deminature

This whole thread is confidently wrong people arguing about legislation they have no understanding of. Social networks have already very accurately estimated your age for the purposes of selling advertising to you. The legislation expects them to use this estimate to restrict access to under 16s. So far it seems to be working pretty well in Australia, only children have been affected.

>A ban on social media for children is a different way of saying ID Verification for the entire population.

ID verification was not required for adults in Australia. Age was inferred based on activity. In fact, blanket verification was disallowed by the legislation.

>not a fan of the government approach of "everyone must prove their age online now", which I believe is how the AU law is done

This is not how the law is implemented. The vast majority of verification is being done by 'age inference', ie analysis of the content the user consumes or posts to infer likely age. Only accounts suspected to be children by the inference process are being required to verify or have the account disabled. In practice, the inference process means very few accounts are required to provide any proof of age. Personally, I haven't been asked to verify by even a single website.

The age inference process is described on this page under 'What is Age Assurance?' https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/your-privacy-rights/social-m...

As an Australian experiencing this first hand and considerably older than 16, absolutely nothing has changed. It seems like all the social networks are doing age estimation of accounts and only taking action on those that fail and are detected as underage. The change is otherwise completely invisible if you're an adult user. Obviously I'm only a sample size of 1, but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely affected by this, so it seems the estimation is accurate.

Pretty well executed - I'm impressed. Given how seamlessly this occurred, it will undoubtedly be rolled out in Europe next year, as the EU has expressed an interest in doing so, but was waiting to see how the implementation went in Australia.

A law in New York came into effect recently that requires disclosure of algorithmically derived prices. Such prices must be labelled with 'THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.'

https://www.regulatoryoversight.com/2025/11/new-york-begins-...

In New York at least, Uber's vehicles are licensed through the same agency that licenses taxis - the Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC). They are held to the same standards as taxis and can be delicensed for violations.

I've reported deepfake scam ads of famous people for months and Google does nothing. It's also not uncommon to see adwords links to phishing sites pretending to be banks above the legitimate bank link, and those ads seem to stay up indefinitely. Very disappointing to see they choose money over ethics.

I agree that friendships with women can be really fulfilling, but I've never had it work long-term without lines getting blurred and usually instigated by the woman. Friendships with men are reliably less complicated.

Piano requires adaptation in the corpus callosum of your brain to coordinate two-handed playing - it takes time to develop. Competent players have usually been playing for years to a decade before they're at a level of public performance.

I wish they'd offer a legal avenue to play Switch games at 4K/60 instead of 720p/20-30. Anyone looking for a higher fidelity experience than the 2017 Switch hardware is able to provide is forced to use software like Yuzu to enable it. Even Sony has started porting their crown jewel games to PC to enormous commercial success, allowing players with high-end hardware to legally enjoy a higher fidelity experience, but Nintendo is stuck in the past.

I've had the same thing with caffeine causing significant anxiety that didn't occur beforehand. One of my medications also stopped working for a month afterwards. I'm surprised there's not more concern in broader society about the multi-systemic health issues this infection can cause before barreling into shoving people into crowded public spaces again, where they can catch it repeatedly.

Google does track your movement with alarming levels of detail, just not to that level of granularity. https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6258979?hl=en&co=GENI...

My experience with covid is that severe post-disease inflammation can cause wild neurological symptoms including anxiety and depression. I had a 'mild' case and still suffered significant, long-lasting inflammation. I see very few people talking about this outside special-interest covid discussion boards. Surprisingly, my doctor was already aware of the destructive potential of inflammation for mental health.

It's only turned really cynical under Cook, chargers no longer included, cables sold separately from chargers to nickel and dime customers, refusal to adopt standards like USB-C unless threatened in court, refusing to pay patent license fee for blood O2 monitoring on the Apple Watch and trying to scalp all the talent from the company instead, anti-competitive behavior in the EU. Jobs version of Apple was pretty benign compared to the win-at-any-cost Cook version of Apple.

The arbitrary laws that the EU has been writing are the one of the last bulwarks consumers have against the creeping power of tech giants and these companies are making more money than ever in spite of regulation, so it doesn't seem to be affecting them too adversely.

Every app on iOS is sandboxed and the damage they can do is very limited. There's risks involved in opening up to third-party apps, and PWAs are only marginally more dangerous. Non-WebKit based browsers don't even exist today, this is not a real problem and won't be for some time.

The obvious solution for now is to enable WebKit PWAs and turn on PWAs for other as-yet uninvented custom browsers as they release, testing for privacy as they get released.

I think PWA developers are going to be pretty unsympathetic to 'your PWA is going be available again in the EU at some unspecified time in the future, when some Apple product manager decides to prioritize it for a given year's roadmap and it's all in the interests of protecting users from unspecified privacy and security threats that nobody seems to be able to define'. Most importantly, the EU may feel the same way.

The DMA has potential fines of 20% of global annual revenue for non-compliance. Apple is playing with fire here. Laws like GDPR and DMA are designed to be just as scary for big entities as small.

The user is warned already on the App Store that installing apps from third-parties comes with certain risks via 'scare screens'. There's no reason they can't do the same for PWAs.

I'm not a fan of PWAs either, but disabling them instead of allowing them to continue to run is an incredibly bad faith response to the DMA.

In combination with the 'Core Technology Fee' that financially cripples any developer that tries to release a popular app outside the official app store, this is pathetic behavior. Hopefully the EU smacks them down for this temper tantrum at being forced to adhere to the DMA. They are trying to flex their market power and should be reminded they operate within a system of laws that doesn't bend for anyone, regardless of their size.

People move there for the high comp, interesting work is a bonus but not guaranteed or even probable. Also the car-centric lifestyle is going to be a shock to anyone used to walkable cities.

You won't find that whole list even at FAANG offices. Employers refuse to make their offices superior to WFH so they have to force people in under penalty of job loss instead.

It's astonishing how much Sundar has managed to tarnish Google's brand over the past few years with decisions like this that optimize for short-term gains at the expense of long-term reputational damage and customer goodwill.

Substack openly hosts unambiguous medical misinformation that can result in harm. It's reasonable to not want to support that, indirectly or otherwise.

Two out of three Australians will be diagnosed with some form of skin cancer at some point their lives [1] due to the higher atmospheric UV. This is going to prevent a lot of unnecessary death. Modern medicine is fantastic.

[1] https://www.phrp.com.au/media/media-releases/two-in-three-au...

Even if it is, the stock is forever illiquid and that comp beyond base salary is a mirage.

It looks like UIKit, the static analysis [1] shows numerous ViewControllers (eg IGSundialSingleVideoClipEditorViewController) with various UIKit lifecycle methods like viewDidLoad, rather than SwiftUI. There's also a surprising amount of Objective-C, in fact it looks like mostly Objective-C, at least all the IG-prefixed classes. Unusual for 2023.

[1] https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.burbn.barcel...

Today when creating a new next app, you get this:

> Would you like to use App Router? (recommended)

It seems like users shouldn't yet be funnelled by default into using RSC.

There's an article explaining it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule. Of any social network, typically 1% are the power users, 9% are intermittent contributors and 90% are lurkers.