Routing is something you can control client-side. Well at least you can configure that all traffic should be routed over the VPN. If your company provides an exit to the internet over VPN is another issue, but I suppose most do.

On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.

I don’t think so. She said she wants to make them unable to continue with their business like they did before, with regulations. Just not outright censorship, but instead go fight their data harvesting, decapitating their business strategy.

In terms of analysis, I’m annoyed at Cohn here. This isn’t something we as individuals have control of. Her saying people individually have to make the difference is like saying you individually have to make the difference regarding climate change by making different choices, like recycling.

I understood her differently. I understood that she advocated into making it possible to leave platforms, saying that it currently isn’t. She said the people are the victims here and often don’t have a choice.

People cannot leave platforms because each platform is like an isle, and leaving it means losing connections to other people. It that sense they are locked-in, by social pressure.

This is is a natural monopoly which, gives social media companies so much power and prevents newcomers (like the fediverse) from joining the market.

Making the current social media companies less important, for instance via privacy laws, means people can connect and stay connected to other people via other means. It makes it easier to just leave twitter or meta, if they don’t like it there. Instead of being peer pressured into right extreme politics, because the algorithm decided that it gets more engagement when surrounding thrm with nazis.

She made it clear that replacing an dictator with another dictator that censors differently is bad, so she made a point against bluesky and for Mastodon and the fediverse.

(Sadly ehe wasn’t given the opportunity to fully complete her arguments though.)

Well… It cannot even search databases without errors.

LLMs just produce plausible replies in natural languages very quickly and this is useful in certain situations. Sometimes it helps humans getting started with a task, but as it is now, it cannot replace them. As much as the capital class want it, and sink our money into it.

I guess you are joking? And mean “side-loading” as in injecting custom code via LD_PRELOAD and not the strange definition phone makers use for describing ‘installing an app’.

You are seem to disagree with yourself… On the one hand you say I should ask them to make a case for their argument, but on the other I’m not allowed to ask for evidence.

But instead I need to provide a proof for… them not providing proof that their argument is not a non-sequitur? Did I get that right?

most people can get behind parental control. that is why bad actors are pushing for age verification everywhere nowadays.

Yes. And I would complain if there is a requirement to need third-party for-profit companies in order to verify peoples ages. Companies want data, and government want control. Both are bad in this case.

i think the issue many people have with that field is, that it enables bad actors to do things.

This needs to be proven. Currently it doesn’t do anything. But there is work to integrate it with flathub, that would allow administrators e.g. parents, to limit access to certain apps. Maybe later there could be some kind of web interface, where a site that offers adult content, would ask the browser, and the browser would look into the account data and then respond if the logged in person is an adult or not. No third-party required, just the person that locally set the date of birth on an local account.

all the while, it does not really do the thing it is supposed to do: if i trust my kid with sudo, the field can easily be altered. if i do not trust my kid with sudo, it cannot install anything either way.

Many apps can be installed without root privileges, for instance via flatpak. And in the future it might prevent certain apps for kids.

with your last paragraph i (and probably most people) agree. but we already have those tools, right?

IDK… I think there are more tools available on Windows for that then on Linux… But I my parents never deployed those and I also never had the need for such tools.

But I guess, very often DNS block lists can be used to block adult content… But knowing the internet and adblockers based on DNS alone, that will often lead to many false negatives and positives. So I would argue that we don’t really have anything like it right now for Linux Desktops.

Why do people so often invert the burden of proof?

If someone says “Picking your nose will cause brain-cancer in 40 years.” Then they have the burden to proof that. Nobody has the burden to disprove that.

They made the accusation that this is a step to make this age fields mandatory, and controlled by third-party age verification services, so they have the burden to proof that there is way to do that.

I find it highly unlikely, because most people using Linux systems at home have admin privileges. Which makes this whole point moot, since they can fake whatever they like to the software running on top.

Maybe this is the issue. I have no problems with parents setting the age of the children in their account in order limit their access to certain content.

And there clearly exists a use-case for that.

My main issue is when it comes to third-party age/identity verification services. Age or identity verification in the hands of private for-profit companies is bad.

I’d rather give parents the tools to set individual restrictions locally on their devices, then pushing for a global internet based age filter.

You do know that this is a slippery slope argument, right?

You would have to demonstrate that there is an intention there to require third party services to validate the age of users using Linux… Or that there is an intention to do so by systemd and the broader open source developers.

I don’t think it will be easily possible to lock out every Linux system from the internet that doesn’t implement some kind of hardware DRM mechanism to make sure that the user cannot just change the date of birth with root permissions.

Hallucinations of LLMs are just one class of errors, and the most dangerous one.

Other stuff like garbeled or repeating output are other errors.

Don’t worry, review was done by an LLM as well. ;)

Kurzum: Erst wenn Sie mit der Ware an die Kasse gehen und eine eindeutige Kaufabsicht mit Preisvorstellung abgeben, entscheidet sich, ob Sie den Artikel auch wirklich zu diesem Preis erhalten. Sie haben kein Recht, den angegebenen Preis einzufordern.

In short: Only when you take the goods to the checkout and express a clear intention to purchase at the asking price will it be decided whether you will actually receive the item at that price. You have no right to demand the stated price.

https://www.focus.de/immobilien/wohnen/falsche-preisauszeichnung-muessen-sie-trotzdem-den-richtigen-preis-zahlen_a0f9868d-30c0-45f0-b25e-27893a11b914.html

To me, that the price label is accidental wrong doesn’t really matter.

I’m not sure there is a difference between those things in the German law.

As I said, in Germany the price tag is a mere price suggestion, the final offer and transaction happens on checkout.

In my case it was an electronic article, where the price tag showed a much lower price and the cashier then demanded much more. But it turned out that they can do that.

Well… In Germany apparently they can.

The price tag is not binding, it is a mere price suggestion. The final price is the one when you actually buy it at the checkout.

Haggling is legal in Germany. The cashier is making the offer.

Wherever it is discrimination or not would probably depend on the metrics used to decide the price.

If someone is really desperate for an article, then I could imagine that the cashier can raise the price.

But I am not a lawer. This is just my assumptions on how it could be implemented.

And if they do it on an individual basis.

Like do they detect that a shopper is in a hurry, or if they just need one more ingredient for their cake so they are willing to pay more.

Sure… If you even notice it. And if enough people will care and if there are still stores around that don’t do that, clearly superior profit maximising scheme.

I’d rather want this stuff to become illegal. So calling your representatives, make news and go to the streets about this would I think help more that yet another boycott.

Issue is that haggling is actually legal in many countries.

So at the cashier they will make you an offer, which, if you pay, accept.

Now with technical support making individual offers becomes pretty easy and effordless on their end, but if you are in a hurry you don’t have that technical support to make a counter offer that effordless… So the shopper is at an disadvantage. Either way, your reaction, wherever you buy or not will train the AI of the store to extract the maximum amount of money of the broad customer base. If some people are priced out of living, they probably don’t care.

In Germany the price is actually set at the cashier, not the tag. I found that out the hard way once, where the price tag was wrong and I had to pay more.

So dynamic pricing wouldn’t even require deploying these smart tags, the cashier or the ‘smart’ self-checkout could just do it on their own. They could just use their cameras, analyze your face to figure out if you are in a hurry or not, or in any other way willing to accept a higher price and then offer you the ware to something you are probably going to accept.

The future is realtime individualized price gouging.