Its harder than you think and no "state" ban will work if the 14-15 year old is smart enough to get around the child locks at the os level either. Next they will ban VPN just wait for it.
But so has trust in government (for very good reasons). And those same unscrupulous governments are heavily influenced by the very same tech companies people are suspicious of.
Kids find ways around everything. Even adults find the 'digital wellbeing' tools on Android and iOS useless. Just look at the multitude of apps available for digital self regulation these days (ScreenZen, Freedom, BlockSite, etc). No single solution works for everybody at the moment.
Regulation by itself is also insufficient. But maybe combining regulation with parental controls plus other measures will be effective. A 'defense in depth' or swiss cheese strategy, with multiple layers of protection.
I do hope we figure out what layers are needed soon, though. It feels like we're running out of time.
Regulation does add friction. And it makes it easier for a parent to say 'no, you aren't allowed that app' (which you can obviously say anyway, but it gives you a very solid and non-negotiable reason to say no). Some children will find their ways round things, but a lot, if their friends aren't using a particular app, won't bother, or they will be the type of children who won't try and break the law.
Most apps and sites are terrible in terms of the parental controls they provide - they tend to be all or nothing. E.g. I'd like to have a group for our family on WhatsApp but I don't want my children to be able to join random WhatsApp groups and there isn't any way to have the former and not the latter.
I think the idea is that while individuals will absolutely find ways round it, it should help to reduce the network effect of everyone a kid knows being already on it. How true that is remains to be seen.
One campaign I’ve liked is one in the UK to try and get the parents of whole year groups in school to agree to not buy phones until their children are a certain age. This removes a lot of the peer pressure of ‘my friends all have one’.
Except they are. I’m not aware of any actual bypasses of parental controls on iOS or android. You choose apps and allow or deny them, and you provide limits which are guarded by passcodes or parental prompt (on iOS at least).
> It feels like we're running out of time.
I mean, does it? It feels like we’re running guns blazing into something that will be trivially bypassable (hello free VPN to some random European country - remember Hola?).
The problem is everyone else’s kids is on social media. As a teenager I never had a Facebook account, but every other kid did and every event was organised and invites sent on Facebook.
It could have been done over sms, email, or any other private messaging, but because everyone was on Facebook, if you weren’t too, you weren’t invited.
Homework requires internet-connected devices (I guess you can semi-supervise that, but it becomes harder as they become older as you don't want to sit there watching them do all their homework).
There is also a cost socially, which is hard to navigate as a parent. If everybody is talking about minecraft every break and playing it together in the evenings, then it's hard for them if they haven't even seen the game.
Simpler still, a “minor” bit on the phone, set by parents once. All services must respect the bit in http headers, and app stores should refuse to install certain apps. No need for id check
I imagine that many parent don’t want micromanage their kids apps, this takes care of the problem.
I’m in favor of this, but it doesn’t solve the full problem. If all your friends use social media as the fabric of their social interactions, you’ll be ostracized if you opt out as an individual.
IOW its a coordination problem. You need most of the other parents in your social group to also implement those controls.
I mean, the government bans lots of things for under 18s. Gambling, alcohol, opening bank accounts, getting married are all restricted by governments. I’m not saying governments shouldn’t provide laws on what children can and can’t do, I’m saying that this law is a poor way of doing it.
I disagree. I don’t have a huge problem with the UK government monitoring my online presence; I’m reasonably sure my ISP is siphoning all that information to them anyway. That may be problematic for some, but I’m ok with it.
My problem is that this info doesn’t go to the government; it goes to persona and Yoti. We are literally giving government issued IDs to tracking platforms to tell Meta, Google, ByteDance, Reddit who we are.
This isn’t about keeping children safe - if it was the law would be to mandate parental controls on devices. I’d stand behind that law.,
the user prompts and harness used for development are much more valuable for training than the final source code.
my approach to open source development with AI now is to include all of the agent sessions used in development in the repository, which makes this data freely available for training for both proprietary and open weights models, but that is just my own approach. every open source developer ultimately has to make their own judgement on the best way to integrate AI in accordance with their values.
This is nonsense. It’s referrals for jobs that get filled before the JD is even posted, or discussions about what companies/people _actually_ want when they’re tendering projects. It’s tickets for sold out events, access to golf tee times or bookings that just aren’t available if you have to ask.
Two examples from my life - a friend is a headhunter for tech companies. My last job was been him hitting me up before the job was advertised - I had met the hiring manager and booked an interview before they saw my CV or anyone else even applied to the job.
There’s a major sporting event in my city every year and the tickets sell out within minutes every year, the good ones gone to season ticket holders years in advance. A colleague is a season ticket holder and not interested in that particular game so the last few years I’ve gotten his ticket for less than face value for the cheap seats.
What chinese labs are on par with GPT-5.3 and Sonnet 4.6 that I can go and use today? (granted they're 4 months ago, not 6 but nothing was released in Dec/Jan so I rounded up).
I use GLM a lot; for what I do (coding), it is Sonnet quality; I did not try the newest 5.2 yet to compare to Opus (some people are hinting). Older Sonnet/Opus , not SOTA but that already worked fine for me.
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