Assembly Bill No. 1043 was approved by California governor Gavin Newsom in October of last year, and becomes active on January 1, 2027 (via The Lunduke Journal). The bill states, among other factors, that "An operating system provider shall do all of the following:"
"(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
"(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user."
That's the one! 😄 Is that an official hexbear emoji now?
Has been for a few years, you can tell because it's an AI image from back when those were seen as just kinda funny and not an affront to all life.
Fair. In their defense they can still be generated cheaply locally by open source programs like stable diffusion, there's just a slight quality downgrade. I'm given to understand that the real environmental damage is in the training, but open source initiatives greatly reduce that (done once, free for all).