And with voting machines there is no verifiable oversight.

You just kind of have to trust that the software that is running on the voting machine is actually correctly tallying your vote, and not doing shenanigans behind the scene. Even if the code is open source, and everyone knew how to read code, you cannot reasonably guarantee that that is the software that is running inside the black box that is a voting machine.

With paper voting you can observe the entire process from start to finish. There are no black boxes which just spit out an answer that you simply have to trust.

In the Netherlands we had switched to electronic voting in the past, but we switched back to paper after some very serious security flaws were pointed out. These days there is some discussion on whether electronic counting of paper ballots should be allowed, but at least there is still a paper trail in that case and you could hypothetically double check everything by hand.

This seems similar in concept to how we have set up the retirement age in the Netherlands, and it is not entirely unrealistic.

People live longer and healthier lives than they used to, so retirement becomes a proportionally larger part of the average life. But retirement also needs to be paid for, so that may not be sustainable long-term. So instead you need to occasionally raise the retirement age, which is politically unpopular.

Tying the retirememt age to life extectency with an automatic mechanism removes the political toxicity surrounding that debate, and makes it more predictable and understandable how the relation is set between life expectency and retirement age.

In the NL for each year your age bracket gains in life expectency, the retirement age goes up by 8 months (the formula is more complex, but that is more or less what it boils down to afaik)

I'm born in 1994, so given the life expectency of my age group (this is ultimately determined closer to my actualy retirement) I will likely be retiring in 2063 at age 69 and 6 months.

I think using electronic counting (of paper ballots) can be an acceptable way to speed up how soon we get to know what the result will likely be after the polls close. But it is important that there always happens a manual count, and that that manual count should ultimately be the answer we trust.

Higher productivity should either lead to more free time, or an improved quality of life (or a mix of both). If one gets to retire later, but they get to experience a proportionally better retirement, then that could also be acceptable.

Worth noting that wages in the NL do generally go up with inflation, people tend to work part-time quite often (giving them more free time before retirement), and the price of luxuries tends to come down over time (except home prices..)

So quality of life generally tends to go up with increased productivity.

"Everbody should use AI"

-Person financially benefiting from everybody using AI

There was an update on this a couple days ago from Accursed Farms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgoODQFrPgw

tl;dw They were already expecting the Commission to be unwilling to propose new legislation, but they have a plan to go forward and achieve what they set out to do, using existing legislation. That would bypass the Commission all together, since no new legislation would be required.

Just wait till Musk learns about banking regulations.
He's already complaining about the EU regulations on social media, but they nothing compared to what banks have to deal with.

Africa, Asia, and South America

So we are not counting North-America, where the ICE raids continue then?

I have a YouTube Premium subscription

Okay.. So he went to Russia in 2003. Considering that the consensus in 2003 was that Russia was still on its way to becoming a democracy I am not that offended by it personally.
"Putin's hometown" being St. Petersburg, which is the 2nd biggest city in Russia.

What is more worrying is all the things that happened since 2003.

It really boils down to a few reasons:

• I don't like ads, and I prefer not to see them
• Running a platform like YouTube is not cheap, and I understand that Google needs money to keep things running.
• The revenue of Premium is split between YouTube and the creators, much like ad revenue is. So it also supports the channels that I follow.

From my understanding this age verification app seems to be based on the age verification blueprint they have been working on for a while now, which is supposed to be part of the European "digital wallet"

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/...

From my understanding it works as follows:

• There will be a central "authority", with which you can identify
• This authority will provide you with tokens indicating you are 18+ (or whatever age verfication you may need)
• These tokens are stored locally, and contain no identifying information other than a simple "is this guy 18+?"
• You can use these tokens to verify age with a website that requires age verification

This solution does seemingly address my two greatest concern with online age verficiation:

• You cannot trust the website, so they only get the information they need. They don't get any identifiable information
• You cannot trust the authority, so they don't get to know for which websites and for what reason you request 18+ tokens

Assuming that this blueprint is followed, it seems like a decent approach at online age verification.

After Trump was elected and inaugurated, Signal has finally been gaining some steam here in the Netherlands.

It's still an American company, so it's not ideal. But it's still significantly better better than letting a tech giant like Facebook have control over the most commonly used chat app.

WhatsApp needs to go and Signal is the most likely way in which we can achieve that. We can worry about the American elephant in the room later.

From what I understand this change will retroactively apply to games released in the past as well. I think that's a rather scummy move on Unity's part. "I've altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further."

And it's not like game devs have been using a free product. They already pay for it through expensive licenses per developer.

If the justification on Unity's part is true, that for each install of a Unity game the runtime environment needs to be downloaded from their servers, then maybe they should look into fixing that rather than nickle and diming their customers for each individual install (customers in this case being the game developers)

This guy can go suck an egg..

He also added, “Let’s take Bandera back to 1880 properly. No double standards, no hypocrisy. If LPRs are ‘unconstitutional’ and invade our right to ‘public’ privacy, we need to be courageous enough to go all the way. I look forward to the ‘Privacy First’ crowd showing up to support these bans [...] just remember to leave your phones at home.”

It's not that difficult to see the difference between having the option to decide not to bring your phone if you don't want to be tracked, and not even getting an option to avoid AI-powered CCTV systems all over town.

Don't let perfection stand in the way of good enough
It may not be the holy grail, but moving away from Meta-owned Whatsapp is already a pretty significant improvement

They are the Anti-Defamation League.
Their stated goal is combatting anti-Semitism, but in practice they mainly target criticism of Israel.

The headline is a bit misleading. Trump agreed to the ABC debate if Harris agrees to the Fox debate.
This is just a ploy for him to either get Harris to show up on Fox, or if she doesn't debate him on Fox, spin it in such a way that Harris is somehow not wanting to debate him (Even though she never agreed to a Fox debate)