His party did try, but the voters weren’t a big enough fan of that idea apparently. So bringing stupidity into the equation would probably just offend voters smart enough to realise that much.

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/labor-calls-for-national-fuel-reserve/u5cjwpc36

It is defensible in this kind of community, but I doubt it’s defensible in a board voter base. For instance people see billionaires and are saying the government should step in and do something, because as individuals we are somewhat helpless. In this instance we’re like we can fork/we can revert so the government ideally just needs to back off. But if you ask a non-tech savvy voter (and a parent in your example) they will just see big tech and say the government should step in and do something. Has this method of governance been compromised? Sure, is this law an example of that? Sure. But what can we do? The government… Well until people can agree on that, I think we are just trying to find a compromise so that most people can easily dismiss the perspective that parenting tech is too hard. And if people can believe that typing in an age for their child and see big penalties for big tech if they ignore that age, that seems to me the placebo this situation needs.

You framed is as a non ideal philosophy. But acknowledging the things slowing down breaks and taking the time to make a calculated step so things don’t break anyway when updating can be appealing. I see it as a slightly faster stable. Inefficient maybe, but that’s just a difference in values. In practice it sounds like this hasn’t worked for some, guess I’ve been lucky. There maybe be other distros that do this better now, I couldn’t tell you, but from a, comparing philosophical differences point of view, Manjaro seems like an option.

I wonder if your sentiment is common, because being a non American, it appears as a vocal counterbalance to the occasional intangible headlines. This would ironically explain the imbalance from my perspective

I’d be interested to know where you draw the line of code ownership. Arguably FOSS is the place where projects are most likely to become a Ship of Theseus.

From my perspective AI slop is pretty unusable as it comes out, but can be an approximate starting point. It seems generous to call an LLM a coauthor, I’d be more likely to have a long list of Stack Overflow commenters as coauthors first.

For the reasons you are stating the snapshot is actually a boon. More than I’d like to admit I’ve had to write something that has been done so many times before with some slight structural differences. And of course there isn’t a library flexible enough nor enough time to write that library. Instead of just busywork mindlessly writing something that should just exist already. You can just slop it out quickly then spend the time it would have taken to write that, to refine it into something maintainable with all the new changes that are actually interesting and useful improvements. I see it as raising the bar of starting point.

That said, I just license my own stuff as MIT because I want to raise the bar for everyone, though I know it’s likely the AI companies haven’t respected the wishes of those who don’t do/want that.

In a way I understand him, the culture is too one sided in its values. There isn’t a balance or a good middle ground. If you appreciate irony, it’s too optimised for “features”. For which I generally agree. So the people upholding these values are too lazy to find the balance.

As an aside, every Dev I know would love to endlessly iterate and improve a single thing. So I understand finding that balance isn’t easy either.

How is that mindset lazy? Unhappy customers also have a cost! At my last job the customer just always bought hardware specifically for the software as a matter of process, partly because the price of the hardware compared to the price of the software was negligible. You literally couldn’t make a customer care.

Oops, forgot the AI step

Optomisation often has a cost, weather it’s code complexity, maintenance or even just salary. So it has to be worth it, and there are many areas where it isn’t enough unfortunately.

Part of that problem is developers are drawn to Shiny too. So things people may want, start working in a random distro first. Then when you are comparing these features people want to Windows, it’s often a catch up game.

But I think the framing the whole thing even to just the comparing the lagging features of a stable and usable distro to well… Windows is still a pretty good light.

Well have to accept that “Linux can’t X” and keep all the (um actually) caveats hush until it just works. Then hopefully with enough traction and resources that time gap will shorten.