Geo blocking the UK satisfies any age verification, otherwise the site owner would have to check if their content is considered adult in the UK and implement something.
Never know when one of your posts might gain serious traction. Not worth the risk. Very easy to find many examples of people making decisions thinking “I/we will never be big enough for that to be relevant” only to be haunted by that decision later. Classic example: partnership agreements/contracts between friends and family on small endeavors.
> IMO a small blog website is not going to get pulled-up for this
Well, maybe not the typical engineering blog but I think if you're a puritan some posts/texts from Aphyr probably reaches borderline "adult content", so I'm not that surprised Aphyr rather play it safe and also make a point at the same time.
It's probably a political point, but I think your comparison over sells how inconvenient it is for someone to geoblock one small country and the headache if anything did happen. It's not much more effort than doing nothing really?
And clearly users in the UK can find their own way to read it if they like, so the cost is also small there.
Considering that there is multiple "why is this blocked in the uk" comments on every single one of these posts maybe the UK isn't such a small country. Geoblocking a decent chunk of your readership would be a pretty big inconvenience for a writer I would imagine.
the culture section of this writeup links to explicitly adult/erotic content in the footnotes and discusses 'adult themes' directly. his caution seems reasonable.
Have you even read the shit politicians are either pulling or trying to these days? There is no amount of paranoia that is too little when talking about things like cross national prosecution, laws regarding users not considered adults, and age verification.
It's self-imposed, I think? curl connects to the same aphyr.com in both cases, but when connecting from the UK it receives a different response body. Probably sensible I expect, if you just want things to work, legally speaking.
>... mandates removing illegal content, restricting access to harmful material, and implementing age verification, with Ofcom enforcing compliance. Violations can result in massive fines of up to 10% of global turnover or £18 million.
I guess some people either figure it's easier to block the UK or do so on principle as a protest against the thing.
You seem to agree that two is not a good number. Better bring four then, so that you're not left with only two after your mishap.
Or bring only two, but step on one immediately, to get rid of the cursed pair situation, and also to get the clumsiness out of the way early. Old sailor's trick.
I wrote this coincidentally a few days before the recent news about Tailwind’s layoffs and revenue downturn due to AI’s impact on doc use leading to their paid product distribution being affected.
In my own AI-heavy workflows, I’ve noticed that AI tools are great at generating layouts quickly, but the results tend to converge on a certain look and feel and often lack polish around responsiveness and design details.
Templates still accelerate my builds. They encode decisions, constraints, and taste that I don’t want to recreate from scratch... even with the help of a coding agent.
As AI becomes more central to how we build things, do templates continue to retain value, or is this just a transitional phase?
I've made a few small projects that were built almost exclusively with Cursor (if that's considered vibe coding, I'm not sure). They don't have many users.
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