The Simon Community where I live went around the city one December and counted how many rough sleepers there were. I forget the exact figure but it was less than 100. Meanwhile there were thousands classified as homeless due to being in temporary accomodation. And this is a part of the UK well known for having a homelessness problem.
Adding that much friction is also going to loose you many genuine users. Might be worth it depending on the community but if it makes newcomers fewer than your usual churn rate its a death sentence.
I think a better approach would be to upload an image to the sign up form with explicit instructions that isn't in text on the page to be easily read by AI. Like "Answer 2 in the Math captcha" even though the correct answer is 5, the AI will always enter the wrong number.
This is fucked and I hate it. Internet is (was?) about convenience and direct access. I understand there are challenges that need solutions, but this ain’t it
Where I live a 2nd class stamp costs the equivalent of $1.24. That's $1240 for a thousand.
Not including the cost of the letter itself, or the envelope, or the cost to write it if it's being farmed out to overseas labour, who then has to send it by international postage. And then you have evidence of where the letter originated, and that can be compared with how the user presents themselves online.
Little bit more than 2 hours minimum wage I think.
Not that I don't take your point that such a service could exist, but the site you linked explicitly says they don't offer letter writing as a service.
Also, I imagine it's not impossible to reliably distinguish between an autopen and genuine handwriting. The company who's site you linked say their machine can't perform complex pen movements so calligraphy is impossible.
The real advantage of posting a letter is that you have to pay for postage, and the stamps on the envelope will indicate which country the letter is really coming from.
If someone buys or makes something like this just to send a letter, they a) put in more human effort than writing it themselves, and b) are probably interesting and would benefit your community.
I think what robostwantdata was suggesting was that people would supply a "Use my mechanical pen for a fee" type service, where customers send the text they want written and the address they want the letter sent to.
As I've already said in my direct reply, there's still the various costs involved in posting the letter, and if the community is based on a particular geographical area e.g. "Connacht Hill Farmer's Association", then it would raise eyebrows if the envelope had a Kazakhstani stamp on it.
I interpreted that as an attempt to mask the number of bots on the site so as to not scare paying advertisers into thinking their ads won't be seen by real humans.
They also now hide the number of subscribers. Before you could see if a subreddit was popular or not. Now you really don't know. I think reddit does this so they can promote stuff to the front page for clicks even if it isn't popular.
What happens when someone agrees to sell or give away their id? The credentialing body could catch the very worst abusers who seem to be signing in to various sites and services multiple times an hour, but would fail to catch anything else.
I don't think you'll ever be fully free of spam, so you'll still need to filter bad content. If credentials get sold and used to spam, they'll get banned.
How do you ban credentials if they're anonymous? Notice that if you can tell two requests are from the same person then you can do it across services by both of them pretending to be the same service.
Also, what happens to someone whose credentials are compromised? Are you going to ban the credentials of the victim rather than the perpetrator?
A VPN can't get around a cigarette and alcohol ban.
Perhaps children should be given locked down phones, with fines for parents who buy non child safe phones for their kids. It would take time for this to take effect but a social media ban would actually be effective at the end.
> Just like you can't get around a random adult buying for kids. It's just an imperfect deterrent.
This argument feels really weak. Convincing an adult to buy alcohol for kids is dramatically more difficult on average than setting up a VPN.
If you’re on this tech website you should know that it’s not hard to get VPN access even with cash by buying cards at retail. You can also use one of the various free (ad supported or spyware) VPN products.
It’s nothing like trying to involve another adult and asking them to take on the legal liability of that action.
I live in the UK, though not in London. I can count on one hand the number of times a group of children asked me to buy alcohol for them. So it's not that it doesn't happen, but it almost never happens.
Compare standing outside a supermarket, repeatedly begging passers by to commit a crime for you every time you want alcohol, with the one time action of installing a VPN client on your device and it's obvious one law is enforceable while the other is not.
What? - I live in London, if you walk through a high street where there is both a secondary school and a corner store (if you say you don't know what that is, I will assume you are Trump) at around 3-4pm - you either get asked to buy cigarettes; or, refusing to do so you will get asked if you have any cigarettes. Without fail.
You are trying to make it dramatic by saying it is a crime - in this context installing a VPN is as much a crime (arguably with more traces / evidence) as buying cigarettes for teenagers.
It is not. There is no law against circumventing age gates by means of a VPN. It is illegal to promote VPN services to children as a means of circumventing age gates, but the act itself is not illegal.
The UK has a real problem with pseudoscientific nonsense invading the education system.
To my knowledge they still teach about audio/visual/kinetic learners and how you should structure the way you learn around which one you are. This has been debunked for decades.
> The UK has a real problem with pseudoscientific nonsense invading the education system.
Not just the UK, pedagogy/education is a very soft science, along with any other field that revolves around human behavior (psychology, sociology, etc...).
Using AIs in experiments and studies will be an improvement even if they do not accurately reflect human behavior, just because you don't need a harm review and you can repeat your experiments multiple times under different variables.
>the IT department setting up new computers with 8 little pieces of preinstalled bullshit up there
You can usually toggle hide on the pre installed bullshit at least. It would be helpful if there was a notification or prompt to tell you the menu bar was full so you know to do that.
I'm guessing they might only know how long they had you on the phone per call and be oblivious to the fact you're intentionally wasting their time. I suppose you're still tying down a person who could be otherwise be genuinely scamming someone.
And a government employee, who was only explaining in a polite, matter of fact way, what their department policy and government legislation allowed them to do.
If the story is true (I know it's labelled 'nonfiction' but c'mon) then likely the only reason the fax spamming worked is because the department policy prevented them from blocking numbers outside of very narrow circumstances.
Was thinking this too. She could have blocked that number on the (valid) basis that it was intentionally spamming them, and then stopped their benefits.
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