From experience there's a motivation, almost a compulsion, to follow the instructions to build the cool thing. Then... they sit there, those bricks never taken apart.
That compulsion doesn't seem present in freeform building, and there's been zero interest in it in our household. I know that's not true for all, but it seems like a lost art. Maybe it's because the IP sets show how but not the why it's constructed in a certain way, so given a bag of Lego most wouldn't know the process of creating something they can see in their minds eye within the constraints of the available bricks.
True, but at least it's not single use. Is there a viable alternative? A non-petrochemical plastic that has the same qualities? It's not like they can whittle them out of wood or cast them with metal so it'll always be some form of polymer, and I'm sure they would jump at a more ecologically sound option.
Less no, different yes. Instead of dodgy meds and dating sites we'd have games and cosmetics and whatever other junk folks are punting at adolescents. If anything, I suspect there would be more ads.
Aside from the concept of adults masquerading as non-adults, nothing so long as those spaces are moderated fully. I have no problem with skipping the verification, but I do question the moderation of most services.
The problems start when the space become not-for-children and identity validation is mandatory to use them, which will exclude people like me who categorically refuse to hand over personal secrets in order to have access. It does not warrant the inherent risk involved with granting access to personal details unrelated to the service offered. I reckon this will happen when someone decides it's better commercially to make a service adult-only than to moderate non-adult accounts. It's a slippery slope, and a predictable next step once adult have become accustomed to handing over papers for some services to have to do it for many, if not all.
My next rebuild is likely to move from Debian to openSUSE Tumbleweed or FreeBSD. They fit better with what I want in an OS used for development purposes (needing newer versions than provided by Debian stable).
However... the lack of Docker on BSD is a deal breaker for some of my uses, jumping through hoops is possible, and moving to Podman might work but looks complicated to set up.
On the other hand, Debian 14 will remove GTK2 which breaks other things.
As someone who dislikes being tracked, I find it disconcerting to have this level of data stored in 3rd party services, but joining up multiple services to give one coherent picture is cool. How cool is questionable, trying to correlate health data with location data is going to give a strange picture, and I question how relating health data to weather is useful. (Do I have lower blood pressure on rainy days?)
Forgive me for I am being sceptical. The might be some insight here I have not considered, but I'd feel a lot more comfortable if it was all self-hosted / self-collected data.
My default reaction to the introduction of any age-verification for any service is the closing account. Goodbye Discord, account closed out of protest.
The second option is ignoring the verification request. Goodbye online-gaming-with-strangers on Xbox. (I see this as a positive). Same goes for Ubisoft who aggressively wanted my secret papers to verify my identity.
I've yet to come across anything I want or need outside banking or government use where age verification benefits me, or is so useful/important that I would willingly hand over critical secret documents. I've not even needed to use a VPN for anything. It doesn't mean it won't happen, but when it does, option #1 or #2 is going to cover everything.
Which circles back to the main point here - if I ignore it, then effectively I get identified as a non-adult. How does this protect anybody?
My daughter simply cannot write without joining the letters, finds it impossible. Time will tell if this remains true. Everyone is different in the best possible way.
I bounced for a while between Magit and Tig, then ended up just using whatever the IDE provided combined with the CLI. I'm a frequent-but-not-daily Emacs user, so it boils down to the friction of switching tools. I should give up the Jetbrains IDEs and go all in on Emacs.
Conversely I don't know anyone who doesn't write in cursive. It's still taught in schools in the UK, and I still write with it and actively aim to improve.
Joplin is open source but isn't half of Obsidian, it's slow and grouchy, a fairly poor Electron app, but at least I can turn off the plugin that does freehand drawing. It's also has self-hosted sync for free. If Obsidian was open source, I'd have switched already even if it needed a subscription to sync, especially if I could toggle off unwanted features.
Yes, for some definition of OS. It could build a DOS-like or other TUI, or a list of installed apps that you pick from. Devices are built on specifications, so that's all possible. System API it could define and refine as it goes. General utilities like file management are basically a list of objects with actions attached. And so on... the more that is rigidly specified, the better it will do.
It'll fail miserably at making it human-friendly though, and attempt to pilfer existing popular designs. If it builds a GUI, it's be a horrible mashup of Windows 7/8/10/11, various versions of OSX / MacOS, iOS, and Android. It won't 'get' the difference between desktop, laptop, mobile, or tablet. It might apply HIG rules, but that would end up with a clone at best.
In short, it would most likely make something technically passable but nightmareish to use.
Revived might be too strong a word, it's still a shadow of what it used to be. Besides, wasn't it Smugmug that introduced the 1000 photo limit for free users? I too could be misremembering here.
Flickr was a hero, then yahoo/smugmug killed it. It's still there, but along the way all changes reduced it to an also-ran. It's still a nice tool, but I just don't see myself using it again. The URL scheme, as neat as it was, I never noticed or cared to hack at. I just wanted to upload photos.
This was why I canned a potentially useful image project a long time ago that could resize and manipulate images from any URL to optimise for mobile use. It's also why I've not dipped my toes into the murky pool of self-hosting any of this and rather use services moderated by someone else. It's just too toxic to handle, and dangerous to my career, and I don't know how I'd contain it beyond never hosting ANY image data and making it text only.
As facebookexternalhit is listed in the robots.txt, it does look like it's optimistically rechecking in the hope it's no longer disallowed. That rate of request is obscene though, and falls firmly into the category of Bad Bot.
On one hand this is not good but predictable. I'm on longer-term commitments with OVH, so it will be interesting to see how they follow. I'm still keeping Hetzner on my shopping list, even with the increase the bare-metal offerings are within my budget, and now that prices have increases they should be stable for a while (also import for budget management).
Imgur self-blocking is nothing to do with propaganda, but it does make the internet worse for it with all many image now not showing. In any case, why should I go to bat for Imgur if they are mishandling the PII of children? The fact that so many images are centralised in a single (now unreliable) service is a prime example of the enshittification of the common web. Services should be hosting their own media files not relying on a third party.
Money is the smallest concern here. It could easily replace the content with state-approved versions and the majority would never know, or at the least redirect to other sites/pages as needed. After all, it's being described as a 'portal' not a simple service.
This is why I don't mix work and play and have a dedicated machine for games, but this only solves half the problem. It really needs it's own VLAN or to use 'guest' wifi to keep it isolated, but that only solves half the remaining problem. Two easy steps to get to 75% solved, but still leaves a high-powered machine connected to the internet that could be abused, can still listen on bluetooth and enumerate wifi (precise geolocation), and so on. At least this way it's only online for a few hours a day at most. It's the most I can do without investing serious time trying to block state-level intrusion in a battle I can never win.
I'm in the UK and can't access https://imgur.com/ - an American service that now refuses to serve content to Britain because "On September 30, 2025, Imgur blocked users from the United Kingdom in response to a potential fine from the Information Commissioner's Office regarding its handling of children's personal data". I presume that means OSA.
It does lend credibility to the blocks when it's US companies trying to dodge fines while mishandling PII. The suggestion of using a US freedom gov to dodge US-based self-censorship is as ironic as it is stupid when the real solution is pay the fine and handle the data properly.
As a Brit/European, would I notice or care if fbi.gov was blocked via consumer internet providers? I'd probably not notice if *.gov was blocked. I'm fairly sure government-level internet provisioning has a very different set of restrictions to the general population for those who need access to US Gov services, in the same way that I'm sure the Chinese state itself isn't subject to the rules of the Great Firewall.