"I’ve read many articles on the same topic but never found it presented this way" it reminds me a lot of a description I saw in a video with Jonathan Blow talking about precedence and parsing with Casey Muratori.
The video is 3 hours long though, and I'm not sure the text he shows is available.
Not sure I'm gonna get any replies, so I don't want to just leave this as a message of support for the bill. It is concerning.
I think I saw MidnightBSD said it seemed like they were thinking of iOS when they made this law, and I agree.
If you did make a child account on a desktop system, and it had some age category signal that programs and scripts can access ... do you have to prevent the child from making their own programs and scripts, since they could be modified versions of the apps that are supposed to have access to the age signal? So are they not allowed to do programming and app development, or even scripting from a child account? Not so much of a problem on iOS where these are already heavily restricted.
On the other hand, if my Android phone had allowed me to set up an account labelled "adult" and another "child", and disable side-loading on the child account except for specific apps I approve, and then the discord app would stop bugging me for photo-based age identification on the adult account, and would prevent access to adult discord channels on the child account but not the adult account, that sounds fine. Still not sure what to do about programming apps on the child account, maybe parents could decide which ones to allow, but there could be similar problems to deciding this question for a desktop system. Also, it would be good to have a quick-switch - if I want to let my hypothetical child play approved games on the phone, there shouldn't be a cumbersome log out/log in process, just a quick change change that changes the age signal, and tells discord etc not to allow access to adult channels until the signal changes again.
Doesn't this law just let parents set up age-labelled accounts for their children with the idea that apps not suitable for children won't be allowed under those accounts?
Seems no worse than what mobile OSes already do and not that bad a feature for a modern general use OS (except if you monitor someone's age bracket and noticed the exact day they change, you can work out their precise date of birth.) It does seem unsuitable to force it to be added to embedded OSes, freedos, CP/M and historical/retro OSes in general.
I like open source and I don't want to lose it but its ideals of letting people share, modify and run code however they like have the same issue as what the AI companies are doing. Openclaw is open source, there are open source tools to run LLMs, many LLM model files are open, though the huge ones aren't so easy for individuals to run on their own hardware.
I don't have a solution, though the only two categories of solution I can think of are forbidding people from developing and distributing certain types of software, or forbidding people from distributing hardware that can run unapproved software (at least if they are PC's that can run AI, arduinos with a few kB of RAM could be allowed, and iPads could be allowed to run ZX81 emulators which could run unapproved code). The first category would be less drastic as it would only need to affect some subset of AI related software, but is also hard to get right and make work. Not saying either of these ideas are better than doing nothing.
Faster and more complex hardware can also have bugs or back doors, as can cheaper hardware. That said, I'm not happy with buggy and untrustworthy code either.
The video is 3 hours long though, and I'm not sure the text he shows is available.
At this point he's talking about left leaning vs right leaning trees, after having already talked about one of them: https://youtu.be/fIPO4G42wYE?t=2256&si=aanthLGe-q8ntZez