Taylan (GNU+Feminism Cat)

@nprofile…pz7p @nprofile…mvm4 @nprofile…un2n
What happened with Codeberg this time? I've noticed a while ago that it's run by people from a certain unpleasant political subculture, so I avoid it, but not following any of the drama closely.

2026-07-22 19:07:05 UTC

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@nprofile…m3m0 Can I have some uppie uppies? :blobcat-puffypleading:

2026-07-22 07:19:52 UTC

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@nprofile…h6ty
Sabine Hossenfelder released a video about this just a day or two ago. Can recommend her content on this stuff.

2026-07-20 21:40:48 UTC

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@nprofile…5n8n
If I can shut down my computer from my phone then I guess anyone can. :blobcat-thinking:

2026-07-20 21:35:05 UTC

ME/CFS Scandal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiwX9Y0NbiQ
This is quite incredible. Heard bits and pieces before, but didn't know this was a full-blown medical and academia-related scandal of this scale.

2026-07-20 15:42:34 UTC

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@nprofile…gfcd
I have no leader btw but I take it you report directly to the head of the CIA?

2026-07-20 15:39:54 UTC

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@nprofile…gfcd Glow so bright...
https://fedi-uploads.feministwiki.org/media/d0/46/e2/d046e28c318df4b58de9bd34dcd362135e6451f6ce9d60add79fa6e9823cc38b.png

2026-07-20 15:37:43 UTC

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@nprofile…gfcd sure thing, glowie
https://fedi-uploads.feministwiki.org/media/25/94/e1/2594e1ee576eddea7c0b30c59749f4b97c00485e3564db3bbb186c49ba4085bf.jpg

2026-07-20 15:34:54 UTC

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@nprofile…gfcd Man you have such a nice office I'm lowkirkenuinely jealous.
https://fedi-uploads.feministwiki.org/media/db/0a/e4/db0ae457f979b3ec6dff40048d0b436b55f60d1ffb2b22e688a20663fedfd912.jpg

2026-07-20 15:22:09 UTC

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@nprofile…gfcd Holy shit your account glows bright.
https://fedi-uploads.feministwiki.org/media/8c/04/16/8c0416bde64ebc6c39384af65cf329998e19cb9d219b6c6c92c3d9d0bd1d0575.jpg

2026-07-19 21:11:46 UTC

I'm not too depressed these days but far from cured so I wonder if this would be beneficial to me... Probably another 10-20 years before it's legal in the EU. :blobcat-joy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M-3vUxxxfA

2026-07-16 21:45:16 UTC

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@nprofile…tsag
Are you suggesting this is something related to biology, or just a current cultural trend? (Re. women hating incels aka "low sexual value men" more than rapists.)
I think it's a cultural trend. There's tons of examples of this kind of warped priority. For example, libs hating "TERFs" more than they hate actual transphobes who physically harass and assault trans people. Conservatives hating women who have first trimester abortions (aka "baby killers") more than they seem to hate pedo priests, and so on.
It's all just down to basic tribalism IMO.

2026-07-16 17:49:15 UTC

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@nprofile…0pln @nprofile…tsag
JKR and Alice Schwarzer are some of the most solid and sane feminists out there right now.
I'm sure you will be able to cite a transpbobic publication from JKR and a racist publication from Schwarzer to prove your claims?.. Of course you won't. Lefty liberal guys just love shitting on feminists who don't bow down to men's interests.

2026-07-12 10:20:48 UTC

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@nprofile…84pg That's kinda funny, but even then it would surely only be allowed if the girl's family (read father) approves of it. Not like she would have a say in it if the father decides to marry her off...
BTW are you sure you didn't confuse Afghan with Alban? :blobcat-joy:
Because the Albanian "sworn virgin" thing is kinda well documented, but from a quick web search I couldn't find anything about an Afghan third gender like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sworn_virgins

2026-07-12 09:50:54 UTC

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@nprofile…hu5l @nprofile…t3h7 @nprofile…72y8
Stallman is such a chillpilled wholesomemaxxer.

2026-07-12 07:39:33 UTC

Amnesty International literally not even knowing the most basic facts about the political groups they libel as "anti-rights" is quite incredible.
They seriously looked at a list of almost two dozen feminist and gay rights groups and said "yup, looks like right wing Christian conservatives to me"?
It's so stupid it boggles the mind. Once again I'm THIS close to becoming a conspiracy theorist and have to remind myself of Hanlon's Razor.

2026-07-09 07:55:08 UTC

God these guys are good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFY-z3JQnHw

2026-07-07 04:46:47 UTC

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@nprofile…87ru I'm designing a new Lisp/Scheme inspired language and although I'm not planning to add operator overloading as such, it supports syntax sugar like foo[bar] whose meaning you can fully customise so there would be nothing stopping you from giving a meaning to foo[3.14], foo[(bar)], foo["bar"] and so on.
Still in its infancy and just a hobby project though.
https://tkammer.de/zisp/

2026-07-05 21:11:35 UTC

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@nprofile…84pg
Why is it so good? :blobcat-sob:

2026-07-04 20:36:35 UTC

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@nprofile…p4qp @nprofile…qjtr
Yes now that I think about it, it's definitely 30. I've actually used that up once towards the end of my employment at the company that burned me out.
Had to see the doctor first to get a 10 day note (2 work weeks), and at the end of that visit him again to get another 20 days (4 work weeks) for a total of 6 weeks which is the maximum.
If you continue to be sick after that, the employer stops having to pay your salary and the health insurance company kicks in instead. Don't know if they start by paying you your full salary or only a fraction coz I didn't go that far. But in any case you keep getting paid something based on your original salary for like... 2 years. :blobcat-extremejoy: After that they downgrade you to the minimum social payment I think.

2026-07-04 19:34:47 UTC

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@nprofile…p4qp @nprofile…qjtr
Note that this refers to legally recognized paid sick leave that the employer is obligated to accept. (They can then get reimbursement by forwarding your doctor's note to the health insurance company, or something like that.) Isn't that basically non-existent in the US and you're always at the mercy of your employer?
IIRC doing this by phoning your doctor instead of visiting them was only made possible due to COVID in the first place. Normally you just go visit them anyway.

2026-06-29 11:21:05 UTC

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@nprofile…qr25
Now I know why MK isn't responding to emails or DMs. Y'all are chilling in the savannah. :blobcat-joy:
If you see this, can you make sure it doesn't get lost?
I sent an email about a problem with 4w.pub that may negatively affect visitors of the site.
I think there's an infected JS package trying to get people to install malware.
And I can't log in to cancel my subscription.
Have fun and don't get eaten by a lion! 🦁

2026-06-24 07:26:13 UTC

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@nprofile…s2sp Wikipedia is such a joke lol.

2026-06-23 09:58:12 UTC

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@nprofile…2zfv
See, you're further proving my point. You associate people with "nazis" based on some stupid shit, like using a fucking piece of software, and when someone says you sound unhinged and potentially dangerous, you double down and see it as further evidence that they might be a "nazi." You yourself are a bit like a nazi who sees "Jewish conspiracies" everywhere. Quite ironic, though not really funny if I'm being honest.
I hope you eventually step out of your extremist echo chamber and chill down a bit.

2026-06-22 21:00:35 UTC

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@nprofile…3mmw Found it!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=sACAnT0fm6o

2026-06-22 20:56:23 UTC

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@nprofile…3mmw I think poison darts tended to only have a mild paralysing agent or such. I've seen a video about a surviving hunter gatherer tribe once in which they prepared and used such a poisoned blow dart on... monkeys. (Yum!)
It was that funny guy on YouTube who speaks like 50 languages. He visited them and spoke their language and they were so friendly they invited him to a hunting trip.

2026-06-22 14:34:50 UTC

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@nprofile…v927
If seeing this post on Fedi is how I learn that the British PM is stepping down, does that mean I'm winning at life?
https://fedi-uploads.feministwiki.org/media/f4/c2/15/f4c215199bdb416f1b815eebe1b700041c53a36ab3d590f7a3df90d4195d870f.jpg

2026-06-19 16:14:31 UTC

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@nprofile…t3h7 @nprofile…2cyt
> left the agp behind
Fucking sellout.

2026-06-19 16:10:53 UTC

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@nprofile…t3h7 @nprofile…hu5l
I think it mainly appeals to other women, because it feels liberating.
Do women find it funny when men are like "hahahah cock and balls hahah Deez Nuts hahah CUM" all the time? I think most women probably find that incredibly dumb and cringe.
t. Woman Defender 9000

2026-06-19 07:01:38 UTC

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@nprofile…fsu6
Probably just made some people unfollow me.

2026-06-19 07:01:10 UTC

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@nprofile…fsu6
You know what's funny? This song is unironically how I feel towards my gf.
I'm never gonna give her up. Never gonna let her down. Never gonna run around and desert her. Never gonna make her cry, never gonna say goodbye. Never gonna tell a lie and hurt her.
SIMPOMATIC 5000
https://fedi-uploads.feministwiki.org/media/71/ee/8e/71ee8e6cd8f8d6b6db3c0d652f7b014a413bc8a08a0152614cd33af740869ef9.webp

2026-06-16 03:01:51 UTC

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@nprofile…j3ng @nprofile…s2ha @nprofile…tsag
This is why I think it's the right idea to force companies / the IT industry into some responsibility. And there's so much low hanging fruit but nobody is interested in simple if imperfect solutions that would bring an immediate benefit without causing any issues.
Perfectly privacy-respecting parental/age controls in software could be stupidly simple:
1. Any personal computing OS with a concept of user accounts allows OPTIONAL entry of a Date of Birth. It defaults to a reasonably old date (e.g., 1970) on empty input so you don't even need to special-case "the user didn't want to enter it." A simple OS API implements: "bool check_user_min_age(int value)". E.g., call "check_user_min_age(18)" and get true/false.
2. Websites are mandated to send an HTTP *response* header to clients that signal the intended age restriction on the served content. This is the only part I'd write into law. Just gotta make sure it uses sensible criteria and definitions. E.g. if your platform allows user-generated content, and the ToS say no adult content uploads but something slips through due to malicious users, then the site operator doesn't get punished. A website could even make only requests for specific pages send this age-limit header, e.g., Wikipedia could send it on requests for the article Cock and Ball Torture.
3. Any client software with web capability uses the combination of the OS age check API and the received HTTP header to implement client-side content blocking.
Now literally all a parent needs to do is make sure that when the kid gets a new smartphone or such, the DoB is entered during user account setup.
Would a lot of parents still fail at doing this bare minimum? Unfortunately, yes. Would it actually make it *possible* for parents who aren't tech wizards to have some basic parental controls in place? Yeah.
Unironically I think the only reason something like this didn't become the norm like 30 years ago already is the political and cultural power of the porn industry. They probably love the additional revenue from minors too much.

2026-06-16 02:26:00 UTC

After all this time, I still loathe journald / journalctl. This is literally the worst aspect of systemd ever. For 99.9% of use-cases there was absolutely never any justification for ditching plaintext log files in /var/log.
And even if an application really needs something more sophisticated than that, including line breaks or binary data in logs, it could just use some well-known plaintext-based serialization format. For example, it could simply log each log line as a JSON string, so line breaks are escaped as \n and you can't "forge" fake log lines with a line break. Or if it really wants more structured data, it could log each line as a JSON array, or object. That way you could STILL just open it with less(1) and use grep(1) and whatnot. Heck, there's jq(1) these days to parse JSON from the CLI.
I loathe journald.

2026-06-12 23:23:01 UTC

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@nprofile…72y8
Deep down I'm neutral good but damn I'm dejected. Or jaded? Maybe even a little bitter. So I try to care less and be more neutral.
Reverse character development. :blobcat-uwucry:

2026-06-09 07:18:26 UTC

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@nprofile…t3h7 @nprofile…qjtr Careful there you almost did a hate speech according to Wikipedia.
https://fedi-uploads.feministwiki.org/media/67/b6/0e/67b60e20e92fee18ae651fdea58ec2f03fcb93d3d7e203b00bc46049e53144d4.jpg

2026-06-07 18:39:30 UTC

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@nprofile…84pg @nprofile…y6jc @nprofile…fsu6 @nprofile…65hg
Out with those god-damned Norman invader scum! English is for the Anglo-Saxons only!

2026-06-07 16:40:59 UTC

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@nprofile…65hg @nprofile…fsu6
It always annoys me when people talk about Israel "controlling" the US. It's like saying an employee is controlling the company because it's a fairly valuable employee who occasionally gets pampered by higher ups.
"Gee I wonder why the US is so invested in a country dead center in the Middle East and loyal to US hegemony. Must be some evil Jewish control scheme."

2026-06-07 14:17:54 UTC

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@nprofile…fsu6 Child spies on his parents.

2026-06-03 00:15:02 UTC

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@nprofile…tsag @nprofile…6wcx @nprofile…l5m0
TBH I didn't read the full thread.
I've read more of it now and I like the Christian Rock analogy. That's the one aspect of it that tends to bother me as well, where you can tell that someone felt very righteous about an ideology, and you can sort of sniff out that certain decisions may have been based on that, and it makes things feel off somehow. (Sometimes it's very blatant so there's no sniffing needed. Like DA: Veilguard. That one's more like a really loud and stinking fart.)

2026-05-29 23:47:37 UTC

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@nprofile…dugj Roided out :blobcat-pensive:

2026-05-29 21:12:01 UTC

It's BIG BRAIN TIME 🧠🧠🧠
https://fedi-uploads.feministwiki.org/media/96/c3/6d/96c36d6b2acd1793d155e7c795aab6668ee96e1a1ea9425244af6e5a9a54495a.webp

2026-05-25 23:12:33 UTC

I think I completed the documentation to the Zisp parser:
https://tkammer.de/zisp/docs/c1/1-parse.html
It mentions some decoder features that aren't actually implemented, but the parser is actually done. :blobcat-googly-aww:
Only took me 2 years.

2026-05-10 23:28:10 UTC

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@nprofile…t3h7
Give me onions or give me death.

2026-05-08 12:08:18 UTC

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@nprofile…8cpz @nprofile…r9u2 @nprofile…xyve
The obvious solution to this is a world government.

2026-05-07 12:48:49 UTC

"What's the EU planning now??" "Sex only with consent."
uhhhhhh what?
Seriously though, that's the title of this video, translated:
> Sex only with Consent: That's the EU's plan. | Why? | ARTE Info
https://fedi-uploads.feministwiki.org/media/84/3d/22/843d2243823488fca4c3a0cfa182989a177a5c725173bbd3bcd8b22bf7271838.webp

2026-05-06 21:04:38 UTC

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@nprofile…8my8 Just stop caring and live ur life lil bro. We're all just insects on a rock.

2026-04-21 20:20:11 UTC

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@nprofile…84pg @nprofile…8kc4
I've actually run into situations in the past where the Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS version I was using on a server didn't have a recent enough version of various software to support certain things. :blobcat-pensive2:
Not sure how likely it is to happen on desktop, but yea I like having easy access to the most up to date stuff.

2026-04-21 19:06:38 UTC

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@nprofile…84pg @nprofile…8kc4
That's another one I'm thinking of. I like how incredibly fast apt is. But generally Debian moves very slow in development, right? I'd love to try out XLibre and stuff.

2026-04-21 18:27:46 UTC

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@nprofile…8kc4
I was just meme'ing. One of the Artix devs has a greek statue as his pfp on the Artix forums.
I'm thinking of trying out Artix and maybe switching to it as my new main desktop OS. Currently on Gentoo, and the package management is driving me nuts.

2026-04-21 08:08:50 UTC

> cool new GNU/Linux distro
> Arch but with OpenRC and XLibre
> the people seem anti CoC as well
> damn this looks amazing?
> ...
> main dev is a greek statue pfp
NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

2026-04-16 20:10:49 UTC

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@nprofile…jgjq
> invent edgy nonsense ideology
> be shocked that dumb kids adopt it because it seems "cool"
> get angry that they "don't get it" even though it's nonsense all the way down
https://fedi-uploads.feministwiki.org/media/0e/0e/d7/0e0ed7bdcd47de2f2e44f2d9c17a4f5b611dc3c8011f076ac9e1aaa47bf91387.webp

2026-04-11 18:47:19 UTC

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I'm angry because I received another 24-hour ban from this godawful piece of shit platform. It didn't even tell me what message for but there's a 100% chance that it was a gender-critical message.

2026-04-11 18:46:34 UTC

I seriously want Discord to crash and burn and finally be abandoned for good by 90% of its users. But there's currently no alternative that normie plebs could easily migrate to.

2026-04-10 11:39:06 UTC

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@nprofile…ja06 @nprofile…8m52 @nprofile…qjtr
I'm uhhhhhh
"straight"
If that counts

2026-04-08 12:13:30 UTC

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@nprofile…ssz9 @nprofile…t3h7
Huh?? But it's such a perfect pun:
mo cap -> moe gap
If you meant "gap moe" then I don't get the connection here:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gap+moe

2026-04-08 11:55:27 UTC

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@nprofile…ssz9 @nprofile…t3h7
Really had to strain all three of my brain cells to get that pun.

2026-04-08 11:48:53 UTC

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@nprofile…t3h7 This is so cringe and cute at the same time. Crute.

2026-04-08 11:48:04 UTC

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@nprofile…s24j @nprofile…m3z9 @nprofile…d73q
1. It was obviously a joke
2. You're replying to a Twitter bridge bot; he can't see your messages
Not beating the autism allegations.
3. Both of you probably know all that and just respond as a joke anyway
I'm not beating the autism allegations.

2026-04-08 11:05:24 UTC

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@nprofile…t3h7 I had him randomly recommended and he seems really friendly and nice. Since trans is my Special Interest I watched the non-binary one and found it really interesting. I wish more autistic men understood that their quirkiness doesn't make them not-a-man.

2026-04-07 21:14:45 UTC

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@nprofile…7jyz
Bavarian detected
https://fedi-uploads.feministwiki.org/media/60/7b/19/607b197c98d03d431fbc8147c4379e339f47b10e1f0e454eb23ae70d7b9dd0c1.gif

2026-04-05 23:51:53 UTC

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@nprofile…y6jc @nprofile…33xk
I thought it was them but doesn't seem so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Island
The guys who did "Like A Boss" and all that.

2026-04-05 23:33:14 UTC

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@nprofile…y6jc @nprofile…33xk
Is this The Lonely Island?

2026-04-05 17:46:25 UTC

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@nprofile…vpvm
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about

2026-04-05 10:40:23 UTC

> A large study of Finnish youths who sought care from gender clinics has found evidence challenging the prevailing claim that gender-transition interventions are tied to improvements in mental health. Quite the contrary. This new study found that the use of specialist psychiatric care—an indication of severe mental health problems—increased dramatically among those adolescents and young adults who underwent gender-transition interventions.
> [...] The study gave credence to the theory, anathema among proponents of gender-transition interventions for minors, that for some adolescents, gender dysphoria may be an outgrowth of deeper psychological problems and that their adoption of a transgender identity may amount to a maladaptive coping mechanism.
https://benryan.substack.com/p/youth-on-gender-transition-treatment
(Original study linked from article.)
The #trans movement is not literally a cult, and not literally a religion, but it is very similar in some ways.
Consider Scientology: Often, people who get into Scientology are vulnerable individuals, whose mental faculties and capacity of rational thinking are limited due to emotional challenges they face in life. They end up in a cult, and it wreaks even more havoc on their well-being.
Look at the way trans communities behave. There's a constant persecution complex, the notion that there is a "genocide" against them, that anyone who disagrees with their belief system is a hateful bigot out to destroy their livelihood, and so on and so forth. It should be obvious that getting into such a subculture will do nothing good for a vulnerable individual's already brittle mental health.
Bullying from actual far-right idiots and zealous traditional conservatives doesn't make it any better, but it's not the core cause of their troubles. Someone who responds to 'misgendering' with an emotional breakdown is not in a sound mental state to begin with.
The "political left" broadly speaking has massively failed these vulnerable people, especially the youth, validating all their most irrational thoughts and beliefs, rather than compassionately challenging them.

2026-04-01 10:38:56 UTC

Fascinating story about blunders in use of DNA evidence in investigations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9okaPzpVhmM
Apparently for years German/European police have tried to track down a female "phantom killer" whose DNA would keep popping up in crime scenes all over Germany as well as Austria and France. They thought it must be some super powerful scary criminal as this woman was linked to a high number of accomplices (all men) who'd be identified at the crime scenes, yet none of them would give any information about her. She was linked to crimes as old as 1993 and as recent as 2007.
In the end, it came out that the DNA belonged to a woman working at the factory producing the cotton swabs used to gather DNA evidence. :blobcat-joy:

2026-03-30 03:49:43 UTC

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@nprofile…4tva @nprofile…r9u2
> but assigning so much stupidity to such powerful people as congressmen and women is probably dangerously offensive
Offensive or not, I'd say it's true. I think human beings exhibit "swarm stupidity." No matter how smart they may be as individuals, the moment you have a number of them grouping together, you start to have such unpleasant effects as group think, tribalism, peer pressure, and so on. These traits may have been useful for cohesion within groups of 20-30 humans living the hunter gatherer life (hence having evolved them), but they're pure poison for rational thinking.
As one single individual who's not even trained in law, I could probably come up with something better than the Californian law we've been talking about.
1. Require personal computing operating systems to offer an accessible interface for *optionally* marking a user account as age restricted in some way during account setup. Explicitly exempt are operating systems that are marketed exclusively to adults, such as for professional or business use, server operating systems, embedded systems, and so on.
2. Require said operating systems to implement an age check API using the stored information, to signal yes/no in response to locally installed applications asking whether the currently logged in user should be allowed to view content meant for ages N or older. (If the user account does not have the optional age restriction enabled, the answer is always yes.)
3. Require any web server knowingly hosting content inappropriate for certain age brackets to attach some kind of machine-readable declaration of the age restriction. (For example: an HTTP response header when serving a page that contains or leads to adult content, or an app metadata field about age limits when serving an application.)
4. Require any personal computing applications capable of displaying third-party content (e.g. web browser) or installing third-party applications (e.g. app-manager app) to use the declared information in point 3, in combination with the API described in point 2, to limit access. Explicitly exempt are any applications that are marketed exclusively to adults, such as for professional or business use.
This would make the lives of parents so much easier. They would have a quick and easy way of enabling age restriction on any kind of PC device they give their kids, and it would actually have an effect. Nothing would be forced on device owners, as the required OS feature is an optional one, i.e. it purely gives power to parents who are computing device owners.
If the IT industry as a whole exhibited some basic sensibility when it comes to children accessing arbitrary online content, the above would have been implemented decades ago by all common operating systems, browsers, websites, etc. without the need for lawmakers to get involved at all. Unfortunately, for decades now, children have had easy access to extreme adult content through the Internet and nobody thought to do anything about it.

2026-03-30 02:44:21 UTC

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@nprofile…4tva @nprofile…r9u2
I wouldn't be able to read the Brazilian law (unless it's available in English) so I can't comment on that. I hear Brazilian laws are often particularly stupid though, due to high amounts of corruption.

2026-03-30 02:17:03 UTC

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@nprofile…ffp8
I've already responded to this silly argument. Random devs who publish on Google or Apple app stores aren't given any personally identifying information, and this law won't change that.
If your argument is that they'll access such data through exploits, then this law isn't relevant to that either, obviously. It doesn't tell the OS to store personal contact information like addresses or phone numbers.

2026-03-30 02:00:52 UTC

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@nprofile…ffp8 And how does that relate to this age verification law?

2026-03-30 01:35:07 UTC

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@nprofile…r9u2 @nprofile…ffp8
Lunduke's interpretation that this may simply be Meta wanting to shift the responsibility to other companies makes sense. Unlike Apple and Google, Meta doesn't develop an OS, nor does it have an app store, so their lobbyists pushing for a law that's purely concerned with OS and app store stuff makes perfect sense for Meta: It ensures they have to do *nothing* in response to this law. That's basically the best case scenario for a company in terms of the result of their lobbying efforts. The new law makes literally no difference to them.
In the second half of the video, he points out that some larger tech industry coalitions, including Google, also started supporting such laws, but mainly through some organization about "social progress" and I see no plausible theory about there being anything nefarious behind this like wanting to be able to do more effective data harvesting.
One also has to ask why these companies would care at all if this is about some nefarious government plot to implement surveillance. I just don't see the panicked arguments in opposition to this law culminating into any kind of coherent theory about some nefarious intent on behalf of any party involved, government or corpo.
What I see happening is a bipartisan push for restricting children's access to various online content, because it's been running rampant for ages and more and more people are constantly talking about it (see also: social media bans for children) and so the companies are sending in their lobbyists to ensure that whatever laws get passed don't bother them too much.

2026-03-30 01:11:33 UTC

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@nprofile…ffp8
You were talking about random developers who publish apps on app stores. That was the whole context of your argument.
Apple, Google, Meta, etc. harvest such data, yes. This law isn't going to make it any easier for them than it already is.

2026-03-30 00:27:48 UTC

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@nprofile…ffp8
This is just an incredibly silly argument. You're speaking as if a flashlight app on Google Play is going to be able to get fully personally identifying details of minors, like where they live or their phone number or something.
I wonder if you have any idea how the common app stores like that of Apple and Google actually work with regards to personal data and how strict their permission system is. Both Apple and Google make it as difficult as possible for developers to get any identifying information.
This law isn't going to make any difference to that, because these app stores already handle age verification at app install time. That's probably why the law is written in this stupid way, referencing app stores the whole time: Apple, Google, etc. already have the system in place.

2026-03-29 23:22:56 UTC

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@nprofile…ffp8
??? What do you even mean with "people who intended to harm kids?"
You mean porn sites being neglectful and not giving a fuck about children accessing their site, because it increases their ad revenue anyway? Not sure how this law would even relate to that, as it says nothing about websites.
Or are you talking about companies doing targeted advertisement to children? If they were intent on doing that, legally or not, they already had the means to do it for ages, so again, the relevance of this law is unclear.
Come up with a serious point instead of something that sounds witty until you think about it for more than two seconds.

2026-03-29 22:01:41 UTC

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@nprofile…ffp8 @nprofile…r9u2
What evidence is there that this law was pushed for by Meta? It seems more likely that lawmakers were going to decide on one or another law to this effect either way, because there was bipartisan support for this, and tech industry lobbyists got involved in the discussion because that's always how it goes in American politics. Their job is to ensure that new laws don't create too big of an issue for the corporations they work for.

2026-03-29 21:46:28 UTC

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@nprofile…ffp8
> an admission that they will be collecting the pii in the first place
You speak as if the people who wrote that FTC statement are themselves the software developers who are implementing age verification. This is obviously not the case. The statement clarifies that as a software developer you have to follow certain strict guidelines if you're going to be using any personal data for age verification. This includes:
- "do not use or disclose information collected for age verification purposes for any purpose except to determine a user’s age": The moment you were to use this for targeted advertisement for example, you may be breaking the law.
- "provide clear notice to parents and children of the information collected for age verification purposes": No secret data collection.
> They prohibit retaining it "longer than is necessary" for age verification. As discussed in the thread already, that means retaining it indefinitely as long as anyone in an effected state may try to access their app on any platform, and they need to be able to verify that they weren't already reported as under age on a previous device or platform.
Assuming server-side user account management, yes. If you have server-side user account data, it's reasonable to record whether the account belongs to someone underage. But, as mentioned above, this data must never be used for anything other than age verification, so there's no problem.

2026-03-29 19:19:08 UTC

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@nprofile…ffp8
> The policy statement states that the Commission will not bring an enforcement action under the COPPA Rule against operators of general audience sites and services and mixed audience sites and services that collect, use, or disclose personal information for the sole purpose of determining a user’s age without first obtaining verifiable parental consent—if they comply with certain conditions, specifically that they:
> ...
> do not retain this information longer than necessary to fulfill the age verification purposes, and delete such information promptly thereafter;
Looks like they specifically prohibit retaining the information. The other bullet points are also pretty solid.

2026-03-29 17:56:26 UTC

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@nprofile…ffp8 At worst I'd say it's open to interpretation. Which is of course a bad thing for a law. It's a legitimate critique and I wish people who talk about this law would focus on these actual problems rather than spread conspiracy theories about how it's all a big plot to collect as much private data as possible or implement mass censorship or something.
What I see is a badly worded law, presumably written from the perspective of people used to looking at everything through the lens of online user accounts and app stores. Which makes it unclear how, if at all, it should apply to other software architectures. The intent, however, seems clear and reasonable.

2026-03-29 17:28:05 UTC

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@nprofile…ffp8
I see nothing in the law implying that devs of an app need to track users across platforms, since they can simply ask the OS for the age bracket on any device the app is being used. Heck, if the app has no online component, then it's a separate app on every device anyway. If I have two computers both with Firefox installed, those are two separate applications.

2026-03-29 17:05:02 UTC

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@nprofile…ffp8
Even if this were stored on some server, a database entry saying "user ID 12345 is a person of age 13 to 15" is not exactly "identifying and tracking children" is it? That being said, if an application is not cross-platform in the first place, there is obviously no need for anything on a server. If an application is simply installed locally on one device, then "across all platforms of the application" just means the local computer.
Requiring every developer to do some kind of age check is indeed one of the main few stupidities of this law. It should only target developers of applications to which some age restriction applies, like adult games for example.
And when it comes to applications displaying third-party content, like web browsers, the law should have handled that separately, requiring the third-party content to merely declare an age limit, which the displaying application then has to verify locally.
The law could have been written way better, but the amount of panic that I'm seeing over it is completely disproportionate. Instead of focusing on actual problems and pushing for amendments, people are coming out with these conspiracy theories about how it's some shady plot to collect personalized data, and I'm just not seeing it.

2026-03-29 16:50:32 UTC

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@nprofile…r9u2
This is just paranoia man. It's basically "they'll allow you to marry your dog next." All the law says is that an OS should require the admin to specify the age bracket of a user account, and offer an API to check the age bracket. It specifically says:
> This title does not require the collection of additional personal information from device owners or device users other than that which is necessary to comply with Section [The one about age brackets].
There are also separate privacy laws that forbid the collection and storing of personal data without consent. If I remember correctly, California is actually ahead of other US states in that regard, and have something similar to EU's GDPR.
The feature mandated by this law is not useless, because it makes the enabling of parental controls seamless and automatic. Most parents are tech illiterate and have no idea how to install anything on their router. Most people still call their router a "modem." When I do a quick web search on how to enable parental controls on MS Windows, I get some stupid complicated mess about some "Microsoft Family App" or whatever.
The whole idea is so simple, it's amazing that the tech industry didn't standardize something like this 20-30 years ago already on their own volition, without needing lawmakers to pressure them. Children and teens have been watching hardcore porn unrestricted for decades, and all the tech industry needed to do was implement the OS feature that this law asks for, and have websites send HTTP headers to indicate age restriction.

2026-03-29 16:21:40 UTC

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@nprofile…ujhs
> app stores requiring photo ID uploads and so forth
Nothing in this law in question says anything to that effect tho.
If anything, European privacy laws (GDPR) make it more difficult to justify a company doing this.

2026-03-29 16:18:37 UTC

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@nprofile…s24j
> When Timmy goes to gnu.org, Firefox receives the header "User-Age-Check: 18"
I didn't know gnu.org was a porn domain.

2026-03-28 04:49:34 UTC

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Humans continue to be a mystery to me. No independent thought, just following the herd sentiment on whether to love or hate something.
https://fedi-uploads.feministwiki.org/media/70/39/c4/7039c4651f65eb0389e491b54668402a02ec581ed07894f1f0835bde63e8dc3c.gif

2026-03-28 04:39:11 UTC

So the "age verification" law that everyone is freaking out over just says an OS must offer an interface for specifying the age of a user? And offer a way for applications to check it?
https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1043/id/3269704
No third party verification of any kind? What even is the problem? THIS IS GOOD.
This is almost exactly how I thought it should be:
1. Adult owner of computer specifies that user account "Timmy" is for a person born in 2016.
2. The OS offers applications a means of asking whether the current user is age X or older.
3. Websites meant for age X and over must send some signal to specify this, such as with an HTTP response header.
4. The web client application (e.g. Firefox) must react to this signal from websites and perform the age check using the OS mechanism mentioned in step 2.
When Timmy goes to adultsite.com, Firefox receives the header "User-Age-Check: 18" and asks the OS if Timmy is 18 or older. The OS says no, so Firefox stops loading the site and shows an error.
The law basically specifies points 1 and 2, just going into unnecessary detail about "age bracket" stuff. (Realistically, an OS would just offer a generic "age ≥ X" check so it can support any age brackets of any jurisdiction.)
This is a step in the right direction.

2026-03-28 04:17:19 UTC

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@nprofile…tsag Isn't it literally just a DoB field added to the user DB? That's not "age verification" it's just a metadata field about a user account.
Unless they did more than that, I think this whole thing is just another case of humans showing their swarm stupidity by spreading panic and anger over a nothingburger.
Assuming it's just a DoB field: There's many sensible ways to make use of that in such a way that the adult owner of the computer retains full control and any user of the computer retains privacy. The crucial point is that the metadata fields about users are under admin control.
I'm not pro systemd but I'm anti being so anti against something that one sees problems where there are none.

2026-03-27 18:24:23 UTC

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@nprofile…v5q3 This shit is exactly why people hate wokism. And why the right wing is gaining popularity.

2026-03-26 15:59:31 UTC

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@nprofile…d9qu Can't wait for the new security holes! :blobcat-aww3:

2026-03-26 15:55:55 UTC

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@nprofile…shek Do you have a higher res version? I need to know if this would make me a Czech or Fr*nch.

2026-03-25 18:06:17 UTC

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@nprofile…d73q @nprofile…s24j @nprofile…dgnf @nprofile…rm88
By that logic, anyone very passionate about Free Software could be called a villain.
It's OK to keep banging on about something that you think is important. Having convictions and sticking to them is OK, actually.

2026-03-25 18:01:53 UTC

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@nprofile…rm88 @nprofile…dgnf @nprofile…s24j @nprofile…d73q
"You're just pretending to be polite. You're not actually."
This is like when a conspiracy theorist calls you a shill for THEM because you presented counter-evidence.

2026-03-25 17:47:51 UTC

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@nprofile…rm88 @nprofile…s24j @nprofile…d73q @nprofile…dgnf
> mfw this mf uses sourcehut
:blobcat-creepy-grin:

2026-03-25 17:46:35 UTC

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@nprofile…rm88 @nprofile…dgnf @nprofile…s24j @nprofile…d73q
"Villain arc" be like:
> Cleanly and thoroughly explains the problem, in a frustrated tone, without insulting or flaming anyone, at most responding with sarcasm to bad faith responses and personal insults...
If you think that makes me a villain, you must have a very sheltered life and never had to deal with an actually unpleasant person. :blobcat-joy:

2026-03-25 16:32:17 UTC

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@nprofile…8kc4 @nprofile…dgnf @nprofile…s24j @nprofile…d73q
Sort of, yes. But it's not some knowingly malicious conspiracy. They think they're "on the right side of history" just like Christian missionaries, jihadis, and so on. Thankfully they're not quite as violent, though some seem to fantasize about beheading "terfs" aka infidels sometimes.

2026-03-25 15:18:45 UTC

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@nprofile…d73q @nprofile…s24j @nprofile…dgnf
My experience has proven this to be false.

2026-03-25 15:17:43 UTC

(German video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtTRxdjumD8
This is so comical and such a German stereotype. Due to bureaucratic nonsense, a school that's 24 km away is considered "nearer" than a school that's just 10 km away, because of some stupid formula they use that's based on "zones" or some shit (not done watching it yet).

2026-03-25 15:01:59 UTC

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@nprofile…d73q @nprofile…s24j @nprofile…dgnf
You are always free to mute or block me. Just ask yourself whether you aren't just proving my original point, which is that CoCs and people who ardently defend them carry with them a culture of toxicity and exclusion, thus harming Free Software.

2026-03-25 14:58:32 UTC

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@nprofile…d73q @nprofile…s24j @nprofile…dgnf
That's fine! People who happen to come across our interactions can observe this, and make up their mind about which side seems more genuine and willing to provide reasonable arguments.

2026-03-25 14:56:32 UTC

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@nprofile…d73q @nprofile…s24j @nprofile…dgnf
Having a girlfriend from outside my bubble, who cares about none of these topics, proves that I'm more connected to normal people, and more able to interact with the outside world, than you. :blobcat-laugh: