Hacker News: jonplackett

New comment by jonplackett in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

jonplackett — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:42:01 +0000

This isn’t that hard to solve.

Kids have their own account on the computer.

Make it the law that if a computer account is set up as a kids account it must send some kind of not-adult header with all requests. Enforce that in the OS so it can’t be messed with.

Leave non-kid accounts alone.

Make it the default thing that happens if you set it up as a kids account so anyone can do it.

New comment by jonplackett in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

jonplackett — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:39:01 +0000

You can - but currently it’s all just done with random private companies that I would not trust with my email address never mind my passport or adult preferences.

Again - apple’s on device verification is a good idea for this. Apple just sends a ‘yes this is an adult’ message to reddit for example and now I can again participate in chrome up discussions.

New comment by jonplackett in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

jonplackett — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:35:23 +0000

Yeah I’m sure the kids are going to be devastated they can’t read HN

New comment by jonplackett in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

jonplackett — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:59:39 +0000

This assumes that it will actually solve the problem anyway. Kids just get a fake account or a VPN anyway.

Addiction is the worst part and that is only going to happen on your own device.

New comment by jonplackett in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

jonplackett — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:57:52 +0000

The proposed solution though is that all adults going into the store have to provide their full name and address and have it recorded by the store to buy alcohol - or any other +18 product they want to buy. These things are not equal.

New comment by jonplackett in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

jonplackett — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:56:14 +0000

That’s what I mean by adding legislation to make it automatic.

If it’s a kids device, then it should just block social media as required by the law. I agree that right now it’s difficult to set up - but this is a choice from Apple and Google. Just mandate sensible defaults.

A hardware block is much more effective than anything else that can be faked.

Just have the phone ask ‘is this a phone for a child’ and if you select ‘yes’ then it’s done.

New comment by jonplackett in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

jonplackett — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:53:17 +0000

The point is there are much better ways to enforce this - like just setting up proper parental controls on a device.

Kids can’t buy their own phone. So parents can always enforce stuff at a hardware level if they set it up properly. It would be much better to just mandate that phones set up with a kid profile cannot access social media.

New comment by jonplackett in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

jonplackett — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:51:03 +0000

You can just turn all this stuff off.

New comment by jonplackett in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

jonplackett — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:47:06 +0000

I’m curious what the account recovery flow is without the AI.

Is it this dumb?

Does it bypass 2fa?

New comment by jonplackett in "ChatGPT for Google Sheets exfiltrates workbooks"

jonplackett — Sun, 31 May 2026 22:09:43 +0000

So is your business model to expose AI security issues and then sell the solution?

New comment by jonplackett in "The Problem with the Ferrari Luce EV Offers a Lesson for Every Leader"

jonplackett — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:57:02 +0000

It sounds like it should be in that car Homer Simpson designed, although I guess it would order doughnuts in this case

New comment by jonplackett in "The Problem with the Ferrari Luce EV Offers a Lesson for Every Leader"

jonplackett — Thu, 28 May 2026 10:48:25 +0000

As apposed to spending it based on feels?

For people who buy a Ferrari the price is not part of the equation at all.

Also Ferrari’s whole game is demand and supply manipulation - there are always more people who want a Ferrari than can actually buy one. These will all sell out whatever happens.

New comment by jonplackett in "The Problem with the Ferrari Luce EV Offers a Lesson for Every Leader"

jonplackett — Thu, 28 May 2026 10:31:04 +0000

I think all cars should have a ‘LUNCH’ button.

It can be sponsored by Uber Eats and whenever you press it, it automatically orders a burger to your current GPS co-ordinates.

New comment by jonplackett in "The real cost of owning a home"

jonplackett — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:14:29 +0000

This doesn’t factor in the growth in the value of your house, which mostly happens tax free (in the uk at least)

We bought our house 10 years ago and it’s basically doubled in value since then. Which is way more than the money I’ve spent on interest.

It seems like this is also based on buying somewhere with a super low deposit, which I agree is probably a bad idea.

New comment by jonplackett in "Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)"

jonplackett — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:52:44 +0000

It’s good that they proved it I guess. But they could have just asked literally any person in history doing anything creative as a job.

New comment by jonplackett in "We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot"

jonplackett — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:21:40 +0000

Least surprising announcement of the decade goes to…

New comment by jonplackett in "Anthropic acquires Stainless"

jonplackett — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:49:38 +0000

Are they buying these for the tech, the people or to prevent supply chain hacks?

New comment by jonplackett in "OpenAI and Government of Malta partner to roll out ChatGPT Plus to all citizens"

jonplackett — Sun, 17 May 2026 08:19:36 +0000

> for one year

So it’s basically I giant government-sponsored free trial.

New comment by jonplackett in "UK sovereign LLM inference"

jonplackett — Fri, 15 May 2026 10:45:28 +0000

Tbf the title only says sovereign _inference_

New comment by jonplackett in "What the Hell Was Going on with Cigarette Ads in the 70s?"

jonplackett — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:17:16 +0000

Hug of death