Fully agree. I have no issues with the social media laws as they don't impact my family at all except for YouTube. Accounts under Family Link control should have been allowed as they are overseen by an 18+ parent.

Youtube should have voluntarily removed shorts and the front page or made them available as a parental control to appease the regulator. When I wrote to the minister they used YouTube's addictive algorithms as justification for including them as social media which I do agree with.

We had curated kids logins with age restrictions, subscriptions, and ad free under premium and also youtube music with individual playlists they used for instrument practice etc. We had to shift music platform. I know we can replicate a lot of this with special apps and browser extensions but this was a single cross platform solution that was working for responsible parents. To be fair it is partly YouTube's fault for prioritizing Shorts and watch time over quality.

Fully agree, responsible parents should not allow their kids (including teenagers) to use Shorts or TikTok. It is a shame that YouTube does not support blocking that crap. It is obvious "Don't be evil" is not Google's motto anymore.

> We had to shift music platform. I know we can replicate a lot of this ...

As far as practical solutions go a cheap VPS and a wireguard connection should let you continue with business as usual. From the perspective of YouTube maybe you moved to NZ or something.

> they used YouTube's addictive algorithms as justification for including them as social media

Did they provide YouTube the option of swapping out those algorithms to be exempted from the new law? It seems like this law was perhaps not a bad idea but the execution poorly thought out.

I won't be chasing an increasingly shitty online experience. I imported chromecasts before they were ever released here and had them connected via vpn to a US vps before services like Netflix went global. The pricing and content were really good value back then. Increasingly the relationship with big companies feels abusive. We are moving more towards self hosting, using physical media and changing lifestyle. Disconnecting isn't so bad.

Australia does not have a bill of rights. Our freedoms are guaranteed by our participation in the electoral process which is very high. This government governs with a large majority and the social media legislation is broadly popular with parents and older people.

The law of unintended consequences will apply. The legislation has been written in such a way that there is some flexibility in the application and there are some safeguards but its not directly addressing some of the biggest social harms. It's primary purpose (despite the conspiracies) seems to be populism and being seen to do do something for the kiddies.

The much bigger social problem is gambling which is out of control here. The second, related problem, is the use of techniques and studies by the gambling industry in games and social media to increase engagement which is what is messing with peoples heads. The government does not dare to touch the gambling industry or stop algorithmic placement of content. This would cause immense damage to company profits and create lobbying pressure.

So far from my experience this has been kind of low impact for adult users with existing accounts. Social media companies obviously have extremely good demographic data on their existing users as targeted marketing and influence is their core business.

Unfortunately this legislation hasn't addressed any of my real concerns with social media (it's the algorithms and engagement farming) and it is creating new problems.

Like Pascal's wager that absurdity is an appeal to stupidity. I expect the people running these companies are more interested in a different type of wager. One where they risk the future of the company to pump shares and make a quick profit.

Insane decision. This whole bubble is irrational.

This is a question of priorities. Identify a problem, decide to fix it, then execute. It isn't about the particular solutions. Australia's gun control would not translate to a country like the USA and perhaps neither would its health care. First decide to put a person on the moon. Then execute. Only one country did that. It isn't that they can't solve problems like school shootings or affordable healthcare. There is no real will to do so. Not sure why exactly. It is a very strange place that defies expectations of how a developed country would behave.

That would be weird and uncomfortable traveling with a kid. Is it geographic or is this madness taking over the world? Seems like something that would get a place destroyed in reviews and lose them business.

Probably requires something that is almost there then a sponsor(s) to throw in developers or funding to get the rest of the way. On the EDA side CERN did a lot to lift Kicad to the point of being a credible alternative that could breakthrough like Blender. Both those projects are over 30 years old and for a lot of that time were dismissed as too difficult to use or lacking in features. FreeCAD is only 23 years old. I don't know what the code base is like but if a large org put a couple of good devs into it for a few years who knows.

It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now.

Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve got interested its probably going to have to wait for a government/ngo/scientific. Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back.

> It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now.

Management just reacts to environments created by governments. When ZIRP was around money was very easy to get hold of - too easy. Now it's really hard because businesses have to beat government bond interest rates, which are guaranteed, to get debt/investment.

> Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve

Valve is not a rogue company.

> Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back

Your premise is wrong. It's impossible to leach off something that is freely given. This is like being angry because people don't all tip a street performer. The deal is it's free.

And your facts are wrong. Businesses fund a giant amount of OSS work.

Valve is rogue as in it does whatever its founder-owner wants it to do. It's neither beholden to what public shareholders want nor to what private investors want. Founder-CEOs are laughably powerless in comparison. When the company is publicly traded, even founder-CEOs who are still majority owners are powerless in comparison, because when their minority co-owners want out their net worth goes down considerably and they tend to really not want that.

That's a strange definition of rogue, though.

IMO the primary limiting factor in FreeCAD at this point is OpenCascade, the CAD kernel, and that is owned by a large org: CapGemini, which has 350,000 employees.

OCC is the domain where FreeCAD's biggest limitations (fillets, chamfers, draft, thickness) are found, and the design of its API is part of why the topological naming problem was so difficult to mitigate.

You need more than a couple of good devs to solve this, or CapGemini would have. CAD kernels are one of the hardest possible things to write in a way that is bug-free, which is why there are so few of them.

I think it is possible that OpenCascade will get more attention because of EDF (french multinational power company) and the French atomic energy commission's involvement in SALOME. Things do seem to be slightly improving.

Making money and complying with the law. They are obligated to do both. In many countries laws are still enforced.

Protecting their app store revenues from competition exposes them to scrutiny from competition regulators and might be counter productive.

Many governments are moving towards requiring tech companies to enforce verification of users and limit access to some types of software and services or impose conditions requiring software to limit certain features such as end to end encryption. Some prominent people in big tech believe very strongly in a surveillance state and we are seeing a lot of buy in across the political spectrum, possibly due to industry lobbying efforts. Allowing people to install unapproved software limits the effectiveness of surveillance technologies and the revenues of those selling them. If legal compliance risks are pushing this then it is a job for voters, not Google to fix.

Complying with the law is just another way of protecting your money. I have no doubt if they would break laws if they judged it better for the bottom line --- in fact I have little doubt they're already doing so. On the flip side, if there were ruinous penalties for their anticompetitive behaviors (i.e., in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars) they might change course.

Certainly voters need to have their say, but often their message is muffled by the layers of political and administrative material it passes through.

It could have been. The platform got taken over by a very different culture and has tended to serve different purposes.

The web solves problems that are almost impossible to properly solve with a terminal, particularly with rendering of more complicated languages and display and interaction with sophisticated visualisations.

Pushing the terminal further while maintaining compatibility, performance and avoiding a terminal war with incompatible protocols is going to be a struggle.