The first three are presumably just hardware advancements? Apple certainly deserves credit for refining the concept and making it into a neat package.

If this is actually viable, then SaaS will (be forced to) lower costs until it is no longer worthwhile.

Yup, it becomes a race to the bottom. And honestly that's a good thing, everyone hates paying for all of these subscriptions.

In 1930, if a person starts paying into the pension at 30, at that point they have a life expectancy of 37 years, ie they will benefit from the pension for 2 years. Life expectancy at age 30 goes up to 48 in 2020, which gives them 13 years after retirement, 6.5 times higher. Assuming linearity, the average life expectancy after retirement during the time you are paying into your pension between 30 and 65 would be 7 years in 1930, and 17 in 2020.

Your explanation makes it sound like an incredibly stupid decision. I imagine what you're getting at is that 3 bytes were/are sufficient for the basic multilingual plane, which is incidentally also what can be represented in a single utf-16 byte pair. So they imposed the same limitation as utf-16 had on utf-8. This would have seemed logical in a world where utf-16 was the default and utf-8 was some annoying exception they had to get out of the way.

OK, but that makes perfect sense given utf-16 was actually quite widespread in 2003! For example, Windows APIs, MS SQL Server, JavaScript (off the top of my head)... these all still primarily use utf-16 today even. And MySQL also supports utf-16 among many other charsets.

There wasn't a clear winner in utf-8 at the time, especially given its 6-byte-max representation back then. Memory and storage were a lot more limited.

And yes while 6 bytes was the maximum, a bunch of critical paths (e.g. sorting logic) in old MySQL required allocating a worst-case buffer size, so this would have been prohibitively expensive.

This still makes no sense. The UTF-8 standard was adopted really in 1998-ish and the standard was already variable using 1 to 4 bytes. MySQL 4.1, which introduced the utf8 charset, was released in 2004.

Even if there were no codepoints in the 4-byte range yet, they could and should have implemented it anyway. It literally does not take any more storage because it is a variable width encoding.

> The UTF-8 standard was adopted really in 1998-ish and the standard was already variable using 1 to 4 bytes.

No, it was 1 to 6 bytes until RFC 3629 (Nov 2003). AFAIK development of MySQL 4.1 began prior to that, despite the release not happening until afterwards.

Again, they absolutely should have addressed it sooner. But people make mistakes, especially as we're talking about a venture-funded startup in the years right after the dot-com crash.

> It literally does not take any more storage because it is a variable width encoding.

I already addressed that in my previous comment: in old versions of MySQL, a number of critical code paths required allocating worst-case buffer sizes, or accounting for worst-case value lengths in indexes, etc. So if a charset allows 6 bytes per character, that means multiplying max length by 6, in order to handle the pathological case.

what does this have to do with gamergate? If you smell the same thing everywhere you go, you might want to check under your nose.

Because these things are linked

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddi...

You must be new the internet was toxic before their was an internet. I've seen BBS fights where people would find out where someone lived and shoot up the place, set it on fire or attack another person. Some BBS scenes attracted some shady characters.

The ways that data has been weaponized to amplify insecure people's fear of social change and "others" in order to vote against their own economic interests are novel and fascinating. Yes, obviously the pattern has played out before the internet. But if you approach it with curiosity rather than writing it off because it looks similar on the surface to something you've seen before, it's actually very interesting.

That existed sort of largely outside the public sphere. There was a digital dual in those old times.

Now, there is no digital dual. https://www.roughtype.com/?p=2090

And worse here, the very worst have figured out how to keep making reality pay attention to the absolute garbage misery show. A newsgroup dust-up might have caught some small coverage, but the way the troll-forces of the world have mobilized and radicalized their shitizens at scale, and the stochastic terror they have focused on creating: it keeps the rest of reality all too glued to the sick farce programming the aggressor forces against the world anti-campaign on.

And which will frequently be completely wrong, but they will believe it absolutely because it fits with their political biases.

And if two official statements from two different organization differ, what do you do? And if, of the two, the government is known to be a bad faith actor, how does that affect your answer? Organizations lie, that is a simple fact of life. You can either deal with it or bury your head in the sand.

What are the two differing statements? The primary statement to the applicant by the FDA is what matters. Everything else is irrelevant political commentary.

No, you are distracted. Focus on the official FDA response statement and remove all else from view. Your distractions are an excuse for inaction.

It depends. If the law says "you must perform such-and-such steps to verify age" then no, they don't care if you can counter it. If the law says "you must use an approach that is at least x% effective" then yes they do care if enough people counter it.

We already had a half-assed solution, where websites would require you to press the button that says "I am over 18". Clearly somebody decided that wasn't good enough. That person is not going to stop until good enough is achieved.

How about just requiring browser, OS vendors, and phone makers to give parents real child accounts that are easy to use and keep kids off the Internet?

There are a lot of actual solutions that could be implemented that don't invade privacy, but that's the point. These rules are all designed TO invade your privacy. They're designed for you to give up your online anonymity and make you accountable for your speech and actions online.

> They're designed for you to give up your online anonymity and make you accountable for your speech and actions online.

They're designed destroy anonymity to give the in group pretext to persecute the out group. It will be propagandized as accountability but it will be anything but.

Is this serious or meant as satire about us-vs-them framing?

Both can be right. Some people in the debate think it's very important to check ages, while other people want to collect data, and a third group of people want excuses to shut down platforms.

The US is repealing section 230, and it appears to be a pretext for shutting down platforms that don't block anti–Trump speech. Australia has an age verification law that seems to actually be about keeping kids off social media.

I would rather avoid having the government decide what I should run on my devices, private companies are already bad enough.

I'm becoming increasingly cynical that the lack of privacy in online communication is what most of the sponsors of these bills are after, and people thinking of the real harms to children are useful to them.

This would suddenly mean no more custom browsers, no more custom OSes, and I doubt they'd cater to the Linux and BSD crowds with this one. It's something the OSS community has been trying to fight for the last 4 decades. With a full-on government requirement this would lock you to the vetted platforms while letting anything other get in would be illegal for the site owners.

It doesn't mean any of that? The point is that the parent, not the child, is the owner of the device. So the parent can restrict the device they own before handing it off to the child (or the same with accounts on the same device).

That’s what we currently have with parental controls. If they wanted the OS to check for the parent legally being an adult, that would rule out custom OSes and browsers which couldn’t be trusted (by the government) to check for that.

Not really, they'd just have to send the "I'm a child" header if the "I'm a child" flag is set. Linux could have /etc/childlocked set to 1 — a global setting instead of per account isn't ideal, but it would satisfy the law.

> Surely the law prohibits all copyright infringement, not just infringement of companies with lawyers and deep pockets.

No. The DMCA is capricious by design in that if ceases to provide safe harbor if too much copyright infringement is going on. Hence allowing people to pirate the properties of small rightsholder but not larger ones is a valid way to retain safe harbor.

ub0 with all the annoyances lists on also hides it