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).

That is another real thing, that doesn’t fit this example.

If it did, any video on other topics would not be in the top few results - and yet in my unscientific testing of several random video titles and authors, they all come up in either the first result or in the first row.

Different experience for searching leftist videos.

The rage-stoking flamebait is definitely a real thing on all social media to drive engagement. But the only explanation for searching for an exact video name with the name of the creator, and the desired video not being in the top few hits but rather buried below dozens and dozens of other results is suppression of that creator. And it happens repeatedly for left-wing creators. That can’t be explained by the ‘I need to feed attention all the time’ algorithm.

I figure its intentional because Google’s executives know right-wing chuds and their politicians will always push corporate-friendly and ultrarich-friendly legislation like tax cuts, deregulation, and defanged government institutions.

But I’m in agreement that it’s likely done with glee by YouTube’s team, who seem as happy to promote right-wing chuds as they do to stamp out left-wing voices from the feed.

Example: I sometimes search for videos I’ve seen from subscriptions, and using the exact title of the video and the creator I still have to wade through three or four pages of search results with far different titles - scrolling past heaps of ideologically-opposite results as I go - to finally find the real video. That’s no mistake, thats an intentional finger on the scale to hide leftist voices.

Damn, the title got me. Thanks for the correction.

Your casual 9 TB of porn.

Fingers crossed for the crash sooner than later, because I’m tired of it all.

If you believe the AI hype there won’t be any programming jobs soon - so those that do (believe) think they need to become highly-proficient AI-wranglers to maintain employability.

I too think it’s the wrong approach, but it’s hard to say what hirers will be looking for in the medium to long term, and devs whom adapt to ‘the new thing’ faster have typically been more hirable.

Personally hoping the big players crash and burn asap because the benefits just haven’t been anywhere near worth the costs across various domains.

Agree with all points. Additionally, compilers are also incredibly well specified via ISO standards etc, and have multiple open source codebases available, eg GCC which is available in multiple builds and implementations for different versions of C and C++, and DQNEO/cc.go.

So there are many fully-functional and complete sources that Claude Cowork would have pulled routines and code from.

I’m sure I donated back in version 0.1 or 0.2, maybe a year ago, but looking now it doesn’t seem to show me as being a registered user, so perhaps I was wrong.

I’m pretty sure it still falls under the definition of ‘donationware’, though?

Donationware is a licensing model that supplies fully operational unrestricted software to the user and requests an optional donation be paid to the programmer or a third-party beneficiary (usually a non-profit).[1] The amount of the donation may also be stipulated by the author, or it may be left to the discretion of the user, based on individual perceptions of the software’s value. Since donationware comes fully operational (i.e. not crippleware/freemium) when payment is optional, it is a type of freeware.

I wasn’t t aware of the Curtis Yarvin link at all. I’ve just read that blog article and it’s not possible to remain cautiously optimistic or give them benefit of the doubt… the FUTO founder (Eron Wolf) seems very clearly ideologically-aligned with fascists.

Well, now I’m really hoping they change their license to true open source, so a group less ideologically disastrous can fork it and take the helm for interested contributors and supporters to join.

Probably for additional exposure to the public and to monetize via paid DLC as a ‘supporter tier’ style offering (with limited or no added features).

Grayjay is donationware - “FOSS”, but with a strong encouragement to donate if you use it regularly and have the means to support.

I put FOSS in quotes because Grayjay is not really OSS. It has a custom license that does not allow commercial reuse of its code.

This has caused significant discussion of concerns and ire from some.

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/grayjay-frontend/14616

https://github.com/futo-org/grayjay-android/issues/18

https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/10/18/grayjay-is-not-open-source/

P. S. Grayjay is great software, I use it a lot and have reported several bugs which the dev team have been super responsive to and resolved all. I have supported them with a donation purely on the aforementioned, but their license is a bummer. I’d like to see other projects be able to reuse their code widely as true OSS. I also personally have concerns with the example screenshots they show on site having a bunch of RW content creators / grifters, and their support of the Rumble service as an official plugin, but I understand they are free-speech aligned and trying to be apolitical in their approach. I personally think they could do that without giving RW figures free advertising in their screenshots, and allowing a third-party to create the Rumble plugin rather than dedicating dev work to support it officially, but it’s just a red flag to me more than a dealbreaker.

(Edit - see comments below, Futo is worse than I was aware).