Just yesterday I was listening to a talk organised by the electricity cooperative to which I belong (or which partly belongs to me?) about consumer cooperatives and their organising principles. The context and discussions were not tech-related in any way whatsoever, but I did quietly ponder about tech cooperatives (cloud services, software development, infrastructure, and yes, LLMs) and their desirability. And just as the article, this comment is not a manifesto, nor a plan, not even the concept of a plan. It is just a musing aligned with what the author is saying.
The user's name is the name of an Anton Labs project [0]. Furthermore, the fact that the user is inconsistently bad at formatting, punctuation and capitalisation of their messages makes me suspect the user itself may be agentic-LLM-based, with a badly calibrated layer of "obfuscation" to pretend to be an oh-so-imperfect human.
After reading the article, for some reason I am finding the following fact profoundly distressing. Surely there are more than 1000 active airlines worldwide‽
> Every airline has a 3-digit IATA numeric code. 098 = Air India. British Airways is 125. IndiGo is 526. These codes predate the familiar 2-letter IATA codes (AI, BA, 6E): they were used when teletypes could not reliably transmit letters and numbers interchangeably.
Bear in mind that this doesn't apply to charter airlines, only public passenger ones.
Given there are about 200 countries in the world, you'd need 5 large airlines per country, which is a lot! Most of them don't have any and rely on other countries. Still more have a single national carrier.
Two-letter codes are assigned to anybody on request, but three-digit codes are assigned only to full IATA members.
The three-digit code is used primarily for ticketing (it's the first three digits of a ticket number), and as an airline you only really need it if you're going to do complex interop things like ticketing another airline's flights. Most low cost carriers like Ryanair are not IATA members, and even Southwest only joined last year.
The Torment Nexus joke is kind of undermined by obviously being a reference to the Total Perspective Vortex from HGTTG, where the joke was that nothing bad actually happened when they used it on Zaphod.
Not sure if this is a spoiler, it’s been a while since I read those books, but if memory serves the only reason Zaphod survived the TPV was because he was temporarily the inhabitant of a pocket universe specifically designed to trick him, and naturally for this universe’s version of the TPV he was the most important being in it, and in telling him so the pocket-universe TPV just confirmed ZB’s own view of himself, leaving him unharmed and a little extra smug. At some further point in the plot this fact is revealed, not sure if it’s the same book, but I remember it as a hilarious deflationary moment for the character.
Try logging in on a new device and putting your main device into aeroplane mode as soon as the login succeeds. Loading of old messages on the new device will stop.
> SAN FRANCISCO – March 17, 2026 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced $12.5 million in total grants from Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and OpenAI to strengthen the security of the open source software ecosystem.
It’s almost cute how insignificantly small that amount is considering the companies named. Great for The Linux Foundation of course, but it still feels like they are being cheap as heck.
Wouldn't the reasons for requesting identification be the same those for banning people - the system has flagged that you might be from the wrong location/under 18/creating multiple free acounts etc - so is validating.
They request ID for bans so that they can ban you personally. ID checks may as well be a sign that you've already been banned and they're fishing for ways to make the ban harder to evade. Venmo does the same thing.
> ID checks may as well be a sign that you've already been banned and they're fishing for ways to make the ban harder to evade.
So identity verification is basically a canary that your account is about to get banned, or is on the chopping block. At that point you're better off abandoning ship rather than handing over your ID.
Basically exactly my point. If you could use the service without ID verification, and others can still use the service without ID verification, but you've been blocked because you haven't handed over your ID, then leave or start a new account. That is if you're averse to being banned personally. If you don't mind the risk then you can verify ID and prepare to jump ship if it's a ban.
Maybe Anthropic just likes creating a market for dark identities. Because that's the most likely effect of such stupidity; generating more ID theft victims with no change to services to criminals.
Is a "dark identity" one that's never been shared with an identity-theft-as-a-service? Or is it just of one that's (supposed to be) privacy-conscious (and wouldn't otherwise have been an easy victim)?
Does AWS actively and by design parse and keep track of personally identifiable information of the data that AWS customers store on their S3 buckets? If that were the case they would absolutely be subject to CCPA (and GDPR) requests for deletion.
However, I suspect that is not the case. AWS is agnostic as to the type of data stored on S3, and deletion of PII stored on S3 is the sole responsibility of the AWS customer that chooses to store it.
Are duct tape manufacturers and their investors constantly hyping about how duct tape is the future, and how it is making professional plumbing obsolete?
I assume you haven't seen those advertisements where they put duct tapes on everything and present it as a universal solution, also there will always be a hype about something in this world and that is not an excuse to jump on the bandwagon unless you're braindead
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