Parental controls means the control is done by the parents… not by the companies. I don’t need to tell any company what age bracket my kid might be, all I need is for them to tell me how can I block / restrict access to their services in my parent-controlled network (or how to allow them, if using allowlist).

Standardization of parental controls would be if routers and/or the OS of the devices came with standardized proxy settings that allowed privoxy-style blocking of sites in a customizable way so we can decide which services to allow… with perhaps blocklists / allowlists circulating in a similar way as adblockers do.

I mean, ultimately it can always be worked around… even if you were to add stronger forms of identification, a kid can take the parents card / ID / DNA sample / whatever when they are distracted and verify themselves. If a kid is smart enough to set up a VM like that they are smart enough to deceive adults. Teenagers have been finding easy ways to get to forbidden stuff for centuries.

I’d much prefer if the source of trust is in the local device, in the OS, that is responsibility of the family to control, and not on some remote third party service offered by some organization in who knows where with connections with who knows who. If parents don’t properly limit the local user account of their kids, or restrict access to the places they don’t want, it’s their responsibility. Set up proxies, blockers and lock the OS locally, but don’t mess up the internet for the rest of us.

Would they actually go after the people?

I expect the law would place the responsibility on the companies managing / distributing the OS. That’s the reason companies are complying. People can always look for alternatives… I’m sure there will always be homemade distros without stuff like this made by ragtag groups / communities without much of a corporate structure behind.

I mean… there’s nothing stopping anyone from setting their age to 100 years old. It’s not like they are adding any sort of identification check, from what I gather. Just doing the minimum to comply.

It recently overtook Japan, so it’s 4th now…

In general, I agree that you can always use the CLI raw, but a frontend is a lot more friendly for many. It’s the reason some people prefer TUI over CLI as well (some people really like lazygit and lazydocker which are just frontends wrapping git and docker CLI calls and presenting it in a TUI). A TUI/GUI can structure information in panels, it can be more context-sensitive and it can help provide visual representations of the operation.

Also, wrapping CLI commands (whether through a GUI or a TUI) means the wrapper can automatically combine the commands in whichever way it’s best for a particular goal, or more conveniently set up batch processing… it’s helpful for people who don’t like having to make their own scripts, or craft long oneliners.

Plus: lets say you have your computer hooked to your TV and don’t have space for a keyboard (but can use a small wireless mouse on the arm of your couch), a GUI wrapper that allows you to perform operations with just a mouse can be very convenient.

I don’t know what kind of GUIs are you imagining, but I’ve hardly ever seen 1-to-1 recreations to a single individual command (unless that command is extremely complex or a graphical representation would be actually useful).

Some examples:

Gparted creates a job list of terminal commands for the disk manipulation, but it presents a graphical representation of the disks before you actually commit to executing the commands internally, so you can see what would be the result of the changes in the GUI side before actually pressing the button that actually executes parted, fdisk, mkfs, resize2fs, etc. (they do wrap the commands when it comes to executing the changes), without you needing to go through the steps and specific syntax of each of them on your own.

There are wrappers to ffmpeg for video editing or transcoding that some people find convenient for discoverability of the options available and/or to have a limited list of presets / sanitized options for those who don’t want to bother creating their own scripts. Sometimes also showing video previews for the graphical representation (useful when the operation is about cropping the image, or picking the exact millisecond where to cut). An example is LosslessCut, they keep a log of the ffmpeg calls… or maybe Shutter Encoder (press Alt+C to see the console commands).

In Synaptic, the GUI package manager, pressing “Apply” calls the appropriate APT commands as a CLI app inside a VTE with the selection of the packages you have decided to add/remove/update, which you have previously selected in the listing that is generated from the GUI view of the app. Some people like having a graphical detailed listing which might be useful for conveniently browsing packages and seeing their detailed description, while still you get the raw information and accurate log from the installation that you would get when you are just using the CLI.

Yes. But my point is that until now that has not been made explicit, so there’s no reason for websites to require IDs right now, at least not until the government does mandate such a system. So I was wondering what’s the minimal effort that would satisfy current mandate.

The thing is that age verification in a digital world is not easy… what exactly does the government mandate as a valid verification method?

Like… would asking the user their age be valid enough? … because it’s not like a reliable method exist (not even credit card verification prevents a minor from taking their parents card and go through it). IMHO, until the government doesn’t actually set a standard, I don’t see why websites should actually give anything else than the most minimal effort possible when it comes to this.

Personally, I feel that if it uses control characters to update the screen in previous positions, altering the scroll buffer, moving beyond where the cursor is and redrawing the screen, then it’s a TUI.

CLI programs only output plain text in a stream, using just control characters for coloring and formatting, and if they do any re-drawing it’s only for the current line (eg. progressbars and so).

So… even something like less is a TUI program… but things like more or sed would be CLI programs.

Isn’t the T for “text”? (ie. “Text User Interface”)

I mean, in the context of Unix systems it’s most likely gonna be within a terminal emulator, but in theory you can have a TUI inside an SDL window rendering the text there (specially when they are ports from other systems where they might be using different character sets than whats available in terminals… or if they want to force a specific font).

The only example that comes to my head right now is ZZT, but I believe there are many games on Steam that use a TUI rendered within their own program, not a terminal.

I generally agree but it depends on the application and the computer purpose / input you will most use.

Like… it doesn’t make much sense to have a CLI/TUI for an image editor… if you start using things like sixel you are essentially building a GUI that runs in a terminal, not a TUI. The same happens with videogames, video players and related entertainment applications.

But like I said, I do generally agree. I’d even argue that when possible, GUIs should just be frontends that ultimately just call the corresponding CLI programs with the appropriate parameters, avoiding duplication.

While it’s true that Debian installation used to make use of a TUI and it did not have a nice GUI “live-CD” installation image for a long time (I think until 2019), Debian installation process included a default DE for way longer than that (2000). And before they did, the installation offered a choice between different window managers (back in the days before well established DE suites were even a thing).

They don’t customize the DE much, but neither does Archlinux which is a very popular distro nowadays (and the installer on that one is arguably even less friendly than Debian used to be).

Personally, I feel it has more to do with how other distros (like Mint, Ubuntu, Knoppix, etc.) have built on the work of Debian to make their own variants that are essentially Debian + extra stuff, making them better recommendations for the average people (if one thinks of those as Debian variants then I wouldn’t say Debian is “left out”). And for the not-so-average people, rolling release style distros (or even things like Nix/Guix) might be more interesting to experiment in.

Isn’t CachyOS more of a general purpose distro anyway?

I expected the OGC was mainly targeted to gaming-first distros, which in my mind are meant for an entirely different kind of devices with different interests and goals. I don’t think there should be much value in CachyOS joining it, regardless.

I always saw I2P as a more modern and distributed onion-routing alternative to Tor.

The thing is that people are used to making use of Tor in different ways than the way they use I2P, but you can also have outproxies (ie. exit nodes/relays) in I2P the same way as in Tor… and you can also host a service inside the Tor network without relying on an exit node, like in I2P. It’s just that people only seem to want to host exit nodes for Tor and not so much for I2P, this led to internal communications in I2P being more common (which is a good thing), whereas in Tor it’s common to use it for anonymous access to the clearnet (which strains the network and causes chokepoints, specially with big downloads or torrent sharing). That’s just a matter of usage, not capability.

For full independence, why not simply detach development from community?

You can even have multiple independent communities with multiple independent moderation teams all about the same software.

As a developer I’ve never needed to engage a particular community on a personal level in order to make a PR to a project… if the technical maintainers want to accept the change, they will, if they won’t then that’s fine, they probably have their reasons. It’s ok to communicate with communities to get feedback, but I’m not making contributions for the social approval, I’m making them when I believe they are useful, and most of the times I write them because I want to have that change myself. If it’s rejected and enough other people are interested in the change, it can be forked. That doesn’t mean I hate the maintainers or that I don’t want the original to exist or anything, it’s not personal.

But well, I understand that some communities wanna make software and they intertwine development and social relationships. However, if you do this then I don’t see how can independence be a thing. Either separate them and don’t intermix them or mix them and don’t expect them to be separate.

I prefer dua over ncdu, specially when called interactively (dua i), since you can explore the results in parallel before it finishes scanning, while it updates asynchronously.

The API specification is unaffected by this.

It only affects undocumented behavior, no documented behavior is being broken.

If you want to consider breakage of undocumented / unintended behavior as a problem, then every bug you fix would require a major version bump, since when you fix something you are essentially breaking compatibility for anyone who might have possibly relied on the existence of that unintended behavior.

100%

JSON is not the optimal solution for either humans nor for machines… it’s a compromise in-between that is more complex to parse than most binary alternatives (and even some text-based ones, if the data can be represented in CSV tables for example), while also often requiring post-processing through beautifiers and similar to be able to visualize it cleanly for humans.

There are situations where it’s the format that makes the most sense… like in the web, where you are already working with javascript anyway. But it’s not a golden bullet to use everywhere.

Thanks! I’ll try with nofail and see if the lockups stop!

Another thing to look out for: SDCards or USB flash drives that might randomly fail to “spin up” and hang, unplugging those helps.

Honestly, that could be it now that you mention it… I have had for a while an external hard drive plugged in that I’ve used for some backups.

I’ve also wanted to try out Guix for a while… part of the reason I’m leaving a comment is just so I can recheck these posts later :P

But when I do I for sure will start out from nonguix because I’m quite confident that my hardware won’t be supported (I even have a recently purchased Wifi 7 card that relies on ath12k module that I’m quite sure won’t be in the official Guix repo… maybe I’d even need to compile it myself…)

I see in the nonguix readme that there’s a way to generate an iso that includes already a nonguix kernel, so I’ll have a look at that.

It even looks like you can create a writeable image to run from a USB thumbdrive, which looks very interesting, I gotta try that!

guix system image --image-size=7.2GiB /path/to/this/channel/nongnu/system/install.scm
dd if=/path/to/disk-image of=/dev/sdb-or-whichever-drive-is-usb bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync

I’ve been burnt by Arch before which is what has got me into exploring other distros. I might ultimately end up again in Arch like you, who knows, but it looks like the way Guix works is well suited for hosting your own repo too… I think I’ve seen before someone hosting their own Guix repo in github, including also a bunch of configuration for their system, which got me curious.