But everything is fine

And big linux groups cannot remove age verification as easily as users can, as a big group is likely to be sued while an individual isn’t as much.

Generally provided by the ISP, no?

Good for you.

Now what about others that are not in your situation? What if this gets flagged as a suspicious behavior? What if your ISP blocks access to devices that are not allowed by a third party (government or company)?

You can always make a slippery slope. The difference is that complying for now brings nothing bad, not complying brings more focus and puts a target on linux and its users.

I don’t disagree with anything here.

But my point wasn’t “there’s nothing to worry about”, it was “an age field is the minimum they can do, and blaming them for it is pointless”.

My point is that this law is already there, and the fight needs to be brought where it matters, and the code of linux systems is not what is going to change politics. When someone is held at gunpoint, you don’t yell at them to fight back and curse them when they don’t, but you attack the attacker.

As I said, it’s a loss. It is not going to bring anything good, and can only bring bad stuff.

But my point is that the alternative of ignoring this law would just worsen the situation.

If you want to fight a law, you need to do it with meaningful measures. You find flaws, you revolt, but you don’t just ignore the law and hope to not be attacked for it.

If a big linux distro does it, it will lead them to endless legal battles that will ruin them, and then what?

The strategy here is to accept the loss, mitigate it as much as possible, and attack the source, which is politics, governments, and popular support and understanding.

Explain to people why it’s bad, burn down the government, and fix the system. If we only fight the symptoms when they target us, we’ve already lost.

And what would refusing a field do?

What needs to be done is basically a revolt against current governments and capitalism, not nitpicking every privacy-invading law that comes, and then waiting patiently for the next one to come.

You’d rather put a big target on linux systems for stupid fucks to label it as “the big danger for our kids” which would just bring nothing good.

You want to stop taking hits, then stop waiting for them and then pretend that dodging is the only solution.

It could be a slippery slope. That’s why the point is not to just accept it and move on, but to comply while pushing back against it.

And complying right away, but with a bullshit field, is a good way to signal “we do not agree, and we’re going to always find a way to fight back”.

Taking a hit to avoid defeat, does not mean surrendering. It just means that you need to recognise when a battle is lost. In a way, the other side of the slippery slope is the sunk cost fallacy, where you refuse to admit that something is a lost cause and you keep on pushing, making things worse.

It’s a matter of balance and reason, which people nowadays reaaaally struggle with.

Or you know, just getting a lot of accesses blocked, your ISP blocking you, etc.

No matter how you put it, it’s more risk than inputting a bullshit field at install.

I don’t know what people expect.

All big linux distros are going to be quickly a target, because the people who like age verification laws like that hate the idea of free software.

Putting a dummy, useless age input, is a good way to comply maliciously, and can be easily reverted if these stupid laws ever get removed.

It wouldn’t surprise me if obvious ways to bypass it appear a few seconds after the changes are validated.

The alternative is that these systems could be outawed in a lot of places, which would have a much more negative impact than an age field.

War is about knowing to take a hit to avoid defeat, sometimes.

No one listened before and covid happened, it’s pretty obvious at this point that it will be the same.

With the exception that covid was relatively mild, in comparison to what it could have been (and to what will definitely happen in a relatively near future)

Because fuck is a swear word, the other is used as a slur.

Better title:

Astral products now defunct, SlopMachines make another victim.

We’re talking about hypothetical changes, obviously it would require more funding. The point being, if you’re going to do a system change, more funding will always work better than trying to make citations cost money.

Yeah I don’t have the mental energy to decrypt your messages, you’re just saying a bunch on nonsense and I’m not really wanting to spend so long trying to see what a slopbro is trying to say.

Have a nice day

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

For a book, there are per-unit costs of the materials, ink, paper, manufacturing, etc.

For an ebook, these are void. So the cost should be, at the very least, much lower than a physical book. Even if you take into account the effort of writing the book and such, it’s an initial cost, so it doesn’t justify a high price.

The point being, physical items have costs related to their physicality, digital items don’t, so they shouldn’t cost as much. It’s pretty straightforward.

And to loop back to my initial comment: that’s why it’s absurd to compare AIs, which are just bullshit for lazy sloppy people, and manufacturing processes, which come from the need to reduce the manufacturing costs of physical items. There is no manufacturing cost of software, so there is no need to mass-produce as fast as possible, and so there is just no reason to let devs throw up slop garbage to go “faster”

Also, on a side note: programming with AIs don’t make you code faster, it just increases the amount of bugs and problems with your code. Obviously, since you’re just using a nonsense generator to try to produce a complex piece of digital machinery.

What? How do you even reach such a conclusion?

It’s not a tool, it’s a chaos generator.

Don’t let people who build houses do it with cardboard boxes instead of bricks, even if it looks like a house in the end.

They cost nothing to duplicate, yes, which is why you wouldn’t pay as much as a physical book for it.

What’s your point?

What about them?