See that's where you're wrong
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Wolfgang
@notthebee@tilde.zone
YAML engineer by day, Youtube beauty vlogger by night.
I make videos about technology, self-hosting, *nix, home servers and potato routers.
Also into cycling, NixOS, music production and languages
EN, DE, FR, RU
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Joined November 09, 2022
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Replying to
@odr_k4tana@infosec.exchange
@odr_k4tana@infosec.exchange
@Gargron@mastodon.social My parents come from a generation of people who had to learn to do their own stuff – you had to be a bit of a carpenter, a bit of a plumber, a bit of a car mechanic, a bit of a farmer, a bit of a tailor. It wasn't a question of pride or hobby or interests, it was a quesiton of self-reliance and survival – most people didn't have the means to bring their clothes to a professional tailor or drop their car off for an oil change.
In my generation, people had to learn how to use a computer and fix some common problems – yes, even people who weren't interested in tech or programming. Not knowing how to use a computer was akin to not being able to drive a car – it meant that you were always dependent on somebody else to help you.
My problem with modern computer interfaces is not that they're making things too accessible – my problem is that this simplicity comes at a cost. You can only obfuscate and dumb things down to a certain point before basically making it so that using your product doesn't require the user to have even the most basic knowledge of computer interfaces.
Before you know it, you've raised a generation of people who don't know how to fix the simplest of issues with their software (let alone hardware). If "reinstalling Windows" was the oil change of my generation (you could probably do it, but it's messy, and you don't have the time), people who grew up with modern dumbed down mobile OSes would have their car towed because they left the handbrake on, and when told, would ask you "what's a handbrake?".
Yes, learning how to work with computers takes time and effort, it requires learning a new skill – but so does everything in life – reading a book, cooking, driving a car, playnig a videogame. I think eliminating any possible friction and asking nothing of the user in terms of skill, just because "not everyone is interested in tech, people just want to get on with their life" is akin to refusing to learn how to cook or drive. It makes you dependent, and in our isolated and lonely modern world, most likely you will be dependent on big tech companies like DoorDash and Uber (and with computing – Google, Anthropic and OpenAI), rather than your family and friends. Personal computers are as ubiquitous and crucial in our lives as food and transport, and in my opinion, there's no getting around it – you *have* to learn it whether it's your interest or not, just for the sake of survival.
@thibaultamartin@mamot.fr I did a similar thing with frp https://github.com/fatedier/frp and Caddy. Works like a charm
Didn't manage to get a ticket for #GPN this year 😭 If anyone has a spare ticket, please let me know!
Replying to
@notthebee@tilde.zone
@6b6279@freiburg.social There's also this but it's apparently a lot more expensive than a consumer smart TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-epPf7D8oMk
@6b6279@freiburg.social My LG TV is connected straight to an Apple TV and is on the IoT VLAN (not allowed to visit the interwebz or contact other devices in the LAN).
Why am I not surprised that the kind of Silicon Valley LinkedIn VC techbros who measure work output in "lines of code" now also measure compute power in "gigawatts".
RE: @GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social
/e/OS founder: we aren't developing a phone for pedophiles so they can evade justice
GrapheneOS social media person: "Why are you attacking GrapheneOS?"
My feed is full of BSD people gloating about the systemd "age verification" stuff and I can basically see them doing the Pixar face behind the screen and saying "heh, told you"
Feels like a good time to remind everyone that just like Linux, FreeBSD (one of the biggest BSD OSes) is also financed in part by donations from "big tech" corporate sponsors – Meta, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYear=2025
Meta in particular is one of the biggest lobbyists that push for the "OS-level age verification" bullshit.
That is not to say that you shouldn't take any money from big tech whatsoever as a project of that scale, but becoming a "Foundation Partner" clearly buys you some influence over the project: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/freebsd-foundation-partnership-program/
My point here is not "you're only allowed to criticize age verification if your OS of choice has zero corporate influence". My point is that instead of dunking on people who use systemd and reveling in the fact that you've "always known better", we should fight against it together.
"First they came for systemd users, and I stayed silent, because I wasn't a systemd user", and all that.
Replying to
@danslimmon@hachyderm.io
@danslimmon This reminded me of that one Twitter thing where they tried to develop an automated system to combat hate posts from white supremacists, but had to shelf it because it would mark posts from official GOP politician accounts
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-algorithm-crackdown-white-supremacy-gop-politicians-report-2019-4
Replying to
@mdione@en.osm.town
Replying to
@victor_tokarev@twiukraine.com
@victor_tokarev@twiukraine.com Thanks! Phanpy looks great
Is there any way on #mastodon to collapse consecutive posts from one user? I follow some very prolific posters (e.g. @pluralistic@mamot.fr ), and sometimes have to scroll for ages to get through their post threads.
Replying to
@notthebee@tilde.zone
@Ember@blobfox.coffee P.S. "quietly" as in without writing a big blog post about how "AI changed the way we develop software at startup_name" and hoping it hits the HN front page
Replying to
@Ember@blobfox.coffee
@Ember@blobfox.coffee Personally, my problem with AI isn't that it always produces bad results – I think that's not true. Under proper guidance, AI can be very helpful for software development. Just like we see a bunch of examples of blatant 'slop', there are also a lot of cases where AI is quietly used by skillful developers, with all of the results thoroughly reviewed by a human, and that results in overall better outcomes, technically speaking.
My problem with it is mostly ethical – even if we ignore the environmental impact and the use of AI in armed conflict... the endgame of big AI companies is obviously to de-skill the software developer job and make themselves an integral part of most software companies by renting the coding "skills" out to them at a high price.
I think if you don't care about the ethics, if you're skillful enough to review the code and if you're only interested in churning out working software faster than your competitors – you can definitely achieve that by using AI.
Replying to
@Ember@blobfox.coffee
@Ember@blobfox.coffee Oh yeah, public 'Linux' people like Poettering or Torvalds are definitely not freedom fighters like people often imagine them to be. Their goal is to develop a working product, and they do collaborate with the big tech to achieve that – Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are contributing a lot of money and code to the kernel and other Linux-adjacent projects.
Replying to
@notthebee@tilde.zone
There's also a very obvious reason why you see so many posts/articles/toots about it – and yes, a lot of them include misrepresented/wrong information, fear mongering and clickbait titles.
Everybody is already on edge because of the 'age verification' stuff that's taking place all around the world. And like a lot of people, I also thought "well, if Windows/macOS asks for my ID, at least there's always Linux".
Seeing some big Linux-adjacent projects not only refusing to react to it with anything other than "absolutely not, go fuck yourself" but even accepting PRs and discussing how best to comply with those laws really breaks my heart.
And even if the aforementioned PRs do not 'verify' anything, the communication from systemd developers has been lackluster.
From the politics standpoint, even if I did think that a 'birthDate' field was useful, I would either have asked the author to reword his PR (because it has nothing to do with the "age verification laws" and wording it this way would obviously create a huge shitstorm online, which it did), or made a public announcement explaining the change and assuring the users that systemd will never try to 'verify' your age.
Ignoring the "fascist" angle for a second (I saw no proof in the blog post of this being 'orchestrated', be that by fascists or anyone else).
I think both things can be true at the same time – governments around the world are fast-tracking laws to verify the identity of Internet users online under the guise of "protecting children", with suspicious level of speed and coordination.
But also, systemd adding an optional 'date of birth' field is not the same as "systemd introducing age verification".
Is it possible that this field will be used in the future to require users to verify their age? Yes, just like the existing 'Location' field may be used in the future to require the user to verify their home address, and the realName field may be used to require the user to specify their full legal name.
That being said, we can't ignore the timing and the explicit justification for the PRs as stated by the author. Quote: "Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws..."
And yes, there are already Medium posts making the rounds that paint the author to be some kind of a sleeper agent who "came out of nowhere" and got his PRs approved by "Microsoft employees".
Being a fan of Hanlon's razor, I think the author simply seized the opportunity, and decided to do a bunch of drive-by PRs to big Linux-adjacent projects, in order to be able to put "systemd contributor" on his CV.
Is this stupid and akin to using COVID shortages to scalp toilet paper? Yes. Is it a malicious plot by Microsoft to sneak age verification into Linux? Probably not, they don't care about Linux on the desktop enough, and if they did, they wouldn't need to be subtle or design elaborate plots to propose adding age verification to it.
Hm...
Sorry for doomerposting... But I think AI slop has killed whatever tiny shreds of passion for the homelab space that I had left. Every other post on r/selfhosted now starts with "I built..." which basically translates to "Claude code built". 50% of those "self-built" projects are for personal use and niche use cases (fine by me), but the other half has the audacity to ask for contributors, donations, testers and offer "business pricing" for their slop. I've now seen at least two self hostable projects go up in flames because of the slop, and many more will probably follow.
Don't get me wrong, I still self host most of my services (because fuck big tech) but because the space is now inundated by LLM-generated garbage, I've lost all interest in enganing with it online.
Mythical #FOSDEM sticker swap pull
Address him #fosdem
That... is the most #nixos thing I've heard in my life.