Julien Castiaux10h ago
Wolfgang

RE: https://hostux.social/@rfc1036/116279298917087751

Ignoring the "fascist" angle for a second (I saw no proof in the blog post of this being 'orchestrated', be that by fascists or anyone else).

I think both things can be true at the same time – governments around the world are fast-tracking laws to verify the identity of Internet users online under the guise of "protecting children", with suspicious level of speed and coordination.

But also, systemd adding an optional 'date of birth' field is not the same as "systemd introducing age verification".

Is it possible that this field will be used in the future to require users to verify their age? Yes, just like the existing 'Location' field may be used in the future to require the user to verify their home address, and the realName field may be used to require the user to specify their full legal name.

That being said, we can't ignore the timing and the explicit justification for the PRs as stated by the author. Quote: "Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws..."

And yes, there are already Medium posts making the rounds that paint the author to be some kind of a sleeper agent who "came out of nowhere" and got his PRs approved by "Microsoft employees".

Being a fan of Hanlon's razor, I think the author simply seized the opportunity, and decided to do a bunch of drive-by PRs to big Linux-adjacent projects, in order to be able to put "systemd contributor" on his CV.

Is this stupid and akin to using COVID shortages to scalp toilet paper? Yes. Is it a malicious plot by Microsoft to sneak age verification into Linux? Probably not, they don't care about Linux on the desktop enough, and if they did, they wouldn't need to be subtle or design elaborate plots to propose adding age verification to it.

8:25amWeb
Show threadWolfgang14h ago

There's also a very obvious reason why you see so many posts/articles/toots about it – and yes, a lot of them include misrepresented/wrong information, fear mongering and clickbait titles.

Everybody is already on edge because of the 'age verification' stuff that's taking place all around the world. And like a lot of people, I also thought "well, if Windows/macOS asks for my ID, at least there's always Linux".

Seeing some big Linux-adjacent projects not only refusing to react to it with anything other than "absolutely not, go fuck yourself" but even accepting PRs and discussing how best to comply with those laws really breaks my heart.

And even if the aforementioned PRs do not 'verify' anything, the communication from systemd developers has been lackluster.

From the politics standpoint, even if I did think that a 'birthDate' field was useful, I would either have asked the author to reword his PR (because it has nothing to do with the "age verification laws" and wording it this way would obviously create a huge shitstorm online, which it did), or made a public announcement explaining the change and assuring the users that systemd will never try to 'verify' your age.

Show threadEmber is so tired of people. ​13h ago

@notthebee i doubt it's a campaign by microsoft or whatever, but i also highly doubt it was for such a "innocent" reason as adding to their CV, two things can be true, or, well, untrue in this case

absolutely ridicululous to say that the opposition to this shit is from fascists when that's just not true, the fascists are the ones adding this shit

also another thing, the systemd PR came pretty close to when systemd added LLM instructions, which at least to me really solidifies where they stand in regards to fascism (that being, with it)

Show threadWolfgang13h ago
@Ember Oh yeah, public 'Linux' people like Poettering or Torvalds are definitely not freedom fighters like people often imagine them to be. Their goal is to develop a working product, and they do collaborate with the big tech to achieve that – Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are contributing a lot of money and code to the kernel and other Linux-adjacent projects.
Show threadEmber is so tired of people. ​13h ago
@notthebee seems these days "working product" isn't even the priority, as evidenced by how many are embracing slop
Show threadWolfgang12h ago

@Ember Personally, my problem with AI isn't that it always produces bad results – I think that's not true. Under proper guidance, AI can be very helpful for software development. Just like we see a bunch of examples of blatant 'slop', there are also a lot of cases where AI is quietly used by skillful developers, with all of the results thoroughly reviewed by a human, and that results in overall better outcomes, technically speaking.

My problem with it is mostly ethical – even if we ignore the environmental impact and the use of AI in armed conflict... the endgame of big AI companies is obviously to de-skill the software developer job and make themselves an integral part of most software companies by renting the coding "skills" out to them at a high price.

I think if you don't care about the ethics, if you're skillful enough to review the code and if you're only interested in churning out working software faster than your competitors – you can definitely achieve that by using AI.

Show threadWolfgang12h ago
@Ember P.S. "quietly" as in without writing a big blog post about how "AI changed the way we develop software at startup_name" and hoping it hits the HN front page
Show threadEmber is so tired of people. ​11h ago

@notthebee Nope. LLMs are always a net negative, whether the dev realizes it's a net negative is a whole other matter.

even if it were to result in short-term positives (it absolutely does not) the long-term deskilling and cognitive offloading it causes would far outweigh that.

Show threadRui Correia12h ago
@notthebee
Well..., it's not a given that this PR is an attack.
But we should stay vigilant. As you said, M$ wouldn't be so cautious, they would just blatantly put that PR and make a press conference on the subject.
But this might just be a test by some other "power"...