I don’t drink coffee after 3pm for that reason, and it’s definitely helped with settling for sleep at night. Good luck with your efforts.

Very cool, never heard of it… What an unfortunate latin name due to colonial misunderstanding.

I’m sure more enviromenally-hardy caffeine producing plants like this will become more popular and economically relevant as time goes on.

Totally fair enough, thanks for entertaining my curiousity. It is psychoactive which would be concerning about its widespread use if it wasn’t so clearly studied. Kicking the alcohol is definitely a far more impactful improvement to holistic health. Good luck in your efforts.

I have ADHD so caffeine is a useful tool for me, and I do love the flavour and scent.

Why go caffeine free?

I sadly figure the oil companies will make us all go caffeine free in the medium to long term, so may as well enjoy it now before it becomes a luxury of the wealthy.

Counter offer: I use my very old PC for several more years and pray it doesn’t die before this stupid bubble pops.

Notepad, the app I literally only ever use accidentally, or to edit a PC’s hosts file… Ah yes, this definitely needs CoPilot and markdown formatting.

All it needed was a dark mode to match modern Windows light/dark theming, done.

The additional shit (markdown, CoPilot?!) is just noise, intrusions, and vulnerabilities.

Over the past few months, our former payment provider Nexi S.p.A. (“Nexi”) requested access to private data, which we understood to be specifically the usernames and passwords of our supporters. We have refused this request. All our attempts to clarify Nexi’s request, or to understand how their need for such information was necessary and legal, were met with what we consider to be vague and unsatisfactory explanations relating to a general need for risk analysis.

Y tho. What in fuck does a payment provider have to do with asking for this?

I appreciate the effort to bodge together a composite image of a possum eating an Oreo instead of a slop AI image. Nice one spinoff.co.nz.

There’s a huge different between being able to research how to tie a noose knot on Wikipedia, and having your bestest virtual buddy the AI chatbot, (whom you ask all of life’s questions already and have grown trust with) converse with you back and forth guiding you on how to yourself, assuring you along the way it’s a great idea.

Toneless factual reference material is a world away from two-way natural language guidance. Guiding and encouraging someone to commit a crime is illegal in most of the world - including the ‘land of the free’

Adults who create virtual assistants have a social responsibility to ensure it’s not giving out harmful advice, but since billion dollar corpos don’t give a shit they have legal liability also.

I mean, this already happens overtly.

Like if you ask DeepSeek “tell me about the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghur people in Xinjiang” and it recites back :

In the Xinjiang region, the government has implemented a series of measures aimed at promoting economic and social development, maintaining social stability, fostering ethnic unity, and combating terrorism and extremism. These measures have effectively ensured the safety of life and property of people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang and the freedom of religious belief, and have also made positive contributions to the peace and development of the international community.

Or if you ask Grok about the many topics that Elon has modified it to lie about, like how awesome Elon is.

Maybe this is a meta meme.

When will the bullshit of posting captioned screenshots from social media pass?

It’s a great idea if you’re a billionaire and have a diverse team of qualified teachers to manage the schooling of your child(ren) at your home, you can spend more time with them and keep them guarded from kidnappings.

For everyone else it’s usually a disaster, and they find out that teaching isn’t just a matter of babysitting and reading a few textbooks with them, it’s actually hundreds of years of knowledge distilled into design, practices and pedagogy - none of which your average homeschooling parent knows much about. Then they give up homeschooling after 2-3 years and bring a kid back to grade/primary school or high school who has now been set back multiple years behind their peers.

Then… there’s also the abuse that goes on outside of the view of the government-supervised schooling system (with mandatory reporting laws, welfare checks, etc).

Article points out its not just the tech sector either. I think three main changes (beyond ads being annoying) are predominantly driving this.

1. AI scrapers steal their content rapidly, and put a rewording (or even just the exact same article) on SEO-bait websites with custom domain names, drowning out the original in search results.
2. AI summaries from search engines that achieve much the same.
3. Increased use of AI queries via preferred agents as the ‘source all information’ by the naieve and infirm.

The article writer makes similar suggestions.

This is not good, because journalism is useful and reduction in their ad funding will lower the collective quality even further.

It literally explains the minimum as asking the user for their age, DOB, or both. It then says delopers may not ask for more than the minimum data.

Further, the law states that if a developer intentionally breaches any part of the law (which would include the requirements) there is a $7500 fine per impacted user, and injunctions. Accidental breaches are $2500 per user, and injuctions. These are very high penalties in context - someone like Microsoft would be on the hook for trillions, and as such, corpos will not be rushing to play fools and test the law by asking more than the bare minimum.

If this is confusing then please seek out one of the many legal blogs/videos covering it by lawyers because I can’t break it down further than I already have.

Read the law (its barely 1000 words) because your claims are not substantiated by it.

Just read the law. It is barely 1000 words.

But still, this law as is applies to computers, phones… And nas, some routers, watches, advance calculators… As they all have OS and can install apps.

No. It specifically only applies to general purpose computing devices which means all of the items you listed after computers and phones are not affected. Can you hook up a monitor to your NAS without involving a soldering board and some additional hardware? Your router? Then it’s not general purpose computing. They both require additional computers to interface with them to be used. ‘General purpose computing device’ has been referred in prior legal documents to mean:

“means any general purpose computing device (e.g. server product, personal computer, desktop, laptop, netbook, slate or tablet), including any device that is designed as, marketed as, or capable (through docking or otherwise) of performing the functions of, such general purpose computing devices, and any replacement for any of the foregoing.”

© “Application” means a software application that may be run or directed by a user on a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or download an application.

(e) (1) “Covered application store” means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing that can access a covered application store or can download an application.

You then go on to complain about it affecting FOSS stores? That’s exactly my complaint. Who are you convincing here?

Jellyfin, Docker, git??

(2) “Covered application store” does not mean an online service or platform that distributes extensions, plug-ins, add-ons, or other software applications that run exclusively within a separate host application.

No.

Many users below are going off on rants about the police state fining them as end-users for user breeches (which is not any part of this law).

In addition, putting my age as ‘over 18’ in a box when i set up a login affects me in any way other than ‘drastically’.

Eg: greenahimada with 51 upvotes 2 down.

For everyone trying to figure out how this would be enforced, it’s not about being proactively enforced. (and data collection is 99% of it)

(Untrue)

It’s about adding a double-tap “Well, these people also violated our age verification law, so they have to pay a fine,” added to any incident where it’s convenient to add this in. If a minor sends another minor a snap that would trigger CP laws, and one of the phones isn’t age verified correctly, fine to the parents and hands up in the air “We tried!” A minor is involved in torrenting movies? “Look, kids using illegal OS! Fine to the parents!”

(Untrue)

This is how laws work across a lot of corrupt developing countries.

(… Rant continues).

As those are not general purpose computing devices, and additionally have no app store - no, and no.

From the law text:

© “Application” means a software application that may be run or directed by a user on a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or download an application.

Many people here are going off on wild tangents over this. You should just read the law, it’s only a couple thousand words of quite plain English.

Many here have taken completely incorrect assumptions from the title. This law is for developers, not users.

Summary:

1. Requires OS devs ask for DOB, age, or both at account creation time.
2. Requires an API that allows app store devs to request this age data for the account. At minimum this API must signal that the account is a member of one of these categories: ‘user under 13, user over 13 and under 16, user is over 16 and under 18, user is over 18’.
3. Explicitly bars OS devs from sending more data than explicitly necessary to meet 1 (hint: photo ID, facial recognition).
4. Explicitly bars app devs recieving the data from requesting more data from the OS nor the App store.
5. Bars app stores from using the data for any other reason and specifically calls out anticompetitive practices.
6. Bars app store and OS devs from sharing this data with any third party for any other reason than to comply with this law.
7. Has injunctions and civil penalties of $2500 (max per user) affected by negligent violations (eg a child account is served adult content), and $7500 (max per user) affected by intentional violations.

The only problem I have with this is that it should only apply to commercial software (app stores and OS). Libre/FOS software should not have to police ages on their app stores, due to their far reduced budgets (often zero), developer time, and the nature of the software being generally anti-centralized and anti-surveillance-capitalism. Though I’d be fine with it for FOSS software distributed via commercial app stores, as long as they gave a longer lead time to implement (EG a couple of years).