Avicenna, avicenna@programming.dev

just wing it

in before .ml downvotes

also needs Putin at the end

the only live stream we actually need

Let’s gooooooo

Arrr

You would already be doing a great service to the world if you produced a really well tuned search engine / information digger with LLMs but no you had to periodically hype it as AGI because it can memorize entire text books with some accuracy. You did this to yourselves and if you fall it will be because of these expectations which are not met.

He does remind me of the Markov text generators of the olden times, the ones that sounded like someone was having an aneurysm.

I am wondering if this is an AI generated text and AI trained on his posts finally cracked his intelligence level.

Good luck if they need to find something in outlook in an emergency situation

“I am sure someone had mailed me the updated emergency protocols just two weeks ago!”

outlooks goes about showing you emails from ten years ago

“The one trick that astronauts don’t want anyone to learn”

Death threats are stupid and indicate severe mental problems. This does not change the fact that the author explicitly mentioned that the aim was compliance with possible age verification laws. Just because he received death threats from some idiot man child does not mean he is right or what he did is inconsequential. It is a statement that they are willing to accept possible future identity verification laws without any legal fight and resistance.

warrior

Warrior

Agreed. I find it a bit insane that main discussion point up to now has been whether or not this PR is related to compliance with surveillance laws, especially when the author of the said PR states that is the motivation.

Whether or not such projects have a responsibility for promoting human rights is a much more valid discussion point, along with practicalities of the approach. But that also reminds us an essential aspect of FOSS. Despite being the dominant init system in the linux world, it is by far not a monopoly and any group with enough knowhow can easily maintain a surveillance free version of it. But ofcourse if people keep downplaying the political aspect of what has been done here then they might find themselves in a boiling frog situation.

I feel like most people are just gonna read the title and get the wrong idea about what is written in the page. So I will quote this:

And this is why I am of two minds about this issue. On the one hand, I fully understand that the various developers involved with these efforts want to make sure they follow the law and avoid getting fined – or worse – especially since compliance requires so little at this time. On top of that, these changes make it possible to implement a fairly robust set of parental controls in a centralised way, keeping the data involved where it makes sense, so it also brings a number of benefits for users. There really isn’t anything to worry about when looking at these changes in isolation.

On the other hand, though, I also understand the fears and worries from people who see these changes as the first capitulation to age verification, nicely making the bed for much stricter age verification laws I’m sure certain parts of the political compass are already dreaming about. With so many Linux distributions, BSD variants, and even alternative operating systems having their legal domiciles in the United States, it’s not unreasonable to assume they’re going to fold under any possible legal pressure that comes with such laws.

I’m not rushing to replace my Fedora KDE installations with something else at this point, but I’m definitely going to explore my options on at least one of my machines and go from there, so I at least won’t be caught with my pants down in the future. The world isn’t ending, age verification hasn’t come to Linux, but we’d all do well to remain skeptical and prepare for when it does make its way into our open source operating systems.

It is not that, “there is nothing to worry about age field creeping into sytemd”. It is that in the current ecosystem in which most large open-source projects live, it is easier said than done to take a principled action against early compliance with such laws. Which is much more reasonable than trying to undersell this change as “eh it is just an optional age field”. It is not, it is a statement that when asked to comply with surveillance laws, they will be met with minimal resistance.

Simply not true. In any such project, major proposals first get discussed as issues and community either vets a plan or comes up with an alternative before more solid steps such as PRs start. What is being done here is clearly trying to downplay a major change as a minor one. There are loads of blog posts and discussions on why this isn’t a minor change, especially when the author of the PR himself admits the goal is to comply with age verification laws. I will not get into that here. Suffice to say, at best, this is a political statement of the kind “we are ok to comply with surveillance and will show minimal resistance”. Yet they try to play this as if they are just changing a typo in the documents. Thanks to Lennart for his life long contributions to FOSS, despite him at some point joining Microsoft, the antithesis of everything that is FOSS. I am sure many things he did shaped how the open-source developed on a world-wide level. This still does not mean that his reaction to everything will be correct. To me this was more like a “fuck all, this was a minor change, don’t care what you say” attitude, which in my world-view has place in propriety software world not FOSS.

If we are going to get stuck in semantics, then he also did not just propose it. Propose would be opening an issue, describing how he would plan to do it and letting people discuss. This is how proposals work. Pushing a very controversial change and getting someone to accept it is not “proposing” when the change is something the community will obviously be so divided over.

And it does not have to implement a full on surveillance mechanism to take a step towards better compliance with possible future surveillance laws. The guy literally said in his comments that this was the intent:

https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/pull/4290

What the hell are we even discussing here?

Why not wait until it becomes absolutely necessary and all other alternatives are exhausted? The mandatory age check thing hasn’t been even accepted whole US wide let alone world-wide. He did not even wait for ut to play out. What is with the enthusiasm to jump on board with this?

At the moment of most intense debates about mandatory age checks and government surveillance you (Dylan) hoped people to be calm about this? Then you my friend are simply delusional. They are angry and for a good reason. Why the rush to comply with a surveillance practice that hasn’t forced on you with some sanction or enforcement. You did not even wait for it to play out. You did not have a discourse about alternatives. You just went ahead and hastily applied a change as if as if doing some sort of coup.

The law yes, it is also I think is a response to rising anger against billionaires. They want to make sure that they have the necessary systems in place when anger actually turns into action.

But I was talking about this person in particular. It feels like no one without a ulterior motive would try to get such a thing passed preemptively and so much like a coup. Even if this law passed in all states you could probably drag any requests to add such a verification for years and years without any actual sanctions. So why the rush to comply without exploring any other options?