That commit message mentions laws from California, Colorado, and Brazil. Today’s article is only about how the Californian law is inapplicable. It seems to me that the feature is still valid.
Perhaps the controversy created by these pull requests is partially responsible for bringing attention to the issue and resulting in change to the legislation.
I'm confused why systemd would even do this? I'm not advocating for "breaking the law", but it's just completely absurd that this project would be prosecuted for anything... The general public as no idea what systemd even is and nor do they care. And 1st amendment free speech seems like enough to protect them.
It’s 150 comments of back and forth on a change which doesn’t have a concrete reason, the maintainers aren’t in agreement on what the right approach is wrt the field’s behaviour, and the person who submitted it is bouncing between saying he’s keeping it on topic and then adding scope where he believes it should be added.
I also personally disagree with the change, I think the OP has gone ahead and implemented what they wanted but not considered the actual ways it will be used. The PR shouldn’t be merged until the laws have made a bit more progress and it’s clear what they’re _actually_ implementing.
That's the facebookisation or redditisation of open source. Open source used to mean when you got the software you got the source code, but now it means a platform for arguing. And there's no doubt in my mind when people say they can't switch their project from GitHub to Forgejo because they'd lose "contributions", they mean this.
I don't understand your point. The phrase "when you got the software it got the source code" makes no sense. And arguments were just as common decades ago on forums, mailing lists, and IRC. What exactly are you trying to say?
I don’t think this is anything new. There’s been massive blow ups for as long as we’ve been doing this - NetBSD and OpenBSD was a massive, public falling out as was the gnome 3 release, or the python 3 release.
I would never look at a person's github account to evaluate them. The most important things people do will be proprietary, or if they contribute to serious projects will be in that project's gitlab/forgejo's instance.
But California could adopt some of Colorado’s language about containerization:
"COVERED APPLICATION STORE" DOES NOT INCLUDE:
(I) A CODE REPOSITORY PROVIDER;
(II) A CONTAINERIZED SOFTWARE DISTRIBUTION; OR
(III) AN ONLINE SERVICE OR PLATFORM THAT DISTRIBUTES ANY OF
THE FOLLOWING APPLICATIONS IF THE APPLICATION RUNS EXCLUSIVELY
WITHIN A SEPARATE HOST APPLICATION:
(A) AN EXTENSION;
(B) A PLUG-IN;
(C) AN ADD-ON; OR
(D) ANY OTHER SOFTWARE APPLICATION.
I have no problem with that as long as it's not the government controlling the age verification. It should be a parent. And as a parent I want the ability to properly control my children's devices - the fact that Apple, and especially Google pretty much ignored this feature until now is a big part of why we have these dumb laws in the first place.
Think about it - if every phone you got asked you at first config "are you over 18? If not ask a parent to set up this device" then everyone would know about that capability and "think of the children" would be met with "parents can just click a button"...
You already have the ability, all parents do, that some (or most) haven't is why this crap gets proposed in the first place and used as a justification for invading everyone's privacy.
If (some) parents actually parented instead of abdicating that role to the state/education system then this tripe would get far less traction - though cynically they'd just switch to the other argument they always trot out.
Oh no, some people are terrible at cooking. Better ban cooking without a license. Giving your neighbor a home baked pie is now a crime unless you're a licensed pastry chef.
That’s correct. We only need one law. Restaurant food poisoned you? NAP violation.
Even that might be too much. As you’ve insightfully illustrated, 1 law is a slippery slope to infinite laws. Next thing you know we need a license to toast bread in our own damn toasters.
California AB1043 is the only reason that app providers have to give a shit about whether parental controls are enabled btw. Before these laws, most apps were openly ignoring parental controls.
Why does birthdate trigger y'all so much, but physical location (literally the field right before it, that you can see in the diff context) doesn't? Shouldn't we be protesting even harder against systemd tracking our physical location?
Didn't physical location exist back when mainframes were a thing? Unix users would use it to find others IRL. Usually you wouldn't mind other users of the mainframe being able to visit you, that was the purpose of the field. But birth date? There are not really any genuine uses for that being at the system level. It's being used exclusively to add restrictions and lock things down, and that's exactly the kind of thing Free Software is not-for.
There’s no legislation coercing that field. systemd is doing what GECOS and chfn and .plan allow, but OS vendors are free to remove GECOS, chfn or .plan support.
Systemd is paid for by Big Business, so they will retain user-identification information in the long run of course. Poettering will never revert what he is paid for by the TechBros.
> A catalytic converter can be replaced, a life cannot.
So don't go around stealing catalytic converters. Same deal with states with "stand your ground laws". It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
And on the "replacing" part- on whose dime? What if someone's only means of transportation is affected, and they lose wages or outright lose their job? Are you going to pay for it? Of course not.
No, a better reason to not allow shooting of common thieves is that you don't want ordinary people shooting randomly at each other. The government / police should be able to handle this, but they either don't care or are incompetent.
Which leaves the ordinary upstanding citizen stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Man extracts taxes from their earnings, and thieves who ruin lives get a slap on the wrist because "lives are oh precious".
It's good to be able to stand your ground if that becomes necessary, I think. When I took concealed carry classes, they taught me to aim towards the center of mass to maximize my chances of a hit that would disable the attacker and to keep shooting until they stop being a threat.
But I also think that it is often more-useful and much, much safer to know how to de-escalate when that's possible. When I took martial arts classes, they taught me that the first step towards winning a fight was to avoid fighting to begin with, and always calm things down one notch at a time. If, and only if, that becomes impossible, then: Kick the snot out of them until they stop being a threat.
And running away can be useful: An attacker's ability to do harm decreases with distance. When I took army basic training, we trained a lot on running. They taught me that being able to run reasonably-quickly for reasonably-long distances was a skill that most people lack. Just keep running and the attacker will probably get tired and give up long before you do, which generally resolves the threat. If the threat persists after running away, then: Use the element of surprise and just turn around and stab them until they stop being a threat.
---
This is not an exhaustive list of methods and it is possible for any of them to go wrong. It's also possible to do nothing at all as a response and still have a very bad time of things.
It's a complex world. We've got billions of other people with different backgrounds, different problems, and different ideas of how they're going to get a little further ahead today than they were yesterday.
If we all had all of the answers, then we wouldn't have the kinds of desperation that leads to these problems to begin with.
I was referring to homes. This situation likely could've been avoided by not engaging in recklessly stupid behavior like road rage and escalating the situation (with one's family present, to boot).
Also, a news article of some random altercation doesn't change anything about what I said: It's simply impossible to be shot (or clubbed, or beaten up, or whatever) by someone in their home for invading, if you never invade people's homes in the first place. So don't do that. And don't steal catalytic converters either.
> It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
The clear, plain-English implication of what you're suggesting is: your risk of getting shot (in the US) is, to a large extent, directly correlated to your invasion of other people's homes.
Except that there's no evidence to support this. According to FBI data from 2015-2019, the ratio of criminal gun homicides to justifiable homicides (as in self-defense) was 34:1.
Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.
Is the context of this discussion unclear to you? Do I need to place conversational guard clauses for you? Or are you just interested in nitpicking? Do I really need to clarify that there are other ways of dying or getting harmed, including other ways of being shot, that have nothing to do with this? Do I have to preface every comment with an obvious disclaimer?
Obvious disclaimer: It is completely obvious that freak incidents occur, that there are other ways to die, that there is no way to guarantee the future or that harm will never come to someone, and that there are exceptions to just about every statement.
But one CAN choose to avoid deliberately putting themselves in situations where harm can befall them, such as comitting crimes like breaking into someone's home, or stealing someone's property. It should be completely obvious that one stands better chances in general by not doing things that make other people obscenely angry.
> Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.
Out of a population of 349,000,000 people. Sad, but most people can live their lives and be completely unaffected. Stop being sensationalist.
> Obvious disclaimer: It is completely obvious that freak incidents occur...
Are you really now characterizing incidents of gun violence and suicide as "freak incidents"? They just happen, like a random bolt of lightning in a clear sky that strikes a person out taking a walk?
> Out of a population of 349,000,000 people. Sad, but most people can live their lives and be completely unaffected. Stop being sensationalist.
The figure I cited was for gunshot deaths of innocent people. Every year, over 100,000 people are shot in the US. More Americans die every year due to guns than they do because of auto accidents.
You can dismiss this as miniscule compared to the size of the population, and refuse to compare the numbers in the US to other developed nations, which shows how absurdly more risky the US is versus the rest of the "civilized world".
But what you can't do is pretend that gun violence doesn't have an impact on people that isn't measured in deaths and gunshot victims. Because there is plenty of evidence that the threat of gun violence has a major impact on the lives of Americans. For example, more than a third of Americans have avoided going to certain public places or events out of fear. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40205802/
Other statistics, with citations, that I'm sure you'd dismiss:
> Are you really now characterizing incidents of gun violence and suicide as "freak incidents"?
Yup, as they basically are. Bolts of lighting would fall under "random acts of god/nature". Talking about whether or not guns should legally be ownable by citizens is an entirely different discussion.
> Every year, over 100,000 people are shot in the US. More Americans die every year due to guns than they do because of auto accidents.
Again, over 349,000,000 people. You do the math. Tons of car accidents, yet the world moves on and literally every adult I know, who doesn't live in Chicago/NYC/[rare place that's walkable + can afford it], drives. Find someone or something to blame for the geography of the country. Are we debating infrastructure now for a country the size of the US?
In any case, it does seem that you are capable of understanding what I meant by the original statement. It seems like all you want is to quibble over slight semantics in phrasing, and lecture someone who actually has lived in the US about how dangerous it really is. Have a day.
> Yup, as they basically are. Bolts of lighting would fall under "random acts of god/nature".
And a person using a gun to kill someone else is a "random act of god/nature" how exactly?
For someone who seems very confident of his knowledge of statistics, here's one for you: ~20-30 people die from lightning strikes in the US every year. Based on the averages, 4-6x that number died due to a gun yesterday alone.
I'm an American. Born and raised in one of the largest cities. I know at least half a dozen people who have been robbed at gunpoint, dated a woman who had been terrorized by a gun-nut ex, and one of my closest friends lost his father to suicide.
With all due respect, there's nothing more callous than believing that something doesn't impact vast numbers of people (proven by empirical evidence) simply because you apparently haven't experienced it yourself.
Okay: It's astonishingly easy to not get shot from committing crimes specifically home burglary or stealing expensive things from people. Other things may still befall you, because life is random like that, but if you don't do those specific things, I guarantee you won't get harmed as a result of doing those specific things. I make no other guarantees.
Doesn't quite roll off the tongue, does it?
> If anything, it's astonishingly easy to get shot in the US of A.
No, not really. It's easier than other countries, but I'm afraid you've bought into media sensationalism. The country has a population of 349,000,000 people. There will be crazy incidents. And they won't happen to the vast majority of people, at least, people who aren't tempting fate by doing stupid things like home burglary. But the ones that do happen, can get televised around the world.
The way the news talks about life in the US is completely out of touch. I myself have pulled into random driveways perhaps dozens of times. It's not uncommon when navigating suburbia. The way the news discusses it, I should be dead probably a dozen times over.
The problem is they never discuss all the other times people do that and nothing happens, which is nearly all of the time.
> The country has a population of 349,000,000 people. There will be crazy incidents.
By that logic, any country with a similar (or larger) population should have similar (or larger) gun deaths per capita as the USA, right?
Take India - population 4.3x but 15x fewer gun deaths per capita. Or Japan - 0.35x the population and 1500x fewer gdpc.
(Admittedly Brazil scuppers my counter-argument slightly - population is 0.6x but gdpc are 1.3x. Poverty and availability of guns seems to be the key rather than "random chance".)
Brazil has entire areas within the largest cities dominated by para-statal organizations that often are in shooting wars within themselves, with the government, or just decide to go on a terrorism spree against the civilian population.
Now let's talk about a doctor-thief, or a thief-doctor - your preference. Let's not get into the reasons/circumstances, because I'm pretty sure those won't be on the cards when a gun is drawn, or two.
Laziness mostly. It takes at least a decade of sustained exhausting mental and physical work to become a doctor, becoming a thief is mostly opportunity.
Or basic simple profit for sociopaths. Organized criminal rings have turned catalytic converter theft into a multi-million to billion dollar+ industry. Its basically steal from the POOR middle-class and make the sociopaths even more rich.
Nobody desperate will dare steal from the gangs since its not just death, but PAIN before death.
No, I believe a combination of the police, state governments, and federal government should be able to handle a) street-level policing and b) shutting down the illicit trade of catalytic converters, without using invasive measures like flock cameras. But that would require the police being competent to any degree, instead of using overtime to steal even more of our tax dollars.
The stolen goods have to be sold and bought somewhere. If they can't accomplish this with the vast resources available to them, (amongst other longstanding issues), then we should probably rethink the taxation process, the election process, or both.
Yeah. There were times in my life I would have put my life on the line (and that of the thief) to defend my vehicle and the tools within it. Those fed myself and my family. I would have had no reasonable means to replace my tools, and barely reasonable means to replace the damage a catalytic converter theft would have caused me.
Today it's trivially easy for me to say "property can be replaced, a life cannot" since I am exceedingly privileged. I would not put my life, or anyone else's on the line to defend anything but my and my family's personal safety. But I remember what it was like to not be so ridiculously privileged. So I get it.
Only someone who has never lived a hard day in their life can spew such stuff at other folks. It's entirely circumstantial.
The laws should reflect the prior case, not the privileged one. At least if you want to disincentivize criminal behavior.
Or you could have a society with a welfare safety net or even viable forms of transportation other than a private car. It appears that places where that happen also tend to have much lower crime rates as an added benefit.
This is a very normal commercial insurance problem. Sure, you can supplement it by buying a gun and staying up all night defending your truck, but the family ain’t gonna be happy if you bought the gun in lieu of insurance, especially if you lose that gunfight.
I would like to agree, but that's not how insurance works, at least in the U.S.
You get your catalytic converter stolen, and you will pay for it three times. The first is you paid for the original one. Then you paid for insurance to cover its theft, and likely your payments over the years have already paid for the catalytic converter a second time. And then after it's stolen, your insurance rates will raise such that you are paying for a 3rd (maybe fourth) converter, just on a monthly plan now.
Now, of course, shooting the thief is only cheaper if you don't invest much in your weapons and training, and don't face any legal scrutiny afterwards and need to hire a lawyer.
You don't have to engage the burglar, you just need to shoot a gun once (a shotgun is especially effective) b/c the blast will render the perp deaf temporarily.
Sometimes you get some mechanics' tools. But the best part is the laugh, watching someone running away with their pants full of shite.
> I would have had no reasonable means to replace my tools, and barely reasonable means to replace the damage a catalytic converter theft would have caused me.
But if you had died in the interaction, and let's say the thief at that point even left the goods and decided to leave, that would have totally been a win outcome, because the property with which you provided your livelihood was saved… wait…
> Only someone who has never lived a hard day
Yeah right…
I never understood why people forget this:
- Life is more valuable esp. if "you + property" combo is the livelihood. Okay, let's make this simpler. Probability of tools replacement ≠ 0; definitely >0. Possibility of you being replaced after death =0. Yup, it's not >0 yet, folks.
- When you are going for a life-losing/taking-possibility escalation level, maybe don't forget it's a two-way street..
The idea is that -someone- reviewed the lines of code they modified, leading to the sum of code being looked at by many human eyes. Using someone else's code has always been a system of trust in this way.
AI/Vibecoding breaks this social trust, hence the general aversion to using those codebases or bringing LLM code in. It's not really about the general quality of the agents. It's about the code no longer being reviewed and understood by a human. How can one place trust in that? Unit tests don't replace careful review and considerate design.
That's MIT. At a state university my friends were making in the ballpark of ~30k.
And yes, that is "next to nothing" compared to the salaries they make now after quitting and just finding work. And their outlooks are in significantly better shape, whereas one friend was highly depressed before.
People can also develop "deep expertise and specialized skills" through their work, and network via conferences, generally paid by their employer. Well, if they can find a job as a junior nowadays.
No, it's an observation that the first primary usage seemed to disagree (not that it did) and so it was observed that the second alt was used by the commenter above
OED has a lot to say about gourmand, Chesterfield in his 1758 letter that you quoted was saying that the Landgrave has a well stocked table .. good food and a lot of it, for he is a Gourmand. Following that Chesterfield example is a 1816 Coleridge extract from Statesman's Man that also about having a lot (but with no talent for preparation) - excess over taste:
Their best cooks have no more idea of dressing a turtle than the gourmands themselves
And, again, the first 1a primary most common usage cited in the OED is:
1. a. One who is over-fond of eating, one who eats greedily or to excess, a glutton.
It's a usage that has morphed in recent times, sure .. but as seen in the OED for a great deal of time the emphasis has always been on the quantity of good food rather than mere quality of good food.
This really gets on my nerves. ishouldstayaway provided a perfectly valid resource to support the initial statement that gourmand isn't just about quantity anymore.
> Well, you had to go to #2
This is clearly a disparaging remark meant to discredit their comment. So what if it's #2? It's a definition in multiple dictionaries. This usage warranted its own definition.
> in an American English dictionary
Same thing here- italicizing American as if it means anything. Again, both Merriam Webster and the OED carry both definitions.
> It's a usage that has morphed in recent times, sure
"Recent" being 1758. 268 years. Long enough that it doesn't warrant a nit anymore.
> the first 1a primary
Again: the non-quantity usage warranted a dictionary definition.
> Following that Chesterfield example is a 1816 Coleridge extract
Ignoring the 1804 extract before that and the extracts after it.
All in all I find this type of interaction (needing to be "correct" instead of accepting that there are multiple usages) to be extremely distasteful, leaving a sour taste in my mouth.
Because the bugs were caused by programmer error, not anything inherent to rust. It was more notable due to cloudflare being a critical dependency for half the internet, but that particular issue could've happened in any language.
This kind of melodramatic reaction to rust code is fatiguing, honestly. Rust does not bill itself as some programming panacea or as a bug free language, and neither do any of the people I know using it. That's a strawman that just won't go away.
Rust applies constraints regarding memory use and that nearly eliminates a class of bugs, provided safe usage. And that's compelling to enough people that it warrants migration from other languages that don't focus on memory safety. Bugs introduced during a rewrite aren't notable. It happens, they get fixed, life moves on.
> caused by programmer error, not anything inherent to Rust
Your argument does not work as a praise for Rust because the bugs in any program are caused by programmer errors, except the very rare cases when there are bugs in the compiler tool chain, which are caused by errors of other programmers.
The bugs in a C or C++ program are also caused by programmer errors, they are not inherent to C/C++. It is rather trivial to write C/C++ carefully, in order to make impossible any access outside bounds, numeric overflow, use-after-free, etc.
The problem is that many programmers are careless, especially when they might be pressed by tight time schedules, so they make some of these mistakes. For the mass production of software, it is good to use more strict programming languages, including Rust, where the compiler catches as many errors as possible, instead of relying on better programmers.
The cloudflare bug was the equivalent of an uncaught exception caused by a malformed config file. There's no recovery from a malformed config file - the software couldn't possibly have done its job. What's salient is that they were using an alternative to exceptions, because people were told exceptions were error-prone, and using this thing instead would make it easier to write bug-free code. But don't do the equivalent of not catching them!
And then, it turned out to not really be any better than exceptions.
Most Rust evangelism is like this. "In Rust you do X and this makes your code have fewer bugs!" Well no it doesn't. Manually propagating exceptions still makes the program crash and requires more typing, and doesn't emit a stack trace.
That was why I brought it up. I wasn't trying to be snarky or haughty. Thank you for filling in the gaps, I should have done that instead of the 1-liner.
E.g. systemd's birthdate field https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954