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.

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.

Damn, Windows has really improved in the last 25 years. Wouldn't know since my last Windows was Win2k and my computers only run macOS or Linux and have crashed less that 10 times combined in the last 20 years or so. A well, whatever. Good for people still using Windows, I guess.

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.

... Fantasy worlds out there that would look epic as a AAA fantasy blockbuster triology. Raymond E. Feist comes to mind. Bernard Hennen, Guy Gavrial Kay, Brandon Sanderson and countless other top-shelf fantasy authors and epic worlds. Can't we just leave LOTR be? It's gotten an excellent film adaption, one that will stand the test of time if it doesn't get diluted with trash like it already partially has. Please stop right now.

I think we may be truly witnessing the dawn of western culture and it effing hurts.

... to all their competitors, grab the deckchairs and some popcorn and watch everybody else tear each other to shreds. Brilliant move if you ask me. 8-)

... in at least one key aspect: The cash going around is almost exclusively from the deep and wide warchests of large megacorps. Which means if a bubble pops it likely will just be a little fart for regular people and we can get rehired for our bullshit desk jobs.

Shouldn't the super-fast rotation of massive black holes counteract at least some of their gravity vertical to it's axis? Could that - at least hypothetically - eventually cause a black hole to break apart into bits of regular non-black-hole matter, if it spins fast enough?

Sorry if I'm sounding silly here, I'm a 5th-grader when it comes to astrophysics but perhaps someone with knowledge could offer some insight?

How many billions did that game make them? Seriously, this just be one of the highest grossing videogames ever, no? How long has it been going? 9 years? That's pretty epic if you ask me. This game was nothing other than an epic success (no pun intended).

Blackwater would like a word...

Modern devices and machines appear to me like some hilarious Brazil-style cyberpunk joke-reality. Imagine an effing cyberattack bricking a lock on your car or engine-starter. LOL! Well, I guess it's not called "Internet of Trash" for no reason.