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.

And even then, you can’t talk to half the US.

“Have you considered not hand-delivering your family overseas to fight for oil?”
“I would but liberals would invade my home with electric cars and their transgenderism.”

Even if most real people would be happy, you can bet Israel, Russia, and the RSF + allies would astroturf the hell out of a “How dare America, evil world police, expansionist imperialism” campaign. And, just like how much of America is stupid, many people globally will believe it. It has happened before.

You got me, they’re actually a set of goalposts with a sheet over them - but it appears someone moved them.

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.

It’s sad to say while it was the default choice for a while, it seems like a lot of people are avoiding Ubuntu now.

Gaming is awesome on CachyOS; it’s very possible much of the better capabilities there can be installed on Ubuntu, but I don’t know how hard that is. I imagine most games would perform similarly by default.

If I understand right, the usefulness of basic questions like “Hey ChatGPT, how long do I boil pasta” is offset by the vast resources needed to answer that question. We just see it as simple and convenient as it tries to invest in its “build up interest” phase and runs at a loss. If the effort to sell the product that way fails, it’s going to fund itself by harvesting data.

For anyone looking for new alternatives, I’m sure most Lemmy users can suggest more open-source pubfed options, but for anyone trying to generate a bit more presence (not that there’s much) I did find a YouTube video highlighting some “indie social media” sites, mostly focusing on nostalgia of simpler versions of the historically popular ones.

Having the whole world operate off of publically-owned shared systems is probably an ideal, but having them at least in tight competition, with easy destinations to abandon off to, is still quite a bit better.