Sam Altman: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”

Meaning: We stole all your knowledge , writing, and art, and now we’re gonna put a meter on it and sell it back to you. You’re welcome.”

We are in a leadership free fall.

There is no leadership and there hasn’t been for some centuries now.

There may have been a blip here and there, but it’s mostly been extractive wealthy sociopaths trying to get richer.

From enclosure in the middle ages, to colonialism, to slavery and industrial age exploitation and on to modern times.

Our societies and countries have been shaped around the wealthy being unaccountable.

They’re not going to start acting like responsible stewards now.

people on reddit are doing a whole lot of yapping about age verification in Linux

I would generally agree that the whole approach of these laws is total dogshit and clearly a wedge issue to enable stricter surveillance laws in the future

at the same time though, the actual implementation and potentially having a portal which exposes the users age bracket seems totally reasonable as a way to implement parental controls... I'm also not totally against holding service providers to higher standards for data processing when it comes to minors, and hey if they're doing that why shouldn't adults get the same treatment?

what im totally miffed about though is why the fuck would you get mad at systemd for adding a birthDate field to userdb, what would you have them do? Would you rather every desktop environment had its own way to store this data??

An XDG portal for this also means you can *trivially* write a stub that always identifies you as an adult or even lets you pick per-app (heck maybe per website! that might be the new cursed way of avoiding trackers under late stage capitalism)

and yeah it sure would be shit if we get real-id laws in a few years, but systemd or XDG standing on "principle" and refusing to implement this API is absolutely not going to lead to better outcomes for anyone. The last thing we want is for users in certain regions to wind up relying on implementations maintained by distros or random individuals, if we need to have this crap the least we could ask is that it's maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!

"how am I supposed to explain gay to a child?"

My brother in Christ have you ever actually been around a child?? They will straight up ambush you with the most unhinged, bonkers, nihilist questions with a completely straight face. Questions that will cause grown adults to have an existential crisis if you think about them too long. Just yesterday in class a student stopped in the middle of playing a scale to ask me how does she even know if I exist or not and I had to sit quietly in a corner with that one for like an hour. PLEASE let me explain the gay. Explain the gay is fucking easy.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116257349992070862

I mean damned near everything else has been stuffed inside it. Honestly, amazed the kernel isn’t a systemd module yet.

Why after avoiding Apple for decades, I'm buying the new Apple Neo

I have been almost entirely in the #Google ecosystem since the dawn of Google, and in fact bought my first Android phone the first day the first Android phone (the venerable G1 with the slide-out keyboard, which I still have and still boots, though with an open source OS version) became available. All my smartphones since then have been Android -- I don't expect that to change.

Other than the single purchase of a tiny iPod Nano long ago, I have avoided #Apple hardware due (among other things) to its typically outrageous pricing and lack of competition in the hardware manufacturing space.

In fact, I made an anti-Apple decision long, long ago, when I chose to work with the 8080/Z80 CPU microcomputers rather than the 68000 series CPUs that Apple chose for its early Macintosh and Lisa lines.

Of course my main work over the decades has been with UNIX/Linux, my servers are and have always run these, and my primary desktops are Linux as well. There are also a number of Chromebooks, Android tablets, Android/Google based TV devices, and some Windows systems for compatibility with needed Windows apps. There more stuff of course but you get the idea.

Along the way I've frequently been asked about issues related specifically to Apple iOS and MACs, and I have simply replied that I don't have expertise with those.

So I've long been aware of this gap, but couldn't justify the expense of any Apple hardware simply for the purpose of filling that gap.

Two events have changed this a bit. First it's clear that both Google and Apple have been moving with notable speed ever farther into the Dark Side, with their billionaire CEOs embracing fascist Trump and seemingly everything evil that he represents.

This creates an interesting dynamic, if one feels that purely open source systems cannot completely fulfill one's required hardware and software needs. In essence, the question becomes is it better to deal mainly with a single Evil Big Tech firm, or split your needs in some respects across two of them (or three, if we include Windows requirements and Microsoft).

For now I view the "split" as the most practical choice -- for me, anyway -- and the new Apple #Neo (whose macOS runs a largely usable UNIX under the hood) represents what seems to be the most cost effective current path to this (it does appear to be a disruptive design in terms of capabilities and pricing, that may give Google's Chromebooks a run for their money, especially in the educational space).

Anyway, just thought I'd mention all this -- more than you wanted to know, of course.

Best,

L