But I keep all my vaping equipment - mod, drippers and all manners of accessories - from the early teens when vaping was free, unregulated and not yet killed by Big Pharma. Hell, I still have 3 gallons of 100mg nic base in blue bottles with nitrogen in storage in the freezer from that time.

I was a big vaping enthusiast for years. It's what kept me from smoking again. I've quit smoking and vaping for years, but just in case I decide to pick up vaping again - like if I'm diagnosed with cancer again, and it's terminal this time - I keep all that good stuff from a better past.

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

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.

You misspelled "intrusive".

Just a bit more than five hundred years ago Cortes & Co. arrived in the Americas. They were riding horses, wearing steel armor, wielding firearms, and spreading diseases for which the natives of the western hemisphere had no defenses. When two previously unconnected networks of similar entities encounter each other, there is conflict, and one "giant component" emerges. The natives that are left are perhaps 1% of their former number and in general they subsist at the edges of a transplanted European society.

AI has reached the point where it's hard to tell meat from machine and the internet is now having that same experience. These attempts to create human only networking are going to crush the life out of existing social media KPIs, and I think it'll be good for the Fediverse. Bot operators don't want to manually work their way through archipelagos of tiny spaces that do NOT want them. There's a political repression angle to the identity verification as well - if you want to manipulate the masses, gotta herd 'em into a space where you can DO that. Ten thousand digital islands are frightful when you have clear memories of being able to operate in a few globally flat spaces like Facebook and Twitter.

I've done computational social sciences stuff with a heavy conflict component. The day Musk took over Twitter was the equivalent of the Titanic bumping that iceberg. The sinking took about six months and I'm glad I made it to a life boat. But the really frightful thing here?

The same dynamics that apply to these social sites today are coming for white collar jobs and this isn't going to be measured in decades, it's going to happen in at most a few quarters. I hope my health care startup is about to get funded, because the alternatives for me are pretty grim. As for the vast majority of people who don't have a computer science background and the autistic focus superpower? I imagine what they feel is akin to the mood in Tenochtitlan in the early 1520s.

I'm in favor of fixing this properly before the politicians mandate something stupid.
My proposal is a sysctl value set by a pam module (or systemd on systems infected with that). The browser then does something like language verification much like the HTTP Language headers. Those can be intercepted, checked or forced in environments that have to provide web access to kids like schools. A web site should be able to ask for something like Australia's under 16 and can return a AGE_AU_VIC_Under_16=True if and only if configured to do so. This allows things like online news papers to allow under 16 access to news but not the discussion forums. The proposal still needs work, but it allows for parents to set things as they wish and keep the politicians out of it while letting them claim they fixed it. In the past local ISPs were required to give out software to lock down kids computers and the take up was smaller than the number of people who supported the law.

He had WiFi or 4G on the aircraft carrier? I don't think so.

And if the Strava app uploaded the logged run later when it got connectivity at port or something, by then the ship was long gone.

> "The cloud" just means "Somebody elses C: drive"

Nah. Nobody is dumb enough to run a cloud service on Windows.

Keep your energy to provide it to Canadians for cheaper. The US has plenty of oil and coal I've been told.

There is nothing at all surprising about this, you have to look at what AI fluent operators can DO with frontier LLMs.

I have a health care startup that has been enabled by Anthropic's AI. The $100/month I pay for Claude Max gets me the full time equivalent of a really smart (but completely unseasoned) developer, and a half time MBA research assistant. I spend time every day trying to figure out how to employ the 40% of my weekly allocation that currently goes unused.

Clawdbot and its successors are sketchy AF, but I did just give Claude Code the run of a one liter HP EliteDesk with a Proxmox cloud install. No way would I trust it with production systems, but for exploring new stuff it'll get the job done, so long as I stand over it.

If you're any sort of knowledge worker and you can't tell a similar story to this, your career is pretty much cooked.

Right now I run with a $100/month Anthropic Max subscription, and the net effect is that I have a really smart (but completely unseasoned) Ph.D. in computer science who works for me full time, and a very organized generalist MBA research assistant that's roughly half time. There are a couple of gratis services in that mix — Exa and Perplexity, that I will start paying for in April. Overall this $200-ish monthly expense would cost me around a quarter million annually if I had to hire humans to replace it. And I won't get someone who matches the 16x7 focus I bring to getting my startup moving.

We are about to hit a hard haves/have nots boundary on this stuff. I've already accepted that AI access is like a turn of the century professional cell phone bill and by summer it's going to match the cost of the sort of luxury sedan an enterprise sales wiz would select. Come next fall I think the choices will be pretty stark - be ready for an inference bill similar in size to the rent on the cute SoMa studio I'm sitting in as I write this, or ... the price of failure is just too ugly to contemplate.

and all the disgusting corporations putting profits above people's livelihoods along with it.

That is all.

100%

Kevin Rose killed digg. He took what was good and ruined it.

Reddit embodied what was good about Digg and ran away with the market share.

As long as Reddit doesn't fuck with their algo, and try to pull a "Kevin Rose" (not unlike what Tik Tok just did) it will be ok.

Fuck digg, and fuck Kevin. Go back to making videos where you pretend you're "edgy" because you have a 40oz in a brown paper bag.

Kevin and his idiot people killed Digg a long time ago when they implemented their own algo to determine what users could see and corrupted it with a bunch of advertising. It should have been left alone. Nobody cares and nobody wants it back.

I run Debian 13 and Chromium has been available as a package for a long time.

So I'm not sure why you would want to wait for Google to release Chrome on ARM, since it's essentially Chromium with Google's nastyware added to it. Just use Chromium.