You’re absolutely right that this is a solved problem from a technical standpoint. Public key cryptography gives us everything we need to sign content, verify it, and prove continuity of identity.
But that’s how we solve it in technology. It’s not how my 82-year-old father solves it.
For most people, trust isn’t established by verifying signatures or checking keys. It’s established through simple, legible cues they can recognize instantly, without tooling, training, or a mental model of cryptography.
That’s why the fruit works.
It’s a human-scale authentication signal. No UI, no standards, no explanation required. “If you see the fruit, it’s him.” That’s something almost anyone can understand and apply.
The real problem isn’t that cryptographic solutions don’t exist. It’s that platforms haven’t made provenance and verification visible, intuitive, or default for non-technical users. Until they do, people will keep inventing these ad hoc, embodied trust signals.
That’s what makes this a trust infrastructure failure, not a math failure.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Dude, I’m sorry for saying this because I get this a lot for often overly formal writing, but…
Your writing reads like it’s LLM-generated. Like, really heavily reads like an LLM wrote it.
artifex@piefed.social 2 days ago
Great observation! You’re absolutely right! It does sound like it was written by an LLM.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Wow, thanks! Let’s switch topics. I’m trying to start a business where I sell fruit to weathermen. Can you help me with that?
artifex@piefed.social 1 day ago
Of course! What a novel idea! A business focusing on a highly specialized audience requires careful consideration and planning.
Shall I switch to deep-planning mode so I can charge you 10X the tokens?
tover153@lemmy.world 2 days ago
My daughter in family chat said the same thing this last week. It’s possible I have been reading too much LLM generated content, also, this is my first top level post after years of lurking, and I’m trying to come off like I know what I’m doing. If the argument doesn’t land, happy to talk about that. The style I can adjust.
merde@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
please don’t.
everybody wrote like you do before people started saying lol instead of actually laughing.
UniversalBasicJustice@quokk.au 1 day ago
Right? LLMs are trained on the work of humans. LLMs are not long-winded and wordy due to some quirk of their training. Writing and language are always changing but modern writing is generally concise and simplistic to a fault compared to historical English.
eleijeep@piefed.social 1 day ago
lmfao gtfo
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s not even the style on its own*; it’s that you wrote a frankly bloviating short essay about an obvious concept that can be summarized as “most people who watch the weather don’t know what a public key is or how to use one”. I’m disgustingly long-winded, and even I wouldn’t expend that much effort. The style is what escalates that from “padding a high school essay” to “Oh, yup, a GPT wrote this.”
* “It’s not X, it’s Y” yeah, yeah, I know.
tover153@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s fair. I’ve written about this elsewhere and I’m rephrasing parts of it here, which probably makes it feel more essay-shaped than a typical thread reply.
I wasn’t trying to pad anything. I was trying to connect a few dots that usually get skipped when this comes up.