There is way too much sensationalism around this law. All this law calls for is an OS-level “Are you over 18?” button, the kind that’s been all over the internet for decades. See the Ubuntu mailing list discussion for a possible technical approach. There does not appear to be any requirement for age verification beyond that of the system administrator, and reporting is by a total of four age brackets, so even the privacy impact is limited.

The benefit of something like this is that age can be enforced by the system administrator rather than the user, so parents can set their kids’ computers with an accurate age bracket. Meanwhile, all of us with just a single user can set the highest age brackets and move on with our lives. Now, as the CEO of System76 says, kids will find ways around it, and we shouldn’t discourage kids from controlling their own computers, but he says “If there is any solace in these two laws, it’s that they don’t have any real restrictions”.

But that same article notes that New York has a proposed bill S8102A that is much more draconian. California’s law is a minor nuisance, while New York’s bill sounds like an outright danger. Please focus on a real threat, especially considering it’s much easier to change laws while they’re still only bills.

AsteroidOS mostly supports watches that come stock with Wear OS, which is a modified version of Android, which, guess what, runs a Linux kernel. These watches are on the more powerful end of the computing spectrum. As you say, there are a lot of smart watches that use pretty lean MCUs, but those aren’t running AsteroidOS or Wear OS, as noted in this FAQ entry.

Sounds like you might like the Pebble Index 01. Except that it’s not shipping yet. It’s supposed to be scheduled for March.

Downvotes are to show that the content does not contribute to discussion. This comment is not related to the top-level post, and looks to be low-effort trolling, so it is not contributing to discussion, and deserves downvotes.

Distrobox might be the easiest way. If you use a custom HOME directory you can even keep the build artefacts isolated.

That’s not at all what the article is saying.

Under the current terms of NORAD, the U.S. and Canada can operate in one another’s airspace to track or intercept threats.

Ambassador Pete Hoekstra cautioned that if Canada purchased fewer fighter jets, the U.S. would “fill those gaps” in security concerns.

“NORAD would have to be altered,” Hoekstra told CBC News.

One can read threats into that, but it’s quite far from threats of bombing.

Follow the link and go down to the third point:

Isn’t this just ReactOS?

ReactOS tries to reimplement the Windows NT kernel, and that has always been its Achilles heel, holding it back from a hardware compatibility and stability standpoint. The loss32 concept is to achieve a similar-feeling end result to ReactOS, but built on a more usable foundation, using components known to work well (the Linux kernel, WINE, everything that glues those together, and a sprinkling of ReactOS userland niceties). As a bonus, the OS would still technically be a Linux distro, so it would be possible to run Linux software when necessary, something ReactOS can’t do.

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Reminder that these rewards are paid by the interchange fees that credit card processors charge to the companies accepting them as payment. Australia and the EU have legislatively capped interchange fees, which helps keep prices down, but ends up limiting these reward perks. I would love to see Canada try to bring down those fees too, but I worry consumers would object to losing their rewards.

My knee-jerk response is to be indignant about a cop being let off lightly, but the article does describe him as remorseful of his behaviour and taking steps to deal with his own issues. So he sounds like someone who is unlikely to reoffend, and therefore should not be punished harshly. In our justice system, I believe a non-cop would have been sentenced similarly.

But I don’t like the idea of him continuing to work as a cop, at least beyond in-office work, as the police should be held to a high standard. He’s going to work on his own issues, but such work isn’t always quick or smooth. Being in the field dealing with challenging people raises the risk that he runs into another situation where he loses control. I don’t know what the policies are of the Guelph police, but I hope they keep a high standard here.

Nice review of the historical trajectory of desktop Linux. I was surprised that the article mentioned Homebrew rather than Distrobox. This is the first time I’ve seen Homebrew given as a solution for command-line tools on an image-based desktop.

define harmful speech

From the post you are replying to:

if some use their free speech to actively/directly hurt or incite harm to others

Do you feel that definition is lacking? If so, what should be clarified?

FYI, here is the article that the graph is from. It includes some other data too, on dropping travel to the US and reduced orange juice imports.

You might be interested in Parabola, an Arch-based FOSS-only distribution. If you don’t want to switch to a whole new distribution, maybe you can use its repos from Arch (not that I’ve heard of anyone trying that).

Sounds like you want Luanti.

That’s a nice analysis. I also want to share Ka-Ping Yee’s 2D simulation visualization from 2005 that really highlights the theoretical problems with plurality (aka first-past-the-post, FPTP) and instant runoff (aka IRV, “ranked ballot”). Also see Brian Olson’s and Warren Smith’s additional simulations.

I’d like to get into an even broader discussion. I’ve noticed discussions about voting systems tend to assume a single winner, because most of our political systems are set up to require a single winner. Most commonly, this is the people in an area choosing a single representative. But if we’re flexible with our political systems, we can expand the possibility space in all sorts of interesting ways.

A simple example: the city of Guelph elects two councillors per ward, with each voter choosing two of the candidates and the winners being the top two (see 2022 election results for details). This is almost like a blend of plurality (aka first-past-the-post) and approval voting systems. Anecdotally, I feel that this creates a better political climate in Guelph, because candidates can’t be at each others’ throats when they will end up sharing voters and eventually sharing power.

Some other examples:

• BC-STV would have created multi-member ridings with an instant-runoff-style voting system (proposed but rejected for BC provincial elections).
• MMP (Mixed-Member Proportional) creates two categories of representative to create proportionality by party (used in a number of countries, was proposed but rejected for Ontario provincial elections).
• Or completely rewrite the concept of representatives and do direct representation and have an unlimited number of representatives independent of ridings with varying voting power in the house (and then we can argue about voting systems for legislatures).

That centralized low-power machine can even be your phone, if it has enough storage for your needs.

This is exactly how I use Syncthing, and as the author says, it sure would be nice if more things were just files. Really, most things are stored locally as files, but not always in a way that plays nice with syncing. Like, I can sync my Firefox profile between machines (it’s all in one folder), but I found it prone to conflicts, with little to resolve those conflicts.

In a similar vein, local-first apps built with Conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) can be another way to avoid server dependency. I haven’t seen any significant apps built this way yet (just occasional blog posts about it). I imagine the CRDT approach would work better for individual apps, since conflict resolution can be written in a way that works best for a given app, but I also imagine that such apps would not play nicely with a generic sync solution like Syncthing.

Where is “here” for you? I’ve never heard of a place with variable speed limits.