If that is so, which I do not know, the only logical explanation is that people who are already unhappy, for unrelated reasons, are more likely to need to find at least some happiness in their lives by participating in online communities.

I would never have believed it possible that almost all politicians of ostensibly democratic countries almost simultaneously agree to prevent young people from having fun, being happy and finding meaning and fulfillment in their lives. How do these people think of themselves as the good guys?

You can do whatever you want; the thing is that if you’re not an EU citizen, you can’t vote in elections to the European Parliament, so MEPs don’t have an incentive to take your positions into consideration; you can’t vote them out after all.

I honestly do not get why “touch grass” became a common phrase/meme around a decade after many people got mobile Internet access (through smartphones).

Before that, it would have made sense because you’d usually only be posting on the Internet when you’re somewhere inside where there’s a computer; but now that we can literally be posting online while lying on grass?! How did this happen?

Me too (whether Linux is an OS depends on how you define the term) and that’s why it’s such a silly post to make. If there weren’t anyone who thought KDE was better than GNOME, why would KDE still exist?

The first two depend on centralized services and nonfree software, which are things I don’t like. The third doesn’t. The fourth doesn’t have to.

So by those metrics I like cryptocurrency the most. In fact I have invested a bit of my savings in Bitcoin. I have never used Uber or AirBnB meanwhile.

Can’t I just ask it for the seahorse emoji once in a while and achieve the same result or something…

I still like what they did last year: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/05/when-trolls-take-on-tyrants-4chan-and-kiwi-farms-sue-the-uk-over-extraterritorial-censorship/

Delaware was a colony of the Kingdom of Great Britain until the Assembly of the Lower Counties of Pennsylvania that declared itself independent of British authority on June 15, 1776, thereby creating the state of Delaware. Delaware subsequently was the first state to ratify the Declaration of Independence, the instrument which created the United States of America, on July 4, 1776. Under the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the Kingdom of Great Britain officially acknowledged the United States as a sovereign and independent nation.

There are certainly some governments around the world that have considered requiring age verification for chatbots. Not sure any such laws are already in effect.

I don’t even want to express an opinion whether I find that worse or less bad than doing so for social media.

Earlier in the week, Miller said passing a law that addresses online harms was a priority for the Canadian government because “kids are dying”.

This is approximately the opposite of true: speaking from my own experiences having once been a minor, the Internet was pretty much the only thing that gave me some sanity and will to live. If early-to-mid teen me had had only my family and classmates and no online social contacts, I’d have had almost nothing. That’s what you want to take away from current minors… >:(

so we finally solved https://xkcd.com/949/ I guess?

Because there’s no good reason to do that that justifies the cost and effort.

Hard forks are generally fairly rare, e.g. you could ask the same about the Linux kernel…

which is however not a fork, either hard or soft, of anything

Pretty sure that compared to NetBSD, Linux still runs on relatively few architectures. 😝

I do use it, but you are quite right I don’t tend to mention it unless asked.

Probably just ask it for the seahorse emoji or something idk

Yes. If vendors in those states want to then preinstall Linux on a device they would have to find a compliant distro…

Doesn’t matter much. At least those of us who aren’t engaged in the business of selling computers are unaffected.

Considering SteamOS includes Valve’s proprietary bits for the Steam client, this likely still applies to Valve and any hardware shipping with SteamOS

Where is the line? Most Linux distros have some nonfree software too, does it apply to them?

IMHO the correct legal and constitutional analysis ought to be: distributing software, in either source or binary form, is free speech protected under the US constitution as well as state constitutions. Therefore the government cannot pass laws requiring that operating systems, in general, implement certain features, doesn’t matter which.

What the government can do is engage in product regulation. It can require that operating systems preinstalled on devices sold in their jurisdiction have certain features. The correct thing to do wouldn’t have been to distinguish FOSS from nonfree operating systems, but operating systems preinstalled on devices from those distributed on the Internet which the user needs to install. That would have covered Android, iOS, macOS and Windows, which is obviously what the legislators were thinking of.

IRC prank from the 2000s: if you type /quit playing games with my heart you’ll hear a cool pop song.

2020s: if you type quit into Google it will understand this as an AI prompt.

It just has more of the web in its index than competitors do, so there are good practical reasons on occasion.