Exactly. And that’s the part that worries me most: I’m seeing people investigating the guy, shaming him (he wrote a blog about using Claude to write a game in 90 minutes, so clearly he must be evil /s), and the article above is written in such a way to insinuate all sorts of nefarious goings on, but everything I see suggests this is just normal procedure.

I really feat this is going to hurt the community and chase good developers away.

Exactly. There’s a massive thread on Mastodon where everybody is panicking about this, but it’s a nothing burger if ever there was one.

Sure, the timing and comments suggest it’s meant for legal compliance, but if that’s what it does, it does it by keeping full control in the hands of the user, where it should be.

Linux has similar fields for realName, emailAddress, location, timezone and more. But like birthdate, I think they’re all optional.

Was Linux ever used for massive multiuser systems? I thought it had always been primarily home use and internet servers. I think big multiuser systems went out of fashion with Solaris. Well, I suppose corporate workstations need user accounts where some of these are set.

Only in California and Brazil. And I suspect neither has a shortage of people able to add this field.

That’s what it sounds to me. You just have to enter a date of birth, which I think puts parents in control of this, rather than shady websites.

Something that I, as a parent, really miss, is the ability to have some parental control without having to subject myself to horrifically broken systems like those from Microsoft and Google, which are just painful to use and don’t offer any meaningful control. Minecraft has become almost impossible to use lately, and apparently it’s going to get even worse.

More applications should have a simple child mode that connects it to a parent mode that allows the parent to keep an eye on what their kid is doing and enable or disable some features for them, but instead, they make it impossible to create an account, and if you do, you’ve got an account that can’t do anything. It’s broken and stupid and shouldn’t be so difficult.

Maybe Linux could set a better example in this.