Meta calls its penalty a ‘tariff’

That’s a retaliatory tariff. Meta broke the law, and the EU retaliated.

The fact is, currently, AI can’t write good code. I’m sure that at some point in the future they will - but we’re not there yet, and probably have some years still.

Imagine at some point in the future, where an AI can program any piece of software you want for you, and do it well. At that point, the value of code itself will be minimal. If you keep your code proprietary, I’ll just get the AI to re-implement the functionality anew and publish it.

Therefore, all code will be permissive open source. There would be no point in keeping anything proprietary, and also no point in applying copyleft. But at this point the copyleft “hack” would simply be unnecessary, so permissive open source would be just as good.

Until then, me not using AI doesn’t in any way prevent others from training AI on my code. So I just don’t see training on my code as a valid reason to avoid it. I don’t use AI currently - but that’s for entirely pragmatic reasons: I’m not yet happy with the code it generates.

with a long tail of grumpy holdouts who adhere to free software principles

Nothing on the core free software principles - namely, the four freedoms - actually concerns the development process and tools used - or copyright. It’s all about what you can do with the software.

The GPL is more of a “hack” that “perverts” copyright to enforce free software principles - because that was the tool available, not because the people who wrote it really liked intellectual property.

Was broken last I checked - as in, would regularly just crash.

How does it compare to NixOS?

Any accessibility service will also see the “hidden links”, and while a blind person with a screen reader will notice if they wonder off into generated pages, it will waste their time too. Especially if they don’t know about such “feature” they’ll be very confused.

Also, I don’t know about you, but I absolutely have a use for crawling X, Google maps, Reddit, YouTube, and getting information from there without interacting with the service myself.

I would love to think so. But the word “verified” suggests more.

while allowing legitimate users and verified crawlers to browse normally.

What is a “verified crawler” though? What I worry about is, is it only big companies like Google that are allowed to have them now?

I agree that it’s difficult to enforce such a requirement on individuals. That said, I don’t agree that nobody cares for the content they post. If they have “something cool they made with AI generation” - then it’s not a big deal to have to mark it as AI-generated.

Aren’t USAid grants public?

It works fine for me on Hyprland.

Yes, OpenAI wishes everyone else has to have authorization to do model training…

Fortunately, their ToS don’t matter all that much, it’s easy to use their model through a third party without ever touching them.

I’m confused, isn’t Fedora atomic immutable? Shouldn’t that make it stateless automatically?

Wary reader, learn from my cautionary tale

I’m not sure what to learn exactly. I don’t get what went wrong or why, just that the files hit deleted somehow…

I’m sure removing these maintainers would be of great help to the Ukrainian war effort…

More seriously: We need to help Ukraine more. But this doesn’t do that. It just hurts a bunch of people (both the maintainers, and the people using their code) for no benefit whatsoever.

Actually, much of that description, perpetuated by dystopian novels, is pretty far off the mark - and it’s the kind of mischaracterization that makes it harder to fight back against authoritarian governments.

The fact is, the vast majority of people in authoritarian states live ordinary lives, just like everywhere else. That’s part of what makes these governments so resilient. If everyone in there lived a nightmare, they wouldn’t last for decades, they’d collapse at the first sign of instability. After all, there are a lot more people than government officials.

For example, a canny authoritarian government won’t disappear anyone who steps out of line. Instead, they’d provide a “safe, legitimate” way to step out of line, that’s well regulated and doesn’t pose a threat to the government, but serves as an outlet. And most people will be satisfied with it. That’s both more subtle, and more effective, that instilling fear in everyone’s heart.

To add about the distro framgentation, and particularly:

If I run into a software I need and it specifically indicates it’s for another flavor of Linux than the one I run, how likely is it that I can get it to work on another distro without any real trouble?

You might have. Some software is distributed as a portable binary and can run on any distro. However, many installers are distro-specific (or distro family-specific, since they’re made for a specific package manager). For example, a software packaged for Ubuntu as a .deb file would install fine on Ubuntu or Mint, and probably install fine on Debian, but if you want to install it on Fedora or Arch you’ll have to manually re-package it.

Most distro-specific software usually ships debian or ubuntu package - so you might go with that for that reason. Or Arch/Endeavor: while you’ll rarely see an official Arch package, most often someone will have already re-packaged it and put it on the AUR.

That said, for the major distros, the desktop environment makes much more difference than the distro.

I’m not sure where the Linux kernel part comes from, but if I open the article and search for “linux” or “kernel”, there are no matches…

I don’t know - but I’m willing to get the instances where people were saved weren’t calls from anonymous voip numbers.

“Just works” is not a mentality imposed by Microsoft, and has nothing to do with loss of control. It’s simply (a consequence of) the idea that things which can be automated, should be. It is about good defaults, not lack of options.