red_admiral

More people should read Oliver Sacks' book Uncle Tungsten. As a kid he was allowed to buy real chemicals for his chemistry set and was told things like "can you make slightly less hydrogen peroxide next time". Minors buying pitchblende (Uranium ore) at the local drugstore for experiments? Sure, might encourage them to be scientists.

Depends. Dolls' tea parties aren't violent.

Those who don't lose the fun of hitting things graduate to hitting things with swords and end up in the SCA (not the coffee one).

I see the point about violence but I'm ok with it because it's based on fun and not anger. Olympic archery, javelin, or even fencing have an obvious past in warfare but today they've become sports.

I can only speak for some of the European versions of SCA-like clubs but there's a lot of pride-flag flying strictly-no-fascists fun activity with a dose of pretending to be children again.

(Buhurt is a bit more complicated.)

Relevant past HN submission: https://www.hgreer.com/PlayingInTheCreek/

(summary: AI as a metaphor for optimising the fun out of play)

Why LGPL when the original license is more permissive? (https://sourceware.org/bzip2/manual/manual.html)

This is a great replacement for Office Online and Onedrive, but will it work as a standalone desktop application that stores files to by home directory?

Office is going to be a blocker - not just because of the two XML file formats, but because of the different UI. I personally find the Microsoft version more productive despite a mental list of complaints I have with it.

The correct choice, in my opinion, would be to invest in a new EU_Office project that uses the Microsoft XML formats. If you're trying to run your government on a new platform, that would also be a hedge against TDF pulling in a direction you don't want: an "independent self-governing meritocratic entity" has possible failure modes that need to go on the risk register.

The EUPL sound like a good idea - preserving some of the ideas of the FSF (copyleft) but in a way that governments and companies can actually use to develop their own software.

Personally I'm still in the BSD camp, but my current ranking is BSD/MIT > EUPL > (L)GPL now.

We achieved "get the Iraqis out of Kuwait" back in the day.

(EC)DSA is indeed fiddly enough that you wonder if it was an NSA operation in the first place. EdDSA on the other hand seems ok.

Curve25519 exists because it's also easy to build ECC footguns - not checking if an input is a valid curve point comes to mind.

ECC is definitely more efficient though.

Then again, we're all supposed to switch to post-quantum.

Which would still apply if the game were sold on a CD-ROM, but needed an internet connection to Sony's licence servers to run. The important bit is that once you bought a music CD, no-one can stop you from playing it?

In the UK at least, consumer contracts have to be "fair", determined as necessary in a court of law: https://www.gov.uk/unfair-terms-in-sales-contracts/unfair-co...

Making the game unplayable on Wednesday might not impress a judge.

Sony is correct here?

If I buy a CD or a cassette or a record, I own the physical media but I only have a licence to the music it contains - not the ownership, and not the copyright. Whether I can play that music as a DJ at an event or on the radio, or remix it as a backing track for another song I'm creating and so on, depends on licencing laws and royalty payments. That was true well before the internet, and it's why Wham! get a huge boost in royalties every December whenever a radio station plays Last Christmas.

A separate question is whether Sony can _revoke_ a licence and delete the game off your device again.

That's typical RAF. Same kind of thinking as the exploding marshmallow incident in a nuclear bomber (https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/exploding-teacakes).

If open source matters more than anything else, there's always GIMP.

If you just want to use the thing, not recompile it, paint.net is still free, even for commercial work, and (in my opinion) has better UX.

It says something that an old paint.net derivative is still the best general purpose image editor out there. (I consider GIMP harder and slower to use.)

To riff of an old political joke: X is for the evil party, bluesky is for the stupid party.

I'm afraid this reads like "we've not 100% proved that smoking causes cancer, so ..."

Is the science 100% settled? No. Is this the best possible way to regulate this? No. But it's sure better than the current state of things.

"laws such as A.B. 1709, as passed by the legislature, function as a ban on social media use for people under the age of 16"

That's not my reading of the bill, specifically 22683. (a) (2) on https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

"This subdivision does not prohibit a covered platform from permitting a user who is under 16 years of age to create or maintain an account on the covered platform if that user is not provided with any addictive feature"

They just need to take out the endless autoplaying shorts and other features that are, honestly, annoying in the first place. The main thing I would change here is that even adults must be provided with a setting to opt out of addictive features.

Would it destroy TikTok's business model? Maybe; maybe that's even a good thing.

No, it's just the most accurate re-implementation that I know of at least for Windows.

You can sometimes tell the difference because the QT emulated widget can do things that the native widget can't.

I guess there's an exception for startups where you have to have something before you reach the end of the runway, and as you say, _mature code_.

> Most apps these days gather credit card details

That's one of the few consumer-facing areas where there are still standards in place, namely PCI-DSS. As far as I know the audits require the name of a human who is responsible for payment security. Card companies can one-hit kill your startup if you're breaking those rules (maybe purely blockchain startups are exempt).

Yes, you can offload this to stripe, but then your app should never see the card number and certainly not the CVV. You end up storing these, even by accident, both stripe and the card companies will hate you.

Haven't paid video streaming services solved that one already? Admittedly not with age verification, but you can set up child accounts. I presume Disney+ is ok here as they want to be in the family-friendly market but also offer content meant for young adults.

How many proper cross-platform approaches are there these days? Just about every one I've seen is "grab the native platform's canvas, draw your own".

Irony: the screenshot with the openclaw logo at the top lists as the first feature "Clears your inbox".

What happened to write-only backups in case of ransomware?

This assumes the parent knows a little bit about computers - as opposed to the child being the one that's constantly helping the parent out.

We got into this mess because people wanted Facebook to have age verification, and MZ decided to push the responsibility on to OSes.

The result looks to me like Facebook will ban access from non-approved OSes like Linux. Android will still be allowed, GrapheneOS probably not.

This was classic Mac era.

> UI constantly shuffling around between updates.

and then 365 came along ... an option to pull stock market data here, a LinkedIn connection there, oh look a wild copilot button appeared.

It used to annoy me that on Windows I could press ENTER to close a message box, but on Mac I had to reach for the mouse.