Criminalizing sexuality and blocking teens from accessing adult content does make them more vulnerable to abuse, but honestly, I think this is a bit of a far cry - the Epstein class already has unlimited access to working class kids to abuse without these laws being added to the books. Look at how prolific their abuse was, and to how many levels of power it touched. They clearly had no problem at all finding kids to abuse.

I think this is far more about political control and censorship than it is anything to do with kids. “Think of the children” is one of the classic excuses used to justify totalitarian action, right up there with “preventing terrorism/crime”.

Again, no, it is not malicious compliance. As per Tom’s Hardware:

The law does not require photo ID uploads or facial recognition, with users instead simply self-reporting their age

It is just compliance. Stop lying about that. The law itself is backed by Meta, Google and OpenAI. Wake the fuck up.

Anyways, stick your head in the sand if you want to, that’s your prerogative, but don’t say we didn’t warn you. I’ve been arguing with people like you about increasing authoritarianism and fascism for decades, you always chirp about slippery slopes until it’s already too late. How convenient.

It isn"t malicious compliance at all, it is just compliance. This is exactly what the law requires, to a T. Windows and MacOS would implement it in an identical way.

You want to act like this field is just being added for no reason, and not for compliance with a law that is being created as part of a fabric of increasingly authoritarian age assurance, age-based restriction laws and a rising tide of fascism. A slippery slope argument is where someone claims negative consequences without evidence, there is plenty of reason to believe the goal is de-anonymization.

What benefits would this feature add for you? How would it improve your computer? Why is it being added now and not at the same time as name and location which were added literal decades ago?

Yes, not yet. That’s how they walk it in, a little at a time. First they add in the functionality, but don’t worry, you don’t have to enter your true birth date! Then, well meaning (or malicious) developers will start making use of that field, instead of asking you for it on a case-by-case basis. Then, more regulation will come down the pipe, requiring that the date of birth be sourced by some trusted provider. Soon enough, you need to use your government ID biometric chip to log in, and all of your activity is directly connected to your real-world identity. That is their end goal. That’s why they’re doing all of this.

The more important question here, why do you feel the need to defend this? What does this feature add to your operating system? How does it improve your computing experience?

“If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about”, people used to say. You don’t hear it as much, these days, probably because it is now such a transparently ignorant thing to say.

Yes, thin end of the wedge. Authoritarianism happens little by little, then all at once. It must be furiously resisted by those of us who care about freedom and privacy.

We should be not complying with any of them, but actively resisting it. This is authoritarianism, pure and simple.

It’s absolutely hilarious that right-wingers think that Sweet Baby fucking matters. They do sensitivity reading. They just write a little report about how the characters or writing may be considered insensitive, then the devs decide if they want to change anything or not. Getting all bent out of shape over that is cringe as fuck, there are real actual problems in the world, we have pedophile billionaires running the fucking world, dude. Leave the culture war garbage in the trash. It’s class war time baby!

I doubt LLMs are being used much for COBOL, if anything it’ll be used in a “replace this COBOL with Java”. COBOL is used as legacy code and most of it has already been rewritten in Java.

As someone who knows COBOL, I’d say, don’t bother. People over exaggerate the availability and remuneration of COBOL jobs. Maybe they used to be well paid or there used to be lots of jobs, but it’s pretty much a myth these days.

Allowing a certificate without proper validation for local only networks is a terrible, terrible idea. I could super easily use this as a loophole to set up a honeypot public free wi-fi, redirect all traffic through a reverse proxy and man-in-the-middle every single HTTPS connection, effectively allowing me to harvest everyone’s passwords in a really quick and easy way.

Just use DNS verification. It’s not that hard.

An opportunity to share one of my favourite StackOverflow questions of all time!

It’s well worth reading through the answers and the comments, but here’s a little sampler platter:

This will run for a lot more than hours. Assuming it loops at 1 GHz (which it won’t - it will be a lot slower than that), it will run for 10790283070806014188970 years. Which is about 83 billion times longer than the age of the universe.

damn - so maybe serveral threads generating guids is a better idea?

4 threads on a quad core processor would make it run in 20 billion times the age of the universe - so yeah, that would help a lot.