You can't use a code editor when you're under 18 now? | Hacker News Reader

You can't use a code editor when you're under 18 now?

mastodon.online

78 pointspabs343 comments

They sent a clarifying email today

> Our email yesterday was imprecise relative to our actual new Terms. To be specific:

> You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service (Zed’s AI-enabled software-as-a-service offering, including features like account creation/sign in, Zed Free and Zed Pro, and collaboration). See https://zed.dev/terms#21-eligibility. We set the threshold at 18 due to children's data privacy obligations under COPPA, equivalent international frameworks, and an increasing number of state and regional laws that extend protections to anyone under 18. Those regulations require parental consent verification, age-gated data handling, and separate retention policies for minors. Building and maintaining that infrastructure is a real cost for a small team, and getting it wrong carries regulatory risk. Setting the line at 18 lets us maintain a single privacy framework for all account holders without carve-outs.

> Zed's Software (open source code editing software) is governed by our open source licenses. In cases where the open source license can govern, it will over the Terms. See https://zed.dev/terms#24-restrictions.

Costs of age gating about to neuter the next generation.

If I’m reading this correctly, the 18+ part is for the paid AI service, not the editor itself.

Yep, the email they sent out is terribly worded so it looks like the age requirement is for Zed itself.

Their actual blog ( https://zed.dev/blog/terms-update ) says the age requirement is only for their AI service (still not the best wording but a little clearer):

> Age requirement. You must be 18 or older to use Zed’s AI-enabled software-as-a-service offering (the “Service").

This still sounds odd. Where is this restriction coming from?

It has binding arbitration. I assume/hope you must be an adult to sign away your right to sue.

Speculation I've seen is that whatever LLM they're reselling has this requirement itself and they need to pass it along.

I had expected this to be about their multi-user editing and chat features.

A kid coder I know can't use free Google Gemini because his Windows laptop has parental controls turned on and his accurate age is associated with his Google account.

Sounds like he'll actually have to learn to code!

he's so lucky!

Time for kids to learn vim.

Fear not, Zed has vim mode!

I learned to use ed as a kid. I was highly motivated — this was the in-game editor for MudOS/Nightmare.

I am just as likely to get the kids on Pharo or Squeak (the old school stuff, not the newer Python based Squeak)

there is a python based squeak? i can only find a completely unrelated python library.

(btw, i also learned ed on a MudOS based mud :-)

I got my facts confused. I was thinking of Scratch, with Scratch 3 being in Javascript. I don’t know why I was thinking Python.

Let's start a list of learning references

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11828270/how-do-i-exit-v...

Why the age requirement for AI?

Given how the engineering market is evolving, that's a huge limitation.

There is no ban on using knives below 18, and you can cut your fingers with those...

Bill gates made more than a years salary programming his first priejct in grade school

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240158

I use Zed, but not the AI bits of it. Works really well as a plain code editor. I hope they remember there are folks like me who just want a better code editor than the miserable shite that is VSCode, without all the LLM stuff in it.

Not that I have a problem with the LLM stuff, I just use the LLM in a shell and then use Zed to fix the problems in the output.

You might like this then https://gram.liten.app/

ooo, yes I would. Thanks for the tip :)

Headline soon:

You must be 18+ years old to use a Raspberry Pi.

Time to short Raspberry Pi stock then.

Of course not. You might try to write code to get around the jail everybody wants to put you into.

I get their point, but since when does a code editor require an internet connection?

Since Notepad require one.

This entire effort at “age verification” needs to die in a fire.

Keep the data protection laws, remove the max age cut off. I want data protection too! No need to verify age.

Amen.

I dunno.

I mostly agree with you, mostly because I don't like being tracked, and I don't like the surveillance state.

But, I mean, kids probably shouldn't be looking at porn. Arguably no one should be viewing porn but it's probably especially bad for young, developing minds to be watching that kind of stuff, and if we agree that kids shouldn't be watching porn then maybe we should be doing a cursory effort to make it so they're not?

It's easy to say "no it's the parents' responsibility", but let's be honest with ourselves. My parents tried child blocks for me so that I won't look at unsavory websites when I was thirteen, and those worked for about twenty minutes until I figured out how to get around them, and eventually reformatted my hard drive with OpenSUSE so my parents wouldn't be able to try again. Kids find a way.

So I dunno, maybe things should be on the provider sometimes?

Yeah the world is not going to end if some teenage boys get to see some naked breasts. All this effort could be invested into providing decent sexual education to teenagers instead.

The world isn't going to end if a teenage boy sees a booby, but I think that it can distort a teenager's view on sex and sexuality. I think that part of the disturbing woman-hating incel "movement" might be, at least in part, a result of a lot of very stupid guys seeing distorted views sex and seeing a lot of media where objectifying women is rewarded. [1]

Also, porn nowadays isn't just a woman showing a titty; if you go on PornHub or something, it is all pretty hardcore now.

I agree that good sex education is ideal, but I still think that we probably shouldn't be allowing kids to watch porn.

[1] Also, who actually pays for the pizza???? I mean, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Pizza should count as lunch, or at least dinner. Are all these horny housewives ordering pizzas with no way to pay for it making the prices of my pizza go up?

Interesting you mention pizza. Fast food fucks people up a lot worse than porn.

I was making a joke about the old porn trope of "delivering a pizza with no way to pay for it", but honestly I think you could make a pretty solid argument that we shouldn't be feeding that to children either, and maybe we shouldn't be letting parents do that regularly.

[I removed this post because it was a long boring cliche. Sorry.]

Let's pretend for a moment that age verification has anything to do with protecting kids.

If we agree that nobody should be viewing porn because it makes us worse human beings, then maybe we should be wondering why producing it is permitted in the first place?

I have no definitive opinion on the topic, like everyone I am torn between desire for individual freedom and desire for effective collective measures. I wish I lived in a world in which we could regularly and scientifically assess the costs and benefits and just enact policies accordingly.

> If we agree that nobody should be viewing porn because it makes us worse human beings,

I'm not necessarily saying that it's bad for adults to be viewing porn. I think there's an argument to be made that it's bad for all humans, though I personally don't think I subscribe to it. Since I don't think it's inherently bad for an adult to watch it, I don't think there should be prohibition on producing it.

I mean, let's rewind back to before the internet; if I thirteen year old wanted to view porn they couldn't easily go to a store and buy it, and even if they did get some the stuff that was easily available, to my understanding, was tame compared to what you get on PornHub. If a kid got a Playboy or caught something late-night on Skinemax, they'd see a booby and some obviously fake moaning, not hardcore stuff you get on pretty much any site.

Obviously this kind of stuff doesn't affect everyone the same way. Many, many, people looked at porn when they were teenagers and most of them aren't incels or creeps, but I don't think it's something that kids should really be viewing. I think drawing the line at "adult" vs "not adults" is a good enough demarcation.

Is it ok for adults because they are accustomed to it already? Or is it because they know better how to use the internet? In either case nobody would suffer from the disappearance of disturbing violent porn but the few ones who make money out of this industry.

The hard question remains: what individual freedoms are we willing to sacrifice for this? Is it worth a Prohibition like policy? Online surveillance?

But in all seriousness, let's not pretend this has anything to do with kids' safety. This is just one more step from the global village towards the safe shopping mall.

> Is it ok for adults because they are accustomed to it already?

I think it’s ok for adults because they aren’t nearly as confused and developing sexually. I think an adult viewing porn is more likely to be able to contextualize it as fiction/fantasy than a young teenager.

> But in all seriousness, let's not pretend this has anything to do with kids' safety. This is just one more step from the global village towards the safe shopping mall.

Ok but that’s why I am conflicted about it. I don’t know the motivations of lawmakers, I am saying my perspective.

But won't anyone think of the little children?!? The US president and his close friends sure do. /s

emacs still works :)

what a joke

The justification of telemetry as a necessity makes me wonder how working software was ever achieved for decades without it. /S

That's the same bunch that starts a software project by installing K8s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com