I imagine it feels quite righteous to drop maxims like this. I too am reminded everyday how glad I am not to have to live in a fascist state.

That said I think this sort of superficial dismissal is really unhelpful.

I think the vast majority of Linux users will agree we don’t want to have to work with these laws but the reality is that we do. Far better we focus our efforts on minimising harm and promoting alternative mechanisms (e.g. zero-knowledge proofs).

Further I fear this righteousness actually serves to foster a toxic culture in the free software movement. And do you know what we call belligerent people who want to stifle dissent? Fascists!

No he doesn’t. We need to focus our anger on the legislators/ lobbiers (Meta in this case).

I’m inclined to agree that OS-level age verification declaration is pointless and invasive but I’m sympathetic with distros looking to comply with the law. I can also see why governments want to pursue identity verification to enforce laws online even if this is obviously not the right way to achieve that.

I want to see Linux become the mainstream choice and accept that it will need to be compatible with laws like this to do so. Were Linux more widely used then organisations like the KDE e.V. might even be consulted by lawmakers which might help avoid this sort of legislation being passed in the first place!

I’m also hoping that this can be solved for those in California with some sort of optional service rather than something that gets too closely integrated with the distros or desktop environments.

So kind of like a personalised learning assistant? I realise it’s different but this inverted instruct approach puts me in mind of Doctorow’s reverse centaur!

Don’t you find that the links you get are hallucinated though? Even if they’re not now you can imagine this collapsing into slop echoes…

I’ve tended to ask for examples to help me bootstrap new projects. A bit like getting customised docs. I certainly haven’t had enough success with generated code to think about automatically adopting it.

This is interesting and sounds like how I’ve been using it - basically like customised stack overflow answers.

Would you mind elaborating a little on your approach? Are you saying you provide it with guidance and links or are you asking it for those?

Get a Steuerberater. IIUC they charge based upon your revenue and it’s certainly easier than doing it yourself. They’ll generally deal with all the bureaucracy.

Don’t use platforms like ODesk/ Fivvver to find work as you’ll be competing on price for commodified work. You’ll have more interesting and better paid work if you have a hand in developing the role with your clients.

You need to do some sales and marketing work - e.g. create a portfolio and go to events to meet people in the industries you’re interested in. Finding work is largely luck but you don’t invest the time then you’ve got no chance.

The fees will really depend on experience and the value you’re adding. Check out e.g. Glassdoor for equivalent employed roles to get a ballpark. Estimate 200 days per being available at full utilisation.

I quite like this one of the baby pulling the pensioners up hill.

Submerge them in brine for a few weeks. This creates an environment favouring lactic acid bacteria which will create pickling acid from the veggies that prevents mould.

You need to keep them submerged which you can do by putting a freezer bag full of brine on top.

It’ll release CO2 so if you don’t have airlocks you’ll need to seal the jars only loosely or burb them occasionally.

Haha yeah it’s great. It’s fast, portable, and has keyboard shortcuts from this century!

I have to say when I saw this headline I was bracing myself for AI “features”…

230B parameters is “reasonably small” now?!

This reminds me of the book “Only you can save mankind” by Terry Pratchett. The aliens surrender once they realise the player is apparently immortal!