The latest shift to lock down Google's android pushed me recently to install /e/OS. On paper it makes those kind of projects a lot harder, but its prompted me to be a bit more considered about what software projects I want to use/support.
Really glad I have done that - I've been a 'boiled frog' of sorts on Android for a while now. Not happy with being continually more and more locked down, but not quite unhappy enough to shift. Feels like a breath of fresh air to have software that's built to serve me, rather than just to serve me ads.
Always interesting when a project stays 0 ver for so long- anyone close to the project know what would be considered significant enough for a "v1" release?
I don't really get the point of this. If the 0 never changes to anything else, then effectively it serves no purpose and shouldn't exist. Some people even refer to software that way. Sometimes something like React 0.82 might be just called "React 82", and effectively it's 82.X in practice.
In Vim, :! cleans up the tty context and hands it off to the child program, to do whatever it wants, you can open any TUI program and it will work as expected.
In Neovim, :! just uses a plain pipe. Actually I believe GVim has the same problem. Since both Vim implementations now have a built in terminal handling stack anyway, I wonder if that could be used to unify the behavior.
Just nvim. Neovim runs :! commands non-interactively, capturing the output in a pipe. vim, on the other hand, suspends itself and runs the command in an external shell.
This isn't a problem, really, for non interactive commands, but causes issues with interactive ones. I personally prefer vim's approach, though not enough to abandon neovim.
France has an amazingly developed grid, with a lot of nuclear. But I think there's a risk of seeing grid make ups as "one size fits all". Norway and Sweden do well with huge amounts of hydro storage, but few countries have the geography for that level of hydro. Similarly, the UK has an abundance of offshore wind (especially in Scotland), so further developing that (rather than focusing heavily on nuclear because it works in France) is by no means a bad idea.
This is of course linked to the UKs renewable rollout (and to do with detaips around the UKs energy markets leading to gas dictating the price for noe), but completely misses the fact that the UKs spending isn't just spending but investment.
Will be interesting to see in five years time looks like, we could well see a scenario where the UK has abundant cheap electricity being exported to the rest of Europe. Will be interesting to hear what the sceptics holding some American states fossil fuel based grids up as examples think then.
None of this of couse factors in the fact that fossil fuels cannot be sustained if we want a livable planet. Factoring that in, payimg energy bills three times as high would be a good investment, if it protects the world we depend on, in my book at least.
I think someone else has already pointed out that the author is writing from a non US perspective.
But at the risk of being patronising, I wanted to say that we should all try to resist the "the author lost me when" reaction. I catch myself doing this too, but I don't think it's useful.
Reading an article isn't a competition where you win if you don't get your mind changed. Someone might have valid thoughts and opinions even if there are details of the article you disagree with.
Especially in the current climate, I feel like we could benefit from being a little more charitable.
Thank you for saying this. It’s hard, but I’ve learned it’s a lot better to approach new information (and thus, articles) with curiosity, rather than skepticism.
I really wish this take was more prominent. I really don't buy that mass-surveillance should be required for age verification. There are plenty of very smart people who have created much more complicated things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every time you use it.
This also isn't helpful, but I think the sudden push of urgency isn't helping. The internet has existed without any kind of age verification or safety measures for about 30 years. We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs, but instead we've waited till now to decide that everything has to be rushed through with minimal consideration.
You don't even need to go all high-tech with it: Children, by nature of being children, aren't going out and buying their own smartphones and computers. When Mom and Dad buy the device for their kid, just punch in the kid's age before handing it to them.
That's the flow that California's age verification system uses. Personally, I'm opposed to any age verification beyond the current "pinky promise you're 18" type deals, but California's is the least intrinsically offensive to me.
> When Mom and Dad buy the device for their kid, just punch in the kid's age before handing it to them.
Doing this doesn't accomplish anything in terms of protecting children from the harms of the internet. In fact it feeds your child's age to marketers and child predators.
Every website will get to decide how to handle the age data our devices will now be supplying them. In the case of facebook, it's not as if they had no idea the children endlessly posting selfies and posting "six seven" on their service weren't adults.
Facebook was 100% aware that the children using their service were children. They knew what schools those kids went to, who their parents were, which other kids they hung out with. Facebook knew they were children and they took advantage of that fact.
The law California (and other states) passed doesn't define what content has to be blocked for which ages and doesn't give parents any ability to decide what content their children should or shouldn't be allowed to see. It takes control away from parents. As a parent, I might think that my 16 year old should be allowed to look up information on STDs but the websites that collect my child's age could decide they can't and I'll have no say in it.
> The law California (and other states) passed doesn't define what content has to be blocked for which ages
No, but it's a framework that would allow other laws to do so. Because...
> it's not as if they had no idea the children endlessly posting selfies and posting "six seven" on their service weren't adults.
...you can make statements like that which sound like common sense, but it would be incredibly hard to regulate based on "if you know, you know" (or "you should have known"/"you had to have known"). The law has to provide (guarantee) a way for them to know in order to actually require them to take action based on it.
> As a parent, I might think that my 16 year old should be allowed to look up information on STDs but the websites that collect my child's age could decide they can't
This is a different problem. It sounds like you're essentially wanting to guarantee access to certain things, not just for your own 16-year-old, but for everyone else's, too (because if it was just yours, you could look it up for/with them if necessary). It'd be difficult to compel businesses to provide services to audiences they don't want to. But again, that's a separate problem that doesn't necessarily conflict with the rest of the system.
> No, but it's a framework that would allow other laws to do so.
I worry that's it's the start of a lot of "other laws" which will limit the ability for children and adult's to maintain even pseudo-anonymity online.
> The law has to provide (guarantee) a way for them to know in order to actually require them to take action based on it.
That sounds like an argument for even stronger proof of age than what the law calls for. Online platforms should do what nearly every other publisher does and provide a rating for their content. Netflix doesn't need to know how old I am. They provide a "kids" profile populated with their own curated content if that's the kind of thing I want and for everything else they provide ratings (PG, R, TV-14, etc.) It would be easy enough to push a rating to clients, they could even use HTTP headers for it. If lawmakers really felt the need to interfere in all of our operating systems it could require some means to collect and act on those ratings.
> It'd be difficult to compel businesses to provide services to audiences they don't want to.
This is the norm. It's what every business does apart from those who demand ID for every transaction. It's useful for businesses to give people their opinion or intention for who they're targeting, but it's entirely inappropriate for every website and online service to force their opinion onto others. They aren't qualified to know what's appropriate for a specific child and platforms like facebook have repeatedly demonstrated that they absolutely can't be trusted to put our children's interests above their own.
> Online platforms should do what nearly every other publisher does and provide a rating for their content.
That only happens to "publications" of particular forms where state regulation has mandated it, or enough noise was made about state regulation mandating it (or simply censoring content) was made that the industry adopted a rating system as a way to discourage that (and in the latter case, there are always plenty of publishers that don't make use of the industry rating system, either at all or at least for selected publications in the field to which the ratings nominally apply.)
> They provide a "kids" profile populated with their own curated content if that's the kind of thing I want and for everything else they provide ratings
Netflix does not provide ratings for "everything else". Most of what they carry has either MPAA or TV Parental Guidelines ratings, and if it has such ratings they provide them. But they have content which does not have such ratings, which is simply noted as not being rated. (Of course, if "not rated" as an option is a valid to comply with your "you must have ratings in an HTTP header" law HTTP header, then it is trivial to comply and provide the "not rated" header for every piece of content, but this doesn't actually achieve anything.)
> Online platforms should do what nearly every other publisher does and provide a rating for their content.
That's fine, but it needs an enforcement mechanism, or we're back to where we currently are ("click here if you're 18").
> It would be easy enough to push a rating to clients, they could even use HTTP headers for it. If lawmakers really felt the need to interfere in all of our operating systems it could require some means to collect and act on those ratings.
I would completely agree it seems reasonable at a glance to have websites push ratings and have the enforcement be done e.g. at the web browser level (with the web browser knowing how to enforce based on the OS's supplied age bracket), rather than making websites read the age bracket and act on it directly. Although it does still run into questions about how you handle websites with content from multiple brackets (like Reddit or X)-- what's the UX supposed to look like if a child attempts to access adult content on one of those platforms? If the platform can't know what's happening (due to your privacy/safety concerns), then you're limited to the web browser entirely breaking the interaction or somehow redirecting them somewhere else.
> That's fine, but it needs an enforcement mechanism, or we're back to where we currently are ("click here if you're 18").
It'd be dead simple to tell if a website returned a rating or not, just pull the http headers and if it isn't there fine them or warn them first and then fine them or whatever. You could even have browsers just refuse to load pages that didn't include a rating header in their response and enforcement would take care of itself.
> it does still run into questions about how you handle websites with content from multiple brackets
I think it'd be up to reddit (or mods) to either set ratings for each subreddit and moderate accordingly. Pages at /r/MsRachel/ would return a different rating than /r/watchpeopledie.
Same with twitter I guess. Every user can specify if their account was intended for children or not. Elmo's twitter account would be shown to everyone, while accounts that don't intend to self-censor wouldn't.
> what's the UX supposed to look like if a child attempts to access adult content on one of those platforms?
browsers that detect a rating higher than authorized can just throw up an about:blocked page telling kids to talk to their parents for access to the page they wanted or click the back button to return to the page they were on.
The platforms would see that a page was requested, and they'd transmit the data to the client along with the rating header. They wouldn't get any signal that the page was blocked. It'd look no different on the server side than it would if the user had clicked a link and then closed their browser/tab/window. If you wanted to be sneaky, you could actually have the browser load the page in the background to avoid platforms guessing between a closed tab and blocked access.
This not only solves the privacy/safety concerns, most importantly it puts parents back in control of what their children can access. Parents would even be able to run software that would log the times/urls of blocked pages, and let them override a rating based on URL or domain. Parents could block roblox.com even though it returns a "for kids" header if they didn't want their 8 year old playing in an ad infested online pedo playground but still allow their mature 10 year old access to plannedparenthood.org even though it has an adult rating without exposing them to adult everything else on the internet.
There are countless better alternatives to what facebook wants us all to be subjected to, but facebook couldn't care less about our interests they are only looking out for themselves and lawmakers are happy to take their bribes and eager to erode our ability to browse without an ID attached to our every action.
>used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs,
On HN itself, no way. Too many people here make far too much money on ads to want that. It seems the other part that want freedom also want so much freedom it gives huge corporations the freedom to crush them.
>things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every time you use it.
The big companies that pay the politicians don't want that, therefore we won't get that.
> We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs [of age verification]…
There is always a conversation, but it is often not the popular one and gets drown out by whatever everyone is excited about at the moment. You can find it if you seek it out.
Lawrence Lessig’s book “Code” (1999), for example, talks about how a completely unrelated internet is an anomaly, and that regulation will certainly be necessary, and advocates that it be done in a thoughtful manner.
I think this is what makes traitors such a popular series - absolutely everyone things they can tell when someone is lying, but the truth is it's really difficult. Especially if someone is a stranger, it's next to impossible to separate what might be possible tells from what might just be their personality.
Pretty sure the answer will definitely be "not at all". For Rye and Python Standalone Builds, I know those where both projects that had a lot of use but where the maintainers didn't want it to become an all consuming workload, so Astral taking ownership made a lot of sense.
I guess it's kind of a shame that a lot of the financial value for UV is added by people who won't see any of that - it seems like that's a wider open source problem/question to be honest.
I'd second this, especially if its just for personal use!
The data world owes a lot to pandas, but it has plenty of sharp edges and using it can sometimes involve pretty close knowledge of how things like indexing/slicing/etc work under the hood.
If I get stuck in polars, its almost always just a "what's the name of the function to use?" type problem rather than needing lots of knowledge about how things are working under the hood.
Ehhh, there are still plenty of pandas idioms for which there is only a clunky polars equivalent. Sure, I like the strictness of polars, but it is missing some day-to-day functionality. Which might never change - the polars team is trying to be disciplined about having a consistent and performant API, which does mean some functionality may be left behind.
Really glad I have done that - I've been a 'boiled frog' of sorts on Android for a while now. Not happy with being continually more and more locked down, but not quite unhappy enough to shift. Feels like a breath of fresh air to have software that's built to serve me, rather than just to serve me ads.
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