Great memories, I worked for a CAD/CAM company at the time.. as an intern. One of the problems they had was that they did not want to ship demoes of their system to certain countries as they had seen code be reverse engineered and stolen.
I made a demo suite that allowed for 3D renders to be played back in vector mode from the internal 4115 memory.
The feedback we got from the main office in England was not good: the demo made it seem that the system was capable of creating real-time rotation views of complex models.
Well, yes, it took several days to compute all frames but once I had the vectors the 4115 could show the frames at incredible speed.
They flew me to headquarters to explain how I got that to work and potentially incorporate a demo module into the system.
Company went sideways after that, I ended up in Cambridge at another startup in a similar but different space, they used Sun Workstations !
Good days.
"When I was a boy, there were still porn magazines; fathers hid them on high shelves. You stood on stools and gawked at them in a state of mortal terror."
> With $10 million in the bank, earning 4%, you'll see $400,000 a year, less taxes.
This isn't your point, but $400k puts you in a top tax bracket, so figure 30% of that goes to taxes. that brings your return down to 2.8%. The Fed wants to keep inflation at 2%, but it's usually a bit higher, leaving your real return at 0.3%. That's $30k per year.
I don't really understand why every adult should need to jump through hoops because parents won't spend 5 minutes enabling it on their kid's devices.
Hell, modern parental control software with an image classifier is arguably better than these online age verification systems since it works with anything that appears onscreen.
This is the exact system I suggested to a friend. I don't mind having to 'prove' my age, but I do not really want a third party to have my identifiable information nor do I really want the Government knowing what fetishes I may or may not have.
For a digital only solution, I think the best system would be some form of public-private key attestation:
The government advertises their public keys for 18+ verification.
A website generates a unique token - this token is then taken by the user and submitted to the government receiving a signed attestation. This can then be given back to the website to prove the user is 18. It only has to be done once per profile and no information is shared between the Government and the website on who is who.
Unless of course the token is saved by both the website and government in some forever database and then a lookup is done.
Another solution could be a timed/signed token produced by the government that has no input from the website. But this still has the downside that this could just be saved by both parties and in future you could identified if both sides compare data.
That also happens with alcohol and tobacco. Cops can run sting operations to catch illegal dealers. But IRL id verification removes easy access for most children while preserving the privacy of adults.
There's a bunch of other "digital wallet" development going on in general, effectively providing digital certificate-backed identity documents and similar (driving licenses, passports). The plan for age verification is that these wallets will also be able to provide a cryptographically signed attestation of age (signed by an EU verification authority, i.e. your id-issuing government org) but with no other personal info included. Then you can present this to anybody, and they can independently verify the signature to confirm it's a recent proof-of-age attestation without knowing anything else about you.
It's still fairly early - lots of blueprints and proof-of-concepts, not yet rolled out anywhere AFAICT - but looks like a reasonable solution I think. In practice I suspect most people's experience will be a government-backed mobile app that you authenticate with once, and then it can handle verification requests on-device or show a QR code that other people can scan & verify.
This reminds me that when payment processors cut off an adult site in Japan, they were able to fall back on users paying for points in cash at convenience stores instead or something like that.
Not a bad system really? Pseudo anonymity and avoids some third party tech firm getting involved?
This is just moving personal data responsibilities from service providers (e.g. porn sites) to the central authority (QR code maker and verifier). Unless there is a semi-anonymous way of purchasing age proofs, e.g. over the counter.
I don't think anyone has a problem with verifying their age.
What many people do have a problem with is requiring disclosure of unmodifiable biometric data and government documents that once "hacked"/sold into the data collection pipeline becomes forever tainted and easily stolen.
You can't "reset my password" with biometric data once a malicious actor has it
I have a problem verifying my age or any other piece of information that isn’t critical to whatever service you are providing to me. Beyond that it’s none of your or anyone else’s damn business. If you don’t have a legally issued warrant then leave me the hell alone. This isn’t an area for compromise.
Many successful American tech founders and entrepreneurs have strong religious or spiritual beliefs — I believe it's part of the unique competitive advantage and edge in this industry
Many successful American tech founders and entrepreneurs don't have strong religious or spiritual beliefs. Both are true.
I think finding self-motivation in life is important, particularly for entrepreneurs, but there are many sources.
I've never thought the SV / San Fran scene was particularly religious. I'd have guessed religion was under-represented there compared to the rest of the US.
As an outsider but someone who spent a fair bit of time there in the tech scene, it seems like there's a really interesting piece waiting to be written about the juxtaposition of SF/SV culture (tech hedonism, psychedelics, affluence, utopian thinking, dislike of authority, social justice) and a seeming rise in leaders being openly religious (usually Christian).
Or maybe it was always there and now it's just more obvious since you can scroll a big name VC's IG account and see him posting Bible verses from his SoMa office.
I find it actually kind of nice that these things are mixing.
Maybe the world is poorer if people with different metaphysical beliefs completely self-segregate into closed communities, especially during these times of great change where our understanding of consciousness, physics, AI, and everything else is rapidly undermining a lot traditional positions on both sides of the aisle.
There's often more overlap with plain old Prosperity Gospel Protestantism than many people realise - especially in the sense that the definition of success is likely to be narrow, material, and individual.
There's usually a lot more "I'm entitled to love and money and I will wish them into existence for me personally" than "I think everyone should have good affordable public healthcare, so I will work hard towards making that happen."
I wonder what the correlation / causation is on that versus having a supportive family and community.
That is, if you took someone who's an atheist, would making them religious (left as an exercise to the reader) make them measurably more successful? Or is it that people who already have supportive families tend to come from religious families, and tend to inherit their parents' religion?
An atheist's principles usually have to be deduced at the source, by e.g. talking to the atheist. This isn't hard, but it does take time. It usually doesn't scale to other atheists.
A moderately devout Christian's principles are likely ones you already know in some low resolution through cultural osmosis. This is reason enough to suspect that, ceteris paribus, people will prefer to engage in voluntary trade with the Christian over the atheist. It is less because of the Christianity itself, than because trying to follow a known standard for good conduct reduces transaction costs.
As someone who isn't particularly religious, but grew up in a religious household, and as someone married to a very religious person (different religions), I believe it's all about outlook.
Religion tends to give you several quite positive beliefs about the world that aren't entirely logical. Things like karma, the golden rule, belief in a plan, etc.
Generally speaking I also believe that religious people are more willing to trust and forgive. These are all pretty positive things.
And finally I believe religious people have a higher sense of duty to others, but the better term is probably responsibilism.
Mandelbrot sets and Towers of Hanoi were so exciting to write in Fortran (I think Fortran 77), running under, iirc, CP/M.