It already has fields for personal information, though, and they’re every bit as sensitive as your birthdate. realName, emailAddress, location, and timezone are already in there. The important part is that they’re all optional, and you don’t have to fill them in at all, or can fill them in with fake data. The system still serves you, not some outside party.

But the timing of it does have a lot of people freaking out about it.

Exactly. And that’s the part that worries me most: I’m seeing people investigating the guy, shaming him (he wrote a blog about using Claude to write a game in 90 minutes, so clearly he must be evil /s), and the article above is written in such a way to insinuate all sorts of nefarious goings on, but everything I see suggests this is just normal procedure.

I really feat this is going to hurt the community and chase good developers away.

Exactly. There’s a massive thread on Mastodon where everybody is panicking about this, but it’s a nothing burger if ever there was one.

Sure, the timing and comments suggest it’s meant for legal compliance, but if that’s what it does, it does it by keeping full control in the hands of the user, where it should be.

Linux has similar fields for realName, emailAddress, location, timezone and more. But like birthdate, I think they’re all optional.

Was Linux ever used for massive multiuser systems? I thought it had always been primarily home use and internet servers. I think big multiuser systems went out of fashion with Solaris. Well, I suppose corporate workstations need user accounts where some of these are set.

Only in California and Brazil. And I suspect neither has a shortage of people able to add this field.

Yeah, this does not sound like it’s going to make our children any safer.

My guess is it’s an Independent Beer Maker.

The kernel can wait. Kernels are good at that.

Exactly. We are extremely social animals, hardwired to recognise ourselves in things around us, which I’m sure is super useful and vital for a tribe of hunter gatherers living in a hostile environment. But it means that now we recognise faces and emotions in power outlets and lawn chairs. It’s really not surprising we see intelligence and awareness in LLMs, because we recognise that stuff in everything. We are really poor at the level of critical thought required to deal with this responsibly.

An AI response should always be treated as a suggestion, not an answer

Exactly. An AI response can be a great way to get started on a topic you know little about, but it’s never a definitive answer. You have to verify whether it’s actually true. Whether it works. Never trust it blindly.

Especially rude if you want to charge money for it. If your boss wanted an AI answer, they would have asked an AI. You don’t need an expensive consulting company for that.

That’s what it sounds to me. You just have to enter a date of birth, which I think puts parents in control of this, rather than shady websites.

Something that I, as a parent, really miss, is the ability to have some parental control without having to subject myself to horrifically broken systems like those from Microsoft and Google, which are just painful to use and don’t offer any meaningful control. Minecraft has become almost impossible to use lately, and apparently it’s going to get even worse.

More applications should have a simple child mode that connects it to a parent mode that allows the parent to keep an eye on what their kid is doing and enable or disable some features for them, but instead, they make it impossible to create an account, and if you do, you’ve got an account that can’t do anything. It’s broken and stupid and shouldn’t be so difficult.

Maybe Linux could set a better example in this.

I still have some DDR3, but no motherboard for it. We need DDR4, but I don’t suppose anyone will want to trade in that direction.

Why are they collecting this data in the first place? You can’t mishandle data you don’t have. The fact that remote access to video is even possible, is very alarming.

I think he’s cancelled in May or thereabouts. It’s a very slow cancellation.