Some people labor under the delusion that if enough people ignore a law, it will get repealed. If that were the case, speed limits would've been abolished a long time ago.

The hate really should be directed at the politicians who pushed for these age gate laws, but threatening a politician usually results in big angry guys with guns showing up at your front door.

Linux can be made compliant when it's incorporated into a consumer product. I gave the Steam Deck as an example. It has all sorts of parental controls implemented.

Yeah, this does mean that the burden of compliancy falls on individual hardware vendors since Linux itself is not subject to a single controlling entity, but this really isn't the massive hole in the dyke that people tend to make it out to be.

Do you really need this explained for you? As an example, here in FL, a few months ago they painted over a LGBTQ+ pride crosswalk downtown. A few people decided to protest by coloring the sidewalk back in with chalk. Eventually, after a bunch of back and forth between the protestors and the city crew cleaning it back up over several weeks, some of the protestors were arrested.

Personally, I feel that temporarily vandalizing (it does wash away in our rather frequent rainstorms) a roadway with some bright colors should be considered a form of free expression, and if people want to spend their time out in the blazing hot Florida sun playing with chalk because they disagree with an aspect of how our state is being run, that should be their right. However, my own opinion on the matter amounts to squat when a cop says you've broken the law and are getting arrested.

If you break a law you disagree with, you might have to face the consequences. Sure, some people have their hills they're willing to die on, but ultimately the news cycle moves on and you'll potentially be stuck with legal fees and a possible criminal record, and in all likelihood the law won't be changed either. Call it defeatist if you must, but I just say it's taking a practical, adult view of what martyrdom for a cause actually entails.

Because if it's not done at the OS level, you're eventually going to have to prove you're an adult through some other method that might be even less privacy-respecting. And it's not just for porn, we're starting to see signs that all social media might end up age gated, because some courts have found that its use can reasonably be assumed to be harmful to children.

Let me be clear - I'm not defending the age checks and personally believe that parents should be the ones keeping their little spawn safe from the things in the world that aren't intended for children. But this is the direction things are heading, because the old "think of the children!" ploy still works.

Of course the average probably includes people hitting the high seas for their streaming content, making those 3 felonies a day look like rookie numbers.

The politicians aren't going to back down on this and the age gates have to be placed somewhere. I live in Florida where they ignorantly expect every adult site on the entire global internet to comply with Florida's age check laws, and the result has been an absolute mess that does very little to prevent children from accessing adult material online. Some sites just blocked IPs that are geographically considered to be in Florida (which can be easily bypassed via VPN), others implemented age checks in ways that leave wide ranging privacy concerns, and some sites took a page out of 4chan's book and figuratively said "We're not located in the USA, so kindly fuck off."

An age gate at the OS level isn't perfect. It isn't meant to be perfect though, it just limits the scope of compliance enforcement effort necessary down to a handful of vendors. Realistically, it's to have something that's good enough to cover the majority of consumer devices that parents are likely to give their rug rats (and then forget to configure any sort of parental controls, which is what landed us in this situation in the first place). That generally means hardware running Android, Windows, macOS, and iOS. As TFS mentioned, Linux being compliant with age gate laws mostly boils down to companies that sell consumer hardware with Linux preloaded (the Steam Deck comes to mind). If you're not going to sell something that is going to end up in the hands of someone's precious little Timmy, I doubt there's going to be much scrutiny over it (kind of like how Florida is basically ignoring the fact that you can still be underage and access a bunch of porn just by adding a VPN plugin to your browser).

Just wait until you see Steam Machine pricing.

Anyway, Sony can jog on. They raised prices in Europe when Trump brought tariffs in on Americans.

It's a 5-year-old gaming console at this point. I'd imagine by now there's a decent supply of used ones available.

Personally, aside from a Nintendo Switch that I was given as a gift (and it's basically obsolete at this point), I'm team PC Master Race when it comes to gaming. If you're buying a console you may as well just take your money outside and light it on fire.

I have a whole collection of obsolete tablets that are newer than my fridge. My fridge keeps chuggin' along fine, keeping food perfectly chilled, while the tablets are just e-waste that I've been procrastinating on taking them to be disposed of properly (except for my 5th gen iPad mini, which is still somewhat useful for checking the Ring cameras and responding to texts - it's otherwise too slow to do much else). It seems like if someone really wanted a smart device stuck to their fridge, they should just attach it with magnets. That way when the tablet becomes too long in the tooth, you replace it and don't have to scrap a fridge that otherwise still works just fine at its primary function.

I feel pretty much the same way with infotainment systems in cars. If I was stuck with whatever homebrew app system GM implemented in 2018 in my Bolt, that'd be miserable, but it has CarPlay and Android Auto support.

> The premise of a device having "one job" again is the position of a luddite.

No, it's the position of being anti-enshitification.

A refrigerator's main function is to keep food cold. That's the reason you buy a refrigerator. If putting a screen on a TV actually had a demonstrable benefit to that purpose then fine; but it doesn't. It actually has no objective benefit whatsoever, and the increased complexity not only increases cost but also reduces reliability. That's literally the definition of enshitification.

If having a computer screen in your kitchen, mounted to your fridge, is that useful... get a tablet and mount it to the fridge. Not only would that be cheaper, but if the tablet fails it doesn't make the refrigerator scrap metal and vice-versa and you can upgrade one without throwing out the other. Bonus is you can take the table off the fridge and put it where you need it.

I have a leatherman multitool that I keep on me whenever I'm out of the house. It does a lot of things, but it does none of those things as good as a dedicated single-purpose tool of the same kind. It's a good knife but it will never be as good as an actual knife. It's a good pair of pliers but it will never be as good as a proper pair of pliers. It's a decent screwdriver but I will always reach for a normal proper screwdriver if there's one available. Does it make me a luddite to not want a single item that does all things kinda shitty instead of many items that each do their one thing well?

=Smidge=

A few companies have tried this with products that cost less than a car. Usually you're on the hook for a service plan if you want the connectivity to continue working, or in the case of what Bird did with a scooter they used to sell, they just announced one day that everyone is losing their connectivity and too bad if you weren't expecting that. Back in the day, Amazon used to offer Kindles with free cellular connectivity, but they discontinued that awhile go.

I don't think we're quite at the point where the economics really work out in favor of the manufacturer (unless they figure out a successful way to monetize it), so smart fridges will probably be reliant upon home WiFi for the for foreseeable future.

They discontinued their old school design for the home/consumer market a few years ago. Their current offerings aren't meaningfully different from what other major appliance manufacturers are selling.

On a related note, I used to think the same thing regarding washing machines - that the "built like a tank" designs from my childhood were the best. Turns out they actually use a shit ton of detergent (which has become expensive in recent years) and are rough on your clothes. I switched to a modern front-load high efficiency washer a few years back, and somewhat recently also upgraded to a heat pump clothes dryer. Even if they don't last 20 years like the old school beasts, I'm saving money by using a lot less detergent, water and electricity, and my clothes aren't getting destroyed.
 

You were saying?

Maybe if we were talking about screens in cars, where it's a different way of getting information and interacting with the vehicle controls, but this is a refrigerator. It has one job - to keep your food cold, and nowhere in that mode of operation is a ginormous display part of the equation.

It's like putting a margarita mixer on a toilet. You could, but you shouldn't.