fafferlicious

I can’t reconcile the fact that the entire discussion is about how we can control, based on user age settings at the OS level, the content people can access and you asking me what my proof is that the system is being created for control.

I really don’t know how to respond because it’s self evident, isn’t it? It’s there in the law? Why else add the tag to the user? Like… I just…what? Of course it’s for fucking control. There’s no other reason to have it.

As for a more broad general “the government wants to control”…I just… Look around? DMCA is a prime example. Or read people that are smarter than me about it.

They even say why I’m the message

Stores the user’s birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.

Now I can hear you already. “But EFF says age verification is the real evil and this isn’t verification! It’s just a text tag any root user can change!”

And that’s where I’m saying it isn’t. Now. But it will be. Who is pushing for this? Do you think they’ll be okay with a giant Linux loophole? Or will they try to close it? Is that not always the typical pattern with laws? Pass it then patch the loopholes.

We’ve gone from “click to prove you’re 18” to “provide a date” to “provide an id” to “make the OS and other apps verify.”

Why should I ever assume that it will stop at a simple plain text annotation? The slippery slope is documented. It’s real.

And I never said it was inherently bad.

It’s the context. It’s the context. It’s the context. It’s the context.

Please engage with me and the arguments i am making - not imagined narrow slices. This isn’t a high school debate where you get points for speed and word count.

Let me restate: In the context of governments actively seeking to restrict access to information on the Internet, I think implementing ANY infrastructure that move towards the government’s ability to achieve their censorship is bad and shouldn’t be done.

I’m not saying there’s no benefit to adding a plain text date field to user information. I’m not saying it’s the end of the world now. I’m not saying it’s verification.

I’m saying use this as a point to stand up and fight and say “NO, You have no authority over the information I can access. And we should not give in because ‘for the children is a lie’ and they’re not actually trying to protect children while our government is RUN BY LITERAL CHILD FUCKERS.”

Is there a government push to verify my name and email before I can access content or is there a government push to have age verification be at the OS level? Could maybe that be a meaningful differentiator that makes “lul r u still using ur real name? Fucking Idiot” response not relevant?

I understand the technical differences and that we can just put a bullshit date format passing value there. I’m not fucking stupid.

My objection is that it is step 0. Before you can have an OS verify to meet government mandated verificaiton, you must create the value store.

My objection is that we’re entertaining putting in the infrastructure that enables actual verification.

Because it will not be enough.

Because they will come back and say “look at this loophole”

“Think of the children” you’ll all say as you agree to give your government authority to determine what information you can or cannot access as “age appropriate” completely ignorant of what you’re handing over.

This would be fine if it was just for you, but you’re trying to give my control over my system and what I can access away from me because you’re too short-sighted to see what comes after volunteer age reporting. And when that still doesn’t save the children, which it won’t, because it is NEVER ABOUT THE FUCKING CHILDREN ITS ALWAYS ABOUT CONTROL, you’ll tell me again that it’s just another little minor infraction. It’s just a little bit more than volunteer reporting.

Afterall, won’t someone please think of the children?!

There’s a lot of people here unable to recognize how important attention span is for deep, meaningful learning.

Way too many people saying “ATTENTION SPANS NOT INTELLIGENCE DUHMASSES” and failing short because they don’t have the attention span to think of implications of decreased attention span.

Long term memory is built on repetition and attention. It is entirely plausible that short form media makes you stupider - by impacting your ability for deep learning

It’s not even strictly what capitalism is about. It’s some stupid bullshit interpretation that came out of the University of Chicago economics department.

Seriously, go look at Adam Smiths wealth of nations. The only mention of the “invisible hand” is so different from what is taught in economics now

… by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

It’s not that we need no regulation. It’s just trying to say that if we set things up correctly, we don’t need to worry about people pursuing SOLELY their own personal gain. Because the market seeks out the “greatest value”, which is not just about money. It’s also the value to society as a whole.

Instead, we got the fucking bullshit from Chicago saying that the only / best way of measuring value is by profit.

A good journalist does not just write for themselves, they must also write for the audience as the audience. They are the readers proxy and ask questions on behalf of the reader.

Imagine a generic shmuck that has no idea ctrl +c and ctrl +v are hot keys.

Now. Do you think they have any concept of what type of duplication tools exist? Do you think they’d just want to use this “super cool everything” software that AI is billed as? After all, it’s supposed to be smart right? They say it’s the next best thing and it’s almost like magic.

Look, I’m not saying it’s a great article. But given all the bullshit hype regular people hear about AI. Is it really unreasonable to think “copilot, help me find duplicated files in my one drive” would be something good old Billy would try?

Maybe it’s not a great article because there are better ways to de-duplicate photos. But that isn’t the fucking point of the article. The article is “look at how AI still fucking fails at basic shit we expect it to be good at.”

And for that, I thank the author. We need way more of that.

Legitimate question.

How is the act of an AI company downloading a copyrighted work and adding it into their “dataset” to generate a summary different from an individual downloading a copyrighted work and adding it to their “dataset” and writing a summary?

Both instances require consuming the material in some way. Both instances generate something new, transformative of the original work.

Why do AI companies get to torrent the entirety of human knowledge, but if any single person does it… Well we know what happened with Napster. Limewire. Kazaa. Megaupload.

Because to me, that hints at a flaw in your logic. AI companies are violating copyright. They had no permission to consume the copyrighted works.

Have you not been paying any attention?

THEY FUCKING ESCALATE WITHOUT AN EXCUSE ALL THE TIME.

Where is this bullshit “oh guys let’s not agitate them it might make it worse”

THERE’S NOT MUCH WORSE THAN LOSING FREE ELECTIONS

ESCALATE. FIGHT. FUCK THEM.

There’s definitely hope that it synergises with what’s going on due to the steam deck.

Personally, I can’t wait to buy two controllers and the machine. The flawless experience of the deck is amazing. And because it’s Linux, I’ll just install YouTube, jellyfin, any app as a non steam game and I’ll have the perfect smart tv appliance.

Stream games, play games, run any program I want through steam big picture - I can’t wait to bury my Shield.

I’ll never have to connect a tv to WiFi again. I’ll never see a fucking ad for anything on my TVs home screen again. With KDE connect my phone is a remote. I’m so fucking pumped.

This is bullshit, IMO.

It’s profitable. It’s just not as profitable as being a douchebag with business decisions - like enshittification and planned obsolescence. The moment you try to to publicly fund your company, you suddenly have a fiduciary duty to your investors to maximize returns. And let’s face it, appliance manufacturing has high up front costs that will likely require an IPO to satisfy your initial private investors.

Just because you make quality appliances doesn’t mean you can’t make money maintaining and manufacturing parts for quality appliances.

I’m curious if you have recommendations on how to structure or keep the notes. I find that I struggle reading technical documentation or how to structure notes so they’re easy to refer to. Have any tips or guides you can share?

Do not mistake the opportunity cost for inviability. Billionaires are not lining up to build one with their money may be a fact (I don’t know), but even if it is, it is entirely possible that the rate of return is just too low for them to consider investing in. Why make 3% EV YoY when you could get 5% EV YoU? Almost double the rate of return!

Not so easily proven.

It’s really not some mythical user, man. I just laid out the two main methods we were comparing of updating firmware. One process requires literally 0 user intervention after device setup. The other require the user to intervene. In what world is the process where the end user has to do literally nothing to get updates inferior to any process that requires intervention? It’s not that the device has Internet that’s the issue. It’s that there’s nothing respecting privacy! We’re on the same side but you wanna…what…make it illegal to do OTA updates because internet connectivity for devices is intrinsically invasive somehow? I just don’t get it. Your position doesn’t make sense.

Make an app

And now the app pulls gelocation data of the user and takes the data on the device and uploads it through the app because no privacy laws.

Why does using a USB stick to flash the firmware equate with chewing your own food, but using an app to update the firmware not? They didn’t compile the app from code!

there is no compelling use case for constant internet connection for these types of appliances

I literally just gave you one. The ability to push out OTA updates for bugs greatly reduces the complexity of maintaining technical support and development to support legacy features. I don’t know, maybe instantly patching a critical Bluetooth vulnerability to protect users privacy via OTA updates is compelling enough ?Do they have to do it that way? No. The device could just get it via BT from the phone app. Basically the same thing as the device itself doing it.

But the privacy issue still remains even if we remove WiFi from the fucking vacuum and then just let the phone app have WiFi access instead.

Did I make my point better? Removing internet access to the device, doesn’t remove the privacy concern. It just moves it somewhere else. And yes I know there absolutely is a way to do firmware updates in some privacy respecting way, but if you maintain that a 0 step process is less preferable to the majority of users than any process that requires multiple steps… Then I don’t know. Interact with users more? There’s plenty of boomers peck typing their way around the internet.

I admit you have points, friend. I share your concern about privacy. But come on… We got where we are in part because the general users don’t give a flying fuck or even think about privacy.

The sheer fact that internet access exists for them indicates there’s a use case. And it’s obvious. Over the air updates are objectively a better user experience. Maybe even the best. For the average consumer that doesn’t even know to use ctrl + c, what do you think they’ll choose: dragging out the USB stick/cord or just having the device take care of itself?

The problem isn’t that the devices have internet access. It’s that we don’t have appropriate legislation governing protection of privacy that would keep this kind of snooping in check.

I’ll give this one go just on the off chance you’re being genuine - since you seem to have some sense of rationality to your position.

You’re wrongly underweighting the damage that will get done while the courts correct things. Yes, eventually the courts would restore broadcasting licenses. But there’s appeal after appeal after appeal. That could kill the stations even if ultimately they’d win. And don’t say that the licenses couldn’t be revoked in the first place. They did it to fucking science funding. Funding mandated by Congress just stopped, and Congress did nothing. Sure it’s coming back now. Kind of.

We know how this plays out already. And we can’t even count on the courts. The supreme Court has shown a total disregard for their duty with some of their rulings.

Like the executive order on birthright citizenship. Before the supreme Court the government didn’t even argue the legality. They said nationwide blocking orders were the real problem. The Court agreed.

Or the use of race or language as a cause for ice detention. Blatantly against the forum amendment and the Supreme Court said it’s fine. They’re snatching US citizens for fucks sake.

This is all easily searchable. If you really care about being rational and reasoned, you’ll put in the effort. This isn’t people desperately trying to be wrong. These are people that have seen what is likely to happen. They’ve updated their priors more accurately than you.

People don’t sympathize with their trash when it ends up in landfill.

Yeah man. It’s crazy how democrats aren’t all in the streets fighting this shit en masse.

Oh, you just wanted to blame the politicians. K.

I think you’re confusing cause and effect. Pensions have been done for a while before people really embrace jumping ship constantly because it’s the only way to grow your wage.

If I was offered a pension, I’d be way less likely to jump ship every 3-4 years because management assholes only ever give a COLA 1-2% over inflation.

Why does everyone take statements about a population and then try to use a specific example to disprove it?

I’m talking about generalities. Look at who the majority of boomers vote for. Spoiler, it’s not democrats. I don’t know your grandpa. I don’t know what anyone’s grandpa did. But collectively, generally speaking, the stats say our grandpa’s share blame for voting R for decades and at the very least, for voting for corpo neolibs every primary.

Because hey, guess what, it’s not the new generations that have the highest participation in primary votes.