• Warm white christmas lights. Diffuse lighting is so much better.
• Induction cooktops. Because gas cooktops are toxic both inside and outside the home.

This site made me enable javascript. Ew.

Furthermore, social media promotes addiction through endless scrolling, which can impair brain development.

I think this is the big one that’s driving this push for age verification. The issue of YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and Lemmy rotting kids brains has gotten measurable and significant. I think Gen Alpha is the first generation to end up less academically capable than their parents. The status quo is considered untenable by voters, politicians, and the Epstein class alike. Not to mention the impacts on mental health. If anything the issue is that the legislation is too centered on kids. That’s problematic firstly because it requires proof of age, and secondly because adults aren’t immune to brain rot and addiction.

First things first they need to just hire my autistic ass for something.

That’s not the computer doing it, that’s the services you use going out of their way to gather one by combining data which has other legitimate purposes. Not so much being “sent” as it is being “abused”.

Unless we want to count Microsoft’s “advertiser ID”.

Your computer has, on a hardware level, sent unique identifiers to ISPs and websites since Pentium IIIs.

Source?

https://www.integrazionemigranti.gov.it/en-gb/

500

That’s $1,000 per employee laid off. They might have been making $60,000 a year each.

$30 million is way too much to pay anyone (especially shareholders) but firing the CFO is not a silver bullet.

Why not. Not like that money would be put to better use elsewhere.

In the case of email, security is more important than privacy. The country your provider is based in doesn’t matter.

Hypothetically if we were talking about something like a VPN, it would need to be a country which values privacy and which has a vaguely hostile attitude to America. I have no idea what country that would be.

Steak

I’d have paid the fee for ad-free YouTube if it didn’t also come with an (expensive) subscription to YouTube music.

Nowadays though I don’t want to give Google money for anything, even incidentally. I just use Ublock Origin.

The carbon intensity wont make the product go away, but the economic cost will.

The product won’t go away either way. I can’t foresee a scenario where Musk kills Grok. Short of a catastrophic global energy crisis that makes anything AI basically impossible to sustain, but that’d never happen.

Inference is dirt cheap. Short of a botnet, nothing we do will at all impact Grok’s finances.

EDIT: I haven’t actually done the math if it is actually dirt cheap. But assuming it isn’t, then that makes it even more important not to use such a carbon-intensive AI.

Grok is one of the worst AI’s you could possibly be using. The electricity used in training it is dirtier than any other company’s and it is owned by a Nazi.

Firstly, the ID requirements for renting a place to live are a more apt example.

Secondly, it depends how the ID is used. If my ID isn’t being associated with my online traffic then it isn’t the end of the world.

I’ve been running an RX580 for years. It’s worked fine for 99% of games, but recently I played RV There Yet and Umigari, both ran poorly. RV There Yet seemed to improve with a Proton update, but Umigari says the RX580 is the bare minimum.

Point is, it’s never the games I expect that I end up falling short on, so a heads up from Steam would actually be helpful. I really wish I could still get a refund for Umigari.

You need ID to drive a car, which is essential in modern America. Worse still you need ID to rent a house and that’s normally getting fed straight into a massive insecure database. The advantage of Linux is that we could theoretically choose who we give our ID to (whether that’s Red Hat, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Debian, Arch, etc). Handing over your ID is necessary for some essential parts of modern life, and while I wouldn’t want to hand it over to access my operating system, I would be able to accept it.

Thinking critically, let’s imagine that only government approved companies could verify your ID and those companies are Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Persona. At that point I’d … really hate it but I’d hand over my ID. Then I’d double check my operating system isn’t logging and sharing my internet traffic.

There’s no indication that our online traffic will be required by law to be linked with our proven ID. If such a thing does happen, then firstly we are totally screwed, and secondly it would likely involve all major websites participating. We fundamentally won’t be able to get around it in that case.

Your response again doesn’t really follow from what I wrote. It retains some key words but not the ideas.

Browser fingerprinting which exists because the average person can’t be bothered concealing it and the theoretical sharing of your ID with the sites you visit due to a government mandate are two entirely different things. The relevant difference is that the government doesn’t mandate browser fingerprinting, it exists because it is technologically possible and the mitigation measures are more inconvenient than the average user is willing to deal with.

As for normalizing OS-level ID checks as a slippery slope towards sharing your full ID as part of a HTTP request … firstly that is not something you can get around with an alternative distro anyway, because it would involve all major websites. Secondly, that is a hypothetical within a hypothetical. Thirdly, if that really is the path that we’re on, now is not is not the most effective time to oppose it, because the slippery slope argument is far more persuasive from the bottom of the slope.

EDIT: I think I just did the same thing I accused you of, talking past you. My response basically just rejects your core conceit, that being a distinction between the private power-user experience and the non-private normie experience, and nothing else. I’ll need to edit this.

EDIT 2: Okay, fixed.