Yes, but also I’m pretty sure every old person who ever lived since the invention of language has thought the same thing at some point.

The fact that it’s a bad idea doesn’t mean that isn’t the reason

Also, the answer to your actual question is no. There’s definitely no way to block people from using any particular characters at the kernel level.

What you seem to be asking for is a way to absolutely forbid all software from writing certain characters to files, and/or from reading those characters. Aside from requiring that the kernel inspect all data in detail before letting other software have it, which would slow everything way down, it would prevent anyone from reading or writing binary data which happens to contain those sequences of bytes by coincidence. Binary data includes things like the programs which make the system work, so blocking those characters would be terminal

It ought to look like a bunch of □, which is the glyph generally used to indicate that the font has nothing to represent the character.

Specifically you’d expect U+25A1 □ WHITE SQUARE

“consider” as in “you won’t understand why Israel does what it does unless you think about”, it doesn’t mean “give them what they want”

Which is more than the law requires. What they’re supposed to report is an age bracket. You don’t need to store someone’s precise date of birth, and you certainly don’t need to make it available to other software, to report a broad age bracket

Optional as far as systemd is concerned, perhaps, but it’s designed to support a whole suite of software which will expect it to be used.

They’re also making dubious decisions about how it will be done, such as how they’ll handle the fact that date of birth is PII and something advertisers will be delighted to know. The laws they’re trying to support require very limited information, but they’re storing far more than that and they’ve actively decided not to protect it properly.

However optional it may be, they’re effectively defining the standard for what will be stored and how it will be accessed by all of the software which will use it

How about the gilets jaunes protests? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests

The french, specifically, have a long tradition of putting their foot down and refusing to accept what their government is doing. I don’t have specific links discussing it, but I know that occasionally entire major motorways will be shut down because farmers or lorry drivers have blocked them with heavy industrial machines, and they stay that way until those people decide to move. I also know that there’s an entire region (Brittany) where the motorways aren’t toll roads, unlike the rest of France, because every time they try the cameras and toll booths get destroyed.

It’s no less protected than any other kind of speech.

The problem is that it’s protected from the government, rather than from the social media company

I own a Tesla, and I also own a broken charger. I assure you it won’t let this happen

Doesn’t matter. The car knows something’s plugged in, even if it can’t talk to it

My point is that wouldn’t work, unless the car was in park. A Tesla will simply refuse to move if a charger is connected

Yeah, that’s supposed to be impossible. Either they’re not moving and it’s a staged shot (unlikely, since they’re in the middle of traffic and there appears to be motion blur), or they’ve fiddled with the car to make it think the charging door is closed, or it’s an edit.

I’m suspicious of the motion blur, personally, because the traffic looks too tight to be moving much, so I suspect an edit

Also, I doubt his dislike for the Sackville-Bagginses amounts to liking them less than they deserve, in his judgement. Anyone who deserves to be disliked doesn’t get counted in that number, unless he dislikes them even more than that.

By being in debt, I presume. Although I don’t know if invested money counts as revenue, so maybe they’re spending that rather than going into actually debt

To the best of my knowledge, openai have never made a profit. If by “made” you just mean income, then they loose money by spending far more than that, presumably on building and running datacentres

Yellowstone would really suck, but it would suck differently than nuclear winter.

For starters, I don’t think it would be directly catastrophic on the other side of the world. The Americas would be pretty fucked, but some places would probably only see climate problems rather than the actual end of days.

Also, nuclear winter would include nuclear fallout. It would involve far less actual material coming out of the sky, but what it did bring would be poison in a way which volcanic ash wouldn’t really match (not to say volcanic eruptions aren’t poisonous, but they’re not persistently and insidiously poisonous like radioactive decay could be)

The UN doesn’t have any particular claim to the word “international”, except insofar as anything they do is international because the UN itself is international.

Other organisations, or even loosely affiliated groups of nations, can do international things because the word just means something like “between nations”.

I gather that it seems more reasonable in french

Certainly, there are a bunch of other people who might legitimately need to know what they’re dealing with