This is pretty key. If they had added this field 8 years ago, absent any context of swarms of lawmakers salivating for personal info so they can find more children to fuck, or data to sell to their donors, then I wouldn’t have thought much of it. The timing is absolutely a critical element of the discussion. Heck, wait until CA has repealed its law, and admitted in embarrassment it was a terrible implementation of child protection, and maybe I’d even be okay with adding the field.

Putting it in now is very much like the nazi standing at your door, holding a hand close to your knob, insisting “I’m not actually searching your house and breaking your 4th amendment rights! I’m just standing here, for no particular reason!”

“C’mon, guys, they’re just ARMING the untrained soldiers. They’re not even sending them to your neighborhoods!”

I play DBD, Arc Raiders, Wild Assault, and others just fine. Funny enough, it’s just a few specific big names with the most anticheat problems: Valorant, Fortnite, BF6, and COD. In some ways, I’m happy not to have to even consider them.

I understand the sentiment, although annoyingly enough Boston Dynamics kicks their “dogs” pretty often, and they’re build to adjust their balance very quickly.

Sorry, but something I’ve had to learn with time is that it really doesn’t matter who’s operating the gas chamber, if their actions rely on hundreds of other people openly saying “Death to all jews”. There’s no importance to whether those people would ever pull the lever themselves. The language is what’s important, not how much they were “only joking”. Both an ultra-racist and an edgy teen in their late 20s are just “trying to get away with it” and don’t care who they hurt.

Right, but isn’t Lemmy itself a bit of a “less features” version of Reddit? I’m not here for features, I’m here to get away from toxic Reddit mods because fuck spez.

I’ll admit, I might have taken the bet that “reddit but not reddit” would hold at least some interest.

Case in point: Typing from a spare Surface Pro that I installed Ubuntu and some support drivers on for the touchscreen. Some update broke the touchscreen drivers, and I needed a keyboard and a lot of googling to repair them.

If this had happened on Windows, someone likely could’ve taken it to their repair shop or to Microsoft. Sadly, these days even Microsoft might’ve dropped any user aid.

Lose, not loose. Loose uses a soft S, and means uncoupled, held in a less firm grip.

If you don’t want your info (whether you are an adult a teen or a child) to be shared with “owners of apps that are on the Epstein list”, then don’t install those apps. There is nothing in this law requiring you to download any particular app.

Linux, as well as any decent system of security, operates via varying levels of trust. If I install a game on Steam, that does not get root access with permission to rewrite my kernel. Similarly, if I have banking info on my device, it doesn’t get to view that, or anything with my face or name. You can install and even run something without trusting it with your life.

If an app were sending this data to a third party, like palantir, then they would be in direct violation of this law.

We have seen time and time again that courts do not provide adequate protections for these types of data breaches. The law does not matter. At the most, software companies get slapped on the wrist, but more likely they get away with it, as “programming is hard, and it’s easier to just send everything”. It is far, far easier to assert that a malicious app is not submitting marketing, or “fuckability” information on your child if that device does not denote itself as a child’s device in the first place. That’s only possible if the law isn’t hammering the OS into openly exposing its own user data to anyone that asks for it.

Your last point about personal responsibility is an important one. It’s why, if you happen to be using an old insecure device running Windows XP, you can toy around on the web with it, but you should disconnect it from your personal network, and should not enter personal info on it. Any device software that is forced to keep an open “Would_President_47_Seek_To_Rape_This_User” flag, available to every application, is removing that option for personal responsibility.

Does it even allow for user privacy protection? Nothing I’ve read of the bill suggests that an app could ask whether the user is of a fuckable class by its Epstein-list owners, and allow the user to block the prompt. Every other app has to ask for permission to use the camera, to write to certain directories, they can even be firewalled to prevent network access. The very idea that an OS must code in a form of user information that must be provided to any app, trusted or not, is a warped, Palantir-driven approach to (in)security.

Most practitioners of data security are aware of the severe dangers of fingerprinting users, and that is a hardline issue. Thus, in order to maintain their security practices, their only choice is to not collect this sort of info on users at any level. If they’re delivering a security product with a built-in vulnerability, they’re not delivering a security product. It’s much better to just surrender one state until it invents sanity.

Wake me when that actually leads to enforcement penalties. This law is vague enough as it is, no company is going to get slammed for “accidentally” skipping a user permission check, and having their FunPad app offer up your age info to one of Palantir’s long fingers.

Even entering DoB is imo too much of a privacy breach. In my view, they should just take the highest age bracket described, apparently 18+, and then ask that on OS installation: “Are you over the age of 18?” If the user says yes, it installs, and every app is hardcoded to receive that 18+ bracket when checking demographic. If they say no, then it simply replies that users under 18 may not install it under the laws of California.

My libraries still lend out a lot of DVDs. I ended up getting Fallout S1 in that format, and while it was a resolution drop, it was perfectly bearable.

I can guess for the audience using discs, a lot still have archaic hardware to play them on.

For honesty, recent example from me:

I bought about a dozen epub comics. They were formatted with a hardcoded 600x450 width or so, maybe expecting a particular device. Having recently worked with epubs to format my own (word) book, I knew the format, and basically wanted to use Python standard library tools to unzip them, rip out some useless sizing/styling code (from hundreds of XHTML files), and zip them back up.

I hadn’t used Python professionally in a few years, so this was an annoying back and forth to work out the process and remind myself of syntax, especially considering this was something I was just doing for a few of my own books. Instead, taking every important piece of this puzzle/process I’d researched, I instead described the problem to ChatGPT, specifically pointing it to the Python standard libraries I wanted to use. It gave me a one-page program that was mostly complete and I only needed to change in a few areas.

I don’t think I’d ever pay money to AIs for a variety of reasons. I take that assistance as it comes, and could live without it.

Most of my Discord usage is text-based or sharing images, and I tend to have casual presence in many of them at once, due to varying interest groups. As far back as I’ve known, those servers haven’t focused much on that.

It seems like they were the main replacement recommendation in many cases, and their servers may have overloaded thanks to the Discord enshittification news.

This has been a common sentiment, enough that I’ve thought of making a video about it.

Running a desktop OS, catering to everything people need from their PC, from printing to fringe drivers to VPNs to package management, is a big task. I have long doubted that Valve is personally interested in taking on that task. They write SteamOS for the deck and machine, since their only real responsibility is playing games. People who try to install that OS for other things will see some Flatpak friction - but that’s fine, it wasn’t built for that.

I’d strongly recommend looking at some other distributions with broader group support. My recommendation is CachyOS. Bazzite has worked great for others, but as a general desktop user I sort of bounced off of it - installing some unusual apps ended up getting a lot of friction against its emulation layers. I believe both are based off the same sort of origins as SteamOS, so that may be the safest thing.

It maybe used to be more true, but these days even when someone posts a decent guide on de-bloating Windows, it can A) Miss something critical, leaving spyware telemetry running, or B) Become out of date one month later when a Windows Update manually re-enables all the things you turned off.

I would’ve appreciated it when I was on Windows, but now? I’m kind of just happy not to be constantly fighting my OS on things, even if I do get compatibility annoyances.

I mean by that logic, stop using Steam. It’s (marginally) possible for a company to get big, and not do terrible things. Just keep an eye on them and don’t become fully reliant on them.