I have a Garmin gps for my car, it does have wifi and bluetooth but my hope is that it’s enough that I have these disabled in the settings and never used them to connect to anything.

What about GPS devices that are not phones

Valid worry, and I would prefer no such legislation, but I can picture a more optimistic outcome where this diffuses demands for more invasive and anticonsumer verification because it would somewhat address the problem of population scale psychological harm to children that there seems to be public consensus about. The sense of “something must be done” is currently giving repressive authoritarian tech an excuse to be implemented, and while there are strong arguments for why that tech is more dangerous and oppressive than it could possibly be worth, the arguments for how the problem can be addressed instead are much weaker. People often point to parental responsibility and the possibility of setting up parental control software, but this argument has some glaring weaknesses; the problem exists on a collective rather than individual level, exists despite the current possibility of parental action, and the argument does not point towards any real hope of improvement.

This all comes back to the reality that the way we use software is largely dictated by the design of that software. Defaults matter a lot. What I like about this solution is that it would work by adjusting defaults, not asking users to take extra initiative, and leaving ultimate control up to the person who bought the hardware. It would be possible, but difficult to get around it for children who can’t easily acquire their own hardware, and so most of them just wouldn’t, which means there is an actual possibility of it being part of an overall solution to the problem.

Whether it’s the best, or a good solution, I do have some doubts about. Banning children from any participation in public discussion seems like a bad thing for a variety of reasons, and it’s easy to see any sort of effective age verification going there immediately. The ability to check the OS for age category would mean an avenue for practically enforceable legislation about how online services must treat users by those categories, and most of that legislation can be expected to suck. And of course there’s the risk you mention that the law is expanded to try to prevent the hardware owner from actually being in any sort of control. Still, the problem is real, and I don’t think the invasive solutions are going to be defeated without proposing effective noninvasive solutions.

It might not be so bad if it was just entering the age of the device’s user when setting it up, since in that case the system would be essentially just a standard for parental controls.

Assembly Bill No. 1043 was approved by California governor Gavin Newsom in October of last year, and becomes active on January 1, 2027 (via The Lunduke Journal).

Sounds like it already passed

The main complaints about Matrix I’ve heard though are about behind the scenes stuff rather than features, which the video touches on:

But there are some reasons why I think XMPP is superior. In Matrix, when you join a room, your server downloads and stores the entire history of that room. If someone on a federated server posts illegal content in a room you’re in, your server is now hosting it, and you are liable. Whereas in XMPP, messages are relayed in real time. Group chat, MU history stays on your server hosting that room. So your server only stores messages for your users which means that no content caching there is no content caching from other servers. This is a fundamental architectural difference which makes the XMPP protocol better in my opinion.

Personally I don’t know that much about it but I briefly looked into what it would take to write a client for Matrix a few years ago and it seemed pretty daunting to work with. Maybe it would be possible to write software that implements more Discord features on top of XMPP to have something that works more smoothly.

The “best engineer in the world” said that it “is fully conscious according to any test I can think of”, which of course means that it is conscious for all possible tests, and so it is unnecessary to look at any particular test or definition of consciousness

The term ‘vibe coding’ I think was originally about generating and using code without understanding it

Merz criticized defenders of online anonymity, saying they are “often people who, from the shadows of anonymity, demand the greatest possible transparency from others.”

Dude is non-comprehending and very offended to hear it