Laurent Bercot

838 Followers
45 Following
7.6K Posts

Grumpy Frenchman, C/Unix addict, author of s6 and other software at skarnet.org.

Good tech (so, probably not the tech you're thinking about), energy transition and climate change, leftist politics, psychology and self-improvement, pillow philosophy, songwriting and production, mechanisms of storytelling, video games as an art medium, shitposting.

Personal websitehttps://skarnet.org
Business websitehttps://skarnet.com
Twitterhttps://twitter.com/laurentbercot
Githubhttps://github.com/skarnet
@khm @dalias Okay, now I have two heroes.
@dalias I have one hero left in this world and if I have to kill him I will be devastated.
@lanodan the only acceptable large lunch masher is my teeth
@linux_mclinuxface @Daveography @robyn kind of a general problem is that there's a missing middle hosting level for this sort of thing. Colocating one beefy server at your friendly neighborhood datacenter used to be a thing that wasn't too difficult or expensive relative to alternatives, but nowadays it's way more expensive and difficult than either cloud hosting or using the fiber you already have to your home.

Reminder: AI "generated" code is 100% plagiarized. You must not accept code of unknown provenance into your code base. Doing so opens you up to potential copyright infringement lawsuits. Nobody needs a repeat of the SCO vs IBM lawsuit over ownership of Unix.

Accepting AI-assisted code is just legally untenable. That's black and white, there's nothing to debate. Projects that accept it are idiots and should be shunned.

https://mastodon.social/@hyc/114777864519941643

@lanodan Processing your breakfast through an LLM may be hazardous to your health.
@navi To exercise property, I would advise talking to a notary

The discussion around "age verification" in systemd/XDG has been largely focused against the California law. But honestly, there's a much deeper problem there.

Firstly, the data collected. The question initially asked is "are you at least 18 years old?" However, that's not the data collected. In fact, the data collected is not even the age — it's the full birth date. It's a perfect example of collecting more data than you need, and a sensitive information too, and sharing it with any application that asks.

Secondly, the extended goal of "parental controls" used as a justification to collect more data. When you think about it, you realize how bad this is: it isn't the case of asking the user about their birth date (with the assumption that a kid will enter a fake date to workaround the limitations). It is effectively a tool for *parents* to impose restrictions on their children, which means that they are more likely to enter the real date to ensure that these restrictions work. And given how popular sharenting is today, do you really think they'd come up with a fake birth date that happens to roughly match their child's age?

This is simply irresponsible.

https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1922

Draft: Add parental controls to the Accounts portal by davidedmundson · Pull Request #1922 · flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal

Applications need to filter content to match the age rating of the user. The rating restrictions tend to be location and domain specific without a common ground for where these groupings should be....

GitHub
The `left-pad` incident was 10 years ago today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

Thankfully, we've completely solved software supply chains in the years since.
npm left-pad incident - Wikipedia