kbal

He’s probably including the mass of the land.

Okay but it doesn’t really matter how much EV sales are up. Tell me how much fossil fuel car sales are down.

Screaming, huh? It seems an odd interpretation. To me it still looks only like a casual observation, of the kind one might be expected to make in a discussion thread about a news article on the Internet. It did not seem out of place or even all that remarkable. I did not feel moved to attempt the kind of more in-depth consideration and analysis that would justify the effort of directing a message specifically to the official statistics agency of Europe about it.

Anyway, to the extent that the message about being careful in interpreting statistics is important and needs to be heard, readers need to hear it as much as reporters.

Some people do indeed write on paper in a journal and keep it under the bed. Some scrawl their words in pencil on the bathroom walls. Some write letters to their members of parliament. Some type stuff into the handy text box on Lemmy. To each their own, I guess.

Yes, I saw the links to more data. I cared precisely enough to read the article, and not enough to follow those links to discover the real story on my own. I sometimes take a moment to point out the obvious flaws in pieces such as this one due to a vain hope that someone responsible for reporting on things involving numbers will one day see such complaints and be inspired to do better.

Some people are just more comfortable with good old familiar units like baby elephants per corgi. What do they even use for that in the metric system? Millihectares per decilitre or something? Whatever.

Well this is marginally better than the reporting we usually see on anything that involves numbers, in that they mention that there is an ongoing declining trend and they give just enough context that we can be pretty sure this year’s number is fully consistent with that trend. Of course they do not actually tell us the variance, they do still pretend that one year’s number is more significant than it is in reality (e.g. “second year in a row with a decline”) and we have no idea how cherry-picked that 2014 date for comparison might or might not be. But still, not bad Europe. A time series chart would’ve been a very easy way to improve it.

I’m not much of a fan of the NSA or anything, but that comparison seems unfair to the NSA. I imagine Palantir is more like a souped-up bullshit-ridden profit-driven Stasi.

Okay great, but steam engines from the mid 19th century could probably outrun humans too.

I know what a zero-knowledge proof is and have read and understood a description of the well-known one relating to proof of age. That is not a sufficient explanation as to how it is applied in practice here — if indeed it is. I’ve seen it claimed elsewhere that it isn’t. But in any case it wouldn’t solve the whole problem of proving whose age it is that’s being established.

Edit to add: Upon preliminary investigation it seems like it uses OAuth in the protocol? But it is claimed that no identifying info is stored “in the app”. Does this mean that the OAuth client_id and any associated public keys are somehow kept secret from the attestation provider when you show it your passport to get the age attestation? Because otherwise it would be personally identifying info. If there’s no identifying info, is it therefore possible if you’re 12 years old to get an older kid to use their ID to get your phone age-attested and then there’s never any possibility it could be traced back to them? I just can’t make sense of it. It seems probable that the privacy claims are an illusion or a lie, but too many people seem to be swallowing them instantly and not noticing that taste.

using zero-knowledge proofs

Can I get an explanation of what it actually does from someone who knows at least more than I do about cryptography, which is to say more than nothing? I still haven’t seen one anywhere. Do I really need to go find the source code and try to read it myself to figure it out?