And if you do it right, you can get a whole bunch of real humans spouting BS on your behalf for free. Just look at all the people here on Slashdot who say they need to tow a trailer across Canada in winter without even stopping to pee. Or the ones who invoke "socialism" every time public charging is discussed. They are doing the work of the oil companies' PR team and it doesn't cost the oil companies a penny.

There was a similar case a decade ago in Australia where the same painkiller was sold under different labels as "headache" treatment, "neck pain" treatment etc. It was all the same ingredient at the same strength, in different packets with different prices: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.abc.net.au%2Fnews%2F20...

The Australian consumer watchdog was not impressed.

What? This is about children NOT having access to social media. So your hypothetical about using "AI to go through all of your history" would come up with zero results as a result of these laws.

Nobody is stopping anyone using a phone to make calls or send texts. Nobody is stopping anyone using email. Anyone can still encrypt their email if they want to.

The only parties who are losing access to "all of your history" are corporations like Meta and Twitter. This is a net benefit for Australian citizens.*

*It might also help protect against this: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.abc.net.au%2Fnews%2F20...

The ones I have seen (e.g Nokia 2720) had access to the KaiOS app store, and also have apps pre-installed, including Google Voice Assistant and Whatsapp. I had to root my 2720 to get rid of that crap.

I guess it depends on one's definition of a "dumbphone," even the old Nokias had games on them :-) I like having a 4G hotspot so I can use the phone to give internet access to a real computer, and I can see how the shitty built-in camera is useful e.g in the event of an accident etc.

The predictive text also SUCKS. Way more laggy than an old Nokia 3310, and handling capital letters is much more fiddly. The phone is nice and small though, and the battery life is good unless you live in an area with marginal signal. If the phone can't hear a tower it will max out its TX power and flatten the battery in ~24h.

Social media is a sewer. Sometimes gold gets flushed in there, but if you go looking for the gold you'll be up to your neck in shit.

No, the phone still works as a phone. Emails still work. Kids are not being "silenced" or "censored."

Any legislation that annoys Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg at the same time is probably a good idea. While I disagree with many, many things the .au government has done, I think this is in general a positive step.

I've already posted on here so I can't mod you up.

And yes, Europe is watching closely: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.abc.net.au%2Fnews%2F20...

Hard to find a proper dumbphone in Australia. The 2G and 3G networks have both been shut down, so that old Nokia in the drawer won't work. Millions of phones and plenty of other infrastructure turned into e-waste.

The government doesn't allow people under 16 to drive cars, drink alcohol or vote either.

It's amazing that after all these years other sites haven't cottoned on. Maybe precisely because it *is* better and harder to gamify.

HandBrake is great! So much easier than DVDdecrypter/VOBdec/Flask and the delicate stack of codecs we seemed to need back in the day. Yes, a USB bluray/DVD/CD writer can be had easily these days for a decent price. There's probably still a decent side hustle in ripping, transcoding or backing up optical media. While I'm sure some of the kids can do it themselves, I bet there are plenty who would just pay someone else to do it, just like 20 years ago.

Unless they weigh less than 254 pounds: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

It's kinda cool that a person can bolt something together and fly it legally without ANY certification or instruction. I mean, I'm not going to try it myself, and I don't necessarily want an uncertified aircraft to fly over my house, but it's still cool that there's a carve-out in the regulation so that people are *allowed* to do it.

Often we don't know the ingredients. Are they listed on the bottle of ink? Does the tattoo shop give you this list before they inject it into you? Are you sure the tattoo shop doesn't add stuff to their ink to make it "better"?

The researchers have to work with the information they have been able to find. If they have found that in particular cases, with particular kinds of ink, there's an immune effect, that in itself is not "meaningless, junk science."

We already have a satellite-based positioning system, that can tell the position of a receiver anywhere on the globe. This can be verified with a short-range radio system like bluetooth - just put a transponder in the charging stations. And finally, don't these autonomous cars already have robust detection of humans? Detecting humans then refraining from mowing them down near a charging station seems no different to detecting humans on sidewalks or crosswalks. Easier perhaps, because the vehicles should only be moving very slowly.

If Waymo haven't implemented all of the above, it's not because it's some kind of sci-fi impossibility. It's because they are greedy scum and were hoping to get away without even paying for a junior engineer to utilise the systems already built into the vehicles for exactly this purpose.

We can do the same with Wikipedia. Wikipedia gives you a nice summary, and lists all the sources so you can read more. It also uses a shitload less electricity than a commercial LLM. I suspect the only "benefit" of using an LLM is for the owners of that LLM.