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

Where I live, gift cards are still very widely available.

Sounds like getting rid of Steam gift cards won’t solve that problem, they can do the same with other gift cards or even entirely different methods. Is that worth it to exclude minors or other people with no other way to pay?

What scams were those?

The main people impacted by this will be minors with no other way to buy anything from Steam…

Did anyone ever ask for the existence of AI shopping assistants, I wonder? No?

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. 😝

News outlets, for example, could spin up a server on their own official domain, and provide accounts to employees. So someone posting from a @news.bbc.com instance could, at a glance, be understood to be a genuine BBC reporter.

Some already do that. The ones I am familiar with are in German though: social.heise.de and mastodon.derstandard.at.

Do you have an example of that?

OSM doesn’t do this, but there are freely licensed satellite images out there. Usually they are produced by or for national governments and often ended up freely licensed precisely because OSM people asked for that…

For my country this is basemap.at and it would actually be an interesting project to aggregate such things in one UI, but I am not aware anyone has done that yet.

was expecting https://files.ohai.social/media_attachments/files/110/572/540/754/559/825/original/6ef5db5a6eab7c39.png

Jes, kaj mi supozas, ke tiu chi parto de la fadeno estas nun proprajho de la Universala Esperanto-Asocio.

I am certainly convinced that TV, being purely passive, is more likely to have negative effects on cognition than online communities, which are something you can actively engage in and be creative.

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

Correction: you can do that. You shouldn’t because it’s beneficial for young people to have social contacts and belong to positive communities, which is very much enabled by social media!

Also the claim is that the reason this particular child is “stressed out” is:

He said girls especially are barraged with unrealistic and sometimes AI-generated images of women’s bodies at a time when they’re feeling especially self-conscious about their own bodies.

Now I was never a girl nor especially conscious about my body, I am a male nerd who quickly learned in school not to care what others thought of me too much…

But I remember around 15 to 20 years ago reading similar claims about youth magazines and advertisements, that they were promoting unhealthy and unrealistic ideas of an ideal body image. So the beauty and fashion industries or whoever didn’t need computers to do those things.

In both cases, “promoting an unhealthy body image” is literally just free speech which in the US enjoys broad constitutional protection. So the government has no business doing anything against it.

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.