CIRCLE WITH A DOT

You are a provider of a large communication platform used by millions of people worldwide. You have a problem with harassment, radicalisation, and illegal activity that governments are starting to be concerned by. Do you:

• Commit to hiring a large team of moderators and engineers who will add community-safety features, under penalty of liability for harms to your users that were preventable if you focused slightly less on short-term profit at all costs?
• Persuade governments that the solution is ’ age verification’. You get to scan government-issued ID, tie their profile with real identity so it’s much more valuable when you sell it, and also refuse service to the people who weren’t going to buy stuff from the ads you host because they are too young to have jobs?

Some folks on the Verona project just shared with me the Lightweight Fault Isolation (LFI) project, which looks like really exciting work!

@JamesBaker

I don't know where Discord was on this, but a lot of the big companies introducing age verification helped steer governments towards this as a 'solution' because it let them avoid actually fixing any of their things and also let them harvest more data to sell. So I am quite happy to push back on companies deploying age verification because if deploying age verification costs them money then their lobbying will start pushing back.

I used the phrase 'too big to fork' in another thread. It's something I try to avoid in projects I maintain. I don't want to control how you use my code. Giving you a license that lets you do whatever you want with it is part of that, but it's on the start. The rest is making sure that, if we disagree on how it can evolve, you can take your copy and make it do something different. That means building small projects, building projects with well-defined and stable interfaces between components, and documenting how things work.

I'm not always good at these things, but they're always my goals. If a project is too big to fork, those freedoms that the license gives you are freedoms in name only: you don't have the ability to exercise them.

@Natasha_Jay

I said back when Twitter was new:

Government communications should never be first on a third-party platform. They should build an open system for notifications, either RSS or something that allows explicit push. If people like Twitter, Facebook, or whatever the kids are using now want to build a bridge from that so that their users can consume things, that's fine. But it shouldn't be public money building that bridge. It's a thing that adds value to that commercial service and so should be paid for by the people who want it.

I said the same thing about BBC iPlayer when it launched, but they still maintain proprietary client apps for a variety of proprietary platforms and use license-fee money to promote lock-in to platforms owned and controlled by foreign corporations.

@michcampbell

Cost of living has gone through the roof since then, though.

I presume this is also true in Australia, but this is also incredibly local dependent. When I was doing my PhD (in Swansea), my rent (in a shared house) was £165/month. My share of bills brought that to a bit over £200/month. Add on food and I was spending well under £400/month. The £1000/month stipend left a lot left over. At the same time, folks in more expensive cities were easily spending £400+ just on rent and bills.

@iodomi I've been using FreeBSD on servers since FreeBSD 4.something. It... just works. I've got a couple of machines that were upgraded in place from 9 to 14 (9 was release in 2012, 14 is still supported). The base system config has barely changed in that time.

All third-party things (i.e. the things that the server exists to run) are all updated regularly and available in packages.

Podman is somewhat immature, but mostly works for container things. There are things like @BastilleBSD for managing jails, but they have largely missed the benefits of modern container orchestration and it feels more like just managing a bunch of machines.

@futurebird @meganmariehart

(I favourited and boosted this, but given the content of the post, I feel like that could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive attack. It isn't meant to be, I have nothing of value to add to this, but I completely agree with the sentiment expressed.)

@michcampbell

I'm not sure if it's the same in Australia, but the PhD stipend is also non taxable in the UK. If that's the only income you get, it's roughly equivalent to a taxable salary of around £25K. But the real win is that it doesn't count against your personal allowance, so the next £12,570 that you earn is also untaxed. This means you can (via internships, consulting, and so on) earn up to £34,375 before you start paying tax. That's about the same take-home pay as someone earning £43K.

When I started my PhD, I think it was £10K, but went up to £12.5K by the time I finished. It looks as if it's roughly kept pace with inflation since then. Consulting on the side made it a better deal than some entry-level jobs.

But even that doesn't really compete with industry salaries. A computer science PhD student's internship salary is typically (pro-rated) £45K/year (maybe a bit more, I'm a couple of years out of date). Making an internship-level salary full time would pay you more than you get from the stipend and a 3-month internship. And that makes it very hard to get people to come back and do a PhD after a couple of years in industry. That's a real shame because people often do a lot better if they've had some practical experience of which open research problems really matter before they focus on one for a few years.

@0x09 @astrid

That is the worst pun in the thread, I applaud you.

@sysop408 @jalager @kwayk42 @astrid

I used to have a flashlight that took 4.5V batteries that were actually three A cells in a bigger box. Unlike the 9V ones, which are quite hard to dismantle, these had a top that was very easy to pop off and so you could see the wiring inside.

I've never seen an A cell anywhere outside of these ones, but when I was young you could buy the 4.5V ones in most hardware stores. I haven't looked for one for a very long time, so I've no idea if that's a good thing.

@chirpbirb

I realise this is a joke, but I would genuinely buy KDE-branded pizza. Especially if it were shaped like the cog logo with cheese in the folded bits used to make the teeth.