Yeah; 100%.

Go go China !

Bops the tankie.

Like, I have a Chinese LLM loaded right this second and follow them closely, but holy moly. Curb your enthusiasm.

Anyway, OpenAI has plenty of compute to train a Sora 2 if they want, but apparently they don’t. My guess is some combination of:

• They couldn’t figure out a more efficient architecture, like you speculated. I buy that. OpenAI’s development is way more conservative than you’d think, and video generation is inherently intense, especially if Sora 1 is the baseline.

• …Maybe they looked at metrics, saw Sora is mostly used for spam, scams, or worse, and pulled the plug for liability reasons?

• They’re focusing on short-term profitability, as other commenters mentioned.

And it can be used to verify how old you are.

How?

This is the part I’m hung up on. What actually physically happens to make me enter my real birthday in the systemd user field, and verify it’s actually my birthday?

January 1 1900 has been my official online birthday forever.

I just don’t see how it’s any different than my Sony PSP having an optional birthday field. Or oldschool forums having one. It can’t possibly affect me, or anyone who’s concerned about it.

If systemd starts talking about bundling face scanners or whatever they actually need to verify someone’s age, and then tons of linux systems start requiring it, then I will be gravely concerned.

So they’re introducing a system where a users age can be verified?

No. They are not.

It is an optional field that does no semblance of checking its veracity. Again, like basically every bit of electronics has had forever.

The source is the source: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/acb6624fa19ddd68f9433fb0838db119fe18c3ed

Takes a birth date for the user in ISO 8601 calendar date format. The earliest representable year is 1900. If an empty string is passed the birth date is reset to unset.

That’s it. That’s all it does.

Whatever was discussed in the PR, the code does precisely nothing to implement any kind of verification. It’s just an optional birth date field, like tons of electronics have had forever.

As others suggest, why stay attached to Manjaro at all? Instead of forking, what about expending that energy on a rising distro without such reputational damage?

CachyOS is very close “in spirit” if they want to develop modified/custom packages, but there are plenty Arch downstream distros with less toxic communities.

They could even fork some other project and make the changes they like. It’d be a saner base than Manjaro at this point.

+1

Renaissance of small, efficient native apps, even on platforms like Android.

Verifiable programming (which tends to involve lower level languages) is much “better” with LLMs. Take this recent one, for example:

https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Leanstral-2603

Leanstral is the first open-source code agent designed for Lean 4, a proof assistant capable of expressing complex mathematical objects such as perfectoid spaces and software specifications like properties of Rust fragments.

https://github.com/AeneasVerif/aeneas

uBlock Origin is the gold standard, but you need something that supports the full version. Plain Chrome (and most forks) are not good enough.

Firefox, Helium, and/or Orion would be my top picks.

On top of three letter agencies, basically every cybersecurity expert that publishes a “basic tweaks” article recommends uBlock Origin.

The results are awful though. Over the past few years, I can hardly even think of a single search where SEO quickly brought me to “the page I was looking for”; searches end in either a wall of spam, or me getting frustrated and more directly finding what I already know I want. Smaller sites I used to love have withered and died, buried from the lack of earnest traffic. Malicious URLs rise above the businesses they are copying.

In other words, what does it matter if SEO is “improved” if the results are junk? It’s clearly not working better, unless one’s a scammer, or a corporation that benefits from the consolidation.

Bender’s Big Score, the first one. I was thinking of the scammer aliens, who have that same attitude SEO folks tend to carry.

No, you’ve got a point… Actually you’re right. To an extent.

I should have qualified my post.

But I’d argue the “bad” part of SEO is just too tempting. It’s clearly winning out, across the entire internet, unless you can look at me with a straight face and say “Google search is fine.” Or that discoverability of genuine services is fine. It’s definitely not; it’s a miracle any legitimate business is surviving from web search anymore, amongts the sea of attention scams and corporate behemoths.

In other words, the I feel like the “honeymoon” where we could trust SEO to happen ethically is now behind us.

When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough.

I love how the SEO industry pretends they’re anything but a caustic cancer leeching off literally everything.

“Oh, but discoverability of small business!” Yeah… I’d punch you if I saw you, SEO jerks. The Futurama movie was right.

I don’t buy that. No way they “open up” iOS to be more OSX-like, as that would spoil their cash cow (the App Store).

I hate to sound so cynical, but I just don’t see any incentive for Apple to do that.

Eh, but will they? There’s a whole lot of OSX legacy Apple would have to throw away.

I mean, I guess they could; they’ve done it before with architecture transitions. But this is different in that stuff on existing devices would stop working, whereas Intel or PPC Macs keep chugging along as-is.

Well, technically, System76 and a few other white box laptop makers did. But they don’t actually make laptops.

And to be fair to big OEMs, “it uses Linux!” was a much harder thing to market before. I can see (outside of the Framework, which caters to enthusiasts) they only dabbled with it but didn’t invest.

Also, an HP or Dell Linux distro would be an unholy abomination. I can only imagine what they’d ship.

As I always say:

…Most people need an iPad with a better keyboard, and a touchpad.

That’s all they use their computers for. They don’t want to mess with filesystems or specs or any concepts like that, they just want to add text to their kid’s picture or send an email or read a PDF or scroll YouTube, or do things like banking or streaming that are honestly better supported as iOS apps anyway.

And that’s basically what the Neo is.

Laptop makers are up shit creek if they insist on staying with Windows, as Microsoft stupendously bungled that experience.

It’s basically iOS at that point.