbitrary punishment from 1984 possible.

Re: Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona

#242

Post by hn_acc1 »

simianwords wrote: post #221
axus wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far prices have generally gone up, which indicates the pie available is scarcer. I am looking forward to the day where more electricity, electronics, food, and housing are produced thanks to AI; but in the mid-term it feels like an AI bubble pop would do more to bring the price back down.

Qualitatively, I now have access to ChatGPT. How much do you think you would have paid for such a tool in 2010? and we are getting it almost for free.

For how much longer?

Re: Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona

#243

Post by sillyfluke »

mystraline wrote: post #187
savanaly wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you also make money by making a good decision that benefits you and another party? I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.

Becoming a billionaire is never done through your hard work. It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers at scale that permits being a billionaire. It is their hard work, not the billionaires. Now, how much surplus the workers get is primarily the discussion between capitalism, socialism, and communism. Naturally, capitalists are disinclined in giving ANY of the surplus, and keeping it all for th…

>It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers

Well, it's possible for a person to become a billonaire without directly doing this. I think it was said somewhere that Lebron James was one of the first wage billionaires, due to his 20+ years on top of the NBA.

But loosening the statement a little, if the person themselves hasn't its almost certain that the people that have paid them have (in the case of sports athletes, the companies paying for the ads).

Be that as it may, being a wage-slave billionaire still leaves you less exposed to direct first-hand moral dillemas than the CEOs of companies.

Re: Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona

#244

Post by IgorPartola »

parrellel wrote: post #138
IgorPartola wrote: post #46

> politically exposed persons I do not know what this euphemism means. Is this like the modern trend of calling inmates “justice involved individuals”?

Translate: People who are likely to be attacked by (Putin|Orban|Erdogan|Trump) or similar.

Apparently that’s not what Wikipedia defines it as. More like potentially shady high level government official.

Re: Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona

#245

Post by IgorPartola »

john_strinlai wrote: post #186
IgorPartola wrote: post #46

> politically exposed persons I do not know what this euphemism means. Is this like the modern trend of calling inmates “justice involved individuals”?

its not some new/modern trend just because you have not seen the term. its been a term for nearly 3 decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politically_exposed_person

I mean today I am one of the 10,000 people learning this for the first time. But it does seem like an awkward term which seems to mean “high level government official who is likely to be corrupt” or just “politician”. Don’t really see the need for this wordplay to be honest.

Re: Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona

#246

Post by bsza »

m4rtink wrote: post #220
bsza wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have agreed 5 years ago, but not this day and age, when AI is raping open source projects and killing platforms like Stack Overflow. We need a safe space from web crawlers and surveillance, and open forums ain't it. (Neither is Discord, but a sufficiently secure alternative might be.)

Do you really think Discord is not scrapping all the traffic that goes through its service for either their own purposes or to sell data for profit. And if its not doing it now, it will certainly happen once/if it goes bust.

Have you read my comment?

Re: Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona

#247

Post by _DeadFred_ »

johndhi wrote: post #76
toomuchtodo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Empathy and the levels of wealth accumulation in scope are incompatible imho. They are the paperclip maximizers we were warned about.

Where do you guys come up with these ideas? Simply having a lot of money makes someone evil? Why? They are obviously all quite competitive in business but the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy. Gates for example is giving away hundreds of billions of dollars. What does it even matter if he's compassionate or not if he's doing that?

My working class family members always gave 10% to charity (kind of the standard social contract in the US for giving) when that 10% made up a huge percentage of the money it takes for them to live a very basic life. Compare that to billionaires who have more money than they could ever spend and the percentage they have given:

Zuckerberg 2.1%. Ballmer 3.7% Bezos 1.6% Sergey Brin 2.5% Michael Dell 2.6% Ken Griffin 5%

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2025/02/03/ame...

Re: Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona

#248

Post by [deleted] »

tofuahdude wrote: post #172
bri3d wrote: post #15

The referenced write-up based on the Persona front end code is here: https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona I definitely recommend reading this primary source before drawing conclusions about the code as most of the secondary reporting is quite low quality.

That was a great read, very interesting!

[deleted]

Re: Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona

#250

Post by mikkupikku »

trinsic2 wrote: post #210
mikkupikku wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> slave morality I think if you're saying: "These billionaires are bad because they do bad things, and being so rich makes their capacity for harm much worse." That's not slave morality, at least not necessarily, because the "doing bad things" can probably be expressed using normal classic values. It becomes slave morality when you abbreviate the above to: "These billionaires are bad because it's bad for anybody to b…

Yeah but I don't think this is being said here. Are you just trying make a point outside of what is being said? I'm hearing people saying the first part in many of these responses.

I'm responding to troosevelts question, not accusing anybody in particular of one or the other. I've seen plenty of both on the internet, but in general I don't think it's slave morality unless somebody is saying that having so much money is intrinsically evil, that to have gotten that much money is wrong in itself, regardless of what the individual actually did or is doing.
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