I wonder what would be the power consumption of a device that sits on your head and emits IR light in all directions until you turn it off, instead of just over your eyes. Similar to how microphone blockers work.

What would jewelry and hats do about cameras?

It would have to be strong enough to damage the cameras, if it’s not to be always on.

Maybe something similar to how microphone blockers work, flood a space with EM radiation outside the typical human visible range.

Or i think i’ve heard of ways to detect when someone has one of these near you (identifying bluetooth signals and such), in which case you can look around for who has glasses thick enough to hold a camera and shine a laser in their camera/eye. That could have too many false positives though.

See also: Firefox tab containers (built in feature), Temporary Containers extension (makes a new temporary folder for cookies & cache every time you go to a new domain/subdomain), and uMatrix extension (block embedded anything from any source, by domain & subdomain).

I don’t see how this could be enforcable. If i don’t let my computer automatically update (and i don’t) i could stick with one version of Debian forever. It wouldn’t be ideal, but i don’t see why all my offline programs wouldn’t work fine with no security issues as long as i’m offline.

And what about those rare operating systems that don’t do any networking? I know most people don’t use TempleOS but it does exist and would suffer little if at all from this. The bill mentions a fine (1798.503. (a)) for failing to either demand a date of birth or say “Not for use in California”, but how does that work with any abandoned OS? There are plenty that are unmaintained now for which there’s nobody to fine.

I am curious to know what the big distros (and i guess also non-Linux OSs) plan to do about this. Some might comply, there might be some “Not for use in California” stickers on download pages.

Hell, even if every OS does implement this and every user is honest about their age, that still doesn’t help protect children from anything. It is in fact false that only one person can use a computer, or only one person can use a user account on a computer. I let my kid brother play games on my computer sometimes and i know other people share too. I can honestly say i’m over 18 and there can still be times when someone who’s not is on my computer. The bill as written even seems to aknowledge this in “1798.504 (g) This title does not impose liability on an operating system provider, a covered application store, or a developer that arises from the use of a device or application by a person who is not the user to whom a signal pertains.”

Sometimes it feels like the world is falling apart at every point and i’m drowning in the overwhelming flood of bad news. ICE, Al, this shit, Ukraine has been pushed out of the news by everything else, how are they doing⸮ And the globe is still warming, people keep making benches with extra handrails and spikes, i can’t grow my own food because the air and water and soil are poison, too many can’t afford a home to not freeze in winter or boil in summer; and it’s all too much.

I’d love to change the world, but i don’t know what to do.

One thing at a time. I’m making sure i have full installer images (full, not just install-enough-to-download-the-rest) for a couple backup operating systems in case somehow this sort of thing does shoot down Linux. I don’t think that’ll happen, but it doesn’t hurt to have onhand.

What else is there to do? That’s not rhetorical. What can i do as a citizen of the USA but not California to stop this?

How USA law handles precedent (i think, i’m no lawyer) makes everything like this feel heavier. As a non-lawyer, letting some dunderhead demand any feature, no matter how ineffective at its stated goal, be implemented in all operating systems feels like a potentially slippery slope. Today, input a number ≥18 when you get a new computer or OS. Tomorrow, some other step towards dystopia. I don’t know, it’s late and i’m tired.

So, who wants this⸮ The jays who made the law and nobody else. Ask anyone, i’m pretty confident that most people will see problems with this immediately. And if they need yet more reasons, (Hacker News has pointed out plenty of downsides to this for just about everyone. But before we all get too critical, i think it’s important to have a look at the actual bill too. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

Done reading⸮ Great, let’s be critical.

The language suggests whoever wrote this doesn’t know the difference between the Internet and the Web, maybe doesn’t know what an operating system is, doesn’t know how peope use computers, and doesn’t have a grammar checker. In fairness, i don’t have a grammar checker either. But i proofread stuff i write, and none of it is as consequential as new laws.

So Little Timmy’s computer knows he’s somewhere between 0 and 13 years old, and has to pass that information along to any “publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform”, which are basically defined as something that distributes programs/apps for a computer that can download apps (so i guess if you can only sideload it’s not a computer). “internet website” sounds like it’s supposed to mean a website that lets you download things. That is, every website that’s still online can be downloaded with a regular browser, and in fact must be so your computer knows what the page you’re trying to read is and what to show you. Even if this doesn’t include every website (and i’m sure it’s not meant to), how is your OS or browser to know what sites let you download applications and what sites don’t⸮

Furthermore, 1798.501 (b) (1) “A developer shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.” That is, it is the duty of anyone who maintains a website where you can download stuff to request to know the age bracket of the user. At worst, this means the owner of every website visited by Little Timmy can see that a user account on his IP address is in the 0-13 bracket. At best, this means that just people behind specifically just app stores can see that same information.

People should not write laws about topics they don’t know anything about. Beyond all the obvious really important reasons why, it makes them look like fools to those of us who do know what they’re talking about, or at least what they think they’re talking about.

It’s worth saying for the handful of people who don’t know about Wine.

I haven’t messed with my Wii U in months so i’ve mostly just focused on trying to back up my worlds to my computer in any form. I do plan to try MCC Tool Chest with Wine, but i also thought i’d ask if people know of any solution that works better or easier on Linux.

It still surprises me that there’s apparently so little overlap between people who prefer Linux over Windows and people who hack their consoles.

I run apt update && apt upgrade every few days at slowest, or whenever i want to install or remove something with apt. That’s Debian.

I’m pretty sure the only programs on my computer that automatically update are those by Mozilla, since i don’t know how to stop them.

Debian is known for being very stable so i trust that when it tells me to do a system update i should, and so far nothing has broken except what i break.

Usually i only don’t use the latest version of something if either the latest version is worse than an older version (KiCAD seems to get less usable over time, from what i know) or the latest version isn’t available to me for some reason (PolyGlot has unsatisfyable dependencies so i use an old version).

This is all true. Unless someone breaks into your home to physically steal your data, offline backups will always be more secure than anyone’s cloud.

I’ve thought about keeping a copy of my own assorted data on a hard drive in a safe deposit box, though i don’t know how much that would cost. If you’re really worried about people getting into these anyway, there are ways to protect entire drives with a password.

At small scale it looks like a granola bar, but up close it’s a very nice space bar.

Does Invidious work?

I’ve been using Linux for so long i’d almost forgotten Windows does that. Just calling it “Documents” and not having to worry about a space in the file path breaking things is so much easier.

MyFucking Hearing Aids™

I don’t always like the smell. I work as a line cook and sometimes have to handle hard boiled eggs that come pre-cooked in bags. They always smell strongly of sulphur when i open a bag and it’s put me off eggs a bit, especially boiled eggs.

Fried eggs are fine. If they have a smell i can’t tell over the spices and butter i cook them in. They don’t taste especially good to me but they’re easy protein that i can cook in the morning for breakfast. They don’t taste bad either, but i only very rarely eat eggs on their own with no other foods.

You can try to not use a search engnie at all, but the Web relies a lot on them. If that’s really what you want, you’re limited to surfing. Go to a site, follow links, and hope you get where you need to go. Surfing is great for finding things you didn’t know you were looking for, and not so great for finding particular things you need information on. For that, either try whatever libraries you have access to or cave and use a search engine.

There are plenty of search engines that aren’t Google. Some don’t use the same search index (big list of web pages that it shows you when you search stuff). I currently use Qwant as my primary engine, and before that i used Startpage. I’m also fond of Marginalia when a big, normal engine isn’t giving me helpful results.

Or you can ask people, like you said. Forums, chatrooms, whatever Lemmy is, maybe email somebody if you think they know stuff about whatever field you’re interested in. Or you could sit down in a coffee shop with a sign that says “Tell me about electrical engineering” or whatever it is you want to know, and see how that goes.

Wikipedia is good, if you don’t mind that it has a search bar with an index consisting of its own pages. You shouldn’t trust everything you read there, but every good article (and most bad ones) cites sources, and you can follow those citations.

My phone actually supports audio notes, but my problem with that is navigating to the notes app while driving.

The issue with just finding smartphone apps is also present when looking for music players. It would be nice if there were more distinct terms for these things.

Things were mostly broken (i couldn’t get fluxbox to start) until i used tasksel to install Cinnamon so i could use a browser to look some stuff up (i only have one computer). I removed Cinnamon but whatever it left behind fixed my system enough that i’m now typing this in LibreWolf with not too many weird graphical issues. Some stuff doesn’t work at all yet, like my laptop’s function keys for things like brightness and volume.

So all in all, better than i thought this might go.

Thank you for that last bit. “Just do it” out to be the advice i needed.

The former redirects to the latter. Any reason that’s better than DuckDuckGo lite? The main difference i see is that the lite version relies less on CSS so i can use it in basically any browser.

Happy to help. I think i found the first three after asking for fonts here.

I don’t find new fonts often, but i went looking for some nice monospaced ones not long ago and found Toren Mono, Drafting* Mono, and Monaspace (Xenon).

Of the three Monaspace is my favorite because of how it handles very wide or narrow letters like MmWw, liIj. If a wide letter is next to a narrow one, the wide one takes up more space at the expense of the narrow one that would normally have a hard time filling the full width. It makes the font prettier and easier to read, while still being fixed width.

I also recently remembered Pelagiad when i saw it on the cover of Mark Rosenfelder’s Language Construction Kit and wondered how he got the rights to publish a book in the similar Magic Cards font.