Because laws have been passed that require it. The problem isn't the OS vendor, it's the law. Any commercial backer of a distro that doesn't comply is, in one way or another, complicit in breaking those laws. Many backers will withdraw support in that scenario. So basically it will come down to community forks and patches that the official distros avoid condoning. Probably it won't simply be a case of 'store date of birth in user database' in future, rather they'll have a government ordained supplier of age verification and you have to store some kind of cryptographic token that ties a user account to their official proof of age. Then browsers will be required to present something based on this token to websites. It's gonna get more 1984 as things go on. But Linux distros aren't in a position to oppose this.

We've come full circle to the tech community deciding what's proper for our neighbors. ChatGPT is free to decide not to include adult stuff, and celebrity/CSAM should totally be illegal, but "The proper use of AI is as a tool, not as a friend, lover or therapist, and especially not as an addiction" is how we get the government regulating how adults use the tools at their disposal.

Aside from CSAM and defamatory stuff we don't have the right to decide what's proper for someone else.

Eventually peer to peer training (Petals using Hivemind, etc.) will lead the way.

At least they didn't do a Tumblr and have the feature put in, then wait for millions to be using it... and then yank the rug out from under them.

We saw how that ended.

Fortunately there are alternatives.

And of course that Mac Pro idea was killed by the cosmic trashcan thing. In a sense what one wants is a kind of 'docking tower' into which a Mac Studio fits, giving a lot of expansion. If you want a machine with 3 SSDs and 4 HDDs, you have to put up with crazy sprawl with modern macs. With an old school tower with it all contained inside, you had a single box you could pick up, carry around, and just plug in.

Most software and music piracy is done using the Windows OS. Most of that is running either on CPUs by Intel or AMD. Are Microsoft, Intel, or AMD, complicit in this piracy given that their products are used for it?

The ruthless selfishness of many billionaires and a certain POTUS are far more deserving of the term 'moral decay' than what goes on on OF. But when it comes to denouncing 'moral decay', people tend to look the other way unless and until something naughty comes along, then out come the condemnation and the pitchforks.

I suggest "Layoff Phone".

To be clear, this was true over 20 years ago. (In light of which, the word "now" probably doesn't belong in the above phrase, since it implies recentness.)

All too often, humans fall into the "thinking without thinking" trap, just regurgitating their inputs rather than actually understanding them. Understanding the failings of AI and how it doesn't think, but rather pattern matches like a super search engine, will probably shed light onto many problems relating to humans and genuine understanding vs regurgitating input.

While delusional thinking is common to religions and especially cults, provided you do the thing religious conservatives hate and actually think through your religious faith, those problems can be avoided. But crafting a sensible, rational, and informed religious faith is a much harder task than a mindlessly religiously conservative one. Thus ease, convenience, and human laziness lead to the latter propagating. But those dynamics are a consequence of human nature: the problems of religions happen because religions are made out of people. Those problems are as inevitable as weeds growing in the garden, and the problem is that the lazy gardener will simply declare the weeds God's chosen flowers and thus don't needed to be weeded out. And not having a religious faith is not necessarily a good solution for those for whom their faith provides central structural components of their mental makeup. It is easy to be simplistic about religion and faith, some declare it absolutely true beyond question (esp. religious conservatives), and others declare it unquestioningly delusional. Both sides associate mainly with those who agree with them, and so anti-religion quasi-cults form, built on the same human dynamics that power religious cults and echo chambers. Humans are complex, complexity is a b****, and we are easily seduced by things purported to take that complexity away.

It's like the way being surrounded by sycophants fuels a dictator's delusions. The first golden rule of using AI is that you must, must, must, verify what they say, and you must therefore have a means to verify what they say. If not, then the unit comprising of you and them turns into an AI feeding itself its own output, and model collapse occurs (or at least something like model collapse). On the human side this manifests as delusional thinking, since the garbage output of a model-collapsed AI has been burned into their brain.

There's a lot I do that doesn't require much CPU power, but for which battery life is important. Stuff that runs happily on a Lenovo T420 under Linux (Chrome with unbloated web pages, terminal, vim). The battery life and power consumption will be insanely low compared to a PC laptop. For stuff on the go that can be massive. (My current solution is a T450 with a pile of spare batteries.) I would love one of these running a Debian Linux with KDE frontend, but could cope with Macos for the sake of reliability and battery life.

Reminds me of an episode of Futurama where Fry runs into the room and breathlessly exclaims, "I got here as quickly as I could once I found out what happened a thousand years ago!"

You can stare at the full moon all night if you like, because the albedo of the moon has filtered most of the light including the UV band that naturally passes through our own atmosphere. The three mile circle illuminated by a mirror would bounce a significantly higher amount of UV than the moon's albedo. If you treat the 60ft reflector as an analog to a pinhole in a pinhole camera, the circular area on the Earth surface would be a rough projection of the image of the sun.

(1) I wonder how they calculate the UV exposure for the observer on the surface within the illumination area.

(2) I wonder if you'd be able to detect places in a coherent projection where sunspots or coronal ejections are reflected through the "pinhole" effect of this arrangement.