Claude is only available to people over 18 years

> We have safety systems in place to detect if people under 18 may be using Claude and we’ll disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity.

So... kids can't use Claude Code _even with adult supervision_?

I remember when I was around 8-12, starting to realize that ageism was all around me. School life dictated by bells and boxes, with teachers whose obvious misunderstandings of the world were unquestionable. Rules dictating where I was able to go and what I was able to spend my paper route money on. Wars fought in my name, and police patrolling my streets, with no opportunity to object to their authority, by voting or any other means.

But I do remember that when I first gained access to BBSs (I think I was 10), and then a year or so later, basic shell internet access, that the world suddenly seemed much more egalitarian and communal.

I was able to read updates about the war in the Persian Gulf at my own pace and discretion. I was able to ask questions on services like FIDOnet on any topic I could imagine, and get uncensored answers.

The internet was _unable_ to discriminate against me; my little shell invariably ran whatever command I typed, because it had no other way of functioning.

My kid is 11 now, and watching him navigate the world has made me realize that I wasn't imagining unfairness around me; it's real. A recent example: several times a year, he flies as an unaccompanied minor, and at 11 years of age, he's still treated like he's 4. He is required to stay with a airline representative at all times, who may not want to do the same things in the terminal that he wishes to do. He has to sit in the back of the plane. He has to deplane last. It's bizarre and infantilizing, and seems to be based on litigation aversion and not any actual safety impetus.

One of his favorite activities recently has been using LLM agents to mod classic video games, and he's gotten quite good at it. Are we about to force the internet to infantilize our children instead of acknowledging the information age as their birthright?

"The government already has our IDs" is missing the correlation between the ID and the service. They know your face and your name but not what you do on the internet. The website knows what you do on the internet but it isn't tied to your name. It's the tying them together which is the problem.

Which is why the people trying to do it always pull out the misdirect about ZK proofs. Those don't fix anything because a system that actually preserved privacy wouldn't be able to prove that the user is over 18, only that someone is over 18, not necessarily them. And that in turn means you're setting up a rug pull. You roll out a system which is indistinguishable from the perspective of ordinary people from the one that screws them, and then that system can't actually exclude minors so what follows is calls to change it to stop protecting privacy, at which point the people trying to collect everyone's ID will be arguing that you already have to show ID.

It also presumes you would even get a privacy-preserving implementation to begin with, which a pretty credulous assumption given how these things usually go.

Fear of a Black Hat, a rap mockumentary in the same vein as This is Spinal Tap, begins with a warning about the language in the movie that's essentially them repeating the offending words three or four times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fmaaZtINRU

Imagine telling a kid they have to learn arithmetic while there's a kid next to him with a calculator.

Imagine telling a kid they have to learn to paint the barn with a brush before they get to use the $12,000 spray rig.

Imagine telling a kid they have to learn to wash mom's car with a sponge and bucket when there's a drive-through car wash down the street.

Imagine telling a kid they have to master a Walmart 20" bicycle before they get to use the Trek Madone $16,000 road bike.

This idea that kids must have it maximally easy is ridiculous. Something broke with parenting in the last few decades because this isn't normal thinking. We are supposed to help children develop themselves into adults, not give the excuses not to. That's some goddamned lazy parenting.

> Banks by law require substantial PII in order to even do business with you.

And those laws are extremely invasive and should be repealed. It's offensive to have a law that de facto requires you to identify yourself in order to pay for a newspaper subscription or buy contraceptives over the internet.

But that's not the issue in this case. It's that the bank knows your name and what you buy -- already very bad -- but now you want to create a path to tying that information to everything you do on the internet.