California is not the center of the universe, but in the US, a fair amount of companies have to tailor their practices to accommodate California law, because A) it’s so weird a lot of the time, and B) California is huge and rich, so there’s a lot of business to be had. It just makes sense to accommodate the outlier. What happens in California has knock-on effects for the rest of the country, and occasionally the rest of the world; case in point, the recent systemd debacle. It’s not certain that they added the age thing in response to the California law specifically, but it was certainly a factor.

A slightly more positive way of putting this is “choosing the set of problems you want to deal with.” I vastly prefer the problems that Linux hands me over the problems with Windows.

Every time I hear about people using chatGPT as a therapist, I want to scream

“Could a depressed person do THIS?” [brandishes Harry Potter fanfic]

Apparently he’s a Quaker, so maybe that’s how the euthanasia stance can pass muster. But Quakerism might also make even less sense with his views on race? I don’t know enough about the reality of Quakerism to say.

Quakers have a history of being anti-racist, but views on stuff like abortion and euthansia cam vary a lot. Quakerism is big on both individual conscience but also social justice and activism. It’s an interesting denomination.

Finally, some good fucking news.

Nearly laughed out loud in a waiting room

There’s a couple new things being worked on; namely, Wayback and Phoenix.

I don’t see what the problem is. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.

If she knew about this list, she’d figure out a way to get herself to the top.

To be clear: there are actually Christians being persecuted or killed for being Christian, just not in the US or anywhere else in the West. The people that Trump and Nicki Minaj are talking about are in Nigeria (and I’m sure Trump would want them deported if they sought asylum in the US, of course). Trump and Nicki both suck but we can at least not make light of religious persecution in other countries, just because Christianity is more dominant here.

I doubt I’m the first one to think of this, but for some reason as I was drifting off to sleep last night, I was thinking about the horrible AI “pop” music that a lot of content farms use in their videos and my brain spat out the phrase Bubblegum Slop. Feel free to use it as you ses fit (or don’t, I ain’t your dad).

I cannot post the picture for obvious reasons, but the CEO of [Company My Friend Works For] has a fancy pair of AI sunglasses he keeps wearing to Teams meetings. Friend got a screenshot of it and the guy looks like, as they say in France, “a total fucking douchebag.”

You’re probably right

(“mad dental science”: Silverbook is the mouth bacteria instead of brushing your teeth guy)

Reinforcing my belief that you can find someone who holds any opinion it’s possible to hold, no matter how dumb it is

Honest to God, I thought a “Librephone” was something that already existed. I think I was thinking of the PinePhone or smth.

Yarvin doesn’t think Trump has the guts to pull off a full fascist nightmare.

It physically pains me to say this, but I think Yarvin is correct here. What IS getting done is bad enough, but he’s right that you can’t really half-ass a hostile takeover, which is what Trump et al seem to be doing. Yes, they’re fucking the US systems up, badly, but they’re leaving the structures too intact. They’re still bothering with things like court cases and gerrymandering. You don’t bother with gerrymandering if you’re not planning on still having elections, yknow?

I also think Yarvin is correct that Trump and crew will ultimately fail because of it. That’s probably cold comfort to the people who have already lost loved ones, or who are dying or going to die because of this administration (and as a trans person myself, I may well be among that number), but it’s not nothing.

So basically, trying to figure out whether someone is actually being altruistic is just the poisoned chalice bit from The Princess Bride, forever

The “sticker” is actually an off-cut from a laptop skin from my other laptop (which also runs Linux, and also has a sticker over its Windows key :P), so it’s held up pretty well

I’m petty enough to put stickers over mine.