As if there’s no backlash for those things! No popular culture reflecting the baby boom on January 1st, 1900. No widespread browser plugins to make e-mail nags and sign-in pop-ups fuck off.

As if legally mandatory age reporting is in any way the same thing as haphazard adoption of a Dark Mode flag. Wikipedia’s not even smart enough to make Automatic the default.

On some level, a website named Porn Hub needing an interstitial that says ‘btw, you might see tits’ is the original sin of the internet. It’s borne of the same puritanical horseshit that tried banning pornography entirely. It’s not about children. They’re the excuse. This ongoing moral panic uses them in a widespread and not entirely unsuccessful effort to deny adult-ass adults the things that most of them want. This has been happening my entire life, and yours, and is why I cannot respect the hair-splitting insistence that forcing your OS to report your age is - somehow! - totally unrelated, utterly disconnected, having nothing to do with the many conservative governments who want to track every video you ever jerked off to.

For the children.

Software freely adding an option to somehow report ‘this user is underage’ is unavoidably distinct from the government mandating any form of requesting, storing, or sharing the user’s age.

Even if you honestly believe there’s no connection to states demanding ID collection before looking at porn - how can you not understand the people recoiling at this? ‘I get it but you’re mistaken’ would see a polite argument. Your apparent bewilderment is inexplicable. ‘Microsoft legally requires your birthdate before you boot up and the internet will work differently based on that’ must be a dark aside in some Cory Doctorow story. How is it our actual reality, which some people think is normal?

Or set it based on the amount of legal protections you want on your data

… do you ever step back and wonder if civilization was a mistake?

‘This law is fine because it won’t affect child predators’ is a brave argument.

What is it for? You’ve found so many ways to say it’s toothless, optional, trivially dodged. So why fucking bother? Critics seem to agree, it’s a foot in the door for all of the other privacy-defeating efforts going on, now running in protection ring zero. What does this nonsense do, besides set off those red flags? What impact do you honestly expect, versus telling websites to have an ‘18+ only’ click-through?

Mandatory OS integration is not separate, optional, or user-driven.

I have explicitly argued against this, in itself, for its own sake.

Under the other submission, I am even arguing against age verification in general.

But sure, let’s talk about this on its merits, in a vacuum, like there’s nothing else happening. What the fuck is it for? You endlessly insist it’s super minor, barely an inconvenience, and obviously any idiot can bypass it. That is your defense. If you freely acknowledge all of the other efforts went too far and didn’t work, why is this one worth trying? How is this encroachment on all operating systems not a waste of time, at best?

The worst-case scenario is already happening - aforementioned facial scans are not theoretical. Only their scope has been limited, and suddenly we’re talking about legally-mandated age gating at an OS level.

Pattern recognition is a requirement for survival.

Many abuses start small so that people like you will let it happen. Some caveats only exist for you to point to while bickering with critics, and when you’re not looking, they quietly vanish. Others were just empty words the whole time.

This law is not some compromise over widely-demanded change. It would be a pointless intrusion even if, by some miracle, it stopped right here. It will not stop here. Be serious. You lived through last year; you know the general state of everything. These exact companies have been spying on you. These governments sure aren’t stopping them, for some mysterious reason. Scoffing about blindingly obvious expectations is a choice of comforting fantasy over worthwhile argument.

If I had to take a photo of my genitals to sign into my own computer, promises against storage or sharing are not addressing my complaints about privacy. Asking my age is a lot less personal - but it’s still information about me, which this object does not need.

‘I’m only okay with this idea because I know it won’t work’ is, just, why are we even talking? What is the function of an argument when you’re not listening to yourself?

How many of these websites where children gather and self-identity are created and maintained by paedophiles specifically to prey on childen?

In light of the Epstein files I would hesitate to say that number is zero. Nevermind that most such platforms are smaller than the giants you mentioned. Or that anyone working for or with kid-filled sites of any size could make it incidentally about preying on said kids. Apparently people manage when they’re just anonymous users.

On the other hand, setting up a public website/app and trying to lure children to it is expensive, risky, and unlikely to succeed on the modern internet.

Right, when has any website become a platform where kids gather and regularly self-identify?

Companies shouldn’t even be allowed to demand more than a username and password, on any machine I could pick up and throw. Making anything beyond that a legal requirement is intolerable, in itself. My age is not this object’s business. It sure isn’t this website’s business.

Stop excusing these intrusions against adult life, for the sake of children who will bypass them anyway. You know they will. You use the flimsiness of this alleged protection as an excuse for enabling it. There is literally no benefit if it doesn’t fucking work. Even pretending the immediate goal is something you should want - this won’t do that.

There is no benefit.

You can’t glibly assert that people can just lie, so it’s not a big deal - and then pretend it’ll do the thing it’s for. Which again, is a bad idea anyway, which this approach would not achieve, if it even worked. It’s fractally stupid. It is dangerous bullshit, at every scale.

And it stops here. Yeah? Today is the end of history. Nevermind any resemblance to rampant demands for facial scans and government ID, just to use a website; this demand for every computer to be 18+ will never cause problems.

Have you ever taken a hint in your life.

This won’t fix that.

we’re talking about providing the option to limit access to mature content, not preventing them from downloading python or using the internet.

We’re talking about stopping adults from using a computer without surrendering their privacy. Whatever excuses you make about that, will not last. This is a flying leap down a slippery slope, and it won’t even fucking work.

Fabulous prizes!

2021: Edge is just Chrome now.

2026: Bing Video is just Sora now.

2031: Xbox is just Playstation now.

2040: Windows is just Android now.

Microsoft… what is you’d say you do, here?

The fact this even almost works remains fascinating. Someone got a full-featured bare-metal operating system to program itself, and it’s halfway between early ReactOS and that Flash game for Windows Really Good Edition.

We forget that computers are for everyone. They’re supposed to be a bicycle for the mind. Needing to rely on existing mature applications, created by teams of experts, is an obstacle we’ve been fighting since BASIC. Anyone should be able to slap together some program that suits their needs. And not just theoretically capable - able. ‘You could learn to do it!’ means you cannot yet do it.

There’s a handful of languages intuitive enough to make people dangerous in matter of days. Until recently, suggesting that English was one of them would be laughable - but now you really can describe what you want and swallow the elephant. It doesn’t work, but it’s alarmingly close, for amateur use of this fiddly tool. The computer literally did your work for you, and people still complain about limitations.

An actual intelligence trained on StackOverflow would look at ‘make me a new OS’ and respond, ‘but why do you want that instead of modifying BSD?’ An intelligence that’s also been trained to avoid backsass would start from structure and complete its own todos. Which some guy claims to have done, for compiling a new language that mostly uses stupid names for things. He’s got the right idea, for weaponizing an LLM into something useful, but that idea is to make it act like diffusion.