But when governments do regulate (UK, AUS etc all) - people cry foul.

The entire age verification push in AUS was started by an advertising consulting company to distract from proposed online gambling regulation.

Protecting children is a noble goal that I personally agree with, but it's also often used to sane-wash further erosion of privacy.

As has been discussed here and elsewhere, age verification turns out to be the complete loss of Internet anonymity due to its implementation techniques. There are proposed alternative implementations, very conveniently for some, this is not part of the discussion.

This is exactly the time when nerds like us should speak up.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

I've heard this so many times. That age gating in AUS was started by lobbying from an advertising firm is a gross simplification / distortion of the facts but a good example of how easily misinformation spreads on the internet. People love a conspiracy.

No doubt that it will be good news to gambling advertisers, but the push for age verification was already underway in 2020, well before government recommended an end to gambling advertising (2023).

It's a neat explanation, so an easy sell, but doesn't match the chronology.

Well, here is the canonical source of the story:

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-b...

I do know that many places in the world were worried about what TikTok and Insta were doing to their kids' minds, prior to that push. However, do you find fault in the Crikey story?

It appears that the AUS domino was the first to fall in the chain after FINCH's major push.

I'm sure that it's right! I've no doubt gambling advertising firms will have been happy to see it over the line to get them off the hook. Hard to argue for a ban on gambling ads if kids (allegedly) can't see them anyway.

I am for ban on gambling ads, full stop. It is easy to argue for it. It is easy to say it.

i agree with the sibling comment here. someone in a comment section somewhere is crying foul about everything.

People cry foul about every other thing too. It's best to ignore them.

Unfortunately we can’t ignore them when they’re our “representatives” in the government.

Because the implementation is a shit show?

Appload and Xovi open up a range of options. You can build a simple frontend in QT and have a backend in a language of your choice serve as an API. Appload handles the display / xochitl for you. I've built tons of little apps like this - and bigger ones.

https://github.com/asivery/rm-appload https://github.com/asivery/xovi

Installing these used to be a bit of a hassle, but ReManager and Vellum make it a breeze: https://github.com/rmitchellscott/reManager

Only with an extension, at least in the UK.

I really like their pdf viewer. It can be slow on complex documents, but I find it much easer to navigate around compared to the one on Supernote and Boox devices.

Their ebook reader though.. that really does suck. It’s had basically zero improvements in as long as I can remember, despite B obviously being a core feature for many people.

I got a ReMarkable a couple years ago. The writing and screen experience were phenomenal, but the ereader UX and file transfer UX turned me off. I returned it within a couple days. I've been disappointed by how other eink tablets I've tried have felt since, but since 90% of my use is reading I haven't minded.

Doesn't that describe all eBook readers? I've owned a few Kindle and Kobo devices and meaningful improvements are never shipped to them. No actual performance improvements, no new useful features, nothing.

Supernote and Onyx Boox both do meaningful upgrades with useful new features on their devices.

It's unusable for architecture drawings :/

Yeah, that’s fair.

There are images in geminispace, and audio, and (probably) video. It's just not inline. One of constraints of the protocol is that pages cannot load content without your express say-so.

The good thing about the Remarkable is that it’s basically just a Linux machine and you have root access. There’s a great community of folk building extra functionality and tools / apps for it.

I did some minor research, I've only found that I can ssh into it in Dev Mode. Is there a way to run a fullblown nice terminal with keyboard over bluetooth and mosh? I'm dreaming of e-ink portable terminal.

Yep, my notes https://fabien.benetou.fr/Tools/Eink#remarkable on the topic.

Is that true on the pro? I trialed one maybe a year ago and got the impression that the company had stopped supporting third party devs.

SDK :) https://developer.remarkable.com/documentation/sdk

I got a remarkable 2 roughly when it was released and as far as I can tell the company never supported third party devs. They gave you root access but no relevant source code...

Really quite disappointing, the device could have been a lot more useful with even a tiny bit of energy spent releasing source code for things they already developed.

It’s another good example of internet sentiment being far different to popular sentiment.

Polling shows around 70% supported it, though far fewer thought it would be effective. Pretty much matches my views on it.

This little "solution" might be fine for .. imgur .. but it shows your nation is well into the authoritarian descent. And there's no where left in the western world to move to either ... It's not a slippery slope, it's a landslide.

We legally have to keep porn on the top shelf in opaque packaging too in any shop where under 18s are allowed.

I mean, it's basically a police state.

Polls don't handle nuance, though. Most people would support "children not watching hardcore porn", but most wouldn't support "not allowed to access imgur anymore". The polls don't ask those kinds of question, though, they ask "do you support the OSA", to which the only reasonable answer is "yes and no".

Is an SUV needed for two children? I can accommodate my two children (and the dog if required) in my smallish hatchback.

Me too. But, when we drive to my in-laws, NL -> Austria and back, we inevitably bring more stuff with us. I’m not going to rent a car three times a year while still owning a hatchback, and paying insurance and taxes for it.

Possibly, but it's not really sync anyway. You can pull and push documents, but there's no synchronisation.

Not worth paying extra for.

Writing latency on the current generation of eink devices is good enough not to be noticeable.

I've found latency when changing pages to be rather frustrating to the point of it being difficult to land on the page you actually want to be on.

wrt to remarkable: changing pages indeed does take a little time, thus it's not good for researching. writing is nearly instant, but not perfectly, so imo it's not quite as good as on paper (although the resistance is pretty nice). One personal note: I would love to have a thicker pen, the pencil-size is not mine. Still, I like the device (I'm one of the old customers so don't know about how the subscription or non-subscription fares, since I am grandfathered in) but it's clearly not for everyone. Also I really love the eraser function of the newer pen.