title text: 'Well, there's speculation that it's due to a mantle hotspot.' --a geologist who's trying to cover up the fact that they didn't hear your question

desktop link: https://xkcd.com/3221
mobile link: https://m.xkcd.com/3221
explainxkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3221

This Afroman trial is giving me life.

Cops raided Afroman's house for no reason. They pointed guns at him and his kids, ransacked his house, and tried to disconnect his home security cameras. They didn't disconnect them all, and so were allegedly caught on camera stealing his money.

He then made a series of music videos using footage from his security camerasz and body cam footage. Now the cops are suing him for making the videos. The ACLU is defending him.

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/2m8NpGplUOM

It looks like the ⍼ saga has finally ended!

The unicode character '⍼' was a mystery first noticed in 2022: https://ionathan.ch/2022/04/09/angzarr.html. It's in the Unicode standard as a mathematical symbol. But no one could find any examples of it having been used, and no one knew what it represented. It was like the only record of an extinct species, fossilized in the Unicode standard.

But now someone has found the document it originally came from! It represents the angle 'Azimuth', and the symbol probably comes from the path light takes through a sextant. https://ionathan.ch/2026/02/16/angzarr.html

(@johncarlosbaez might appreciate this symbol!)

That was not the origin for this that I expected to read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_it

So, I have actually read the text of California law CA AB1043 and, honestly, I don't hate it. It requires operating systems to let you enter a date when you create a user account and requires a way for software to get a coarse-grained approximation of this that says either 'over 18' or one of three age ranges of under-18s. Importantly, it doesn't require:

• Remote attestation.
• Tamper-proof storage of the age.
• Any validation in the age.

In short, it's a tool for parents: it allows you to set the age of a child's account so that apps (including web browsers, which can then expose via JavaScript or whatever) can ask questions about what features they should expose.

In a UNIX-like system, this is easy to do, with a tiny amount of new userspace things:

• Define four groups for the four age ranges (ideally, standardise their names!).
• Add a /etc/user_birthdays file (or whatever name it is) that stores pairs of username (or uid) and birthdays.
• Add a daily cron job that checks the above file and updates group membership.
• Modify user-add scripts / GUIs to create an entry in the above file.
• Add a tool to create an entry in the above file for existing user accounts.

This doesn't require any kernel changes. Any process can query the set of groups that the user is in already.

If a parent wants to give their child root, they can update the file and bypass the check. And that's fine, that's a parent's choice. And that's what I want.

I like this approach far more than things that require users to provide scans of passports and other toxically personal information to be able to use services. If we had this feature, then the Online Safety Act could simply require that web browsers provide a JavaScript API to query the age bracket and didn't work unless it returned 'over 18'.