Hi, OP here. Not sure what else to add beyond the first paragraph of the article:
> The rating itself is fine: the target audience is well past that age anyway. What baffles me is the logic.
I don't mind the 18+ label, even though it's up to the users what they use the app for, whether it's tracking sex, a partner's health, or personal wellbeing.
But I do find the history of age ratings and categories in the App Store and the limits they have to be quite hilarious, and figured I might as well write them down.
Hi OP! I’ll share what I mentioned below in hopes of a response from you directly, because I’m genuinely curious to hear what you think:
Seems like people should be of whatever age we consider mature before they start capturing intimate data about themselves on random platforms. If we don’t think you’re able to understand the risks of pursuing your reproductive impulses, do we think you can measure the risks of sharing data about those impulses on a platform you don’t control?
Local data or not, if I were the steward of a marketplace I’d use that position to create this kind of teaching moment for pre-developed consumers. If young people had been warned since the mid 2000s of how much of their intimacy they were handing over to Meta, ByteDance, etc. before they started, the world would certainly be better off.
Hey! I don’t disagree that people of any age should think twice before putting personal data (intimate or not) into any platform.
My point wasn’t about lowering the age rating. The issue is that Apple doesn’t have a real category for this kind of wellbeing at all. The age gate itself is sensible, but what’s funny is why it exists. It’s not "because we carefully considered how to protect teens’ data", it’s "because in 2009 the Store was drowning in farting apps, and we’ve been patching around that ever since."
Urm, did you read a different article then the one linked?
Because there's isn't really an argument innit - at least none that I took notice of. Isn't it just exploring the reasons why it is like it is today? They even made it abundantly clear in the beginning (and in the comments here) that the rating is fine for the app
And for what conceivable reason would this need to have sure underage people aren't using it?
A period tracker has relevance in the context of a sexual relationship, but there is really nothing about it that needs to be censored from underage people. It is not explicit content. It's a specialized journal, that's it
I bet that the ratings are dictated not by usability but by liability.
Yes, people younger than 18 engage in sex, but this has different legal consequences than for people past 18, and Apple has no interest to wade through that legal quagmire.
> Hi, OP here. Not sure what else to add beyond the first paragraph of the article:
I would imagine that the confusion arose because they read past that sentence. You wrote that you don’t mind that the app you specifically made for adults to use got the rating that it did and then sort of talk about how you don’t find the rating system to be rational.
I couldn’t tell if the subject of this article is “I think my intimacy tracking app shouldn’t have an adult rating because a user could use it for general wellbeing” or “I don’t like Fortnite”
That’s fair feedback, thank you. The point I was trying to make wasn’t "my app deserves a lower rating", it was "I built something for adults and realised there isn’t actually a correct category for it at all."
Once I noticed that gap, I went digging into the history to understand why the App Store age ratings and categories are the way they are, hence this archeological detour of a post.
Root cellars are far more stable than a ground-floor garage in my case: steady temperature throughout the year, low airflow. Some wooden cabinets are also superior to modern chambers, i.e cedar acts like a humidity buffer, which is why miso makers still swear by cedar koji boxes.
To call it a wooden cabinet might be a wee bit generous. Actually a broken wardrobe he probably found on the side of the road with broken hinges on one of the doors so he nailed it shut. :lol:
I wish. No-fault evictions aren't a thing in Scotland, but I'd still struggle to explain the whole "I plumbed a cold line for salami" thing to the landlord.
OP here. Yeah, "copyright law" was a lazy shorthand, but it reads better than "tortious interference."
PureGym's T&Cs [1] have a ridiculously long "PIN abuse policy" (probably meant to stop people sharing with mates). They can cancel memberships or even retroactively charge for gym use if you "knowingly provided your PIN to another individual."
I'm not a lawyer and don't fancy being the test case for whether entering your PIN on a third-party website/app counts as "knowingly providing" it. Given how their app works, I suspect they might just ban a bunch of accounts instead.
Though now that I think about it, the squat racks are always packed, so maybe I should just distribute the app to people who go at the same time as me.
> I'm not a lawyer and don't fancy being the test case for whether entering your PIN on a third-party website/app counts as "knowingly providing" it.
I guess I'm assuming that you would design the iOS app to collect and store the PIN number on the device, and never ever share it, since (if I read the post correctly) that's all you'd need to get to basic auth. I take your point that that might still be considered "sharing with a third party" but honestly I suspect that (a) they wouldn't notice for a long long time and (b) they would typically start by sending a c&d, not hiring a team top-notch lawyers and going straight to court unless you're really wealthy and there's some prize to be had for all of those legal fees.
Yeah, screenshot on Monday, messed with the app that evening, tried using it Tuesday morning -- dead.
I've seen people on PureGym's Twitter successfully refreshing screenshots weekly though, and the API response suggests the same.
That being said, I couldn't find a validation endpoint to check if mine got invalidated by something specific (maybe signing out?) or if there's some other magic happening.
I wonder if opening the app invalidated it, and those people who had it working just screenshot once.
My gym has a similar system but I realised it's time based and the app functions without Internet. I installed the app onto an old android with no sim, logged in at home over WiFi and it successfully regenerated QRs without data
OP here! Appreciate you actually pulling examples instead of just dropping "this is AI".
> There's a mixture of em dashes joining words and double hyphens spaced between words, suggesting the former were missed in a find and replace job.
The em dash conspiracy in the comments today is amazing -- I type double hyphens everywhere, and some apps (e.g a Telegram bot I made for drafts, or the macOS' built-in auto-correct) replace them with em dashes automatically–I never bother to edit those out (ok, now this one I put here on purpose).
> It's just a ZIP archive with delusions of grandeur
> Clear examples of LLM fluff that don't "add facts or colour to the story".
Yeah, no that's fair enough, should've known better than to attempt humour on HN.
I've got to say though, pkpass is a ZIP archive, and no ZIP archive should require one to spend 3 hours to sign it.
I enjoyed the humour.
(We’re heading towards a sad world if any attempt at levity in an article is interpreted as evidence of LLM usage by critical killjoys.)
Edit: total random thought: something in your prose shouted ‘Brit’ to me very quickly. Is it possible that part of this is simply cultural differences in humour and writing, and over-interpretation of subtle differences as evidence of LLM use?
Or do LLMs just write in a subtlety more British style because, well, Shakespeare and Dickens and Keats and Milton? Or does ChatGPT just secretly channel PG Wodehouse?
Authors use humour as a form of connection with their audience. It's a way of saying hey I'm a human and I have the same human experiences as you dear reader. Take the first paragraph for example:
> Wednesday, 11:15 AM. I'm at the PureGym entrance doing the universal gym app dance. Phone out, one bar of signal that immediately gives up because apparently the building is wrapped in aluminum foil
It says, "Hey I'm a human who goes to the gym and experiences the same frustrations as you do". Now imagine for a second this paragraph was written by AI. The AI has never been to the gym, the AI doesn't feel impatience trying to pass through the turnstile, the AI has never experienced the anxiety of a dodgy internet connection in a large commercial building. The purpose of any humour in this paragraph is completely undermined if you assume it was actually written by AI.
So please don't conflate being anti-LLM with being anti-humour. It's just the opposite. We want humour because we want to feel a connection with our fellow humans and for the same reason we should also want writing that comes from a human, not a machine.
> So please don't conflate being anti-LLM with being anti-humour. It's just the opposite.
I'm not.
I'm trying to analyse, or hypothesise, why this author's particular writing style seemed to trigger people's nascent LLM warning heuristics.
I considered the humour, because, well, other people brought it up. From the surrounding discussion, it seemed that the jocular writing style was one of the points generating suspicion.
Does sound like some people just don't get the humour which is fine, personally I liked it (but then I am british).
British people do tend to have a fairly humorous indirect way of communicating that can take some getting used to for people from other cultures, but that doesn't mean we're all secretly LLMs
FWIW, I found "It's just a ZIP archive with delusions of grandeur" pretty funny and for me it was an example of a human adding (relevant) colour to the content.
I swear some folks have just been normalised to the shit writing that AI does so much that they look for tricks like punctuation rather than just reading the damn text. Although maybe they're just blatting the whole thing into ChatGPT and asking it to summarise, or determine if it's AI generate.
FWIW I enjoyed the article and the humour, and I don't know where the AI conspiracy is coming from – I wish I could get the AI to write copy this good. So thanks, that was a fun read!
> The rating itself is fine: the target audience is well past that age anyway. What baffles me is the logic.
I don't mind the 18+ label, even though it's up to the users what they use the app for, whether it's tracking sex, a partner's health, or personal wellbeing.
But I do find the history of age ratings and categories in the App Store and the limits they have to be quite hilarious, and figured I might as well write them down.