CeeBee_Eh

You had me at "no Node.js"

They've been pushing the thin client for years

I think it's been decades at this point, and I hope it never takes off.

My specific issue is a buried line at some point between my house and the next ISP demark. I did say "all the time", but that was hyperbolic. It only goes down when it rains or when snow is melting, which suggests a cable somewhere is cracked and water gets in and degrades the signal.

It happens maybe once a week in the spring, and is back as soon as I reboot the router.

But your assertion that just because a single person's internet goes down that the entire country's internet is not "the best" is childish and a reductionist argument.

I do live in a 1st world country. I enjoy socialized (free) health care. And actually my country has some of the best internet in the developed world.

Maybe this is a product aimed at 1st world countries.

I guess that rules out the USA.

Expected downtime for 1st world countries is normally under an hour a year

Citation needed.

If your internet is shit you do not need to buy this.

Nobody should buy this.

yes but how often does your internet go down?

I have a 1Gb connection. I work in software development. I live in a nice neighbourhood. My internet goes down all the time.

Dear lord I hate being right!

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/operating-systems/a-new-california-law-says-all-operating-systems-including-linux-need-to-have-some-form-of-age-verification-at-account-setup/

Third time?

This is the ninth time. Including certs for their repos and forums.

But I don't see anywhere in this specific Colorado bill trying to restrict OS level features or go anywhere near open-source

Because the people proposing the bill don't understand or know what open source is.

I guess my example "realization of open source" dialogue wasn't in your face enough, eh?

This is about a single signal (kid/no kid) at the user-auth level, without slurping up PII and shipping it off into the ether.

You claim to be a developer, but seem to not understand the fundamental truth of "you can't trust the user's computer". The proposed law, would make it law that operating systems have some mechanism to verify age. Now if it's a law to guarantee the verification flag is available, then that would also mandate the mechanism be free from tampering, otherwise the law means literally nothing and is unenforceable.

So once they learn about open source, root access, jailbreaking, etc, those things will very quickly become illegal.

As I said in my other comment, this problem has been attempted with gaming client-side anti-cheat for decades now. There's a reason most online games still are riddled with cheaters, despite anti-cheat software being near Orwellian in what they can do.

Age verification is nothing more than the new guise of forced online tracking.

And I will tell you this: the operating system is 100% where you want to do age verification.

Oh, what's that you're using? It's Linux? Sure that's fine, just make sure the age verification check works on it.

Wait, what do you mean you have "root access"? Why do you keep repeating "it's my hardware and I own it"? You removed the age check system? You can do that! Hey, he's not supposed to be able to do that!

Colorado proposes bill to ban open source operating systems

Crap.... I was right </Edit

As a parent, systems and web developer of both open source and proprietary software. This would single-handedly be one of the most damaging things to ever happen to the world of personal computing.

From a technical point of view, having OS-level verification is the least worst, and in my technical opinion, the best option.

It's a horribly bad opinion. It's the same old problem with client-side anti-chest. You can't trust the hardware. If the user has full access to the computer, then they can do whatever they want with it. This is a core issue in security modelling. So what's the answer? Try to lock down the system. This is why anti-cheat software, to play a video game, has more access to your computer's hardware than you do as a user. Full access to every single file, data in memory, webcams, things on screen, etc.

What's going to happen if it becomes mandated that age checks must happen in the OS? We're going to get computers so locked down that you won't be able to open a .txt file without some kind of authentication check.

No thanks. I'm happy to avoid every single age-check required service.

A mathematician in the 70s said, "hey what if this is how brains work?"

If you really want to be pedantic, the modern concept of neural networks was invented decades prior.

But in either case, ANN do follow the basic concept of how neurons work. That's not even up for debate. Obviously biological neurons have way more going on, and there's even evidence for "warm" quantum processing happening within each neuron in the microtubules. But the feed-forward signal mechanism is real, and ANNs are based on that concept.

Except the Neural Net model doesn't actually reproduce everything real, living neurons do.

No idea what you're saying here. But if I had to guess, you're saying that "real brains, not artificial ones, create novel outputs". And if that is what you meant, then congrats, you said nothing of value. The discussion was never about biological vs artificial neural network quality.

I wouldn't be found dead or alive in a Tesla

That's not what an LLM is. That's part of how it works, but it's not the whole process.