There have been calls in the Netherlands (perhaps even at the EU level) to ban filtered cigarettes, for the simple reason that they are misleading and offer no protection, but are harmful to the environment because of the non-degradable micro-plastics.
Part of the problem is that vapes easily let you ingest a lot more nicotine than cigarettes. Researchers in the Netherlands found that some teens are vaping so much they effectively have the nicotine intake of a three pack a day tobacco addiction. This is due to a combination of (illegal) vapes being available in all sorts of fruity and hip child-friendly flavours, illegal vapes simply containing more nicotine, and vapes coming in reservoirs good for 9000 or so 'puffs'.
If you stuck with plain vapes bought through a legal channel, that risk factor would have been absent.
Is nicotine a problem, though? I'm not a cigarette or vaping guy. I do like a nicotine pouch, and I love an evening pipe. My understanding is that nicotine is not much of a problem, but the smoke / vape contaminants are where the real hazard lies.
For many demographics nicotine by itself poses a clear health risk. Basically that's pregnant women and anyone under 25 whose brains are still developing, according to the CDC. The WHO further states that nicotine use also increases cardiovascular risk, and that's for everyone. This last one was new to me too until a while ago (although fortunately I never take nicotine in any form).
That is what is left if you ignore the big one, which is its addictiveness. By itself that is probably not directly harmful, but the ways of consuming nicotine mostly are. Nicotine pouches carry some health risks, but are obviously not nearly as bad as snus and other crap like that containing tobacco.
I feel like the addictiveness isn't the big one? Playing with fidget spinners can be addictive, but there's no push to put warning labels on them.
As for the nicotine: yes, it's not great for your cardiovascular system. One Juul pod per day probably twice as bad as drinking three Starbucks grande drip coffees. However, the harm reduction of vaping is profound. Smoked tobacco is just devastatingly worse: smoke has carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, acrolein, and these are on top of the radioactive polonium and lead isotopes.
It's crazy seeing a lot of fearmongering (not saying that's what you're doing, but it is certainly a prevailing narrative) about vaping when, per the data, it's the strongest smoking cessation tool available outside prescription drugs and a massive harm reduction even if it's just a permanent substitute.
Sensible. Add in a 'Nee, flikker op met je kutcookies' button for cookie consent banners, and you're golden.
This 'maybe later' dark pattern seems to have gained so much traction that UX folk just use it because everyone uses it. There is probably some handwavy reason for it that amounts to not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive, but it just ends up being another grain of sand on the micro-annoyance pile of today's tech.
Consent-O-Matic handles those kutcookies for me, but an interesting feature would be to use these fancy new "decision models" to determine the correct explitive to use in the No,-button text based on (the context of the element on) the current page.
> not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive
In their refusal, while (accidental) acceptance is always definitive...
EDIT: In another thread this is called the ratchet of consent. Apt.
Keeping track of your kids' homework is your concern? Doesn't it only become your concern, briefly, when the school contacts you about your kid not getting their homework done?
As a parent people from prior generations do not get the current situation. I actually agree that this is a useful use of the agentic work tools - and it’s the only case I mentioned above I’ve used it for successfully, if not saving of time.
Homework isn’t assigned in class any more. It’s posted on dozens of inscrutable websites in weird UX’s that are impossible for any single human to understand. Children are mystified, parents confused, teachers at their wits end.
A few times a week children miss some website or queue from some system, teachers can’t get things to share properly, this needs tending, they need to photograph this and upload that to this place as well as that but not the other one.
It’s truly remarkably astounding. I have serious doubts frontier models can navigate it either honestly. But this is in fact where I see the most chance of using these tools.
“Computers at school” is the worst idea ever, and no one who hasn’t experienced the clusterfuck of middle school in 2026 can understand it. It makes the world of the movie Brazil seem utopian.
Btw I did this Muse, giving it the ability to use its cred vault to log into her school information system and read through all the crap and other websites and collate the homework’s and their due dates, adding to my child’s calendar when they’re due and a reminder the day before with a link to the calendar. I had model the workflow formally (I do this with all LLMs for procedures) and set it up to run daily. We shall see!
Overall it was not bad. The cred vault is useful. But I’m not giving meta any information that I wouldn’t otherwise be fine with disseminating and I feel the burden the school puts on us vs the information loss is worth the trade.
Thanks! First meaningful use of an OpenClaw like system.
I'm not the person you're asking, but in general, I would also stay on top of my child's obligations - homework, chores, etc. I don't want the first sign of trouble to be a call from a teacher, or the complete absence of clean clothes for them to wear in the morning.
You don't teach children responsibility by removing yourself completely from that equation
You equally don't teach them responsibility by always being there as the backstop though. I think missing a couple of homeworks is quite a low-stakes thing that can teach them a lot about responsibility, failure, and how to recover from it.
A lot of kids now seem to go into adulthood having never been allowed to fail, and it can really mess them up the first time it inevitably happens.
There is quite a large gap between checking in with your kid and having an AI analyse their homework and assignments and raising an alarm if anything appears to slip. The latter is a solid WHUP-WHUP-WHUP-WHUP-WHUP on the helicopter parent spectrum.
Missing homework once or twice is part of life and a really good life lesson with low risk besides.
OTP works with a password manager too. I have Authy on my Android, and Pass on my Linux computers. The second is backed up properly. This approach just means that enabling 2FA (which is mostly OTP in any case) just means registering the OTP URI in two locations instead of one.
Additional benefit: I can generate an OTP for any service protected like this without having to get my phone from wherever it is.
It's a dumb thing to do too. If you have a website, you control what it says. For a shop or restaurant it's totally fine to just show a nice photo with your name, opening hours, address, and contact details, and just link to whatever social media accounts and reservation/delivery ordering platform you use.
It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in social media account for some reason.
Not having a normal website means that potential customers who search for you get hit by login-walls for Instagram and Facebook if they're not on it, or 'you need an app for this' with crap like TikTok. It also makes my (volunteer) job of mapping the area around me harder, because I'm most certainly not going to bother to enter any additional info about your business if I have to go to Instagram or Facebook (and in the OpenStreetMap community I'm not alone in that).
My experience is most restaurant websites are either outdated, offline, or hacked and showing some malware page. While the social media page is up to date.
While all of then problems you list are real, small restaurant owners don’t have the time or skills to run a website, having a social media and listing on the maps apps is enough.
I agree. If a business decided to only be on Facebook or Instagram, then they're choosing the path of hiding themselves from the open web. I wouldn't even bother to update their info on OSM.
A lot of people today, particularly young people, no longer use the open web in a browser. They only use the social-media walled gardens through phone apps. Even for some newspapers etc. that might have existed first as websites, they use instead the official phone apps. So, a restaurant making its own website is not as important in 2026 as you think.
I think it's a very sad state of affairs, but I find even myself trusting the Facebook page more than the actual website for many places, since you can see the latest updates on Facebook (and how recent they are), while the website could be completely outdated with no way to tell it.
Edit: ah, there it is. This site is so crappy loading this weird code that fucks up the clipboard takes a minute. You can tell it is loaded when the text selection colour changes to light blue instead of whatever you normally have.
This is better explained elsewhere in this thread, but it boils down to a totally valid trademark dispute over a company calling itself Automatic.css which supplies services for WordPress installs.
This rings true to me. I am looking at setting up my own online store, and if you sell (legal!) stuff which Shopify Payments disallows, but Stripe does allow, you end up looking at WooCommerce (a very popular WordPress plugin) pretty fast.
Except they don't:
https://exposetobacco.org/wp-content/uploads/Cigarette-Filte...
There have been calls in the Netherlands (perhaps even at the EU level) to ban filtered cigarettes, for the simple reason that they are misleading and offer no protection, but are harmful to the environment because of the non-degradable micro-plastics.
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