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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2025

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  • Your correction is accurate. I should have been more specific.

    Discord announced on Monday that it’s rolling out age verification on its platform globally starting next month, when it will automatically set all users’ accounts to a “teen-appropriate” experience unless they demonstrate that they’re adults.

    Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won’t be able to speak in Discord’s livestream-like “stage” channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive. They will also get warning prompts for friend requests from potentially unfamiliar users, and DMs from unfamiliar users will be automatically filtered into a separate inbox.



  • I really like this analogy, but the biggest one to me is the intentionally addictive nature of the media and information it provides. Like the specifically targeted nicotine hits smoking provides designed to be addictive, phones sooth, stimulate, and distract in new and yet similar ways leveraging cognitive biases and physiology. They also fuck up your mind and body in screwing sleep cycles, changing your attention threshold, and probably more. Might not be as bad as cancer, but they still have an impact.



  • Beyond my frustration at this being buried in a video podcast, I also would rather promote why people should be worried about privacy in a concrete and direct way.

    The Cascading Impact of Privacy Loss

    Concrete Example: A 10-Year Timeline

    Year 0: You’re a healthy middle-class person who “has nothing to hide”

    Year 3: Your insurance premiums inexplicably rise. You don’t know your fitness tracker data was sold and correlated with your grocery purchases.

    Year 5: Passed over for promotion. Algorithm flagged social media posts about work stress as “low resilience indicator.”

    Year 7: Attend peaceful protest. Face-recognition adds you to databases. Now randomly selected for “additional screening” at airports.

    Year 9: Can’t get affordable loan. Your zip code + purchase history + social network = high risk score. The specific formula is proprietary.

    Year 10: Chronic condition develops. Can’t get treatment covered - insurer says it’s “pre-existing” based on data you didn’t know they had from a DNA test you took for fun in Year 2.

    Your lifespan: Statistically reduced by 5-10 years compared to privacy-protected cohort.


    Privacy isn’t about “having something to hide.” It’s the immune system of human dignity, economic fairness, political freedom, and literally - survival.

    Without it, you become a data object to be optimized for others’ profit and control, not a human with agency over your own life.