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Comment by TZubiri | Hacker News Reader

This cynic take only makes sense if you have no children btw, because for you children don't exist, but you as an adult exist, so you only consider the possible impacts this may have on you as an adult.

That the impacts on adults are negligible compared on children is irrelevant, because they are multiplied by 0, since they don't apply to you, so you only consider the infitesimal effect it has on you as an adult.

For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.

Nothing wrong with being (very) selfish though, just pointing out the dynamic.

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I have children and I am very much against the implementation of age verification in the US. It strikes me as a thinly veiled attempt to collect event more data about people. I'm skeptical that it will prevent children from accessing these services.

sure sure but just don't give kids internet access problem solved. All these problems are because we insist on giving kids internet access then try to ban them from internet sites. Its all just very stupid.

We should remove age checks from alcohol, and just don't let kids go in the shopping mall.

*parent post edited and elaborated while I was writing my reply

Can you elaborate? I do have children, and I don't view it as any platforms job to police their Internet usage. I appreciate parental controls, but if they have Internet access it's my job to teach them to use services safely and keep an eye on their activities

The impact on ‘minors’ is even greater.

In first year university I was 17. Imagine being that person today: 90% of the class can use LLMs, but you can't.

Then you are in the lucky 10% whose brains arent't fried. LLMs are like television.

I am a parent and I'm grossly offended by the thin veil of fake excuses in the effort to normalise staggering invasion of privacy.

For my kids.

This effort trains them to expose their full name and home address and their real face to all the sites and services that request it. Predators dream, really.

If the age verification was done in the privacy-preserving ways, it would be okay, but already several high profile leaks and scandals proved this is the exercise in data collection and deanonymisaiton.

> For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.

Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life, and negative impacts on adults are, mathematically, bigger in anyone's life than same impact on children?

It get even tinier if you factor that the slice of life were someone is old enough to use Claude, willing to do so and minor at the same time is really small.

Even more if you try to articulate how Claude could be more harmful to an educated minor than any other activities.

Sure, but for all that short duration, childhood age is foundational and happens to effectively guide just about everything that follows;p

Of course, but it's also, with teenage years, the best years to learn tools.

There's a lot of myopic comments about children on HN, but this argument is so insane it's worth pointing out.

You're essentially arguing to poison a well instead of inconveniencing yourself. You have agency, you're allegedly intelligent. But it sounds like you're so dependent on Claude you can't even conceive of using an alternative.

There are NUMEROUS alternatives available. If you lack the agency to subvert the check or implement an alternative that's on you.

A minor that's educated enough to build their own is a different topic, but so many unmotivated or uniformed humans would quit if Claude simply didn't work. The barrier to entry is supposed to be the validation of comprehension.

> But it sounds like you're so dependent on Claude you can't even conceive of using an alternative.

I don't use Claude whatsoever.

> There are NUMEROUS alternatives available. If you lack the agency to subvert the check or implement an alternative that's on you.

I know there is, but I also know this trend of age verification bullshit is coming for everything, and that's a problem.

Ultimately it will be ID verification. How else are you going to check age?

Once everyone is used to handing over an ID to use AI, eventually it will be restricted to a small group. If you get on the naughty list you will be banned from ever doing knowledge work again.

> Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life...

The loudest parents absolutely cannot. I don't know if this is because of the sleep-deprivation-induced brain damage that caring for a tiny human for their first year or so gives you or what, but there are some very loud, very neurotic people out there who appear to have forgetten that humans live for sixty to a hundred years.

Childhood is a tiny slice of life and if these folks had the time and ability to sit down and think very clearly and carefully, they'd see that making it so much harder for parents, relatives, and authority figures to get away with child abuse -sexual or otherwise- does far more to keep minors safe than removing those minors' ability to talk to adult strangers.

Hell, being able to talk to adult strangers is one way minors can both realize that they're being abused and find a way to get out of that abusive situation. To borrow a dark meme, it's hard to know that Penis Inspection Time isn't a legitimate activity when you can't talk to anyone who knows better.

Counterargument, everyone lived a childhood, but not everyone lives adulthood, so childhood affects more people. Also related, childhood is foundational, what happens in childhood forms who you are as an adult, so issues in childhood affect you as an adult too.

Everything that happens in childhood affects everything after that, you know. Children aren't a separate class of people from adults. People are children, and then they are adults.

I'm a parent. I care about children. That's why I hate this wave of hysteria cutting them off from everything. It's way more damaging to children, and especially to teenagers, than any of the stuff it's supposed to protect against. And frankly that's obvious if you haven't let yourself get worked into a frenzy.

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