May not ever 'figure it out'.

A lot of 'leadership' saw "everyone is hiring tech" in the aftermath of the pandemic and so they did, with or without any vision.

This represents a narrative consistent with shedding those people they didn't have business value for. So they end up no more broken than they were in 2019, and it provides a narrative consistent with doing things "right".

Based on some codebases I've seen...

AI slop can be bad, but has *nothing* on the closed source codebases I've seen for low quality slop.

You people have gone insane.

Stop trying to control every atom of existence and every move people make.

You're sick in the head, not visionaries, not thought leaders.

Go plant a garden and get back in touch with the real world.

No, NOT FARMVILLE!

> All in all, it was just ...so american.

My father often said that if you want tits and explosions to watch with your brain turned off, you watch American. If you want something that doesn't spoon feed you, watch British. If you want to commit suicide, watch something Scandinavian.

Things have evolved a bit since those days, but it's not the worst general rule to start with.

And that the 'Newtonian' physics of Gravity wasn't.

I'm a huge buzzkill. I can watch Pacific Rim with a smile on my face, but tell me you've made something realistic when you haven't and it nukes suspension of disbelief for me completely.

For attracting venture capital, about 10 years ago.

> genuine question - why was this code pushed now

Zuckerberg has aggressively been bribing politicians to enact this at the State level.

Several news stories about it though you have to search for terms like 'lobbying' and 'Meta' as fig leaves.

Every time Hollywood sells a movie as 'realistic', it's turned out to be bullshit. The trade mags and entertainment reporters repeat the lie, but that doesn't make it true.

I'll be watching this movie soon, it looks fun. I will not expect them to get physics anywhere close to correct enough that someone with a decent high school physics class under their belt won't see where they got it wrong.

If a government forks GNU, they will do it at the copyright law level, not the code level.

So, during this story, someone pointed out a command to contextualize the info:
# userdbctl user --output=json $(whoami)

Ok, so run that and I see "hashedPassword". A field that my entire career has been about "not even the user themselves should have access, even partial access to it needs to be protected by utilities that refuse to divulge that to the user even as they may need that field to validate user input. And now, there it is, systemd as a matter of course saying "let arbitrary unprivileged process running as the user be able to access the hashed password at any point".

Now this "age verification" thing? I think systemd facet is blown out of proportion. All it is is a field that the user or administrator injects, no "verification". Ultimately if wired up, the only people that are impacted are people who do not have admin permissions to their system and have an admin that's forcing your real date of birth somehow.

The biggest problem comes with "verification" for real, when an ecosystem demands government ID or credit card. However, most of the laws consider it sufficient for an OS to take the owner at their word as to the age of the user, without external validation. So a parent might have a chance at restricting a young kid (until kid knows how to download a browser fork that always sends the "I'm over 18" flag when it exists), but broadly the data is just whatever the people feel like.

Whenever an authoritarian demagogue tries to justify a power grab by telling you, "Think of the children," look them in the eye and respond, "I am."

There's legitimacy to that. Taking a potentially dangerous drug under the supervision of a doctor who knows how things are supposed to work, what side effects look like, with drugs of consistent purity and dosage, has a lot of advantages over winging it with stuff made up random chinese chemicals and toilet bowl cleaner.

Unless you're talking about cocaine etc. brought to the penthouse by a personal assistant or something. Plenty of ultra-rich celebs have killed themselves that way.

How can it be that? Survival has never been more assured. I wonder if we'd be less depressed if we had to do physical labor for food and fight the neighboring tribe once in a while to punctuate life with more immediacy and urgency.

The laws in several countries are going to require it. My preferred way is for the OS to offer a flag of "This user is of legal age in this region based on information provided to the administrator of this computer." I'll leave it up to the people with compilers to comply or not with their local laws.

My proposal is stuff the flags in a sysctl user.$UID.age var. and then let the browser send info off to other sites just like it does with language selection. That way a pam module (or systemd) can set an over/under age of majority for the region and then let the browser send a "yes/no" flag. The pam module or sysd can calulate that based on a birthday or a +18 flag so you may have to log in to reset it but the birthdate is never sent to the browser let alone to the end web sites.

This gives schools a way to control content. It allows parents to control content. It allows home router vendors to claim to control content. It allows web sites to stop annoying users about being above 16,18 or 21 depending on what they are pushing. The politicians will look at it and say the industry is working with them while patting themselves on the back.

The other solution is let the politician's owners come up with a solution and that will be an expensive id solution that tracks everyone through the web with no way to opt out.

I just bought a new fridge. I really would have liked a big tablet on the front and the interior camera to play with... but the manufacturers insist on using their custom Android you can't do much with, and it must always spy on you and feed you ads.

So my new fridge was a lot less expensive and doesn't have a built-in screen.