The UK’s generational tobacco ban might not work. I’m supporting it anyway.

Tobacco bans are starting to look a lot less radical, despite a lack of evidence. As the parent of two little girls, I often think about how their childhood is different from mine. The seven-year-old is learning about AI at school. The five-year-old is given internet-based homework every week. And they are both absolutely repulsed by the idea of smoking. That was not the prevailing sentiment when I was young. My parents smoked. The customers at our family’s restaurant smoked. Cartoon characters smoked. My friends and I would buy little cigarette-box-shaped packets of sugary white sticks and pretend to smoke in the playground. Smoking was a central part of our culture. Which is why the UK’s recent passing of a generational sales ban on tobacco products feels like such a big deal. As part of the Tobacco and

Vapes Act 2026 , retailers are prohibited from selling tobacco products to anyone born after January 1, 2009, in perpetuity. It doesn’t matter when those people turn 18—or 38 or 68, for that matter. It will always be illegal to sell to anyone born after that date. This is what’s described as an “endgame” approach. While many tobacco control strategies—such as taxation or gory imagery—aim to reduce consumption, policies like the UK’s are designed to eliminate it entirely . It’s a new approach, and no one knows whether it will work. The Maldives was the first country to implement a generational smoking ban, in November last year. It’s too soon to say how that has panned out. Nor do we know if these laws will even last. In 2022, New Zealand passed a similar generational sales ban as part of a broader anti-smoking law. But it was never enacted—the law was repealed by a new government in February 2024. In the UK, both major parties support the ban. But Nigel Farage, whose right-wing party has seen a recent surge in support, has promised that “the generational smoking ban will not last long if Reform gets the chance to start rebuilding our mismanaged country.” Chris Bostic, an attorney and former policy director for the advocacy group Action on Smoking and Health, says he and his colleagues began promoting the idea of a generational ban in the United States 11 years ago. Back then, they struggled to win support, even from major health charities. “People said we were crazy … [and] that this was impossible,” he says. Opponents argued that bans would infringe on personal freedoms. “The public health argument is: Well, what about freedom from addiction?” says Britta Matthes, a tobacco control researcher at the University of Bath in the UK. Most people who smoke began when they were teenagers, want to quit , and wish they’d never started . Tobacco is arguably the most harmful consumer product of all time. It will kill half its users who don’t quit, according to the World Health Organization. It also kills people who don’t smoke. Of the 7 million who die from tobacco every year, 1.6 million are nonsmokers who were exposed to secondhand smoke, according to the WHO. Generational sales bans are a long-term strategy that will only protect future smokers. Most experts agree that people who already smoke should be a main consideration for any policy, and that a multipronged approach is probably the best way to go. Janet Hoek at the University of Otago, who has explored tobacco control policies in New Zealand, believes that enforcing very low limits on nicotine levels and banning filters—an environmental scourge that does not make smoking safer, as many people believe—might be a “powerful combination,” for example. But preventing teenagers from starting to smoke in the first place is an enticing prospect, even among the majority of people who smoke . And it’s starting to look a lot less radical. The US has quietly been making progress on a smaller scale. Since 2021, Brookline, a town in the Boston area, has banned the sale of tobacco products to anyone born after January 1, 2000. The idea has spread. Today there are 23 towns in Massachusetts with similar bans, says Bostic. Nine towns across Minnesota, New York, and California have implemented other endgame policies. The UK law has normalized the idea more than ever, he adds. His colleagues are already fielding calls from health agencies around the world. “People [are] saying, Wow I can’t believe the UK

just did this—can we do this here? ” he says. Norms change. Like many other millennials, I vividly remember my first night out after a ban on indoor smoking took effect. My clothes didn’t stink! My hair still felt clean! And my throat wasn’t scratchy the next morning! Now that’s just normal. I hope a tobacco-free world can be the new normal for my kids. The country wants to become a global leader in brain implants. Strong government support is expected to help accelerate that process. Researchers are decoding how signals move between body and brain, with implications for how we understand and treat conditions from obesity to anxiety. The next step in the youth quest is a technology called chemical reprogramming. In an early step towards artificial wombs, a biotech company claims it’s developed a “fully artificial” chicken egg. Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more. Privacy Policy Thank you for submitting your email! It looks like something went wrong. We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@ with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.

Godot says bye bye AI, bans vibe-coded contributions

'We can’t trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it,' say maintainers who previously called the flood of vibe-coded pull requests 'demoralizing' Vibe coders apparently don't understand what their AI servants write - at least that’s what the team behind open-source game engine Godot seems to be implying with a new policy that cracks down on AI-generated contributions. The Godot team announced on Tuesday that they were in the process of rewriting their contribution policy to prohibit almost all use of AI from contributors, citing an overwhelming number of pull requests that have poured in, many of which appear to be AI-generated. Nor, the maintainers suggested, can many heavy AI users be relied on to respond meaningfully to review feedback. “AI cannot take responsibility, and we ca

n’t trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it,” the Godot maintainers said in their announcement. The maintainers described AI pull requests as “demoralizing” for the Godot team, echoing comments made earlier this year when maintainer Rémi Verschelde said AI pull requests were increasingly draining and demoralizing wastes of time. AI PRs, one game studio that uses Godot noted earlier this year, are largely garbage, come from users who don’t understand what they’re proposing, and are largely “a total shitshow.” The Godot team said that it now recognizes the problem isn’t going away, so it’s time to do something about it. “Accordingly, we are in the process of updating our contribution policies, including adding a stricter policy on AI contributions,” they said. For starters, new contributors (defined as anyone with three or fewer merged pull requests) will be required to get explicit permission from maintainers if they want to submit new features or significant refactoring to Godot's codebase. This, the team said, is a bid to exclude vibe coders and AI agents and nurture a group of contributors who understand the Godot codebase and are willing to communicate with the team to learn more about it. On that note, contribution discussions will be required to remain human-to-human, too: No AI agents or bots clogging up the comms channels, unless they're being used to translate between languages. “We need to ensure that people who choose to review PRs feel their time is well spent,” the Godot maintainers explained. As for AI code itself, any autonomous agent-authored contributions or vibe-coded garbage will continue to result in an auto-ban from the team’s GitHub repo, and the team is extending that ban on AI code to include a prohibition on the use of AI to generate any substantial piece of code. “AI assistance should be limited to menial things (like code completion, regex, or find and replace),” the team explained. “If you do use AI in some capacity to author code, you must disclose it in the PR discussion.” The policy has yet to be formally amended, and the Godot maintainers didn’t say when exactly they’d release the update. Needless to say, vibe coders and AI agents aren’t welcome even now, so don’t push your luck. Vibe coding has shown other signs of falling out of favor lately as horror stories about deleted databases and wiped drives continue to pile up. Just last week, the chairman of IT consulting service Infosys predicted that vibe coding wasn’t something professionals should be worried about as there’s more to writing good software than coding. “Given that AI is a much larger and disruptive technology transition than ever before, the questions are louder and the doubts are more insistent,” Nandan Nilekani said in a speech at the company’s AGM last week. “While we will embrace the best coding tools and improve our productivity, there is much more to do in the software development life cycle.” Context, Nilekani said, is paramount in software development. Based on the vibe-coded disaster that Godot has dealt with, AI doesn’t seem quite capable of grasping that important element. ®

How to Build an AI Chat Endpoint in with the Telnyx AI Assistants API

Most "add an AI assistant to my app" tutorials stop at the demo. They show you how to call an LLM and print the response, then leave the...