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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Writing an API is not required by AB1043.

Providing an API is required if you do some other thing, but you are not required to do that other thing. Requirements that are triggered by engaging in some other activity are not compulsions if the activity they are triggered by is not compulsory. (Now, whether restricting the thing that triggers the requirement by adding the requirement is permissible is a legitimate question, but that is not the question that is addressed when you ignore the thing triggering the requirement and treat the requirement as a free-standing mandate.)

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> Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user...

Yes, and the other thing you have to do for this to be applicable to you is choose to be an "operating system provider", as defined in the law.

If you don't want to write, hire someone to write, pay someone to provide an implementation that has already been written, or acquire an implementation already written that is available without payment, such an API, you can simply choose not to do what is defined as being an “operating system provider”, and no obligation attaches,

No one is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to do labor to write code for an API.

If you write an operating system and distribute it (an act of speech) you are forced to do this or else you risk $7500/child/day in fines from the California AG. The law makes no distinction between Terry Davis and Microsoft. (In fact, you could say TempleOS is protected religious speech...!)

I don't know what's wrong with you, honestly, that you would so vivaciously defend this impractical, immoral and completely nonsensical law so vivaciously.

It is seriously disturbing.

> I don't know what's wrong with you, honestly, that you would so vivaciously defend this impractical, immoral and completely nonsensical law so vivaciously.

I do, these people are entryists and they have evil goals in mind.

Do not hire people like this, and block them from working on your projects.

The law can be bad and a specific legal argument against it can be wrong at the same time. Would you logically accept (as opposed to mere political convenience) every potential argument whose conclusion is that this law is invalid? If not, does that mean there is something “wrong with you”?

On the object level: giving medical advice is a form of (literal) speech. If you want to practice medicine and give medical advice as part of that practice, there are tons of constraints on what you can say to patients. The argument you’re laying out here is clearly too general.

> I don't know what's wrong with you, honestly, that you would so vivaciously defend this impractical, immoral and completely nonsensical law so vivaciously.

I don’t know what’s wrong with you that you are reacting to arguments that exist only in your own mind. I'm not defending the law. (Nor—while I am very much opposed to the law—have I been opposing it here. I haven’t made a normative argument in either direction.)

Also, I don't think “vivaciously” means what you think it means.

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