this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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What I want to know is: in my own haphazard note-to-self text file cribbed from ArchWiki, is it before or after the disk partitioning step that I'm supposed to add an instruction to "email anthraxx my date of birth"?
Or better yet: at what point in the development of my ad hoc tasking system for an ESP32 do I need to stop and go "shit, guess I'd better add a keypad so 12 year olds can self-report their age and safely be prevented from using the 'romance' setting on this lightbulb"?
Do you live in California?
Then my sincere condolences. But you will figure something out.
If not, just ignore this silly stuff.
What a stupid take, California is one of the largest econmies in the world. what get decided in california often leaks out to the rest of the world because companies don't want to have 2 seperate products so even if you dont live there you are stuck with it anyway.
Even if it doesn't affect you in anyway you should still worry about it because other states and countries will soon follow if it is left unchallenged.
Shh this guy might figure out how the usa works in another 10 years. Perhaps he will see a movie about it, I have no ideas where those come from, magic freedom land right?
We were just talking not about the law itself or how commercial products are affected, but about personal hobby projects and small Linux distros.
And for those the effect is negligible (and the law also should be ignored by them, as this will be the most effective form of challenging it imho).
I don't but I roleplayed for the bit.
If it weren't completely, stupidly unenforceable, I might still worry about this idea being exported to the rest of the world though.
I'm tired of arguing with people who don't understand what the California law is trying to do so I'm going to try making this copy-pastable.
Thanks, honestly I had not actually read the bill before coming here to shitpost, and it seems like yeah it's more well-intentioned than people are giving it credit for.
I still have serious reservations about the broadness, vagueness, and premise that mandatory age signals are a good idea at all -- it's a lateral move at best; weakly attempting to kerb the most overtly predatory parts of the whole "age verification" movement, without opposing the idea itself.
But you're right, it's not the blatant data-vacuuming law that I think some people imagine it to be.