Louis Rossmann and David from 3D Printing Nerd should be there. They were at the last one on June 23rd and planned to show up again.

https://spsf.senate.ca.gov/agenda

Christopher Cabaldon had a great monologue during CA's social media ban hearing the other day:

> And so I think one thing I've learned here is that when something's framed up as let's do it for the kids, let's do it to stop murderers and rapists, or let's stick it to the big corporations, all of those are important. Those are important objectives, but they can sometimes cause us to stop thinking about what's the actual policy underneath.

https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279699#t=80...

And yet, he still didn't vote "no" on it but abstained.

So, if you use SSH tunneling to forward a port from localhost to a remote, then Docker unwittingly pushes to a remote. This is super useful "off the grid" with robotics/embedded applications where you don't want to bother with a registry and a good Internet connection.

Example, docker pussh: https://github.com/psviderski/unregistry

It's understandable Anthropic would do this to limit their liability against minors getting harmed. Especially with laws like California's AB 2023 in the works, where parents can sue a chatbot maker if the chatbot harms their child.

Still, I hate that I have to share biometrics and blindly trust that Persona is doing cybersecurity properly.

There actually isn't much evidence of this. Most of the thrust for this hypothesis comes from The Anxious Generation, which was written by a moral psychologist as opposed to an adolescent researcher, and has been widely criticized by experts.

https://kidsplaytech.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Panic_Fi...

There is evidence that social media use is associated with poor mental health but the causation piece is contested. Most stories about social media harm are kids who were already struggling.

> Can anyone suggest a better way of protecting kids, other than age verification?

As far as protection from social media, the best solutions I've seen are:

- Antitrust and interoperability: people want social media, just not the toxicity. Give them a way to migrate to better platforms. CA tried this with the Digital Choice Act (AB 2169) but it got shot down by Big Tech lobbyists.

- Education: Teach kids how to be responsible with social media. There's a CA bill authored in cooperation with high schoolers doing exactly this: https://edsource.org/2026/social-media-ai-mental-health/7559...

- Privacy protection: rather that detect who's a child and protect only them from being tracked and surveilled, protect everyone.

IMO social media is a red herring. There are much more obvious sources of youth distress with far stronger effects in the data: poverty and economic hardship, abuse in the home, parental mental illness, drug abuse, marginalized demographics (e.g. LGBTQ+ youth have way higher suicide rates).

The kids would be way better served by things like universal healthcare, universal childcare, a better foster care system, etc.

And I think a lot of this is projection from parents who massively struggle with social media.

It's quite telling that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is aligned with the Christian right, and whose job as press secretary was to be a meat shield for Trump's incompetence and absorb all the anger from the press and social media, sent a copy of The Anxious Generation to governors in all US states.

There are so many times where I've bounced away from an interesting article because I didn't want to deal with the subscription paywall.

The argument for subscriptions is it helps cultivate a relationship with customers and gives the business recurring revenue. Which is fine if I want the relationship, like with Ars Technica, Wired where I'm usually interested in their reporting. But in most cases the relationship feels awkward and forced, like this linked article mentions.

Like I'm not paying $400/year to The Information just to unlock a one-off story.

Since they might get a flood of written correspondence, I also called their district office and either talked to a staffer or left a voicemail telling them the same thing.

The key is the district office phone number, not the capitol phone number. One of my reps said the capitol phone line was understaffed and they missed one of my voicemails.

This and AB1043/AB1856 just make me so mad. These politicians apparently think they can threaten fines upon the open source community and coerce us into implementing their poorly researched laws.

It’s like in a toxic workplace when a non-technical manager agrees to a questionable assignment on your behalf, without your consent, and tells the stakeholder oh yeah, no problem, that’ll take 2 weeks.

That and lots of FOSS licenses use some variant of those words "copy, redistribute, and modify" so it's probably a term-of-art that courts recognize.

This is what Colorado's law says. It prevents Tivoization but not feature nerfing like the Play Integrity API.

§ 6-30-105 (3)

(e) AN OPERATING SYSTEM PROVIDER OR DEVELOPER THAT DISTRIBUTES AN OPERATING SYSTEM OR APPLICATION UNDER LICENSE TERMS THAT PERMIT A RECIPIENT TO COPY, REDISTRIBUTE, AND MODIFY THE SOFTWARE WITHOUT ANY PLATFORM-IMPOSED TECHNICAL OR CONTRACTUAL RESTRICTIONS IMPOSED BY THE PROVIDER OR DEVELOPER ON INSTALLING ALL MODIFIED VERSIONS.

Or, they can have a license like the Business Source License where you can copy, redistribute, and modify the software but you can't use it commercially. This goes against OSI's open source definition.

We emailed this amendment to Buffy Wicks's staff:

§1798.504(f) This title does not apply to[...]:

(4) An operating system or application that meets both of the following conditions:

(A) The operating system or application is distributed under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software, including for commercial purposes and without payment of a royalty or fee.

(B) The operating system provider or developer does not, by technical or contractual means, prevent the recipient from installing modified versions of the software on a device on which the unmodified version operates, and does not restrict the functionality or interoperability of modified versions.

The answer to the burger analogy is that it's the wrong analogy. McDonald's is selling you the burger. AI companies are essentially selling you the grill.

The hype works so well because it plays on people's ego and desire for power. They think I have the power to end the world with this technology but I won't because I'm a good person.

Lee Vinsel's criti-hype article nailed this 5 years ago, before we even had the chatbot economy we do now: https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-cr...

The suicide rate in Palo Alto, for instance, was so high that the CDC investigated it (around 2016). The situation hasn't improved much since then. https://elestoque.org/2025/12/07/opinion/community-members-t...

Another example: in the California Assembly hearings for AB 1043 (their age verification bill), one mom offered testimony in support by saying it was social media that enticed her daughter into developing anorexia.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587620

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

War aside, I also bet there's going to be a huge demand for edge-compute for other kinds of robotics: self-driving cars, delivery robots, factory robots, or general-purpose humanoids (Tesla Optimus, Boston Dynamics Atlas, 1X NEO, etc). Moving that kind of compute to the cloud is too laggy and unreliable. I know researchers who've tried it, the results were mixed.

Also, the engineers working on these platforms aren't going to reinvent the wheel every time they need to connect hardware together and they're going to use interoperable standards, like PCIe for storage or GPUs, DIMM slots for memory, ATX for power, etc. So I don't see general-purpose computing dying.

As the Heritage Foundation admitted:

> Keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids. No child should be conditioned to think that permanently damaging their healthy bodies to try to become something they can never be is even remotely a good idea.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/kids-online-safe...

But I also don’t want to step on the EFF’s toes. They’ve been doing good work on this area for decades and I’d prefer we work with them on policy details.

Here’s a whitepaper on their policy positions: https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-onli...