or just not ask for it at all.

The three times I've needed to provide a scan of my passport were: to enroll in a university course, to buy from an e-commerce site, and to become an app developer. None of those orgs really needed a scan of my passport, which can't be revoked like a cracked password, and will now sit unencrypted somewhere until the end of time or until they are hacked and subsequently shamed into handling their customers data more like radioactive waste.

The only times I had to provide a scan of my passport was to cross a border:

    - get a VISA to be allowed to cross the border
    - send to the airline for my flight that will cross the border
    - show the real passport at the border

I have another ID for authentication inside my country, which by the way, is not a driving license (which is used only for car driving usage).

I sold a house recently, my lawyer/solicitor who’s physically known me for 6+ years had to scan my passport & licence to “verify” me according to new AML laws.

KYC & AML is poison.

Edit: to be clear, this lawyer also represented me when I bought said property.

In my experience, hotels in other countries also take a copy of the passports of all guests.

Also learned “know your customer” laws require US people to give passport + SSN to a foreign bank who then reports it back to the US. Given that such bank’s website involves disabling right-click for “security”, the only glimmer of hope is that the data is catastrophically lost due to stupidity before it can be compromised.

The design / UX world has been creating imaginary user personas, paying jobs for people to be the shaman / guru of each persona, for years.

It's all just larping, inserting the bias and assumptions of your team into the spot where knowing your customers should be.

Cut off one mechanical turk and two more will rise to take it's place.

Intelligence and perseverance are two different traits. Smart + hard working kids will be fine. The problem is smart and lazy kids will find the easiest path, which in a world of AI leads to little actual learning. Maybe it was ever thus, but I fear the currently dwindling endangered book + teacher approach was better at getting slack asses to learn and eventually gain skills and knowledge for themselves.

"Go ahead, obfuscate your contribution to the repository of all human knowledge, see if that impedes our imminent invasion! Moooahahahar!!!" - Kang and Kodos

Yes, buggy software is the right model. In the popular imagination AI currently sits in a weird zone of unaccountability, it's not a person so cannot be held responsible, and developers get a free pass when their golem goes off the rails.

LLM's will never be reliable enough to let loose on tasks that require 100% accuracy, therefore a human will have to review their work. So will any time actually be saved, or at least enough time to justify the cost and extra complexity of the new system?

Not to mention many people actually enjoy to create, not to endlessly review and correct AI slop.

"hotword" detection, is this basically sniffing encrypted data for words the authorities don't want you to speak?

Seems counterproductive to their stated aim of privacy.

Not even just by the authorities. This sounds like the wet dream of Google itself or any other data mining companies. You can just ship the most sensitive data around and extract signals to your hearts content - and even if it would be protected by law, you're good because hey, it's always encrypted, and the signals, ad assignments and profile markers are encrypted too!

This is what I don't like about all this "I'm not touching you" privacy tech, also including the new trend of nonvoluntary on-device processing.

They pretend "privacy" was a primary goal of it's own, completely detached from any reasons why you would want to have it.

Then they go on gloriously holding up the flag of privacy, while at the same time enabling all the things that you wanted to have privacy against in the first place.

And if they can detect "words", surely a determined attacker can reconstruct the whole thing.

from what I understand, only the holder of the private key would be able to see if a hotword was detected or not. even if Google ran hotword detection over your data, they’d only get a encrypted output on if the hotword was detected or not

Unsurvivorship bias.

Maybe Google's decision to waste everyone's time and pollute the truth ecosystem by pushing half baked AI assertions into search was a mistake.

I quite like the ai/search thing - I like that there is a super accessible ai I can ask questions without infecting my ChatGPT history

The answers it gives are often trash though, even more so the whatever lobotimized model they slap on top of google search.

Why not just use temporary chats for ChatGPT?

I quite like it too. Convenience I guess.

Where does the sound on these AI videos come from, is that AI generated in the same pass, a second model, or is it added by a human after the fact?

Same pass.