Why add age checks?

I’ve read this from several sources now and not found anywhere that explains why they’re doing this. Are they being threatened with legal action?

They do, but Linux is not dependent upon Red Hat.

Debian has always attracted zealots, many of whom were extremely… impolite… during the systemd wars, on both sides of that schism. Sadly, as in most things, the majority of reasonable, quiet, hard working community members get drowned out because, well, they’re reasonable, quiet and hardworking.

I think RH made a lot of important contributions to the Linux ecosystem and pushed it forward by a lot.

I agree - and historically they have led innovation in truly groundbreaking ways, but my personal view is that those glory days are a long way in the past now. Whilst they do still do some good work for FOSS, the purchase by IBM has in my view, changed objectives. To me, Red Hat has changed from being a profit making company that existed to support foss projects, to a subsidiary running foss projects to support a profit making company.

IBM don’t buy companies to make the world a better place.

Just installed debian on a S440 tonight to replace a HP Pavilion that had just ejected its charge port. Doubt the thinkpad will have the same problem, the HPs flex so much I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.

The thinkpad install was flawless, even had the wifi drivers in the installer without needing non-free.

Imagine having only two parties. Wild.

That happened ™

It happens every day. Hundreds if not thousands of times.

Never heard of something like that, and I suspect anyone who started creating it soon filed it under “Really bad ideas” alongside “Whoops, why did my kernel just stop?”

sar is the traditional way to watch for high load processes, but do the basics first as that’s not exactly trivial to get going. Things like running htop. Not only will that give you a simple breakdown of memory usage (others have already pointed out swap load which is very likely), but also sorting by cpu usage. htop is more than just a linux taskmgr, it’s a first step triage for stuff like this.

/Colour/ Photocopiers cost about the same as a new car back then, so whilst they existed, they weren’t exactly within access to schoolkids.

Not a Lemmy resource, but if you do want reasonably unbiased news that gets suppressed - especially in certain countries, Wikipedia does cover some of it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

1490s

Yeah. Why didn’t people just stay put?

I’m older than most on here and seen more decades, and yes, I agree totally.

We’re lucky enough to have lived through a long period of relative global peace, but that seems to be drawing to an end. Corruption, fascism, stupidity, control, fear and lack of freedom are all far more now than at any time since the 1940s.

Even if you do know code, nobody reads all the source code when trying something out.

We still rely largely on trust, and herd protection. Lots of stars on github? Been around for a while? Keeps showing up in “Top lists” and on those posts on social media where people list the foss software they use? Issues get solved reasonably quickly and there’s no ancient and ignored posts on there? It hasn’t changed hands recently to somebody with a new account and no history? It’s probably a good project.

It is still a risk, but a managed one.

I’ve been playing with computers and writing code since 1981, so have seen a few things change, and the past couple of years have been alarming from a world new stage, but that’s not so much about tech as global unrest.

It started with the cookie banners… “We value your privacy” == “Of course, it’s worth money to us” The internet has shifted a lot over the past couple of years particularly, and it was inevitable. Just as inevitable is the loss of the small internet (I speak as someone who runs several small websites that get scraped and stolen from constantly), and the attempts of governments to control it. That was all going to happen, and just as inevitable is the impossibility of complete control - it’ll just make life harder for the honest person.

We’ve seen some shitty changes to software too through global business. With hindsight, that was inevitable too - it took a long time for someone to realise just how locked in the likes of vmware’s customers were. How cloud and then AI additions were reasons to charge more for features we don’t like. There’s a lot of fear about global instability for obvious reasons, and that’s hard to shake.

But also… People haven’t changed. For every big name enshittification, there’s people sprouting two more things without such controls. Where we are now - founded largely because of shenanighans at Reddit. You mention Linux - again, most of it free and accessible and those are baked into it. (We’ll skip over Redhat here, I think, perhaps the exception that proves the rule). There’s a lot of free software projects that are born out of love for the free and open community. A place where respect is more common than rudeness.

So I’m certain there’s a balance. Yes, crappy things. But also good things. I’m constantly amazed at new inventions and how tech is genuinely improving life for many people. I grew up in England in the 70s and the quality of life today is better despite what we might think, but it’s also far more complicated, and makes us feel helpless and small. Back then, our world was small, we knew people. A disaster on the other side of the world took days to arrive on our newspapers, and we weren’t made to feel like we should do something about it.

Perception may be playing a big part in your view here, and you sound both burnt out and depressed. Not uncommon with the bombardment of badness in the news that we can do nothing about. Understanding that, and stepping outside of the doom cycle, definitely helps.

Ultimately, you’ve got to do what’s right for you. If tech is a hobby to you, then it’s the same as any other hobby. When it stops being fun, it’s time to find something else that you enjoy instead of, or as well as. Hope you find a better balance.

Holding in the farts.

Horror

Certainly traumatised me as a child.

You can’t trust an inherantly untrustworthy industry.

The problem is that to make a good AI, you need a lot of input and we know from leaks and reports that many/most of the major players deliberately ignored copyright to train their models. If it was reachable, they used it. Are using it. Will use it. Like Johnny 5, there’s no limit to the data they want, or that their handlers want to feed them with. They’re the Cookie Monster at a biscuit factory.

So when the question of trust comes up, you’d have to be pretty forgiving to overlook that they’re built on foundations of theft, and pretty naive to assume these companies have suddenly grown ethics and won’t use your data and input to train with, even when you’re using commercial systems that promise they won’t.

Even in the event that there is an ethical provider that does their utmost to ensure your data doesn’t migrate (these do exist, at least in intention), this is an incredibly fast moving, ultra-competitive market where huge amounts of data are shifted around constantly and guardrails being notoriously hard to accurately define, let alone enforce. It’s inevitable stuff will leak.

GPSLogger, the GOAT.

Not only recording GPX daily and uploading them to the cloud for me to record walks, rides and all movements, but also sending location data to a selfhosted Traccar server. Disappeared off Google Play due to problems keeping it listed there, but still available on Fdroid.

Well, I’m absolutely certain people have taken lifelong orders for less than your example, but I’m thinking more about situations where someone is left alone, homeless and without any other options. Government aid is often slow to arrive, especially if you’re a single man, and homeless charities are always overstretched. Even today, it’s not such a stretch to imagine someone turning to God in their hour of need.

(I’m athiest btw, I’m not arguing that it’s a good option, only that some people may see it as their only option and honestly, there are worse)

You’re 4.5 times more likely to be seriously injured or killed if you’re armed when attacked. Even if the attacker isn’t armed, they often end up using your weapon against you.

Beware your ego making you think you’re better than the statistics.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090930121512.htm