Mine is a large German bank; I’d rather not say which one specifically.

Lineage runs mine just fine, though it does require the google services addon

In the early days of the steam engine’s success, what helped it find an economic footing was the need to pump water from coal mines. At the time, logistics of transporting things over large distances were difficult, so having the coal supply on-site was an obvious benefit. So while using a steam engine to pump water from a pool would be quite archaic and inefficient, but at least for emptying the pool, it could technically be used.

Of course, a locomotive moving the engine around would be entirely impractical for pumping a somewhat steady stream. Chlorinated water would also make for poor steam, I imagine.

I guess driving a scrubber back and forth would be possible, but I could do that more efficiently by hand. I drink less water, eat less coal, don’t require rails and skilled operators and I’m easier to transport to the site. I’m not sure how the carbon footprint for a human compares to that of extracting and processing iron, but it won’t be favourable if at least one human is involved.

The scrubber couldn’t be as large and heavy though. If you need a heavy scrubber, you’d also need a powerful motivator. That’s where a steam engine might have an edge over me: sheer power output.

To match that, you’d have to employ and pay multiple people. So if the steam engine’s rent seems cheaper than that…

Ah yes, let’s let the AI qualify AI code submissions.

At that point, why not automate the whole process? Have an AI guess what kind of software you might be interested in, slop it together, evaluate and criticise it, suggest amendments, evaluate the amendment, include it, build the product, ship it, install it directly to your machine for your convenience, then proceed to operate it for you so you can automate sloppy execution of a sloppy task you never wanted to do, in a sloppy tool you never asked you for a purpose a random generator slopped together without your input.

What the fuck is that README and why does it stink of slop?

I’m not qualified to tell if the code is just as sloppy, but I’m not touching that.

It identified my many-years-old phone with “360x760 pixels rendered at 3x density” screen as “recent, high-end display”. Bitch, this wasn’t even high-end when I bought it. It was small, it was cheap, it was barely “recent” when I bought it.

without the walls listening in and making decisions about doors.

I’m not sure what you mean with “walls listening in” when we’re talking about a public forum, but the doors are perfectly openable. As the creator stated elsewhere, you can unban individual pages or delete the whole list. The “decision” is more like a suggestion.

I understand you’d rather not have that suggestion preconfigured. I personally see no harm in it.

I admit I don’t know the whole story. I don’t know what evidence was produced to support the LLM claim and what efforts were made.

The few comments I read here seemed like some attempt to reconcile were made but fell apart. I can’t and don’t want to point fingers one way or the other, personal bias notwithstanding.

I just wanted to point out “he said something even though we said it’s wrong” isn’t a particularly strong argument. That’s just one party’s word against the other’s.

The difference between a proprietary, politically charged, censored echo chamber and an open source “do whatever you want” platform should be obvious though.

Free speech is about the right to say what you want, meaning the government isn’t supposed to repress you for it, but it doesn’t guarantee the opportunity to do so on other people’s private platforms. However, in this case, you’re free to host your own platform where you can say what you want.

As an aside, I’d like to point out the “Paradox of Tolerance” and the proposed resolutions: If you’re an advocate for free speech, extending that freedom to those seeking to undermine it empowers them to use it against that freedom. That way, “free speech for all” is a good intention paving the road to authoritarian hell.

Hence, it is reasonable to deny a platform for those hostile to your principle. Popper frames it as a form of self-defense, to compromise part of the principle to protect the rest. Others frame it as a social contract of mutual respect, whereby the people violating it also forfeit their own right to demand it.

Either way, if “free speech for all” is a self-defeating principle, an open society needs to accept some measure of illiberty for its enemies if it is to be defensible.

He ignored comments from our admins explicitly telling him he’s wrong, because it went against his narrative.

Idk, sounds to me like you’re equally ignoring comments from other parties telling you you’re wrong because it goes against your narrative too. “We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing” is hardly an argument.

That’s why this is a slugfest: "You’re wrong! “No, you’re wrong!” “No, we told you you’re wrong!” “Your telling me that I was wrong was also wrong!”

Reasserting conflicting claims like they’re facts isn’t worth jack shit.

The extra knowledge, research and development in everything from materials, human biology, life support systems, to just engineering management improvements yield absolutely massive benefits to life on earth, greatly outweighing the alternative.

This is the non-linear aspect of research, where discoveries and improvements in one field may prove useful for other fields as well. Not all research pays off, but you can’t predict what will and won’t, so the “duds” that end up going nowhere are just part of the cost for the bangers that change the world. And who knows, maybe one of those duds may end up going off much later still!

Not to mention inspiring people to enter STEM, especially girls who are still hugely underrepresented. Which has incredible benefits.

More brains and perspectives examining a given problem increases the chances for useful solutions. Getting women into STEM isn’t a diversity measure for diversity’s sake, but an enrichment of the mental resource pool.

because it is leaning towards profit focus instead of benefit focus

Now there’s a chorus I’ve heard a hundred times…

CEOs are lauded as visionary and it’s just not as engaging to read about crushed visions. Even if we disregard the whole “corporate talking pieces” and “journalists often stem from the social elite” parts, just the drive for engagement and clicks would explain a slant towards writing about great ideas rather than disappointing realism. How many people enjoy SciFi? How many love pedantic analyses why they’re absolutely unrealistic?

I mean, I love pedantry (as well as the genre itself), but I’m a minority and fine with it – stories can be fun without being realistic and disbelief can be suspended in favour of entertainment.

CEOs spouting bullshit shouldn’t be taken as stories for entertainment though, and much less printed in a serious manner. For them, critical disassembly should be the norm, mandatory even.

I doubt those changes would be PRed, merged, updated in my distro and somehow automatically pushed to my system in the blink of an eye. This isn’t Microslop we’re talking about who can force-push intransparent “fuck your settings” at the drop of a hat, and I’m certainly going to be much more wary of upcoming updates now. This isn’t my point of objection (yet - mandatory entry would be), but definitely a point of caution.

If they stick to malicious “here, you can ask for a date, but we can’t guarantee which date, if any, you’ll get” compliance, that isn’t perfect, but it’ll be good enough to make a joke out of tracking the date at all.

Besides, just this change being minor would be no reason not to keep pushing back against the law and airing our discontent about the direction they’re heading in, because the direction is definitely concerning.

The systemd PR also referred to a flatpak PR who said they had wanted that to allow for parental controls even before the law came. That’s a somewhat reasonable use case, in my opinion.

I’ll believe that if and when they actually force me to upload identification to prove that my birthday really is 1970-01-01 and my name really is Nunya Bissnis. Otherwise, it’s really no different from Steam asking my birthday when opening store pages or porn sites asking “click here jf you’re 18” and take my word for it.

So long as it’s being enforced just as well as the realName field, I maintain that it is indeed harmless. If the point is to have a hilariously ineffective solution as a fig leaf against a stupid law, I’ll prefer that to efforts to actually implement verification.

LLMs are highly impressive text generators, amazing facsimiles of human writing and wholly unsuited to anything involving semantic understanding and critical thought. You cannot generate facts, and it doesn’t understand how the patterns it analyses and reproduces relate to actual concepts or things, but they’re extremely “knowledgeable” about those patterns.

They’re a technological marvel, relentlessly abused by grifters posing as prophets to scam the gullible.

Unfortunately, the gullible are executives and representatives.

It doesn’t as long as other init systems exist

Of course, which is why I said it was “somewhat” central earlier in the thread: it’s not universal, even if systemd is widely used.

Other init systems generally also have ways to store data (not specifically dates, just in general), and some overarching standard for securely accessing them would be useful for intercompatibility, but that’s a mess as it stands anyway.

people can luckily choose, hopefully that will always be the case.

Also agreed. Just because I personally come down on the systemd side of the debate doesn’t mean everyone should have to use it. Standards are nice, but there always should be alternatives, in case a standard gets captured by twats (which kinda is the debate we’re having: whether systemd has started bowing to fascists significantly enough to warrant migrating away).

I believe that’s on purpose so people can easily accept it and they can do worse later.

That point, I disagree on, because systemd (not) implementing this doesn’t actually make it easier (or harder). Distros that want to comply would just write a file for it somewhere instead. Distros that don’t comply will just not implement any verification process.

What systemd does here is offer a solution to secure it centrally (see the commit discussion about the most efficient and reasonable way to wipe that info from memory again). Considering the whole issue, I think its impact on feasibility of verification is minor, while the advantages of standardisation make it preferable to a wild growth of uncontrolled alternatives.

Corporations are behind this, don’t forget that.

Another user pointed out the concept of anticipatory obedience to me, and in that context, corporations pre-emptively bowing to authoritarian surveillance is definitely a cowardly move. We agree on that.

Here’s to hoping this entire discussion becomes just as pointless as you expect the PR to become. If that’s what I end up being wrong about, I’ll gladly take the L for cynicism and the W for privacy.

there’s also a push for making opensource exempt from it

Let’s hope it succeeds. Actually, let’s hope the law is overturned entirely. And while we’re at it, let’s hope Meta fails, crashes, burns and takes all its bullshit down with it, but that’s only tangentially related.

It depends, if the purpose is age verification then yes I will oppose it.

Then I’ll not tell you what I intend to use that encrypted hash I’m writing to my app’s data storage for.

Any data storage can be abused. This one is transparent about its content, but I don’t see anything implying that you have to enter anything, let alone have to enter your actual birthdate. It can be used for parental controls, it can be used for age restrictions, but if I implement age verification, where I store that data on your machine is the least of your worries.

Where I store your ID on my machine, on the other hand, should be more concerning, and even more so the fact that I need your ID at all.

We can argue whether this is necessary, whether it can serve reasonable use cases (such as voluntary parental controls), but at the end of the day, it’s such a small and exchangeable part of the system that it’s not worth the shit people give systemd over it.

I think controlled, transparent storage is better than intransparent, and any storage is only as evil as the things using it. Target those things instead.

You’re right, and thanks for that and the second link too.

Still, as “bowing to fascist fuckery” goes, trying to figure out how to securely store a piece of data is hardly problematic. The Flatpak PR they cite also mentions that they wanted options for parental controls independently of the law, and it’s that part I’d be more concerned about, but still less than about the “upload your ID please, promise we won’t pull any fuckery with it- whoops” shit going on elsewhere.