This has happened before with LCD panels. I remember my mother’s work laptop had a 1900x1200 panel (back when they were still 4:3 aspect ratio). It was a mid-tier ThinkPad, not cheap but not crazy expensive.

A few years later, panel makers started pushing widescreen formats and user friendly language to “help us understand and make informed choices” like HD and FHD.

The resolution of HD? 1280x720.

High-definition was already a concept, but the idea of calling panels that were a huge step back in resolution “high-def” was exactly how they managed to extract more from consumers for less.

I’m sure they’ll find a way to mislead people into buying overly expensive RAM they don’t actually need.

“You totally need ECC for your HTPC bro, wouldn’t want cosmic rays to mess with your movies!”

Building off this, the last time I remember anyone being a copywriter at a software company I’d worked for was IBM in 2015.

They simply expected the developers to write the documentation. Strangely, this actually worked some of the time, but is usually why modern docs are cobbled together and half-finished, or omitted entirely.

Say what you will about AI being used in this way, but it’s still fuckloads better than the current trend of putting everything on fucking Discord jfc whyyyyy

The speed is slower but the slope is slippery all the same.

Beware the fallacy fallacy.

What makes you think it will stop there? Once the groundwork has been laid for this framework, all they need to do is roll out v2 which requires a little more from the user, etc.

Most servers won’t check this bit at first because they don’t need to or care, but once the technology is in place, it won’t be long before legislation mandating the checking of that bit begins to roll out affecting industries and providers that deal in topics and goods deemed to be bad for the children (it won’t stop at porn).

Once that happens, minors will learn ways around the check (or parents will be lazy and give their kids access to adult logins, etc), and the “need” to enact stronger checks will be pushed for and…

Put all of it together and you’re heading towards an Internet without anonymity in a couple of decades.

Any sort of hardware attestation that non-trivially identifies a person to verify their age is going to be used to track and exploit people.

Anything less than that isn’t going to be effective for the supposed purpose.

The moment we need photo ID or government issued keys to access computer systems, things will get a lot more ugly real fast.

The Bethesda Model™