I already have lifetime but there have been increasingly more and more yellow/orange flags recently.

For you jellyfin folk: Is there a good solution to being able to cache/download episodes/movies ahead of time for “offline mode” with any of the android clients yet? Last time I checked that was a pain point and most solutions boiled down to “just download the file and use VLC”. At which point… why am I running a media server when I can just mount a samba share at home?

that the company has to give it back because the company already has all that information

Do they?

Let’s use Nintendo as the example.

First and foremost, how much did they change the price of the switch 2 based upon tariffs? More specifically, how much can you prove they did? Should a company that chose to eat the costs of the tariffs themselves be penalized and forced to lose even more money over NOT raising the price every time fuckface did? What about the specific case of the Switch 2 where they intentionally waited a week or three to announce the price after revealing it to factor in expected tariffs?

Also, what about the units they had stockpiled ahead of Liberation Day? Do they now owe “the customers” money based on the date of sale rather than the date of import? Or does Baby Jane Doe get less because her gameboy’s serial number corresponds to a unit imported in March rather than May?

All of which ignore that Nintendo weren’t doing direct to consumer sales in the vast majority of cases. They went through intermediaries like Best buy and Amazon. Many of whom ALSO were playing the same math regarding stockpiled units and ordering more supply from Nintendo.

Because the company handled all the nonsense of importing on behalf of the end customer (also most intermediaries).

The youtube channel HowNot2 talked about this a bit since they somehow became a(n actually really good) climbing gear store. Because tariffs were changing so frequently (often multiple times a day), basically nobody could plan for them. So companies had to balance their in-country stock with anything they were going to buy in the next few months… or even days. And try to figure out what price they might be paying.

Some companies basically just charged the tariff rate on any given day… which is bullshit since they would have bulk purchased whatever they could while they were “low”. Others would eat the cost because they didn’t want to lose customers by increasing the price of a preordered item. And so forth.

And… people who got their aliexpress on can tell horror stories of getting a bill once things made it through customs.

So… it actually makes perfect sense for the companies that dealt with this bullshit to get reimbursed by the christofacists. I would hope they would “pass it on” to the customers as an act of good faith (even if it is just a free game or something) but… this is a case where the problem isn’t the corporations: it is the government.

Symfonium on my phone (so also android auto and just connecting to a bluetooth speaker while I cook) and Feishin on my desktop. Still need to verify that scrobbles are propagated correctly for discoverability purposes (so far it looks like ratings in Feishin aren’t propagated to the server).

I could probably have gotten away with just mpd but figured “why not?”.

And there have been a lot of discussions over the decades over artists/“aritists” who overly sampled a song and became orders of magnitude bigger than the original artist.

Its a balancing act. Most people aren’t going to get too annoyed if someone uses generative AI to help build a backing track or a beat to go with their song.

The issue is that so much of this slop is “make a song like this” from scratch. And while there is a lot to be said about manufactured acts and the role of major labels… one of the few good things about spotify et al destroying the music industry is that it has become so much easier for smaller independent artists to get a foothold.

And all this does is add more slop to push them back out. And the difficulties with detecting slop will mean people will be a lot less likely to ever check out a smaller band when they can instead listen to whatever the latest major act that beyonce et al vouched for is.

This (moreso for youtube music, since Deezer seems to not have a lot of East Asian labels signed) is a huge part of why I’ve been building out a selfhosted Navidrome.

Obviously there is the old school way of getting music. But Bandcamp is WAY more beneficial to the artists and ebay and Half Price Books are also awesome for grabbing music.

And combine all that with musicbrainz for scrobbling and discoverability of new bands.

Ehhhh.

Yes, there are some fairly revolutionary(-ish) chips. Those are few and far between because they tend to be hyper specialized. Inference but not training or only optimized for a very small input matrix (common for edge computing like cameras).

By and large? They really ARE “traditional” GPGPUs that are optimized to hell and back for vector operations and linear algebra. And a lot of the gains there come from multiplying their floating point performance by 2-4 (depending on if half or quarter precision). They aren’t as good for double precision as something optimized for it but basically only a very small subset of users need that. There will be no issues repurposing the hardware in these data centers.

And the rest is data movement which has always been the real problem.

It collapsed into… 4 or 5 of the most powerful companies in human history.

And that is the thing to understand. These bubbles are less about widespread collapse and more about consolidation. And it tends to be the smaller companies that suffer, not the biggies who were driving much of it to begin with.

“aren’t making a profit” gets into the mess that is book keeping and is a giant rabbit hole people actively avoid because it is just easier to get angry at stupidity rather than complex malfeasance.

But what makes something an “AI data center” outside of the branding?

The reality is that it is a shit ton of computers connected to a really fast internet connection. Preferably through a properly managed set of switches but you do you. And the reason that we still mostly use GPUs for “AI” rather than highly specialized hardware (although, nvidia DID just buy groq a few months back…) is for that reason. They might do linear algebra of quarter precision floats REALLY well but they also do linear algebra of single and double precision floats pretty well too. And the CPUs and mobos (that are mostly optimized for data movement to offload to said GPUs) are no slouches either.

Which is what most of these companies are planning for. openai is, arguably, really fucking stupid. Whereas anthropic have shown decent signs of “diversifying” as it were. And nvidia… if we lived in a world where they could get enough RAM I think they would be fine. As it stands… Jensen (and a LOT of people) are kinda fucked and I expect to see a hard pivot over the next 12 months.

Because if we banned ALL generative AI tomorrow? The people who think you can’t use a computer without installing litellm first are gonna be fucked. But everyone else will just put other workloads on there and be… “fine” is a strong word but they won’t go bankrupt. And the data centers themselves will still be incredibly valuable.

Think about the dotcom bubble. We went from having all of these businesses that shot to the moon for valuation… and then it collapsed.

Amazon and Google and basically all of FAANG/MAMA beg to differ.

And basically every company still has a website and ecommerce in general is still massive.

The Dot Com bubble was brutal. But it was not a collapse of the industry. It was much more of a correction after so many companies blew up to sell services like “rate my dog” and many of the smaller ecommerce sites were absorbed by larger ones.

And that is likely what will happen with generative AI. I expect a MUCH bigger bloodbath for openai but anthropic seem to have scaled a lot better (although they also are going into their IPO with a massive data breach…). But expect most of the smaller companies to similarly get gutted.

But

Makes sense. It takes years to complete construction projects and budgets always overrun. AI is a fad for most companies trying to get into it.

Data Centers exploding… honestly have little to do with AI. No… not the way they explode in the UAE… metaphorical exploding. The reality is that data centers are GOOD money. Basically every company needs data hosting and offloading internal infrastructure is… honestly a really smart play. Same with the massive push for streaming of basically everything so that nobody owns anything and subscribe to everything. You want regional data centers and… this is how you get them.

Ooooh. Cloudflare Pages definitely looks like what I want.

Thanks

For no apparent reason:

Are there any good alternatives for gh-pages dor a super lazy/simple website? I’ve been meaning to actually use one of my domains for a personal website and pointing at which project is on which code repo site would be a good idea. But… I need that page to be hosted by one of them.

I mean… if you take into account fair price of utilities (water and electric) and skyrocketing costs of RAM… I don’t fully disagree.

Ballparking, but 50% of an engineer’s job being “boilerplate” and “charlie work” sounds reasonable to me. Maybe even 75%. That IS what generative AI is really good at. It is the kind of work that you can have a particularly ambitious student intern do.

What makes a good engineer is the ability to verify that work. In software this is “code review”. And the other aspect is actual innovation. Solving particularly complex problems or breaking a problem down into manageable and verifiable tasks.

And… guess how you maintain your skills to be able to do that? That’s right. Charlie Work.

Which is the problem. Managers (and wannabe managers) just see short term gains. So they want EVERYTHING to be done with “AI” because they want to bulk fire people and reduce operating costs. And they don’t at all care that they are causing a massive brain drain because that is next quarter’s problem.

But yeah. Use generative AI to accelerate your workflow. But also understand when it is very much worth taking your time. Either to keep those skills fresh or just because you can do it in a “fun” way. And if you feel that ALL of your workload can be done by chatgpt… maybe think about how much cheaper a claude subscription is compared to your salary and benefits.

It just seems like such a defeatist attitude to me to cede ground on this,

It’s not “ceding ground”. It is picking and choosing battles.

What does adding a DOB field to a user account do? Absolutely nothing that the Location, Email, Phone Number. whatever fields didn’t already do.

What does adding libraries to fetch cost us? Yes, I dislike that on principle. But it provides an OS functionality that is genuinely useful (age restricting accounts) and… it is one that I can work around should I ever need to.

What does it get us? It is an immediate response to “There is no way for parents to protect their children from this vile content” because… it is exactly that. It is an immediate response to “We can’t manage school systems” and “We want to provide a way to lock this down but those evil OSes won’t let us”.

Versus “holding the line” and ceding absolutely nothing… and then getting blindsided because this is a feature downstream companies actually want. So rather than implement it their way with all the hooks into remote databases at the systemd level, it is instead a wrapper for useradd commands.

especially when the laws you mentioned actually being worried about would use this as precedent.

They don’t need a precedent. They are already pushing their own (often more restrictive) laws.

without doing more reading on the topic

And that is what EVERYONE should be doing. Understand what is being demanded. Understand what is being done. And understand what the actual meaningful impact is.

You’re saying there are already age checks for certain sites (and analysis of your web traffic and associated data being sold) and that this is no different, if I understand correctly.

Correct-ish.

I would amend that to be “All of this information is already out there and you provide it, without thinking, often multiple times per day”. But with the added caveat that this ONLY changes if a third party verification is required.

It is worth pointing out that while the California law requires no verification, the New York law potentially requires more than just a declaration of age. It’s worse elsewhere in the world.

To my knowledge (and skimming what I can find), the New York bill also does not require third party verification. At least, as of 2025-S8102A.

But yes, fully agree regarding the rest of the world. People get EXTRA pissy if you point out the EU isn’t magically doing exactly what they want it to do and always siding with “consumers” but… the frameworks and legislature being pushed through there are deeply alarming.

Right, but you see how this is also a bad thing right? Given that the FBI has now spoken about buying this data and uses it to target people, I would think that we would all want better privacy protections, not fewer.

Do not expect companies (and company adjacent) orgs to protect your rights.

But also? The FBI doesn’t need to “buy this data”. They can just buy the same marketing data everyone already has on them (unless you go above and beyond to obfuscate that).

And this legislature has absolutely zero bearing on any of that.

I don’t see how that should sway opinion about this being a good or a bad thing. It’s a bad thing for everyone, right?

No, it is not. Like I pointed out above: We always say “parents should watch what their kids are watching so that I can keep getting my goon on with tiktok” and all that nonsense. And do you know what the first step to ACTUALLY protecting kids online is? That’s right. Restricting accounts based on age.

Adding a user provided birthdate to your account in systemd is no more dangerous than having a field for location or phone number. Having an API to fetch this from the OS IS concerning but is also very much in that realm of "This genuinely makes browsing the internet easier"as, depending on implementation, your computer can auto-verify you so you don’t have to wipe the lube off your hand when you change sites.

And… its almost like those of us on open source OSes can maybe consider a way to go even farther with controlling what gets sent…

I don’t see how that should sway opinion about this being a good or a bad thing. It’s a bad thing for everyone, right?

Correct. But I would bet my bottom dollar that at least a few of the folk insisting this is the evil US (fair) forcing their will upon the world don’t realize their own governments might actually even be ahead of the game. Like apparently a bunch of live service games disabled chat in the UK in the past day or two?

No, I am saying that. I was saying that calling this a slippery slope doesn’t feel like it is based in the history of privacy erosion.

Again, that privacy already eroded away years ago. Pretending otherwise is just lying to yourself and increasing your own risks.

but just because it isn’t the first step doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight against consolidated, government-mandated privacy violations, right?

The door to your home fell off and all your windows are shattered. Does it make ANY sense to freak out that your ex still has a key to your front door?

And that is why… it is more than a bit tinfoil hat but I really do wonder how much of this “outrage” is being intentionally stoked to distract from the very real concerns. If you actually care about your privacy then you need to educate yourself on what you should have been doing for years now. And consider getting on that.

I’m asking why we don’t try and just fix the problem instead of letting something like this slide by because there are other, similar issues.

Yes, let’s try to fix it. Complaining about a single field being added to a user profile (that already has user provided location, phone number, email, etc) ain’t it.

Focusing on the third party verification component… is part of it.

But also understanding that all of this is out there and never coming back is more important.

One of the biggest con jobs facebook has ever done is to pretend that they let you delete your account. And they do. Except… not really. Because User 1234 who has the real name field of “Fred Jones” was deleted. But User 1235 “Daphne Blake” isn’t and she has lots of pictures of her and Fred. And Old Man Wilkinson also has pictures of his home that some meddling potheads raided last month. So removing metadata from THEM would violate their digital rights.

So (simplifying), User 1234’s “real name” field is indeed voided. But their profile remains the same so all associations with Daphne and Shaggy and all the mansions remain the same. Same with the knowledge that some blonde haired d-bag with an ascot went to school with Red Herring. And that he is related to Skip and Peggy Jones. And that his name is suspected to be “Fred Jones” for the purposes of making sure to protect his identity in case someone registers as him and can’t provide ID to prove that.

But folk just fixate on “Delete your profile so that zuckerberg can’t control you!” and ignore all that.

Because understanding things is hard.

Can I ask you to explain your point, “age doesn’t matter, your digital footprint carries over?”

I… didn’t say that? Not sure if you replied to the wrong person?

But I’ll try to respond to what I can?

You mention solutions to protect yourself from the digital footprint carry over, but this law would just make it easier to overcome those solutions.

Assuming we are referring to the California legislature (I believe most/all of the US legislature if on the same grounds. The proposed EU "framework"s are very different), there is no requirement for third party verification.

It is literally the same check we already have. “Enter a random ass date that is more than 18 years ago”. This doesn’t “overcome” anything and, arguably, is a good law to get on the books so that you can say “Something is being done” before all the legislature and “frameworks” that want to be built around third party verification and “digital passports” do gain traction.

Now instead of having to figure out the various unique patterns of accessing the internet to determine info about you, you just tell them your age (or that you’re an adult, whatever) on those systems directly.

All of this is already happening and HAS already happened. You know all those stories about how google knows you are pregnant before you miss your first period? You know how you can quite often just click “verify you are human” and it processes without making you generate training data?

Hell, you know how targeted ads are a thing?

All of that is the same thing. It is about building profiles that tend to be so ridiculously specific that it isn’t even “This user connecting from Norway actually lives in the US and is from Cleveland” and is more “Oh, this is Oswald Harvey using his nordvpn subscription that he got with a discount from a Spiffing Brit video. He tends to favor the endpoints that are 25% down the list”

I also think it’s a bit disingenuous to call ‘this is the first step towards something worse’ a slippery slope when that is exactly how the creeping erosion of privacy has gone in the US historically, but especially the last few decades.

1. This is not exclusive to the US. This is something being pushed globally.
2. I never said this is “the first step towards something worse”. That step happened LONG before programming computers was “women’s work” and the cray loveseat was a genuine accomplishment

Both of which speak towards why people need to educate themselves to understand what information is already out there.

You acknowledge that a lot of people don’t fully understand how to protect themselves (and offer solutions that require more money, time, and education to accomplish) and in the same breath that is why it’s okay that we make data collection easier.

Yes? I am sorry that protecting your privacy takes effort? I am sure that if you pay a random sponsor on an LTT video that they’ll claim to do everything for you?

Like… I really don’t know what to tell you?

That is really going to depend on what your actual risk is. There are a decent number of articles and videos out there that go into what journalists have to do and… they are generally ahead of the curve on stuff like that.

But what people SHOULD do is to gain an understanding of what is actually going on. This entire debacle REALLY feels like a mix of people being mislead as to what the California legislature actually is (whether for Views or more nefarious reasons) combined with making it abundantly clear that they know absolutely nothing about their current risks.

Like, you telling pornhub you are over 18 is not telling PornhubCorp anything they don’t already know from all the other cookies and fingerprints you are carrying everywhere. Hell, a lot of services are dedicated to tracking by IP to get around incognito mode and even caching to get around VPNs (although, most don’t have to bother since people have been trained to just put EVERYTHING through a vpn so that it doesn’t matter in the first place). They are literally just ticking a checkbox in the hope of not getting blocked by more payment processors.

So if you truly care about protecting your age? Have multiple devices. Learn how to split your traffic based upon device to get around many fingerprinting techniques. Figure out where to sit at Starbucks so that you have your back to a wall but don’t look like a pervert. And so forth.

Rather than freaking out and throwing tantrums because people are trying to inform you about how little a self-reported age at the OS level that can be requested matters.

One fun bit of paranoia. I am sure most people are aware of the “Abnormal behavior has been detected from your IP. Please click here and then do some ML training to prove you are human” prompts that tend to come up on shared connections or if you have too many adblockers running.

Understand a lot of that is you “consenting” to have even more of your specific cookies checked (which is what happens when they “verify” you without a test). But a few years back there was an excellent paper that actually used how you perform on the ML training to further fingerprint you. The person at 1.2.3.4 with these cookies who is probably color blind is distinguished from the person at 1.2.3.4 with most of the same cookies (everyone loves going to Dildos R Us) but gets confused over whether a hotel shuttle is a bus.

And that all goes towards making sure they know exactly who you are and what ads (and trackers) to use.

I have a choice to who an d which third party collects my data.

Only if you actually understand what information you are and aren’t exposing about yourself in your every day activities.

Which… yeah, does really feel like understanding the meaning of a text/concept. So… spot on?

People can run secure systems that share minimal info.

And those generally aren’t the machines you want to connect to the internet and use for all your everyday browsing.

This requires all systems to store and share specific info.

Specific, unverified, info. That you are already sharing in most of the situations where it is being asked for.

So you’re making it illegal to have a private system. Sure most people don’t, but now you’re making it illegal.

A lot of things are illegal. Without the third party verification requirement, you are perfectly fine to hardcode that to say you were born on June 9th, 1969 by default. And that complies with the California legislation (last I read through it).

You think that’s okay because we don’t have good privacy laws right now? You want to give up?

No. I want people to actually understand what is going on so that they can actually protect themselves.

“More secure” is a minefield of marketing and intentionally misleading the populace. In a “perfect” world, everyone would believe that just putting something in a txt file protects it from The Government. Its akin to how so much media has pushed the “if you’re a cop you have to tell me” myth.

But mostly I see it listed more as a way to build up precedent/probable cause. I forget which country it was, but Graphene was specifically listed as being used by criminals/drug dealers. Whether that is true or not isn’t the point. The point is that now, using Graphene, counts against you for the purposes of pressing charges or taking you to a black site.

Which is the reality of a lot of laws. Let’s say it is declared illegal to have the text of Animorphs 01 in your possession. Cops aren’t going to be going door to door to find out if you are a Friend of Katherine. But if they raid your home because they decided you are a drug dealer or a dissident and find it? That is an extra charge. Or their suspicion that you had it is the entire reason they raided in the first place.

Which IS the reality with a lot of “decency” laws. That isn’t to say they are all evil (CSAM being pretty universally accepted as being banned for a reason) but it is important to always understand how enforceable a law is and whether it actually changes anything.