Many use cases come to mind. If (retinal?) identities were private, encrypted, and “anonymized” in handshake:
web browsing without captchas, anubis, bot tests, etc. (“human only” internet, maybe like Berners-Lee’s “semantic web” idea [1][2])
Non “anonymized”:
non-jury court and arbitration appearances (with expansion of judges to clear backlogs [3])
medical checkups and social care (eg neurocognitive checkups for elderly, social services checkins esp. children, checkins for depressed or isolated needing offwork social interactions, etc.)
bureaucratic appointments (customer service by humans, DMV, building permits, licenses, etc.)
web browsing for routine tasks without logins (banks, email, etc)
Human-only Internet: why choose this implementation over something simpler? Surely there’s a simpler way to prove you’re human that doesn’t involve 3D avatar construction on a head-worn display that screws up your hair and makeup. [1] E.g., an Apple Watch-like device can verify you have a real pulse and oxygen in your blood.
Court: solution is already in place, which is showing up to a physical courtroom. Clearing backlogs can be done without a technological solution, it’s more of a process and staffing problem. Moving the judges from a court to a home office doesn’t magically make them clear cases faster.
Medical checkups: phone selfie camera
Bureaucratic appointments: solution in place, physical building, or many of these offer virtual appointments already over a webcam.
Web browsing without logins: passkeys, FaceID, fingerprint
[1] yet another male-designed tech bro product that never considered the concerns of the majority of the population.
You raise fair points. I'd also prefer a simpler solution for a human-only internet, but nothing has really worked so far. Bloomberg issued secure cards with fingerprint pads that you held up to the monitor to retrieve credentials to their system, so maybe a simpler physical authenticator could work at scale. I'm not sure how secure a pulsometer would be, but hacking an apple headset chip and retinal pattern seem harder.
Court: disagree in part. More judges are needed to address the severe backlogs, but as an example NYS judges oppose expansion (see [3] from previous post). A lot of calendar time is spent appearing before judges around a city (they're not all in one area) for motion hearings and the like despite all documents being electronically submitted. Also, there are frequent reschedulings when one party can't physically appear. Some state judges allow teleconference, but a lot don't. Appellate and federal courts rarely.
Checkups and social services: some secure way of monitoring client interactions and outcomes is needed. In Los Angeles, the homeless services agency has been criticized by a federal judge for incompetence [1] and more than half of the child-prostitutes in a notorious corridor were found to be "missing" from the foster system [2]. Maybe headsets are not the best answer, but govt agencies and social service NGOs need to record evidence of their efforts for accountability.
SB79 was “meant to address two crises at once: The state’s long-term housing shortage and the financial precarity of its public transit agencies.”[a] The 3rd crisis is the enormous budgetary deficits the state and cities are also facing: San Diego has a $300m deficit, SF $728m, LA $1b, CA $45b.
One suspects the 2nd and 3rd crises are the intended targets.
But it’s unclear how SB79 would fix transit’s fiscal cliffs. The SF BART system is facing a 2026 cliff and ascribes its steep revenue declines to high work from home rates and a struggling downtown area [c] The SD MTS system has a 2028 cliff LA Metro uses sales tax increases (measures M and R) to fund 50% of its budget (fare revenue funds only 1%), yet it still faces a 2030 cliff. RTO remains deeply unpopular and downtown commercial real estate has seen steep losses [d] However, SB79 does allow transit agencies to develop and acquire land adjacent to transit stops as an additional revenue source [e]
SB79 supporters seemed to be focused on lowering multifamily rental prices, but again it’s unclear how SB79 would accomplish this, since it still depends on market incentives to add multifamily units. Banks or investors won’t loan money to developers unless the net operating income (rent) is high enough to justify investment. The other factor is interest rates, but SB79 can’t change that. Many existing multifamily properties struggle to break even and now have the highest loan delinquency rate after offices [e] Manville points out new multifamily supply is constrained by recent “mansion taxes” (eg 2023 ULA measure in LA, 2020 Prop 1 in SF)[f]. Also, SB79 reserves only 10% of a multifamily building to low income and allows market rate rents in the other units.
SB79 would give even more leverage to institutional investors and developers over municipalities and communities. Their concerns are valid (eg zoning and development plans balanced over decades, gentrification, eminent domain, etc.) and shouldn’t be dismissed automatically as collateral damage in an attempt to drive down rental prices. One housing coalition estimates 2/3 of multifamily units in LA are owned by investment vehicles which historically have shown higher annual rent increases and eviction rates than local operators [g]
Your comments on sensor fusion seem to describe the weird results of 2 informal ADAS (lidar, vision, lidar + vision, lidar + vision + 4d imaging radar, etc.) “tournaments” conducted earlier this year. There was an earlier HN post about it <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44694891> with a comment noting “there was a wide range of crash avoidance behavior even between the same car likely due to the machine learning, and that also makes explaining the differences hard. Hopefully someone with more background on ADAS systems can watch and post what they think.”
Notably, sensor confusion is also an “unsolved” problem in humans, eg vision and vestibular (inner ear) conflicts possibly explaining motion sickness/vertigo <https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-025-00417-2>
Urban Scenarios: “a massive, complex roundabout and another segment of road with a few unsignaled intersections and a long straight...The first four tests incorporated portions of this huge roundabout, which would be complex for human drivers, but in situations for which there is quite an obvious solution: don’t hit that car/pedestrian in front of you” <https://electrek.co/2025/07/29/another-huge-chinese-self-dri...>
The compelling interest for state and federal governments would be to ensure a fair marketplace by prohibiting false advertising and deceptive practices. California is considering Assembly Bill 1251 (Banning “ghost” job postings) to deter “unfair competition” in the labor marketplace. <https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab...>
Regarding First Amendment conflicts with commercial speech, the Supreme Court described its four-step analysis in Central Hudson Gas & Elec. v. Public Svc. Comm'n, 447 U.S. 557 (1980) (stating “For commercial speech to come within the First Amendment, it at least must concern lawful activity and not be misleading.”) Hence, the FTC Division of Advertising Practices (DAP) <https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-consume...> has survived legal scrutiny of its enforcement authority due to its compelling interest in fair public markets.
As the Congressional Research Service pointed out, FTC enforcement actions regarding ghost jobs would be difficult, since employer intent is not easily discoverable and consumer harm not easily quantifiable. On the other hand, “While employers generally do not have a legal duty to respond to job applicants, differing responses based on protected characteristics could violate Title VII of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 or other employment laws.” page 2, <https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1297...>
For instance, if an employer used job postings to hire from certain countries or age groups, this would likely violate Title VII since national origin and age are protected classes under Title VII, eg Mobley v Workday (where plaintiffs argue the Workday job postings platform violated Title VII)
<https://www.pleasantonweekly.com/courts/2025/08/21/judge-ord...>
Disclaimer: this is not legal or medical advice, but an encouragement to read the research for yourself and accumulate an understanding of the issues for your decision making. If you know any good studies or criticisms, please add them.
There are already lawsuits challenging EUA vaccine mandates. They’d be moot, though, after FDA approval, since the Supreme Court has upheld states’ vaccination mandates (cf. Jacobson v. Massachusetts)
Some issues around BLA/FDA approval:
First, a BLA has some implications. It would likely force the FDA to revoke EUAs to all other candidates (one of the conditions for an EUA is that no other viable approved treatments exist. Some of the controversy around ivermectin and off label use is related to this condition). This would impede development of other treatments, current and future.
Second, the history of SARS-cov vaccines is promising, but incomplete. Many previous trials showed good progress (high antibody titre levels, etc.), but tended to fare poorly on later virus challenges. eg
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Third, sometimes, side effects might not be sufficiently analyzed until well after authorization, eg “Dengvaxia”: a dengue fever (R0=65, CFR=20-30%) vaccine that was extensively used in the Philippines in 2017-8, but later showed evidence of increasing risk of disease severity on the uninfected and now carries that warning: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6214489/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_vaccine
Finally, Breslow (https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2021/02/18/employer-...) suggests mandates aren’t legal: previous CDC and FDA guidance have consistently advised against mandatory use of EUA vaccines, and courts would probably continue to defer to those agencies.
In April 2020, Dr. Amanda Cohn, the executive secretary of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, reiterated that “under an EUA, vaccines are not allowed to be mandatory. Therefore, early in the vaccination phase individuals will have to be consented and cannot be mandated to be vaccinated” (page 56, https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/min-arc...)
In addition, the EEOC June 28, 2021 update (https://www.eeoc.gov/wysk/what-you-should-know-about-covid-1...), Section K in particular, defers to CDC and FDA guidance on EUA vaccine use and practices.
Tinfoil pt 2: AVP might be working on a related but applicable product. Most people old enough with presbyopia issues would happily forget bifocals. <https://appleworld.today/2025/07/apple-glasses-could-look-li...>