Parental controls means the control is done by the parents… not by the companies. I don’t need to tell any company what age bracket my kid might be, all I need is for them to tell me how can I block / restrict access to their services in my parent-controlled network (or how to allow them, if using allowlist).

Standardization of parental controls would be if routers and/or the OS of the devices came with standardized proxy settings that allowed privoxy-style blocking of sites in a customizable way so we can decide which services to allow… with perhaps blocklists / allowlists circulating in a similar way as adblockers do.

I mean, ultimately it can always be worked around… even if you were to add stronger forms of identification, a kid can take the parents card / ID / DNA sample / whatever when they are distracted and verify themselves. If a kid is smart enough to set up a VM like that they are smart enough to deceive adults. Teenagers have been finding easy ways to get to forbidden stuff for centuries.

I’d much prefer if the source of trust is in the local device, in the OS, that is responsibility of the family to control, and not on some remote third party service offered by some organization in who knows where with connections with who knows who. If parents don’t properly limit the local user account of their kids, or restrict access to the places they don’t want, it’s their responsibility. Set up proxies, blockers and lock the OS locally, but don’t mess up the internet for the rest of us.

Would they actually go after the people?

I expect the law would place the responsibility on the companies managing / distributing the OS. That’s the reason companies are complying. People can always look for alternatives… I’m sure there will always be homemade distros without stuff like this made by ragtag groups / communities without much of a corporate structure behind.

I mean… there’s nothing stopping anyone from setting their age to 100 years old. It’s not like they are adding any sort of identification check, from what I gather. Just doing the minimum to comply.

It recently overtook Japan, so it’s 4th now…

In general, I agree that you can always use the CLI raw, but a frontend is a lot more friendly for many. It’s the reason some people prefer TUI over CLI as well (some people really like lazygit and lazydocker which are just frontends wrapping git and docker CLI calls and presenting it in a TUI). A TUI/GUI can structure information in panels, it can be more context-sensitive and it can help provide visual representations of the operation.

Also, wrapping CLI commands (whether through a GUI or a TUI) means the wrapper can automatically combine the commands in whichever way it’s best for a particular goal, or more conveniently set up batch processing… it’s helpful for people who don’t like having to make their own scripts, or craft long oneliners.

Plus: lets say you have your computer hooked to your TV and don’t have space for a keyboard (but can use a small wireless mouse on the arm of your couch), a GUI wrapper that allows you to perform operations with just a mouse can be very convenient.

I don’t know what kind of GUIs are you imagining, but I’ve hardly ever seen 1-to-1 recreations to a single individual command (unless that command is extremely complex or a graphical representation would be actually useful).

Some examples:

Gparted creates a job list of terminal commands for the disk manipulation, but it presents a graphical representation of the disks before you actually commit to executing the commands internally, so you can see what would be the result of the changes in the GUI side before actually pressing the button that actually executes parted, fdisk, mkfs, resize2fs, etc. (they do wrap the commands when it comes to executing the changes), without you needing to go through the steps and specific syntax of each of them on your own.

There are wrappers to ffmpeg for video editing or transcoding that some people find convenient for discoverability of the options available and/or to have a limited list of presets / sanitized options for those who don’t want to bother creating their own scripts. Sometimes also showing video previews for the graphical representation (useful when the operation is about cropping the image, or picking the exact millisecond where to cut). An example is LosslessCut, they keep a log of the ffmpeg calls… or maybe Shutter Encoder (press Alt+C to see the console commands).

In Synaptic, the GUI package manager, pressing “Apply” calls the appropriate APT commands as a CLI app inside a VTE with the selection of the packages you have decided to add/remove/update, which you have previously selected in the listing that is generated from the GUI view of the app. Some people like having a graphical detailed listing which might be useful for conveniently browsing packages and seeing their detailed description, while still you get the raw information and accurate log from the installation that you would get when you are just using the CLI.

Yes. But my point is that until now that has not been made explicit, so there’s no reason for websites to require IDs right now, at least not until the government does mandate such a system. So I was wondering what’s the minimal effort that would satisfy current mandate.

The thing is that age verification in a digital world is not easy… what exactly does the government mandate as a valid verification method?

Like… would asking the user their age be valid enough? … because it’s not like a reliable method exist (not even credit card verification prevents a minor from taking their parents card and go through it). IMHO, until the government doesn’t actually set a standard, I don’t see why websites should actually give anything else than the most minimal effort possible when it comes to this.

Personally, I feel that if it uses control characters to update the screen in previous positions, altering the scroll buffer, moving beyond where the cursor is and redrawing the screen, then it’s a TUI.

CLI programs only output plain text in a stream, using just control characters for coloring and formatting, and if they do any re-drawing it’s only for the current line (eg. progressbars and so).

So… even something like less is a TUI program… but things like more or sed would be CLI programs.

Isn’t the T for “text”? (ie. “Text User Interface”)

I mean, in the context of Unix systems it’s most likely gonna be within a terminal emulator, but in theory you can have a TUI inside an SDL window rendering the text there (specially when they are ports from other systems where they might be using different character sets than whats available in terminals… or if they want to force a specific font).

The only example that comes to my head right now is ZZT, but I believe there are many games on Steam that use a TUI rendered within their own program, not a terminal.

I generally agree but it depends on the application and the computer purpose / input you will most use.

Like… it doesn’t make much sense to have a CLI/TUI for an image editor… if you start using things like sixel you are essentially building a GUI that runs in a terminal, not a TUI. The same happens with videogames, video players and related entertainment applications.

But like I said, I do generally agree. I’d even argue that when possible, GUIs should just be frontends that ultimately just call the corresponding CLI programs with the appropriate parameters, avoiding duplication.

The second most restrictive of the Creative Commons licenses (only behind the BY-NC-ND one). CC BY-NC-SA is not considered an open source license.

It gives the most control to the original owners of the Copyright, since only they can produce commercial and proprietary versions of the product. Free as in free beer, but not as in freedom.

While it’s true that Debian installation used to make use of a TUI and it did not have a nice GUI “live-CD” installation image for a long time (I think until 2019), Debian installation process included a default DE for way longer than that (2000). And before they did, the installation offered a choice between different window managers (back in the days before well established DE suites were even a thing).

They don’t customize the DE much, but neither does Archlinux which is a very popular distro nowadays (and the installer on that one is arguably even less friendly than Debian used to be).

Personally, I feel it has more to do with how other distros (like Mint, Ubuntu, Knoppix, etc.) have built on the work of Debian to make their own variants that are essentially Debian + extra stuff, making them better recommendations for the average people (if one thinks of those as Debian variants then I wouldn’t say Debian is “left out”). And for the not-so-average people, rolling release style distros (or even things like Nix/Guix) might be more interesting to experiment in.

At least when it comes to the German one, it’s essentially a rebranding of existing open source products packaged/adapted to work as a suite.

For example, for editing documents they are using Collabora online (Libreoffice-based), for chat it’s Matrix, for storage Nextcloud, email & calendar from Ox Cloud, etc.

This just applies to the French government, unless you land a public job it’s likely you’d still have to deal with that shit.

Still, it’s good news and lets hope it sets a trend.

Isn’t CachyOS more of a general purpose distro anyway?

I expected the OGC was mainly targeted to gaming-first distros, which in my mind are meant for an entirely different kind of devices with different interests and goals. I don’t think there should be much value in CachyOS joining it, regardless.

And specially for Microsoft, they would be shooting their own foot if they were to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the development community over the legality of the use of AI tools like Copilot, which they themselves promote and sell.

The only reason for CSD is touch interfaces on small screens.

Even in this case I’d argue that on small screens most apps simply have no real decorations (not even client-side)… there’s typically not even a close button. Hamburger buttons are menus, which isn’t what’s typically considered “decoration”. One could argue that the bar at the bottom in Android with home/back/etc controls is effectively a form of SSD. Android offers system UI or gestures to send the app to the background (ie. minimize) or closing it, it does not require Apps to render their own, which is effectively what Gnome is asking with CSD.

They justify the rejection of SSD because it isn’t part of the core Wayland protocol and at the same time push client apps for the “minimize” and “maximize” buttons (along with respecting some settings) despite it also not being part of the core protocol and it being only possible through extensions. There’s a ton of tiling compositors that don’t even have any concept of minimize/maximize, so why should this be required of every client app?

It feels backwards to ask the app developers to be the ones adding the UI for whatever features the window compositor might decide to have. They might as well be asking all app developers to add a “fullscreen” button to the decoration, or a “sticky” button, or a “roll up”/“shade” button like many old school X11 WM used to have. This would lead to apps lagging behind in terms of what they have implemented support for and resulting in inconsistent UX, and at the same time limiting the flexibility and user customization of the decorations, not just in terms of visuals but also function and behavior.

LLMs abstract information collected from the content through an algorithm (what they store is the result of a series of tests/analysis, not the content itself, but a set of characteristics/ideas). If that makes it derivative, then all abstractions are derivative. It’s not possible to make abstractions without collecting data derived from a source you are observing.

If derivative abstractions were already something that copyright can protect then litigants wouldn’t resort to patents, etc.