but I don’t see an alternative

An alternative to what? This will not prevent children from accessing content. The weak point is the humans that willingly allows it in the first place. Having an extra step won’t stop them if it can help them not be bothered by actually having to look after their kid.

This is not sacrificing freedom to gain security; it’s sacrificing freedom to not gain anything.

And there’s never been any kind of international cooperation between law enforcement ever, anywhere.

You sure about that? They have a legal obligation to keep this trace, and it sounds like it would easily qualify as a legitimate interest. We’re not talking about some third party logging a visitor’s IP, but an ISP, that have a requirement to keep this information.

The GDPR isn’t making all personal identification data inaccessible, they restrict how they can be stored and accessed. If there’s a legal requirement and/or a legitimate interest, they can be stored, and if the data exists and is requested by law enforcement, it’s likely that higher agreements will hold.

do they think people will keep expressing these kinds of opinions publicly? Oh course not

People are already pushing all kind of extreme and suspicious opinions on multiple websites under their “official” name that can be found on their ID. This won’t change. And the risk isn’t people stopping saying thing at one point; it’s the list of “allowed” topics changing over time, then going back to older content.

When looking at an IP for an investigation, they don’t use GeoIP. They use “ask the ISP who had this IP at this time, oh, thanks for the full name, address, bank info, phone number”.

Because in the end, you, the person that is forced to use various AI chatbot/agent/model/whatever, will be held responsible for anything that happens after one of the 3000 decisions they imposed you to make with no way to check everything turns out to cause the slightest problem. When that happens, YOU were supposed to know that NOTHING the AI tells/says/do is to be expected correct, so it’s your responsibility if something’s gone wrong.

Bluesky leadership: slightly worse than JD Vance. It must not have been easy for them to reach that, but what an achievement.

There’s an easy workaround : install W10 with a local account, then upgrade. No need for any kind of workaround. Disclaimer : this might have worked because I’m in Europe.

Otherwise, there are workarounds for a vanilla install with only local accounts that still works to this day, I did that in a VM. But that’s flimsy.

Of course, this leaves you to the whim of “fucking microsoft, we’ll screw you forever, bork your data when we want, force you to change computer every other year, and you’ll love it”, but the option exists.

Thats all there is to it.

Not really. Even with (theoretical) infinite context windows, things would end up getting diluted. It’s a statistic machine; no matter how complex we make them look. Even with all the safeguards in place, as these grows larger and larger, each “directive” would end up being less represented in the next token.

People can keep trying to hammer with a screwdriver all they want and keep being impressed when the bent nail is almost flush, though. I’m just enjoying the show from the side at this point.

I’m sure this will be fixed with an ever increasing context window and more “plz be nice” inserted left and right.

Well, too bad. Do something else.

But as long as people have some brain, if the market gets a majority of “smart” devices to the point there’s enough people looking for alternative, some people are likely to try and fill the gap. It might become a new niche market, but it’s one place where supply and demand will work to our advantage.

The alternative is having every individual program try to store data about the user in their own, non-interoperatble formats

The alternative is NOT to store that data system wide, NOT have it made easily available to anything in the first place, and NOT normalizing having all your personal data available at will to everything.

Are you really arguing about the convenience of having personal data available system wide when it’s is absolutely irrelevant to 99.9% of running applications?

The biggest defense for this I see is:

• it’s not bad now
• it’s not mandatory
• it will remain unused like the other fields that were previously there
• you can put anything in it

Then, tell me, why bother adding this in the first place, exactly at the time governments are looking toward full control of everybody’s computers? If it’s that innocent and useless, either someone really likes throwing shit up, or it won’t stop there.

And given the slate of other things that “didn’t stop there” in the past few years, you know, it cost nothing to be cautious. Especially if it’s “so useless you won’t even notice it’s there” after all.

Until the next one refuses to even pass through HDMI if it’s not connected.

Just don’t buy shitty devices.

I’m sure you think you’re smart dropping a short, “insightful” three word post. But you might have missed the constant falling down we’ve been having in every possible places these last few years. It’s not a fallacy when it turns out to be a series of fulfilled plans.

is a classic slippery slope

Were have you been the last few years or so? We’re not just “going down” one slippery slope after another, we’re speeding down them.

Good luck building a distro that play nice with your fork, then. Systemd is embedded deep in most distro, replacing it without breaking things is not an easy task.

Damn. It’s only being talked about and people have already folded.

It’s only a date field. Then it’ll only be an API for other service integration. Then it’ll only be an optional plug into a remote service. Then it’ll only be an optional, but strongly recommended, dependency in other software. Then it’ll only be a digitally signed third-party value that’s mandatory. Then it’ll only be something most installer won’t proceed without.

We’ve been jumping from slippery slopes to slippery slopes over the past few years. It’s tiring. And the coincidental timing of all this is not helping.

Linux Distros (so far) Refusing Age Verification

The systemd dude, ever so flexible as long as the request does not come from actual users, is already working on adding this into core components, though.

It already happened in the actual demo pictures nvidia themselves provided. Colors appearing out of nowhere, details showing up or decor elements disappearing, etc.

It’s a shitshow, and it was the best they could garner in a finely controlled environment.