As long as Google is doing a better job maintaining AOSP than a nonprofit would, what’s the point?

If they ever stop doing so, then this might be an option.

At the time vi was originally developed, such keyboards did exist (on terminals). That’s the reason it works the way it does.

since interface has been designed to be as unfriendly as possible

No, it hasn’t.

It (well, vi, which vim is a clone of) has been designed to be a possible interface on a keyboard that doesn’t have arrow keys or other modifier keys than shift. There aren’t that many ways to program a visual text editor when those are your constraints.

That it’s more productive once you know it is a side-effect.

It’s a fairly widespread Internet meme, I think in order to make fun of France, though I’m not sure exactly where it originated.

It’s probably going to be even harder to prevent here because due to federation it’s very easy to open multiple accounts across instances and no instance admin has full user data of accounts on other instances…

But it also provides the opportunity to move to instances (and their communities) where the problem is well-managed, if any exist.

wait wait wait reddit is against AI bots? news to me… https://documentingourdecline.substack.com/p/ai-bots-appeared-after-reddit-partnered

(Why exactly would anyone believe that face ID verification can stop AI bots? Have they seen how well generative AI can generate videos of humans?)

Yes, you did: OpenID.

I remember when I first read about it (late 2000s? not sure when), I thought it was an awesome idea and surely the web of the future would be full of “log in with OpenID” buttons.

Instead it is now full of “log in with Google”, “log in with Facebook”, “log in with Microsoft” buttons.

The harm this law aims to address is grave and real. For the 99% of the population who aren’t compiling their own kernels, the ability to “age-lock” a child account to prevent young children from accessing doomscroll brainrot on Instagram is an amazing and valuable feature.

I disagree even with this premise. I reject the idea that it’s legitimate to want to keep young people from seeing, watching, reading things that they actively want to see/watch/read simply because we have a vague idea that “it’s not good for them”.

My parents too unfortunately agreed with your idea, and I remember being a (teenaged) minor and worried that my parents might find out too much about what I’ve been reading and doing on the Internet and punish me for it, I don’t wish that on anyone who happened to be born after me. I hereby resolve that if I ever have children, they will not have to worry about this. I think it is a very good thing that modern technology makes it somewhat harder for parents to oppress their children in such a manner.

But there’s nothing inherently wrong with OS developers implementing such a feature if that is what their customers want. There’s a lot wrong with the government mandating it.

The principled “linux source code is free-speech, and no government mandates can compel changes” stance is quite divorced from reality.

No, it’s an exactly correct legal analysis; at least morally, and should be legally.

Are crypto-exchange founders likewise free to implement whatever fraudulent schemes they like, as their source code is their speech to freely dictate?

I’m not sure what scenario you have in mind. Distributing software (even software that can be used for illegal activities) is free speech. Running and using software isn’t (automatically) speech, it’s an action that can be declared to be criminal. Anyone can use Thunderbird to send phishing emails, but it would be absurd to prosecute the developers of Thunderbird for that.

I agree with the idea that a user account with an age field is less bad than actual (biometric or ID-based) age verification.

The rest of your post is so full of meaningless buzzwords that it’s impossible to write anything coherent about it.

With chat control we actually have to distinguish two different things that people sometimes confuse:

• voluntary chat control (“chat control 1.0”), which is currently already the law in the EU
• mandatory chat control (“chat control 2.0”), proposed in 2022

Voluntary chat control is about letting operators of communication services voluntarily scan messages for certain illegal activity (without this constituting a violation of data protection laws). This doesn’t break encryption and isn’t a part of a war on general purpose computing. While there are many good arguments against it, it’s not especially catastrophic. It’s a detail of business regulation.

Mandatory chat control is about forcing them to do so, which must necessarily break encryption and impose limits on software freedom. This is what is most important to oppose.

The most recent win ended up rejecting even (most) voluntary chat control, which is a good sign that mandatory chat control won’t get a majority either.

Yes; recent news have made me somewhat optimistic that the resistance to it is winning though.

Age verification laws currently look like a much greater danger to freedom.

2000s: war on general purpose computing because of copyright

2020s: war on general purpose computing because of child protection

In the 2000s the forces of freedom mostly won, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act didn’t become law. So far it seems that we are currently losing. :(

Confusing because there is a DB client called SQuirreL.

But also relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1989/

I think someone highly confused about the UI.

It’s possible in general, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on specifically here; not many people read IP addresses in such detail to notice such things at first glance.

Yes, I think it’s realistic if we look at how things in computing have changed even just within the last few decades.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-200901-202603 in early 2009, IE was at ~65%, Chrome at <2%, we’ve gone from that to “IE does not exist” and Chrome in the same spot IE was then

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202603 in early 2009, Windows was at ~94%, now it is at ~26% with Android having taken the top spot, even that is just at ~37%, so there is now no dominant operating system overall

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide#monthly-200901-202603 even disregarding mobile devices, Windows has fallen from ~95% to ~61% in that time frame

and maybe I’m just old but early 2009 doesn’t seem an enormously long time ago somehow

that has already happened tbh

Typical Linux distributions are almost objectively harder to use than Android

So are Windows and macOS.

How does this compare to salaries for comparable positions at comparable for-profit companies?

It’s kinda the point of donations that they can afford to hire people whose labor costs that much.

I’m not sure if that law will pass/has passed,

It has already passed the legislature and been signed into law, but not become operative yet, won’t until 2027-01-01.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

That’s not very similar to how AI typically writes, at all.