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Comment Re:Looks like a robotic arm on a rail (Score 1) 29

The Chinese have these kinds of robots deploying much larger installations. They also have drones that fly panels into mountainous areas for installation.

Not that I'm knocking it, it's good that they are copying good ideas. The cheaper solar gets the better, and for political reasons stuff like this has to be home grown.

Comment Looks like a robotic arm on a rail (Score 2) 29

This doesn't seem like particularly new tech, just a tweak on what the automotive industry has been using for several dacades. I'd also be curious if that "twice as fast" calculation takes into account the time necessary for setting up the necessary rails etc. required for the Maximo robots to operate.

Comment Facebook and other billionaires are pushing it (Score 1) 81

It's mandatory for them because there is so much AI slop now it's starting to infect their data sets. Facebook doesn't give a shit about the quality of their advertising because no matter how many bots there are people keep buying the ads. But the advertising is only about 1/3 of their revenue 2/3 of it is selling data to brokers and law enforcement.

There is so much AI slop and it is so sophisticated it's becoming difficult to keep it out of their data sets and that's gradually making the data sets useless.

So they are going to force complete tracking under the guise of think of the children so that they and they alone know who is a bot and who isn't. As an added bonus is also means that they can effectively and easily figure out who is a person and use their data to train llms.

AI slop is basically an existential threat to these companies because at the end of the day they do need to know who is and isn't a real user and they need to be able to do that quickly and effectively. So mandatory age verification is the way to go.

Your privacy is completely irrelevant. And frankly I think it's irrelevant to most people here. Everyone will talk about how important privacy and internet and anonymity is but when it comes time to vote a dozen other issues come first often pretty stupid ones.

So Mark Zuckerberg can go around buying up laws and there really isn't anything we can do about it because voters prioritize other things.

Comment Taxes (Score 5, Interesting) 52

Taxes made them successful. We used to have super high taxes for the wealthy and corporations. This created a use it or lose it mentality among businesses because they couldn't just pocket all the money themselves because it would be taxed up the wazoo at a certain point. There were ways around taxes even back then but they weren't nearly as effective as they are now where you have billionaires paying an effective tax rate of 0%

Also stock BuyBacks used to be illegal. Stock BuyBacks mean that companies don't invest anymore they hold on to their cash so that they can do BuyBacks and pump the stock during downturn. This is exactly why stock BuyBacks were illegal for so long.

I don't think folks realize how much of a role public policy plays in their daily lives or the myriad of knock-on effects from those kind of policies. There's an idea of a chesterton's fence, which is a fence that you don't pull down unless you know damn well why it was put up. High taxes and Wall Street regulation were a classic chesterton's fence.

Comment Re:It's inevitable (Score 0) 162

it is LGPL2 or later. So LGPL3 applies. So the anti tivoization clause applies.

That's the opposite of how that works. It's LGPL 2 or later. That means you can follow the terms of redistribution from either license. Either. Or.

Sure. But it won't be your usual Linux distro.

It will do the same jobs. Most of the software on which we depend predates the GPL3 and/or uses an even more permissive license without an anti-tivoization clause.

Comment Is that because of the monopoly? (Score 3, Interesting) 52

The most fortunate part of Bell Labs' situation, however, was that in being attached to a monopoly it could partake in long-term thinking... Without competition nipping at its heels, Bell Labs engineers had the luxury of working out difficult ideas over decades.

Was it the monopoly that made the difference? Or was it simply management smart enough to not only not kill the goose, but also to feed it? They had wins, they got more funding, they had more wins, repeat until they no longer got more funding and stopped getting wins. What's probably more important than why they succeeded is what happened at the end.

Comment Re:Installer level disabling (Score 1) 162

Installer level disabling of the installation of systemd, please.

If you're a Debian derivative user, it's called Devuan.

Otherwise...*

* Note: Removing systemd from a systemd-based system is madness. There's a reason Devuan exists, and it is that simply changing the init system on Debian results in a lot of breakage, which best illustrates the biggest problem with systemd.

Comment Re:the issue is putting it in systemd (Score 1) 162

systemd is an integral part of many Linux systems. Adding the birth-date to it is the issue here. It's not the right place.

Yes, that is literally the entire ethos behind systemd.

It's crazy to expect a distro maintainer in a sane country to need to yank it out of there manually

Yes, that is literally the entire situation with systemd.

This change literally could not be more on brand for systemd.

Comment Re:It's inevitable (Score 1) 162

A Linux distro (even preinstalled) cannot be closed source and/or unmodifiable by the end user, the GPL3 made sure of that.

The Linux kernel is GPL2 and glibc is LGPL, and you can construct a complete userland without any GPL3 components. Also, you seem to be under some weird misapprehension that the federal government will follow the law, which it has never done across the board.

Comment Re:advice to children (Score 2) 162

Slavery and many other such things were once legal.

Amendment XIII
Section 1: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction".
Section 2: "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation".

Emphasis mine.

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