+1! 🎶🚀

And Qobuz does as well.

https://github.com/BryanLunduke/DoesItAgeVerify

😂 🤝

A reminder also to boycott, as much as possible, those thirteen major publishers – most or all of which are stealing from academia:

APRESS MEDIA, LLC; CENGAGE LEARNING, INC.; ELSEVIER INC.; HACHETTE BOOK GROUP, INC.; HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS LLC; JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.; MCGRAW HILL LLC; BEDFORD, FREEMAN & WORTH PUBLISHING GROUP, LLC D/B/A MACMILLAN LEARNING; MACMILLAN PUBLISHING GROUP, LLC; PEARSON EDUCATION, INC.; PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC; SIMON AND SCHUSTER, LLC; AND TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP LLC

…that the EU will impose age verification…

Translate: …that the EU oligarchs will impose age verification…

Nobody knows whether the majority of EU citizens really want something so invasive. No referendum has ever been made. A fact that flies in the face of democracy.

It was exactly as you said; a difference I didn’t know about. Also confirming that Kubuntu apparently installs them system-side, even if flatpak install ... is called without sudo, again as you inferred. I don’t know how I managed to install them user-side in one laptop, but now they mirror each other :)

For others interested, these two commands show the difference, as explained by another user in a cross-post:

flatpak --user list
flatpak --system list

Thank you!

It goes deeper than that, though. Why is the person talking about this with a chatbot in the first place, rather than with some professional?

It shouldn’t be a chatbot what prevents suicide in the first place. Something has gone horribly wrong with society – and it has already been normalized too.

Thanks for sharing. I’d be happy if you posted updates on other stuff that works or that gives you problems after the OS change.

It is actually not so difficult to see this for yourself in a much simplified setting. One can easily build a “Small Language Model” that extracts correlations between only three consecutive words. On the web there’s plenty of short scripts that do this; here and here is one example. The output created by such a SLM can have remarkably long sentences with grammatical meaning (see the examples in the links above); this is remarkable since all it learned was correlations between triplets of words.

Now you can take a large amount of output from such a SLM, and use it to train a second, identical or even better SLM, then check the output generated by this second one. You’ll see that the new output is less coherent than the one from the first SLM. Give the output of the second SLM to a third, and you’ll see even less coherent text coming out. And so on.

They aren’t out of context, and you have just said the same thing. Data processing can help in removing noise, but it can’t help in creating information or extracting information that wasn’t there in the first place. In fact – again as you said – it can end up destroying part of the original information.

LLMs extract word correlations from textual data. Already in this process they are losing information, since they can’t extract correlations beyond a certain (yet large) length, and don’t extract correlations at shorter lengths. And in creating output they insert spurious correlations that replace (destroy) some of the original ones. This output will contain even less information than the original training data. So a new LLM trained with such an output will give back even less.

Yes it does. Indeed it is a mathematical theorem from Information Theory, called the data-processing inequality. Quoting from two good textbooks on Information Theory:

“No clever manipulation of the data can improve the inferences that can be made from the data” (Cover & Thomas, Elements of Information Theory §2.8).

“Data processing can only destroy information” (MacKay, Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms exercise 8.9).

Thanks for the info! 🚀

Very nice what he’s doing, although I’ll prefer to get it from other sources than YouTube (which I suppose will get a commission).

You’ve read the stances of all different people. I agree with most and I’m a bit more conservative: I switch to a LTS (even-numbered) release only when its main non-LTS (odd-numbered) upgrade is out; and skip all non-LTS.

I agree. I’ll actually contact the national Consumer Policies department and ask if this is at all legal.

The fundamental problem is that age verification is bullshit. So let’s not normalize it. It must be fought, on all fronts, including the FOSS front.

Indeed I wonder if that kind of keyboard check is even legal - personally I feel it as a breach of my privacy, none of their fucking business what kind of input method I use. (If anyone here is knowledgeable about such matters, please let me know!)

I’ve been having similar turd-kind encounters with bank apps even within Android. I use the egregious Heliboard from F-droid, and my bank app refused to start because I use an “untrusted keyboard” – funny as it’s way more trustworthy that Gboard or Microslop board apps. Turns out the apps of all banks in my country are like that. So now I simply access the bank via the browser instead. Fuck their apps.

But I understand that the browser solution may not work for everyone :(

Partly this problem comes from incompetence of the app’s developers, partly for shifting responsibility: it seems to me that they let Play Store do the checks, so if any hacking happens they can blame Play Store. And there’s also the modern motto: “if you want to make an app secure, make it unusable”. Even better I’d then say “don’t make it at all”! – there, security-problem fully solved.

Put pressure on banks would be best. Possibly one could also play a “disability” card: I must use such-and-such app or OS owing to visual impairment, say. Or collect signatures for a petition… but I imagine we’re a very small minority.

As a protest in my case I changed bank a couple of times.

But thank you for the USB-ADB tip! I’ll use it when I switch to GrapheneOS.

During our in-person visa appointment in Seattle, a shooting involving CBP occurred just a few parking spaces from where we normally park for medical outpatient visits back in Portland. It was covered by the news internationally and you may have read about it. Moments like that have a way of clarifying what matters and how urgently change can feel necessary.

Our visas were approved quickly, which we’re grateful for. We’ll be spending the next year in France, where my wife has other Tibetan family. I’m looking forward to immersing myself in the language and culture and to taking that responsibility seriously. Learning French in mid-life will be humbling, but I’m ready to give it my full focus.

Sounds like a splendid person.

It’s also a smart move considering that, with age-verification laws advancing, it looks like a good part of the Linux world will become with time another instrument of mass surveillance.