This discussion, being so timely and important, inspired me to draft an article that explains a possible third way that might not have been fully considered. I would be humbled and honored to receive any feedback:

https://www.robpanico.com/articles/display/presence-derived-...

(posting link because it would be too much for a comment)

Is it possible to have more than a purely transactional relationship with an AI assistant? If so, what are the benefits and how does it work?

Using Agile methodology with agents actually works pretty well in my experience. We do sprints and then code reviews, testing and revision, optimization. During code review, I inspect everything the agents created and make corrections and then roll the corrected patterns into the training documentation for the agents so they learn and don't make the same mistakes.

I have not found that to be true on a personal level, but in fairness it does seem to be a widely reported problem. At its core, I think it is an issue of alignment. That is something different than skill.

IMHO, this is the exact instinct and there's a way to verify identity, location, and age without even having to share those directly.

Switzerland just voted recently to officially implement Selective Disclosure JWT, which does exactly all that. Social network registration can ask "are you 18?" and run with that - and only that. Or the club entrance. Or whatever, because it's all controlled by yourself in your app.

That seems like a good idea. The question is how the JWT is generated. A standard one would be more akin to a traditional crypto keypair. That is a "signal" key insomuch as it tells us who controls an account. It can't tell us the owner is the controller and that is the current weakness of crypto right now. To know the owner, we need another type of keypair to go alongside the traditional kind. That would be a "tone key" and is generated by a refreshing seed derived from the entropy of long-running, unfakeable conversations. The same way a friend might recognize us as being ourselves.

But you don't need to prove to all others that you are yourself, do you? You are only asked whether you're 18, the bouncer doesn't care about your name. So you can still hold the phone (like last summer the ID) of someone else and fake their answer.

"What looks like effortless writing is often the result of years of thought and revision. New tools change how prose is produced, but not where ideas come from. In the end, the real question isn’t who polished the sentence—it’s whether the signal made it through."

The above summary was generated by ChatGPT after assisting me with drafting the article. I couldn't have said it better myself. The point isn't to show off my writing skills, but to get a message across. I outline some of the reasons why I go with AI writing style, instead of using my own writing voice.

Bad money only drives out good money under fiat. Absent legal tender laws, the opposite is true.

In this essay, I explore the nature of "gifts" and self-knowledge... specifically whether we can fully know ourselves without deep and meaningful relationships? Thoughts most welcome. Enjoy!

Local journalism, weather, breaking news, community forums and events, our preserved print newspaper archive, and a full-featured regional marketplace — built for our four counties in the Catskills. If the experiment works in our area, maybe other regions could also find value in it?

Maybe there's something to be learned from focusing on the gap between a symbol and its meaning? If so, it might be worth an exploration into how this gap emerges in the first place, using some examples from our shared history...