As a commercial lawyer, I use AI every day.

Unlike much of the commentary around it, it doesn’t save me much time. If anything, it makes me slower and more careful.

If I am lazy and ask it for an answer I have to check almost every legal principle it gives me, because it confidently makes things up.

What I find it useful for is thinking. Where I might once have bounced an issue off a colleague and then made the call, I now use AI in that role and still make the call.

If you’re using it to do the bulk of your drafting or to give advice without verification, you’re not a modern lawyer. You’re outsourcing judgment, and that will almost certainly end in an avoidable mistake.

Judgment is what clients actually pay lawyers for. And it’s the one thing you can’t responsibly delegate.

Prohibition doesn't eliminate the demand for social media in under-16s; it simply drives it underground, where parent visibility and accountability collapse. Tech savvy teens will sidestep mainstream platforms in favour of peer to peer systems. Many are already using private discord servers to chat with their schoolmates.

Like the speakeasies of the Prohibition era, a digital underground will emerge as the new medium of online communication. In the same way that western governments “fix” the housing crisis by inflating demand instead of increasing supply, they now try to solve social media excess by restricting access and forcing the youth toward a digital wild west.

The end result isn’t increased safety but opacity. In this fragmented digital ecosystem, parents, educators and regulators lose visibility, whilst digital subcultures multiply exponentially. Algorithmic and advertising exposure may shrink, but echo chambers, misinformation, and exploitation risk will expand. All this, just as AI goes mainstream and it becomes increasingly difficult to tell whether you're interacting with a human or a machine.

Liberating for the competent and opportunistic; extremely dangerous for the naïve.

Anon, you're analysing what they're doing (digital IDs, censorship, surveillance, social control), but you’re not fully stepping back to question why they need this now. You see through the “protecting kids” rhetoric as a façade, but you haven’t fully confronted the structural collapse and loss of control that governments and legacy institutions are panicking about.

It’s not about control in a generic sense. It's that their entire method of governance is becoming obsolete. Centralised systems (financial, media, political) are losing grip because of decentralised tech, alternative economies, and a cultural shift away from institutional trust. Digital ID, censorship, and "protect the children" are not moves of confidence; they’re moves of desperation to keep relevance.

Been a minute, but seems more relevant than ever...

Having a look at the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill, just released today in Australia. Both sides of government appear to support it.

The bill targets "providers" of age-restricted platforms, requiring them to take "reasonable steps" to prevent underage (under 16) access.

This gets me excited about Nostr:

- Nostr doesn't have a centralised provider or entity that could comply with these obligations.

- If a relay or instance of Nostr is primarily used for social interactions, it might fall under the "age-restricted social media platform" definition. But without a central entity, enforcing compliance becomes impractical, if not impossible.

In short, there's no way (that I'm aware of) to enforce age restrictions or privacy obligations in respect of Nostr.

Spread the word.