Note that "attestation through a web of trust" means something like needing an invite from an existing user. It doesn't have to mean mass surveillance.

> I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust.

This seems self evident to me too.

It's another factor in why I think the tech community needs to get ahead of governments on the whole "prove your ID on the Internet" thing by having some sort of standard way to do it that doesn't necessarily involve madness in the loop.

> I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust.

I'm happy to verify my identity as an honest-to-god sack of meat if it's done in a privacy-protecting way.

That probably is where things are gonna go, in the long run. Too hard to stop bots otherwise.

> without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust.

Let's put aside the idea whether it will be the end of all privacy as we know it (I'm not sure if I personally think it's a good idea), but isn't Sam Altman's World eye ID thing supposed to do that? (https://world.org).

How does it work (like OpenId)? Do I have an orb on my desk, or some sort of phone app? I still want to use my desktop to login to HN.

Would it stop this sort of "get human id", past it into .env, so agents can use it?

Personally I think we need to start utilising the safety features built into AI, to ensure that who we're talking to is a human. We'll start to have to only reply to people who talk in nsfw cursewords (like cocks), or profess their love of capybaras

Im not sure proof of identity solves anything. People will still have LLMs with their real identity verified.

It'll come back again once ZKPs become standardized and become baked into devices:

https://eudi.dev/2.8.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-pr...

I personally can't wait for a mechanism to kill 99% of bot traffic.

"I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust."

Those sorts of places were always the only places with reliably good communities.

>I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity

How? I have an identity. A state driver's license, birth certificate, social security number. I've even considered getting a federal license before, never bit the bullet. If I wanted to run a bot, what stops me from giving it my identity? How do I prove I'm really me (a "me" exists, that's provable), and not something I'm letting pretend to be me? You can't even demand that I do that, because it's essentially impossible.

Is there even some totalitarian scheme that, if brutal and homicidal enough, could manage to prevent this from happening (even partially)?

I'm limited to a single identity only as a resource constraint. Others more wealthy than I (corporations or ad hoc criminal enterprises) could harvest thousands of real identities and use those. Consensually, through identity theft. The only thing slowing it down at the moment are quickly eroding social norms (and, as you point out, maybe they're not doing that and it's not even slow at the moment).

The web could become a way to indicate identity if public institutions publish for example www.university-country/professors/John. And that implies that John is a professor. I designed a 6000 lines protocol, but anyone could construct that web using hmac(salt+ url).