Unleaded8163

Canned bacon?!?! Tell me more please.

Now I want a cool, refreshing Coca-cola. This post was the real ad all along.

lowest approval rating so far

lowest approval rating so far

I need this crossover.

The real life hack is having a crappy low powered microwave so you don’t even have to set it to half power.

Absolute privacy? Not at all, the fact that I’m over 18 is personal information, you’ve all invaded my privacy a little bit by reading that. Absolute accuracy? Not at all, I have no idea how anyone would ever prove for sure someone’s age. Any potential solution is going to about compromise. The real question is: How well can we verify someone’s age well enough while preserving as much privacy as possible?

The best solution I’ve heard of, that hits a pretty good compromise, is giving the local device some indicator of the user’s age, and allow applications or websites to perform a limited resolution query of that value, along the lines of which of several age brackets does the user fall into. The birthday can optionally be provided when the device is configured; a parent can set up a device for their kid, setting whatever value they want for the kid’s age. A good implementation would make it quite difficult to extract or change that birthday value without admin rights, which the parents would keep.

If this sounds a lot like the laws in the news from California and Colorado, that’s because it is. I think that they’re stupid laws, but they describe reasonably good features for software. That law making effort should have been put towards banning the incredibly invasive and somehow also incredibly inaccurate use of AI image processing for age estimation.

He’s going to have to pay damages, reimbursing investors for the loss caused by his BS.

Because it is a class action case, it is not clear what amount in damages Musk will have to pay to thousands of shareholders, many of them institutional investors, but it is likely in the billions. The jury awarded shareholders between about $3 and $8 per stock per day.

Umm… I was born 1-Jan-1970 at 0:00 UTC.

They’re not even really covering their asses. They don’t make an OS, they make a small but important art of many distros. They’re providing a clean, standardized way for Linux distros from RedHat to Ageless to comply with the law if they choose to. Some distros will comply with the law to the letter, others will not comply out of spite. At least the ones that comply will do it in a standard way.

Yup. Putin couldn’t have planned it better himself.

Unless… no, it couldn’t be… but that would mean… oh shit.

On of the questions I ask when interviewing for a company is what kind of IT platform they work with. Windows is a big red flag.

Almost anything is better than lettuce on a BLT. In my house, the L stands for leaf. Often its arugala (aka rocket), sometimes a power green blend, honestly whatever I have. I’ll have to try cucumber though.

I’ve got some bad news for you…

I agree that it’s a poorly written law, I mean it was written by politicians who don’t understand what an OS is. My main point is that something baked into the OS and browser is better for a handful of reasons than most of the other ‘solutions’ we’re seeing.

Here’s the thing, open source is big business for the likes of Canonical and Red Hat. There is no need for any of this to be in the linux kernel, or even in the window system. It is a pretty trivial feature to implement as a simple add on, and those who sell Linux based OSes and support contracts will ensure that they can continue to do business in a market as large as California. The law is clearly not perfect, but it’s also not awful. My understanding is that it does not mandate any kind of age verification, only age declaration. The idea is to let a porn website or similar ask the browser “Is the user 18 or older” and get a response based on an age provided when the user account was created.

If you accept that there is content on-line which small children should not access, then it follows that some type of age verification beyond “Click here only if you’re old enough” is necessary. Something like this, baked into the browser and/or OS, is kind of the least bad option. When you look at the kind of AI age verification garbage some web sites and apps are starting to do, an age signal baked into the OS actually starts to look pretty good. If this gets adopted widely and sites start to take advantage of it to skip the “I’m totally old enough” button, I’ll be happy to tell my OS what my birthday is… Jan 1, 1970.

The legeslation has been in place for years, but we held off because we didn’t want to be out of sync with Washington, Oregon, and California.

From https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2026AG0013-000209:

Recent actions from the U.S. have shifted how B.C. approaches decisions that merit alignment, including on time zones.

Thanks Trump :D

This is hilarious. I work on translation software and know exactly what’s wrong. They’ve selected a spanish voice, but not translated the content to spanish. I was playing around with these settings in our software and produced exactly this result.

They’ll be in real trouble when they get fined into oblivion. I bet they’re looking a thousands of dollars here!

Being pre-recorded isn’t what I’d choose to mock it for, but as long as it’s getting mocked I won’t complain.