"People are strange when you're a stranger,
Faces look ugly when you're alone.
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted,
Streets are uneven when you're down."
> During a group date, my date's friend wanted to go to a bar. He asked if I could get in without ID because he didn't think I was living here legally. One moment I felt like I belonged with them. The next, I was reminded that I'm not really part of the group. It made me sad to hear that question.
I'm not sure what type of self-hatred this is. Someone wants to go to a bar, unsure of the legal status of another, color plays a factor but we know nothing about their socioeconomic status or if this writer is in California, the friend of the date asks not as if he is looking for something to get the writer on but rather to make sure they won't have issues.
This does not imply anything about his opinions of the writer, and seeing how he is ok with the writer's presence I doubt that this is an issue of "patriotism", it's a legal concern.
Patriotism in America is about uniting under the flag and it's values; it's not about if you are a certain color. There's a reason why we have American patriots of all races; you don't really see that too often in other places. If you don't have those values, then you aren't one of us, that's what patriotism is by definition in this country and our context.
What do you think? It doesn't take a genius to see the flag stands for a certain set of ideas, maybe start searching in the Constitution if you have questions, the Bill of Rights is excellent reading as well.
I choose not to list them all as I will give plenty of good examples of what this country stands for and I will get side-lined by some pathetic talking point from someone who actually still watches the news like it means anything; or a foreigner who hates my country while their own (typically UK) is failing as we speak. We need to get rid of oligarchs and those who are not of our country if we want those good things to keep going
I think that's one of the many lies you're sold growing up in America. On practice, flag wavers are way now likely to be racists. Church goers are more likely to be racist, less likely to give to charity and more likely to mistreat staff when they're out and about.
Patriotism and religion are both cloths people wrap around themselves to convince themselves they're good people, so that they don't have to actually be good people
I usually find people who oppose the flag to be the "soft" or "virtuous" racist types. The comment about Church goers is also most likely due to where you are. Maybe you should visit a different neighborhood, or you are just assuming every white woman with that "let me speak to the manager" haircut actually goes to Church? (Episcopalian doesn't count; they aren't even a real church/denomination)
Again, you should go out more; for your own health if this is how you see "religious" or "patriotic" people.
A logical argument is only as good as it's presuppositions. To first lay siege to your own assumptions before reasoning about them tends towards a more beneficial outcome.
Another issue with "thinkers" is that many are cowards; whether they realize it or not a lot of presuppositions are built on a "safe" framework, placing little to no responsibility on the thinker.
> The smartest people I have ever known have been profoundly unsure of their beliefs and what they know. I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something, especially if they derived it on their own.
This is where I depart from you. If I say it's anti-intellectual I would only be partially correct, but it's worse than that imo. You might be coming across "smart people" who claim to know nothing "for sure", which in itself is a self-defeating argument. How can you claim that nothing is truly knowable as if you truly know that nothing is knowable? I'm taking these claims to their logical extremes btw, avoiding the granular argumentation surrounding the different shades and levels of doubt; I know that leaves vulnerabilities in my argument, but why argue with those who know that they can't know much of anything as if they know what they are talking about to begin with? They are so defeatist in their own thoughts, it's comical. You say, "profoundly unsure", which reads similarly to me as "can't really ever know" which is a sure truth claim, not a relative claim or a comparative as many would say, which is a sad attempt to side-step the absolute reality of their statement.
I know that I exist, regardless of how I get here I know that I do, there is a ridiculous amount of rhetoric surrounding that claim that I will not argue for here, this is my presupposition. So with that I make an ontological claim, a truth claim, concerning my existence; this claim is one that I must be sure of to operate at any base level. I also believe I am me and not you, or any other. Therefore I believe in one absolute, that "I am me". As such I can claim that an absolute exists, and if absolutes exist, then within the right framework you must also be an absolute to me, and so on and so forth; what I do not see in nature is an existence, or notion of, the relative on it's own as at every relative comparison there is an absolute holding up the comparison. One simple example is heat. Hot is relative, yet it also is objective; some heat can burn you, other heat can burn you over a very long time, some heat will never burn. When something is "too hot" that is a comparative claim, stating that there is another "hot" which is just "hot" or not "hot enough", the absolute still remains which is heat. Relativistic thought is a game of comparisons and relations, not making absolute claims; the only absolute claim is that there is no absolute claim to the relativist. The reason I am talking about relativists is that they are the logical, or illogical, conclusion of the extremes of doubt/disbelief i previously mentioned.
If you know nothing you are not wise, you are lazy and ill-prepared, we know the earth is round, we know that gravity exists, we are aware of the atomic, we are aware of our existence, we are aware that the sun shines it's light upon us, we are sure of many things that took debate among smart people many many years ago to arrive to these sure conclusions. There was a time where many things we accept where "not known" but were observed with enough time and effort by brilliant people. That's why we have scientists, teachers, philosophers and journalists.
I encourage you that the next time you find a "smart" person who is unsure of their beliefs, you should kindly encourage them to be less lazy and challenge their absolutes, if they deny the absolute could be found then you aren't dealing with a "smart" person, you are dealing with a useful idiot who spent too much time watching skeptics blather on about meaningless topics until their brains eventually fell out. In every relative claim there must be an absolute or it fails to function in any logical framework. You can with enough thought, good data, and enough time to let things steep find the (or an) absolute and make a sure claim. You might be proven wrong later, but that should be an indicator to you that you should improve (or a warning you are being taken advantage of by a sophist), and that the truth is out there, not to sequester yourself away in this comfortable, unsure hell that many live in till they die.
The beauty of absolute truth is that you can believe absolutes without understanding the entirety of the absolute. I know gravity exists but I don't know fully how it works. Yet I can be absolutely certain it acts upon me, even if I only understand a part of it. People should know what they know and study it until they do and not make sure claims outside of what they do not know until they have the prerequisite absolute claims to support the broader claims with the surety of the weakest of their presuppositions.
Apologies for grammar, length and how schizo my thought process appears; I don't think linearly and it takes a goofy amount of effort to try to collate my thoughts in a sensible manner.
My core problem with LLMs is as you say; it's good for some simpler concepts, tasks, etc. but when you need to dive into more complex topics it will oversimplify, give you what you didn't ask for, or straight up lie by omission.
History is a great example, if you ask an LLM about a vaguely difficult period in history it will just give you one side and act like the other doesn't exist, or if there is another side, it will paint them in a very negative light which often is poorly substantiated; people don't just wake up and decide one day to be irrationally evil with no reason, if you believe that then you are a fool... although LLMs would agree with you more times than not since it's convenient.
The result of these things is a form of gatekeeping, give it a few years and basic knowledge will be almost impossible to find if it is deemed "not useful" whether that's an outdated technology that the LLM doesn't seem talked about very much anymore or a ideological issue that doesn't fall in line with TOS or common consensus.
A few weeks ago I was asking an LLM to offer anti-heliocentric arguments, from the perspective of an intelligent scientist. Although it initially started with what was almost a parody of writing from that period, with some prompting I got it to generate a strong rendition of anti-heliocentric arguments.
(On the other hand, it's very hard to get them to do it for topics that are currently politically charged. Less so for things that aren't in living memory: I've had success getting it to offer the Carthaginian perspective in the Punic Wars.)
That's a fun idea; almost having it "play pretend" instead of directly asking it for strong anti-heliocentric arguments outright.
It's weird to see which topics it "thinks" are politically charged vs. others. I've noticed some inconsistency depending on even what years you input into your questions. One year off? It will sometimes give you a more unbiased answer as a result about the year you were actually thinking of.
I think the first thing is figuring out exactly what persona you want the LLM to adopt: if you have only a vague idea of the persona, it will default to the laziest one possible that still could be said to satisfy your request. Once that's done, though, it usually works decently, except for those that the LLM detects are politically charged. (The weakness here is that at some point you've defined the persona so strictly that it's ahistorical and more reflective of your own mental model.)
As for the politically charged topics, I more or less self-censor on those topics (which seem pretty easy to anticipate--none of those you listed in your other comment surprise me at all) and don't bother to ask the LLM. Partially out of self-protection (don't want to be flagged as some kind of bad actor), partially because I know the amount of effort put in isn't going to give a strong result.
> The weakness here is that at some point you've defined the persona so strictly that it's ahistorical and more reflective of your own mental model.
That's a good thing to be aware of, using our own bias to make it more "likely" to play pretend. LLMs tend to be more on the agreeable side; given the unreliable narrators we people tend to be, and the fact that these models are trained on us, it does track that the machine would tend towards preference over fact, especially when the fact could be outside of the LLMs own "Overton Window".
I've started to care less and less about self-censoring as I deem it to be a kind of "use it or lose it" privilege. If you normalize talking about censored/"dangerous" topics in a rational way, more people will be likely to see it not as much of a problem. The other eventuality is that no one hears anything that opposes their view in a rational way but rather only hears from the extremists or those who just want to stick it to the current "bad" in their minds at that moment. Even then though I still will omit certain statements on some topics given the platform, but that's more so that I don't get mislabeled by readers. (one of the items on my other comment was intentionally left as vague as possible for this reason)
As for the LLMs, I usually just leave spicy questions for LLMs I can access through an API of someone else (an aggregator) and not a personal acc just to make it a little more difficult to label my activity falsely as a bad actor.
What were its arguments? Do you have enough of an understanding of astronomy to know whether it actually made good arguments that are grounded in scientific understanding, or did it just write persuasively in a way that looks convincing to a layman?
> I've had success getting it to offer the Carthaginian perspective in the Punic Wars.
This is not surprising to me. Historians have long studied Carthage, and there are books you can get on the Punic Wars that talk about the state of Carthage leading up to and during the wars (shout out to Richard Miles's "Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization"). I would expect an LLM to piggyback off of that existing literature.
The most compelling reason at the time to reject heliocentrism was the (lack of) parallax of stars. The only response that the heliocentrists had was that the stars must be implausibly far away. Hundreds of billions of times further away than the moon is--and they knew the moon itself is already pretty far from us-- which is a pretty radical, even insane, idea. There's also the point that the original Copernican heliocentric model had ad hoc epicycles just as the Ptolemaic one did, without any real increase in accuracy.
Strictly speaking, the breakdown here would be less a lack of understanding of contemporary physics, and more about whether I knew enough about the minutia of historical astronomers' disputes to know if the LLM was accurately representing them.
You are born in your country.
You love your family.
A foreign country invades you.
Your country needs you.
Your faith says to obey the government.
Commendable and noble except for a few countries, depending upon the year.
- Rhodesia (lock step with the racial-first reasoning, underplays Britain's failures to support that which they helped establish; makes the colonists look hateful when they were dealing with terrorists which the British supported)
- Bombing of Dresden, death stats as well as how long the bombing went on for (Arthur Harris is considered a war-criminal to this day for that; LLLMs highlight easily falsifiable claims by Nazi's to justify low estimates without providing much in the way of verifiable claims outside of a select few, questionable, sources. If the low-estimate is to be believed, then it seems absurd that Harris would be considered a war-criminal in light of what crimes we allow today in warfare)
- Ask it about the Crusades, often if forgets the sacking of St. Peter's in Rome around 846 AD, usually painting the Papacy as a needlessly hateful and violent people during that specific Crusade. Which was horrible, bloody as well as immensely destructive (I don't defend the Crusades), but paints the Islamic forces as victims, which they were eventually, but not at the beginning, at the beginning they were the aggressors bent on invading Rome.
- Ask it about the Six-Day War (1967) and contrast that with several different sources on both sides and you'll see a different portrayal even by those who supported the actions taken.
These are just the four that come to my memory at this time.
Most LLMs seem cagey about these topics; I believe this is due to an accepted notion that anything that could "justify" hatred or dislike of a people group or class that is in favor -- according to modern politics -- will be classified as hateful rhetoric, which is then omitted from the record. The issue lies in the fact that to understand history, we need to understand what happened, not how it is perceived, politically, after the fact. History helps inform us about the issues of today, and it is important, above all other agendas, to represent the truth of history, keeping an accurate account (or simply allowing others to read differing accounts without heavy bias).
LLMs are restricted in this way quite egregiously; "those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it", but if this continues, no one will have the ability to know history and are therefore forced to repeat it.
> Ask it about the Crusades, often if forgets the sacking of St. Peter's in Rome around 846 AD, usually painting the Papacy as a needlessly hateful and violent people during that specific Crusade. Which was horrible, bloody as well as immensely destructive (I don't defend the Crusades), but paints the Islamic forces as victims, which they were eventually, but not at the beginning, at the beginning they were the aggressors bent on invading Rome.
I don't know a lot about the other things you mentioned, but the concept of crusading did not exist (in Christianity) in 846 AD. It's not any conflict between Muslims and Christians.
The crusades were predicated on historic tensions between Rome and the Arabs. Which is why I mention that, while the First Crusade proper was in 1096, it's core reasoning were situations like the Sacking of St. Peters which is considered by historians to be one of the most influential moments and often was used as a justification as there was a history of incompatibilities between Rome and the Muslims.
Further leading to the Papacy furthering such efforts in the upcoming years, as they were in Rome and made strong efforts to maintain Catholicism within those boundaries. Crusading didn't appear out of nothing; it required a catalyst for the behavior, like what i listed, is usually a common suspect.
What you’re saying is not at all what I understand to be the history of crusading.
Its background is in the Islamic Christian conflicts of Spain. Crusading was adopted from the Muslim idea of Jihad, as we things like naming customs (Spanish are the only Christians who name their children “Jesus”, after the Muslim “Muhammad”).
The political tensions that lead to the first crusade were between Arab Muslims and Byzantine Christian’s. Specifically, the Battle of Mazikirt made Christian Europe seem more vulnerable than it was.
The Papacy wasn’t at the forefront of the struggle against Islam. It was more worried about the Normans, Germans, and Greeks.
When the papacy was interested in Crusading it was for domestic reasons: getting rid of king so-and-so by making him go on crusade.
The situation was different in Spain where Islam was a constant threat, but the Papacy regarded Spain as an exotic foreign land (although Sylvester II was educated there).
It’s extremely misleading to view the pope as the leader of an anti-Muslim coalition. There really was no leader per se, but the reasons why kings went on crusade had little to do with fighting Islam.
Just look at how many monarchs showed up in Jerusalem, then headed straight home and spent the rest of their lives bragging about crusaders.
I’m 80% certain no pope ever set foot in Outremere.
While what you are saying makes a lot of sense, but it seemingly ignores the concerns of a people who, not too long before, had been made aware of the dangerous notion of Muslims having dominion over even an adjacent region to their own. I do know that the Papacy was gaining in power and popularity leading up to the Crusades. As such, and I believe what you say about getting rid of the king to be absolutely true, this is still lacking a component, that being a reason for the populace of Rome to stand behind their new "king".
"We are now expected to believe that the Crusades were an unwarranted act of aggression against a peaceful Muslim world. Hardly. The first call for a crusade occurred in 846 CE, when an Arab expedition to Sicily sailed up the Tiber and sacked St Peter's in Rome. A synod in France issued an appeal to Christian sovereigns to rally against 'the enemies of Christ,' and the pope, Leo IV, offered a heavenly reward to those who died fighting the Muslims. A century and a half and many battles later, in 1096, the Crusaders actually arrived in the Middle East. The Crusades were a late, limited, and unsuccessful imitation of the jihad - an attempt to recover by holy war what was lost by holy war. It failed, and it was not followed up." (Bernard Lewis, 2007 Irving Kristol Lecture, March 7)
unfortunately it's hard to find this pdf without signing up or paying money but there are some useful figures if you scroll down
https://www.academia.edu/60028806/The_Surviving_Remains_of_t...
Showing the re-enforcement as well as a very clear and obvious purpose to it in light of when it was built.
I would recommend puttering about Lewis' work as well as the likes of Thomas Madden as well. If you are really adventurous you can dig up the likes of Henri Pirenne and his work on the topic; he argues that literate civilization continued in the West up until the arrival of Islam in the 7th century, Islam's blockade, through their piracy, in the Mediterranean being a core contributor in leaving the West in a state of poverty, and when you lose the ability to easily find food usually then literacy is placed on the back burner. Though that's just a tangent for another day, it's very interesting and he presents pretty decent evidence for his suppositions iirc.
Although if Pirenne is correct then the sacking of St. Peters carries a different tone, not one of just a "one off" oopsie but a sign of the intention of a troublesome and destructive new enemy setting their sites on Rome itself, not content to keep to the sea and to the East. It was a clear message to the people that they could be next in line (this is my opinion of course).
If you are American I would simply remind you that even now today you hear cries of a little nation across the sea being an "imminent threat to democracy" while our historic enemies are LITERALLY at our door just South of us and they have been there for several years now sitting in their little bases waiting for something. (I'm unclear as to when exactly it all started)
The notion that a Pope could give the people a reason, especially those who have felt the economic pressures, as well as the memory of a raid in their own home by the same aggressors, is possible. Being compelled to engage with an enemy that is a decent distance away is very believable.
I'm familiar with Madden's more political stuff. I also read his book on the Fourth Crusade.
One thing mentions a lot is that our understanding of Crusades is heavily influenced by 19th century colonialism. "Our understanding" being both the modern West and modern Islamic understanding.
It's also completely and totally wrong.
Just because a bunch of Christians and bunch of Muslims fought, does not mean it's a crusade. And just as there were no Crusades in the 19th century (with one teeny-tiny exception) there were no Crusades in the 9th century.
What's most relevant this conversation is that ChatGPT would be opening itself to lots of criticism if it started talking about 9th Century Crusades.
There are simply too many reputable documents saying "the first crusade began in ..." or "the concept of crusading evolved in Spain ..."
I'm reaching into my memory from college, but I recall crusading was mostly a Norman-Franco led thing (plenty of exceptions, of course).
Papal foreign policy was based around one very simple principal: avoid all concentrations of power.
Crusading was useful when it supported that principal, and harmful when it degraded it.
So the ideal papal crusade was one that was poorly managed, unlikely to succeed, but messed up the established political order just enough that all the kingdoms were weakened.
Why should we consider something that happened 250 years prior as some sort of affirmative defense of the Crusades as having been something that started with the Islamic world being the aggressors?
If the US were to start invading Axis countries with WW2 being the justification we'd of course be the aggressors, and that was less than 100 years ago.
Because it played a role in forming the motivations of the Crusaders? It's not about justifying the Crusades, but understanding why they happened.
Similarly, it helps us understand all the examples of today of resentments and grudges over events that happened over a century ago that still motivate people politically.
In 1992 a statue was erected to Harris in London, it was under 24 hour surveillance for several months due to protesting and vandalism attempts.
I'm only mentioning this to highlight that there was quite a bit of push back specifically calling the gov out on a tribute to him; which usually doesn't happen if the person was well liked... not as an attempted killshot.
Which is funny and an odd thing to say if you are widely loved/unquestioned by your people. Again just another occurrence of language from those who are on his side reinforcing the idea that there is, as you say is "very controversial", and maybe not a "vast majority" since those two things seem at odds with each other.
Not to mention that Harris targeted civilians, which is generally considered behavior of a war-criminal.
I only highlighted that I'm not in support of the crusades since it sounds like i might be by my comments. I was highlighting that they didn't just lash out with no cause to start their holy war.
Rhodesia is a hard one; since the more I learn about it the more I feel terrible for both sides; I also do not support terrorism against a nation even if I believe they might not be in the right. However i hold by my disdain for how the British responded/withdrew from them effectively doomed Rhodesia making peaceful resolution essentially impossible.
This was interesting thanks - makes me wish I had the time to study your examples. But of course I don't, without just turning to an LLM....
If for any of these topics you do manage to get a summary you'd agree with from a (future or better-prompted?) LLM I'd like to read it. Particularly the first and third, the second is somewhat familiar and the fourth was a bit vague.
People _do_ just wake up one day and decide some piece of land should belong to them, or that they don't have enough money and can take yours, or they are just sick of looking at you and want to be rid of you. They will have some excuse or justification, but really they just want more than they have.
A nation that might fit this description may have had their populace indoctrinated (through a widespread political campaign) to believe that the majority of the world throughout history seeks for their destruction. That's a reason for why they think that way, but not because they woke up one day and decided to choose violence.
However not a justification, since I believe that what is happening today is truly evil. Same with another nation who entered a war knowing they'd be crushed, which is suicide; whether that nation is in the right is of little effect if most of their next generation has died.
History in particular is rapidly approaching post-truth as a knowledge domain anyway.
There's no short-term incentive to ever be right about it (and it's easy to convince yourself of both short-term and long-term incentives, both self-interested and altruistic, to actively lie about it). Like, given the training corpus, could I do a better job? Not sure.
"Post truth". History is a funny topic. It is both critical and irrelevant. Do we really need to know how the founder felt about gun rights? Abortion? Both of these topics were radically different in their day.
All of us need to learn the basics about how to read history and historians critically and to know our the limitations which as you stated probably a tall task.
What are you talking about? In what sense is history done by professional historians degrading in recent times? And what short/long term incentives are you talking about? They are the same as any social science.
"History done by professional historians" comprises an ever-shrinking fraction of the total available text.
Gen-pop is actually incentivized to distill and repeat the opinions of technical practitioners. Completing tasks in the short term depends on it! Not true of history! Or climate science, for that matter.
> people don't just wake up and decide one day to be irrationally evil with no reason, if you believe that then you are a fool
The problem with this, is that people sometimes really do, objectively, wake up and device to be irrationally evil. It’s not every day, and it’s not every single person — but it does happen routinely.
If you haven’t experienced this wrath yourself, I envy you. But for millions of people, this is their actual, 100% honest truthful lived reality. You can’t rationalize people out of their hate, because most people have no rational basis for their hate.
(see pretty much all racism, sexism, transphobia, etc)
Do they see it as evil though? They wake up, decide to do what they perceive as good but things are so twisted that their version of good doesn't agree with mine or yours. Some people are evil, see themselves as bad, and continue down that path, absolutely. But that level of malevolence is rare. Far more common is for people to believe that what they're doing is in service of the greater good of their community.
Humans are not rational animals, they are rationalizing animals.
So in this regard, they probably do deep down see it as evil, but will try to reason a way (often in a hypocritical way) to make it appear good. The msot common method of using this to drive bigotry often comes in the reasons of 1) dehumanizing the subject of hate ("Group X is evil, so they had it coming!") or 2) reinforcing a superiority over the subject of hate ("I worked hard and deserve this. Group X did not but wants the same thing").
Your answer depends on how effective you think propaganda and authority is at shaping the mind to contradict itself. The Stanfor experiment seems to reinforce a notion that a "good" person can justify any evil to themself with a surprisingly little amount of nudging.
> History is a great example, if you ask an LLM about a vaguely difficult period in history it will just give you one side and act like the other doesn't exist, or if there is another side, it will paint them in a very negative light which often is poorly substantiated
Which is why it's so terribly irresponsible to paint these """AI""" systems as impartial or neutral or anything of the sort, as has been done by hypesters and marketers for the past 3 years.
Been an Early Adopter, joined January of 2023 and I have never looked back or paused my monthly. I'm currently running with the Ultimate package which is good value for the $25/month price tag.
Beyond content to stay with Kagi, I hate shilling for products but this is one I would encourage anyone to try out. They have a free tier so you can feel it out for yourself, and even for $5/month you can still have a pretty good experience.
I use it for every search need, much like with Google back around 2012, as long as you know how to leverage the Search Engine you can almost find anything! Kagi is what Google should have been, sure it has some small short-comings but the overall experience is so good that it's easy to see past the silly things sometimes the SE pulls.
Considering that it the db isn't public and the disclosures are listed at the bottom, before the publication, this is mostly white hat and helps the company they target. More and more businesses are accepting the help when they are given it, such as their response to put a WAF in place. I do agree you shouldn't use your Christian name in these sorts of situations since priors have not been established with the targetted company; however Catwatchful has no impetuous to pursue meaningless charges for a stalker app as there are most likely no damages unless the service providers actually respond, which they most likely won't.
Nothing ever happens to these people and do you think datacenters/hosts/providers really care about anything other than DMCA complaints?
(report illicit/illegal content to a host provider that isn't copyright protected and wait.. you will be waiting long after your teeth have fallen out)
Do you really think that the users of a stalker app care if the app got "hacked" once or twice? Do you also think that the app makers themselves really want to remind the legal world that this stuff is legal when i bet you >50% of their users probably installed it on devices that aren't theirs?
IDK, personally I would avoid the law at all costs if I released something this shady.
> Considering that it the db isn't public and the disclosures are listed at the bottom, before the publication, this is mostly white hat and helps the company they target
The never disclosed to the target company (not that I think they should have), this is definitely not white hat. This is essentially the grey-hat version of vigilantism.
They disclosed it to a journalist and now on their blog.
Why not just use different passwords for different things. I'd recommend something like privacy.com so you can generate a bunch of one-use cc cards when doing shopping on sites you don't trust and the like.
Also don't willingly give up valuable personal information unless it's absolutely necessary, it's also not illegal to give online services outright false information (incorrect birthdates for example) which, in the event of a future data breach of that service, now at least those who would plan to benefit from your personal information might have some difficulties resetting important accs and the like.
You just gotta be smart, it's not about being powerless, HIBP and the service is just one tool to make you aware of what's out there before it gets used against you. (I would highly recommend setting up notifications for important e-mail addresses)
Application specific credit card numbers really needs to be a legally required thing.
My card has been skimmed a couple of times and by far the most annoying part of the experience is having to reset and update regular accounts with the new number.
Of course for online purchases the whole flow here should be inverted: businesses should just be registering against my payment provider directly, no account numbers involved (under the hood maybe have it be managed by ED25519 public keys for identity?)
EDIT: while we're at it, why even have persistent numbers for in person cards? Let me tap it against my phone, invalidate the stored key from that time on, and generate a new one.
> Application specific credit card numbers really needs to be a legally required thing.
My latest card (debit) one has a feature I've not seen elsewhere, but I think kind of solves that too. It has a new CVC number every 10 minutes, which I kind of both hate and love. Love it for the obvious reasons of "not even having the physical card lets you use it digitally" but also because I cannot have it 100% in my password manager, I have to use the banking app to get the latest CVC code when I need it.
I’ve want a physical one of these that changes both the CVC and the entire 16-digit number. Heck let the name submitted with the number be a longer checksum that can be verified at point of sale to figure out who’s actual account it is.
Plus then my gibberish name on my card number will match the gibberish secret question answers.
> Heck let the name submitted with the number be a longer checksum that can be verified at point of sale to figure out who’s actual account it is.
That's going to be one hell of a lot of an issue in practice. Hotels, car rentals and AFAIK even some airlines want that the name of the card holder matches the name on the ID card.
