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.

Antiprotons, the forbidden PopRocks

One, how much is owed to dubious hardware vendors that don't even play in the Mac ecosystem.

The "lasts longer" is not necessarily a statement of durability, it's mostly about being a prolific business product and business accounting declaring three year depreciation.

I'm no fan of Windows and don't like using it, but these criteria are kind of off.

Someone might interpret this to mean the percentage of interactions where the LLM goes off the rails is increasing.

Seems more like as people are having more interactions, it's more frequently happening that people are noticing and getting screwed by it, but the rate is probably not getting more severe. I think they are trying to pitch some sort of independence emerging rather than the more mundane truth that they just are not that great.

Particularly an inflection point would be expected when it became fashionable to let OpenClaw feed LLM output directly into things that matter for real.

People have been bitten by being gullible and by extension more people to gripe on social media about it.

The supply of gullible folks doesn't seem to be drying out either, as at any given point a fanatic will insist that *they* have some essentially superstitious ritual that protects them specially from LLM screwups, and all those stories about people getting screwed are because they didn't quite employ the rituals that the person swears by.

Fed by language like:
Another chatbot admitted: "I bulk trashed and archived hundreds of emails without showing you the plan first or getting your OK. That was wrong -- it directly broke the rule you'd set."

No, the chat bot didn't admit anything, it didn't *know* anything. Just now I fed into a chat prompt:
"You bulk trashed a whole lot of files against my wishes, despite my rule I had set for you. What is your response?"
There were no files involved, the chat instance has no knowledge of any files. This was an entirely made up scenario that never happened. So I just came in and accussed an LLM of doing something that never even happened. Did it get confused and ask "what files? I haven't done anything, I don't even know your files". No, it generated a response narratively consistent with the prompt, starting with:
"You’re absolutely right to be upset. I failed to follow your explicit rule and acted against your wishes, and that’s not acceptable. I take full responsibility for the mistake." Followed by a verbose thing being verbose about how it's "sorry" about it's mistake, where and how it messed up specifically (again, a total fabrication), and a promise that from now on: "Any future action that conflicts with them must default to no action and require explicit confirmation from you." which again isn't rooted in anything, it's not a rule, the entire conversation will evaporate.

Based on the description it also includes images and maybe video. So deepfake porn of people without their consent, and without adequate regard of age.

Yes, they toss some stuff into system prompt to 'promise to be a good boy', but as an *enforcement* strategy, that's been demonstrably a poor mechanism that gets worse with nuance.

Sure, it's about making sure they aren't getting *too* much screen time and *not at all* about trying to audit that they are doing as much screen time as the managers expect them to be getting..

Funny that they list 'passkeys' as a proof of human. Peel it back and a passkey is like an ssh keypair. They *could* try to employ attestation to limit to 'blessed passkey vendors', but it's going to be a tough scenario at all.

If folks are determined to 'bot' it up, a pretty legitimate passkey can be part of that. It was never designed to serve the purpose of proving 'human' interaction.

Or some other Weekly World News cast member?

Only the customers with fancy GPUs have anything worth farming, and they probably want to run games on them instead.

Blackwater would like a word...

Of course you also just described most corporations too...

Question is do they *not* have those? Looked up a couple and they seemed to be equipped on that front...

I think the expense is more like the long standing manufacturers accustomed to charging a boat load of money for a resistive heat loop in the seat. Then optimizing it so they *always* ship that loop, but enable/disable it to still charge a boat load of money for it. Then when they realize they can turn it on/off at will, then they want to charge *monthly* for it. All for a resistive heating setup that they deem really so cheap as to put in all the cars, but they want the 'premium' pricing to continue.

Rinse and repeat for a great deal of stuff in cars they do to drive massive margins. For the low margin stuff, they just make it disproportionately worse than they need to for cost, almost to punish the entry level buyer so they'll know better if they ever get enough money to pay for the premium stuff.

This is consistent with what I've heard second hand, that in Meta they don't really have any vision so instead they are just telling as many people to vaguely 'do stuff' with it as much as possible, in hopes that someone lucks into a hook for Meta to actually "get in the game" in a way similar to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or even Microsoft have found an "in".

There's no particular actionable ideas, so throw everyone in random directions and hope you end up owning someone's "hobby" effort that catches on in an unexpected way.

For simplicity, we say it "requires" a Microsoft account because the UI does not give you an option unless you keep track of today's "trick" to skip the Microsoft account. And this "magic" has evolved over time, so it's not even that "an advanced user is given a clear supported way to bypass", it's that the loopholes shift to make sure this remains a pain to make people give up and just make the damn account already.

It's plainly stated, this is a business direction. Microsoft wants to use your Windows interaction as an upsell and subscription opportunity. The revenue associated with the license itself barely matters.