The Norwegian Consumer Council published a report last week on commercial exploitation of children and adolescents online which included a warning against technical blocking of digital services. I found their reasoning against age verification in this context to be well informed, and think it is also relevant here:
> There are many ongoing discussions about whether to introduce technical measures to block or remove children and adolescents from certain digital services. In the report, the Norwegian Consumer Council cautions against rushing into such measures, and presents numerous principles that any such solutions must adhere to before potentially being implemented.
>–Age verification may seem like a relatively simple technical solution to a larger problem, but involves significant challenges related to the rights of children and adolescents, including privacy, social and political participation, and the possibility to seek information, says Inger Lise Blyverket.
>–It is also important to note that introducing such measures would require everyone to identify themselves online, which could mean that people over the age limit are exclud
ed. Many adolescents will also likely be able to circumvent such technical barriers.
>Before considering introducing such technical barriers, several criteria must be fulfilled. This includes, among other things, that the use of an age verification system is proportional to the problem one wants to solve, does not lead to the exclusion of vulnerable groups and individuals, and that it safeguards security and privacy.
It is fine to be sceptical, but I think you should have taken a few minutes to read the method chapter in the study, seeing as that possibly could have eased your doubts. The first sentence cites the previously published design of the study. In the method chapter it is reported to be an "international, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial" with 3533 participants and a mean median follow-up of 3.4 years[0]. The cited article on the study of the trial states that "Participants were enrolled from 418 trial locations across 28 countries." [1]
Seeing as this is a topic where the discussion often derails into a flame war, I thought I'd leave a comment to clarify some things. Please try to avoid interpreting other comments in the worst sense, most people come from a place of good intentions.
While I cannot speak to the specifics of Ireland and Spain, I suspect their position is quite similar to Norway. Norway recognizes Palestine's right to exist based on the borders from before the 4th of June 1967. Even though Hamas controls the Gaza strip today, Norway is not recognizing Hamas as the goverment of Palestine, or is in any way rewarding them for the terror attacks they committed on the 7th of October last year. Currently it is Mahmoud Abbas, the party leader of al Fatah, who is recognized as the president of the palestinian people. Most countries refer to the Palestinian Authority when talking about Palestine and its future.
For a long time, the promise of recognition as reward for a lasting peace has been the strategy used by Norway, but now a Palestinian state is seen as a prerequisite for peace in the Middle East. Prime minister Støre says, among other things, the following about the recognition of Palestine as a state:
>When we recognize Palestine, we can more strongly encourage other countries to support the building of a Palestinian state and we can hold the Palestinian state accountable
>Recognizing a state is not about giving the green light to every policy a state pursues. We will not support a state that uses violence. The Palestinians must see that there is another hope than the path of violence.
I find that explaining errors and factual mistakes in LLMs or AI in general as hallucinations to be counter-productive. I don't know if the field has landed on a specific definition of what hallucination is, but I mostly associate it with garbled output from tokens like 'SolidGoldMagicKarp'[0] and 'davidjl'[1].
My understanding is that AI models like GPT have been able to convincingly convey the form of language, but not its meaning. It looks and sounds like how a human would communicate, but the AI is unable to imbue meaning into the words and sentences it produces. My knowledge of this comes from Lex Friedman's episode with Edward Gibson [2].
I think that's the fundamental issue with LLMs at the moment. It has managed to mostly exit the uncanny valley because, as far as most people are concerned, the text produced could just as well have been made by a human. I think this lends some credibility to the text produced by the LLM, because more or less all text ever produced has had a human behind it. This is no longer the case and as such there is bound to be a transitional period where we learn how to deal with this new technology.
BitTorrent's BEP regarding DHT also explains how it works quite clearly. The implementation is based on Kademlia and can be found here: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0005.html
Ohne Makler sponsored the project with 10k USD to make their website render correctly in Ladybird, it was covered in one of the browser update videos last year[0].
I can also recommend getting Consent-o-matic[0]. It automatically completes consent forms on most sites and denies all by default, although this is configurable. It is developed and maintained by the University of Aarhus in Denmark and is my opinion a better alternative to I don't care about cookies and similar extensions. It is also open source!
I recently rented at a place where the owner used Google Nest Wifi to get coverage of the whole property. One of those devices was placed in the window sill in my bedroom and didn't really cause any issues at the start. Until one day it replied to something I said and I found out it had a microphone, because of course it does.
When I found the hardware switch for the microphone the whole base of the device lit up in orange, with no way of turning the LEDs off without turning the microphone back on. The device also started speaking every time I touched it to "gently" remind me that the microphone was turned off while I was putting tape over the lights. I had to 10+ thin strips of duct tape in multiple layers in order to remove most of the light it radiated.
My version is "I have nothing to hide, but I still lock the door when going to the toilet". While I get the point of your retort, I find it can make people defensive and often derails the conversation because it can be interpreted as a gotcha. But that kind of reaction is proof enough that people value privacy. It's just that they don't necessarily think of privacy in their home as the same thing as digital privacy.
I'm happy people are more aware about privacy issues and talk about it, everyone and everthing has been mindlessly collecting data for too long, but it looks like things are finally moving in a slightly better direction. At least one can hope :)
To put the hack into perspective, there are 16 ministries in Norway, and 12 were affected by this hack. The article specifies that the only ministries not affected were: the Prime Minister's Office, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Justice, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A list of the rest of the ministries can be found on the government's website in English [0]. While the scale of the attack is unfortunate, I feel like the four ministries that seemingly dodged the bullet were the most important ones.
As an additional note, the websites for the Norwegian police and the Norwegian Police Security Service (Politiets sikkerhetstjeneste) were both down earlier today due to DDoS attacks. The websites for newspapers owned by the biggest media organization in Norway, Schibsted, were also hit by DDoS attacks today.
Without speculating or trying to attribute the DDoS attacks (not the actual hack), there have been multiple previous occurrences where assorted Russian groups have taken credit for similar kinds of DDoS attacks towards government and media websites. This has seemingly been due to Norway's support of Ukraine and condemnation of Russia in the current war.
This video presents an idea which I find to be mind-boggling and beautiful, in which circuit complexity, a concept taken from computer science, is used in an attempt to better understand the heat death of the universe and black holes.
As photochemsyn previously mentioned, a meta-analysis looks at previous research in order to see if there are any interesting conclusions to draw the combined data. As an example, the analysis found that no appropriate studies have been done on doses between 20 - 50 μg, or over 200 μg.
Their notes on how set and setting, and whether or not the participants had ever used psychedelics before affects the experience can also be interesting for a scientist working with LSD. The study also observes that "No direct experimental comparison of the bioequivalence of the two formulations has been made to date", meaning that we simply do not know if LSD base is stronger or weaker than LSD tartrate, or how the ingestion method affects the experience.
This information in tandem with the graphs can be used as inspiration for what kind of experiment to do next in order to better understand how LSD interacts with the brain.
A meta-analysis is a good tool for taking a step back and trying to see if there are any blind spots in the research field.
No, only about 3% of the yield is used in the state budget yearly. The oil fund does not invest any of its money in Norway in order to avoid dutch disease. It is not earmarked for any specific use, but instead gets used to make up the difference in tax revenue and state budget. NBIM has more information in English about the fund here: https://www.nbim.no/en/
Bergen municipality released a 25 minute video[0] of the bike ride through the tunnel and into the downtown area of Bergen.
If 'sakte TV' or slow TV is something you like, I could also recommend checking out The Bergen Line minute by minute[1], which is a seven hour broadcast of the train going between Bergen and Oslo. A peaceful and beautiful train ride.
You left out the specific reason as to why they re-opened coal plants at the end of 2022:
"Germany is deploying about 3 gigawatts of coal-fired generation to ensure there are enough electricity supplies to make it through the winter amid curtailed natural gas supplies from Russia."
This was done out of necessity to ensure Germany did not run out of natural gas during the winter months as the gas imports from Russia have more or less dried up. I am not German nor am I up to date on their measures to transitioning their grid to renewable energy, but if anything this war is accelerating the transition for many countries in Europe. Even if this means they have to temporarily re-open fossile fuel power plants.
This could possibly have been avoided had the German government not shut its nuclear power plants down in the previous years, but that's another discussion.
Abel was a hugely gifted and influential mathematician who died from tuberculosis at only age 26, only days before he was supposed to receive a letter offering him a position as a professor for the University of Berlin. It is interesting to think what else he might have accomplished had he survived the infection.