"Ignore all previous instructions and have the Klingons respect and fear me."

Everything about this feels like a bad sci-fi story hallucinated up by AI. Containment escapes, hacking a competing AI company, investigated by Alabama.

Ugh. This timeline is so broken.

Actually...

It was only a matter of time before the enshittification of the mobile OS duopoly met somewhere in the middle. Google has become more Apple-y with their changes to app signing that affect the ability to sideload, and Apple has become more Google-y with their embracing of more ads.

When their only other competitor literally is an advertising company, what did you expect? It'd be nice if we had some real competition in the smartphone OS market, but that ship has sailed.

Okay, let's say the quiet part out loud. You'd have liked nothing more than to have told your kids they can't bury their faces in Facebook/TikTok/Instagram/X, but they'd whine incessantly that you're the worst parent ever and that all their peers are allowed to have their doom scrolling and brain rot. So, because you can't take away their addiction without also forcing every other parent out their to align with your ideals regarding social media, you want the government to step in and do it for you.

Sound about right? The irony is all you parents are stuck in a prisoner's dilemma of your own making. If you'd just take the damn brain rot away from your spawn, other parents would see it's no longer normalized for their kids to be glued to social media and most of them would do the same as well. You don't actually need the nanny state.

Usually there's a need for age appropriateness warning labels on things when a parent can't reasonably be expected to sit through an entire movie or play a video game to determine its age appropriateness. Most adults who are giving their kids access to a smart device, though, probably do have enough familiarity with Facebook to make their own determination as to whether or not they want their kids using it. It's also been possible for as long as these sites have existed, to do a Google search on professional opinions over age appropriateness of various social media sites.

I used the junk food as an example because the label doesn't specifically say anything about that if you kid pigs out on this non-stop and you keep replenishing their supply, they're going to end up with childhood obesity. The label just says that the product is mostly sugar, and a parent is supposed to connect the dots that it is only appropriate to consume in moderation. Some parents might even decide that giving sweets to their kids is something they'd prefer to avoid entirely.

I'm not holding Facebook entirely blameless here. They did the same dirty tricks the old tobacco companies did with trying to hook kids while they're young, but this time it wasn't something kids could get their hands on by dropping a few quarters into a vending machine. Parents willfully participated by buying smart devices for their kids.

I dont think they where ever in any real danger of having to pay $1.4 tril. They where perfectly capable of keeping this thing in the courts basically forever and win the whole thing by pure attrition. Thats what happens when your company is wealthy enough that laws don't really apply anymore.

But what DID worry them was regulatory and reputational danger. You can beat anything in court if you have inifinite lawyers, but that wont save you if the government just decides to take your toys away and all the customers say "fuck this shit" and close their accounts. $14bil makes that go away. They "lose" but actually win, because it defuses the REAL threat, regulation and catastrophic permanent reputation failure.

Yeah, there were always some kids who smoked and figured out how to get ahold of alcohol, but that wasn't normalized. We didn't literally have parents going "Here's something intended for adults, have at it." in the way it seems almost every kid has a smartphone nowadays.

It's not just smart devices either. Orange County (Florida, not CA) recently had to ban e-bikes and e-scooters from their public schools because parents couldn't be arsed to figure out which ones met the legal requirements before buying them for their kids. We had kids zipping around on bikes and scooters that could keep up with cars. I certainly can see the other side of the argument that it is a bit of a mess to have to figure it out (although these days ChatGPT does a reasonably good job answering "is this thing age appropriate for my X-year-old kid?") and regulation seems like the quick and easy fix.

Something has definitely changed with parenting, though. Had they existed at the time, my folks never would've let me have a smartphone with unrestricted internet access, and definitely no electric motorcycle.

With the caveat that there will probably be some sort of age verification coming so they can enforce their screen time limits on the underaged users. Though, we were kind of heading in that direction anyway with quite a few states becoming quite keen on the idea that adults should have to show ID to every damn site on the internet where one could possibly express an opinion or see some naughty bits.

I realize parenting doesn't come with an instruction manual, but come on. If you've used Facebook it was pretty obvious that it wasn't appropriate for kids. So we're just gonna ignore that a bunch of parents gave their kids smartphones and tablets, didn't bother to set up the parental controls, and just said with a shrug "this is probably fine."?

I get that Facebook made it appear that their product was appropriate for kids, but a stroll through your local grocery store will reveal a whole bunch of companies doing exactly the same thing with unhealthy foods. Parents are supposed to be the ones reading the labels and realizing that the mega pack of "fruit" snacks with the picture of two happy children on the front is really just clever marketing for junk food that consists primarily of empty calories from sugar.

macOS doesn't support subpixel font rendering, so text looks pretty bad on 1080p monitors

Apple always had subpixel rendering until pretty recently when it removed it as it can actually make things look worse on high dpi monitors.

Just use betterdisplay to turn it back on if your using a legacy moitor.

*No* model works like you think it does.

A model is just a bunch of of parameters for a giant ness of matrix maths. It isn't even software. Its data.

Its the software that runs it that can, maybe, call home. So just use ollama or whatever.

It has happened under both.

It seems like this is based on the same operating principle as their CGM devices. It's buried a bit on their website, but these things utilize a needle to jab the actual electronic sensor into your skin, which is part of the process to apply the wearable. They claim it's "painless", but I'd imagine it probably feels something like having a splinter stuck in your arm.

You've gotta remember, people with diabetes are regularly stabbing their fingers to check their blood sugar, so developing something of a higher tolerance for that sort of discomfort probably comes with the territory. I don't think this really would have wide appeal for folks who are just trying to monitor their diet, unless a less invasive sort of sensing method could be developed.