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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 1st, 2024

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  • I can’t reconcile the fact that the entire discussion is about how we can control, based on user age settings at the OS level, the content people can access and you asking me what my proof is that the system is being created for control.

    I really don’t know how to respond because it’s self evident, isn’t it? It’s there in the law? Why else add the tag to the user? Like… I just…what? Of course it’s for fucking control. There’s no other reason to have it.

    As for a more broad general “the government wants to control”…I just… Look around? DMCA is a prime example. Or read people that are smarter than me about it.

    They even say why I’m the message

    Stores the user’s birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.

    Now I can hear you already. “But EFF says age verification is the real evil and this isn’t verification! It’s just a text tag any root user can change!”

    And that’s where I’m saying it isn’t. Now. But it will be. Who is pushing for this? Do you think they’ll be okay with a giant Linux loophole? Or will they try to close it? Is that not always the typical pattern with laws? Pass it then patch the loopholes.

    We’ve gone from “click to prove you’re 18” to “provide a date” to “provide an id” to “make the OS and other apps verify.”

    Why should I ever assume that it will stop at a simple plain text annotation? The slippery slope is documented. It’s real.


  • And I never said it was inherently bad.

    It’s the context. It’s the context. It’s the context. It’s the context.

    Please engage with me and the arguments i am making - not imagined narrow slices. This isn’t a high school debate where you get points for speed and word count.

    Let me restate: In the context of governments actively seeking to restrict access to information on the Internet, I think implementing ANY infrastructure that move towards the government’s ability to achieve their censorship is bad and shouldn’t be done.

    I’m not saying there’s no benefit to adding a plain text date field to user information. I’m not saying it’s the end of the world now. I’m not saying it’s verification.

    I’m saying use this as a point to stand up and fight and say “NO, You have no authority over the information I can access. And we should not give in because ‘for the children is a lie’ and they’re not actually trying to protect children while our government is RUN BY LITERAL CHILD FUCKERS.”


  • Is there a government push to verify my name and email before I can access content or is there a government push to have age verification be at the OS level? Could maybe that be a meaningful differentiator that makes “lul r u still using ur real name? Fucking Idiot” response not relevant?

    I understand the technical differences and that we can just put a bullshit date format passing value there. I’m not fucking stupid.

    My objection is that it is step 0. Before you can have an OS verify to meet government mandated verificaiton, you must create the value store.

    My objection is that we’re entertaining putting in the infrastructure that enables actual verification.


  • Because it will not be enough.

    Because they will come back and say “look at this loophole”

    “Think of the children” you’ll all say as you agree to give your government authority to determine what information you can or cannot access as “age appropriate” completely ignorant of what you’re handing over.

    This would be fine if it was just for you, but you’re trying to give my control over my system and what I can access away from me because you’re too short-sighted to see what comes after volunteer age reporting. And when that still doesn’t save the children, which it won’t, because it is NEVER ABOUT THE FUCKING CHILDREN ITS ALWAYS ABOUT CONTROL, you’ll tell me again that it’s just another little minor infraction. It’s just a little bit more than volunteer reporting.

    Afterall, won’t someone please think of the children?!


  • I can potentially shed some additional insight.

    Hear shock proteins are known as chaperones in that they are responsible for chaperoning proteins through the folding process. This process is important because I’m biochemistry (that is the chemistry proteins can do) shape is function. If you can look at the shape of a protein (specifically any site that does chemistry or is responsible for protein protein interactions), you can confidently predict the function of the protein.

    Shape is function.

    So the heat shock proteins (HSPs), are responsible for chaperoning the shape that dictates function. They derived their name because they were first noticed as being more expressed when you subjected cells to elevated heat ( or a heat shock). Increased temperature can cause proteins to have the wrong shape more easily, so the cells respond by making more chaperones!

    The research finds that we get fewer copies of those chaperones once the works were capable of procreating. This suggests that while the observable effects of what we call “aging” can be caused by many things. Aging more generally can be understood as a programmed winding down of our self maintenance machinery.

    Of course this is just a lens of viewing it from and may not be a complete picture. But it’s a very useful and productive one.




  • It’s not even strictly what capitalism is about. It’s some stupid bullshit interpretation that came out of the University of Chicago economics department.

    Seriously, go look at Adam Smiths wealth of nations. The only mention of the “invisible hand” is so different from what is taught in economics now

    … by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

    It’s not that we need no regulation. It’s just trying to say that if we set things up correctly, we don’t need to worry about people pursuing SOLELY their own personal gain. Because the market seeks out the “greatest value”, which is not just about money. It’s also the value to society as a whole.

    Instead, we got the fucking bullshit from Chicago saying that the only / best way of measuring value is by profit.



  • As someone who has never done any serious coding work or collaboration, hadn’t touched Linux in 18+ years and am really only fluent in windows and Mac, and with limited time to get up to speed, I fucking love opinionated guides.

    Tell me exactly what to do to get it up and running. Let me learn along the way, but don’t expect me to be able to read and understand the pros and cons of lets encrypt vs other solutions.

    I simply do not have the requisite base knowledge to make informed decisions on this.

    If you wanna leave it up to me how to do a golden gate assembly, quick change reaction, or a gibson assembly, I can handle that.

    Understanding the nuance of docker networking, reverse DNS,maintaining SSL, and just generally how to make it so I can use a hostname and not an IP address to access my services locally is something I want to learn. Eventually.

    It’s not that your critiques of guides are invalid, but they may just not be structured for general learning. And their target audience is temporarily ignorant fools like myself.


  • A good journalist does not just write for themselves, they must also write for the audience as the audience. They are the readers proxy and ask questions on behalf of the reader.

    Imagine a generic shmuck that has no idea ctrl +c and ctrl +v are hot keys.

    Now. Do you think they have any concept of what type of duplication tools exist? Do you think they’d just want to use this “super cool everything” software that AI is billed as? After all, it’s supposed to be smart right? They say it’s the next best thing and it’s almost like magic.


    Look, I’m not saying it’s a great article. But given all the bullshit hype regular people hear about AI. Is it really unreasonable to think “copilot, help me find duplicated files in my one drive” would be something good old Billy would try?

    Maybe it’s not a great article because there are better ways to de-duplicate photos. But that isn’t the fucking point of the article. The article is “look at how AI still fucking fails at basic shit we expect it to be good at.”

    And for that, I thank the author. We need way more of that.


  • Legitimate question.

    How is the act of an AI company downloading a copyrighted work and adding it into their “dataset” to generate a summary different from an individual downloading a copyrighted work and adding it to their “dataset” and writing a summary?

    Both instances require consuming the material in some way. Both instances generate something new, transformative of the original work.

    Why do AI companies get to torrent the entirety of human knowledge, but if any single person does it… Well we know what happened with Napster. Limewire. Kazaa. Megaupload.

    Because to me, that hints at a flaw in your logic. AI companies are violating copyright. They had no permission to consume the copyrighted works.



  • There’s definitely hope that it synergises with what’s going on due to the steam deck.

    Personally, I can’t wait to buy two controllers and the machine. The flawless experience of the deck is amazing. And because it’s Linux, I’ll just install YouTube, jellyfin, any app as a non steam game and I’ll have the perfect smart tv appliance.

    Stream games, play games, run any program I want through steam big picture - I can’t wait to bury my Shield.

    I’ll never have to connect a tv to WiFi again. I’ll never see a fucking ad for anything on my TVs home screen again. With KDE connect my phone is a remote. I’m so fucking pumped.




  • I’ll give this one go just on the off chance you’re being genuine - since you seem to have some sense of rationality to your position.

    You’re wrongly underweighting the damage that will get done while the courts correct things. Yes, eventually the courts would restore broadcasting licenses. But there’s appeal after appeal after appeal. That could kill the stations even if ultimately they’d win. And don’t say that the licenses couldn’t be revoked in the first place. They did it to fucking science funding. Funding mandated by Congress just stopped, and Congress did nothing. Sure it’s coming back now. Kind of.

    We know how this plays out already. And we can’t even count on the courts. The supreme Court has shown a total disregard for their duty with some of their rulings.

    Like the executive order on birthright citizenship. Before the supreme Court the government didn’t even argue the legality. They said nationwide blocking orders were the real problem. The Court agreed.

    Or the use of race or language as a cause for ice detention. Blatantly against the forum amendment and the Supreme Court said it’s fine. They’re snatching US citizens for fucks sake.

    This is all easily searchable. If you really care about being rational and reasoned, you’ll put in the effort. This isn’t people desperately trying to be wrong. These are people that have seen what is likely to happen. They’ve updated their priors more accurately than you.