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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • A Riemannian manifold isn’t necessarily non-Euclidean, it’s just a smooth manifold with a Riemannian metric, which is just sort of a way of defining local geometry in a coherent way. Namely it’s a smooth family of inner products on the tangent spaces at each point, where an inner product on the tangent space is sort of a way of comparing any two directions at a point and the smoothly varying part means that for sufficiently close points, the comparison function on their respective tangent spaces is similar.

    Anyway, like “manifold” is a formalism intended to capture the idea of a “shape or space,” a “Riemannian manifold” is just “a shape or space we can do geometry on.”












  • I don’t think the changes in question are “upholding” any law, but rather giving system admins and software devs a convenient/predefined way to attempt to comply with the law if they choose. “Upholding” the law would be requiring the field to be filled or checked.

    That said, to your point, if someone proposed a race field “so that devs can implement segregation if they choose,” I’d find that reprehensible even though it doesn’t do anything on its own. Similarly, I object to the systemd change.


  • Do you think that would prevent or discourage age verification software from existing? It’s not as if a systemd user field is the only place a user’s birthday could be stored.

    Realistically, age verification software that is seriously attempting age verification isn’t even going to touch the systemd field, because why would it? The field could only be trusted if it is managed by an age verification service anyway, in which case the service could just as easily store the data outside of systemd.