And yes, to be clear, Elon Musk is a censorious tyrant. All the big tech leaders are, both because some of them started out as outright fascists and because the rules of the tech CEO game are, in the Nash equilibrium, unfavorable to liberal ideals.

Dehumanization is another common tactic of tyrants. You look at the group of dissidents you want to censor, identify those who are weak enough to silence, and use your control over society and government to make them pay for not being on their side. Rinse and repeat until you've salami-sliced away every dissident's rights. The only effective means of stopping dehumanization is to render it ineffective by making lots of friends who understand and defend against these attacks. [0] The interminably dense social justice literature uses jargon terms like "solidarity" and "intersectionality", which seem almost calculated to piss off the unenlightened into reflexively opposing social justice because we might as well be wizards chanting Latin curses at people to sound smart. But the idea is simple.

So yes, freedom is intersectional - because it it ultimately comes from the people as a whole exercising their power to check the power of tyrants.

[0] "Apes together strong", in case HN doesn't render emoji correctly.

Of course, this was also several years ago, and it's possible the bug has been fixed. Maybe I should try Wayland again.

Rust specifically does not forbid deadlocks, including deadlocks caused by resource leaks. There are many ways in safe Rust to deliberately leak memory - either by creating reference count cycles, or the explicit .leak() methods on various memory-allocating structures in std. It's also not entirely useless to do this - if you want an &'static from heap memory, Box.leak() does exactly that.

Now, that being said, actually writing code to hold a LockGuard forever is difficult, but that's mainly because the Rust type system is incomplete in ways that primarily inconvenience programmers but don't compromise the safety or meaning of programs. The borrow checker runs separately from type checking, so there's no way to represent a type that both owns and holds a lock at the same time. Only stacks and async types, both generated by compiler magic, can own a LockGuard. You would have to spawn a thread and have it hold the lock and loop indefinitely[0].

[0] Panicking in the thread does not deadlock the lock. Rust's std locks are designed to mark themselves as poisoned if a LockGuard is unwound by a panic, and any attempt to lock them will yield an error instead of deadlocking. You can, of course, clear the poison condition in safe Rust if you are willing to recover from potentially inconsistent data half-written by a panicked thread. Most people just unwrap the lock error, though.

In other words, all of these age verification laws are here predominantly to indemnify Facebook from a growing wave of child endangerment lawsuits in a way that will ensure Facebook doesn't have to kick off even a single teen from their platforms. That's why the "verification" is just a date and an age range bucket.

My personal opinion is that these laws are stupid, but not harmful to Linux users, and that everyone angry at systemd for complying is shooting the wrong guy. Your real target is Facebook and you should be yelling at your local representative to make this bill not target Linux distros.

Maybe Google should finally make good on their threat to only stream YouTube in royalty-free standards.

The moment the ultra wealthy slip up - that they reveal that they're a normal shitty person with a severe case of affluenza - the illusion shatters. And social media has made it both very easy and addictive for rich people to indulge in their worst vices. So now instead of fundamentally soulless people engaging in virtue signalling to pretend to be human, you have fundamentally soulless people engaging in vice signalling, because suddenly these p-zombies been given access to a machine that finds them fellow p-zombies to validate themselves with.

Furthermore, once you see this happen a few times, your mental default changes. Now you assume every wealthy person is an asshole until proven otherwise. Even if Elon Musk might be saying something poignant about space travel or AI safety, you've seen enough Cybertrucks and "X Æ A-12"s and "autistic" Nazi salutes to know that he's a moron. You, personally, were ignoring the latter to focus on the former, because you were probably smarter than him. But he's shoved the latter in your face to the point where it's undeniable.

> Did I grow up and they changed to a younger audience and what I used to enjoy was just a different kind of stupid?

No, you're thinking of MAD Magazine. Notably, it's still possible for an emotionally mature adult to still enjoy that kind of humor. But emotionally mature adults tend to not enjoy manchildren.

[0] 10 years ago was 2016, which is probably not as far back as you were thinking.

Additionally, as others have already mentioned, the best security would be no dynamic code at all, just static pages generated by Jekyll. This should have been a Jekyll frontend, IMO.

>And because WordPress plugins run in the same execution context as WordPress itself and are so deeply intertwined with WordPress code, some argue they must carry forward WordPress’ GPL license.

That is a feature, not a bug. I already have to debug broken or poorly-documented WordPress plugins as-is, my job would be 100x harder if those plugins were proprietary and forbade inspection of the code.

Furthermore, while the GPL forbids locking down plugins to charge a licensing premium, it does not forbid charging money in general. While in theory you can legally pirate paid WordPress plugins (it's called "nulling"), in practice few do this because it's an obvious and blatant security risk[1]. Paid plugin authors are selling support and software assurance that has real value.

Also, I must take umbrage with the legal hedging. "Some argue"? Like, the GPL is strategically ambiguous with regards to the definition of a "Program"[2], but it'd be very hard to write a useful WordPress plugin that does not become part of the same Program.

[0] This is predominantly a fault of JavaScript, which has no threading story and is designed to fit in a foreign event loop. In Rust, async code can spawn and await real threads to hold blocking code, and sequential code can host its own event loop to run async in.

[1] Especially if you were to, say, name your nulled version "Secure Custom Fields". Nobody would EVER do that, right?

[2] No, proprietary Linux modules don't count. Linux has a userspace syscall exception that defangs the GPL, so it's perfectly possible to write kernel-mode code that only touches syscall equivalents.

Wait, isn't this what MIDI is for?

The only reason why we even know YouTube "has DRM" is because third parties have been able to plausibly allege DMCA 1201 circumvention claims against yt-dlp regarding a nebulously named "rolling cipher". These are not actual court findings of fact, just that you can say this in a legal filing and not immediately get your case thrown out on summary judgment. Which is a really low bar. Whether or not the rolling cipher actually qualifies as DRM is still an open question.

The way DMCA 1201 is written, basically anything intended to function as copy protection is considered DRM under the law. Like, those really annoying no-right-click scripts people used to put on sites probably could be argued to be DRM under DMCA 1201. However, in this case, there's a disconnect between the people offering the DRM (who don't actually claim it's DRM) and the people using it as DRM.

The real shit is happening parallel to the actual legislation. Companies that need to comply with, say, the extremely onerous UK Online Services Act, are forcing everyone to use data-heavy verification paths like facial recognition age estimation or ID scanning. Newgrounds just used your account age or a credit card.

A core property of fascism is that, unlike other forms of tyranny, it is specifically a public-private joint venture. The government uses corporations to bypass its own constitutional restrictions, and those corporations then agree to follow rules that don't actually exist, specifically so that those corporations can shut down all their competition and form para-governments that supercede the democratically responsive bits. This has actually been going on for a while, but it's only now that the people are actually noticing it.

[0] Inspired by Louis Rossmann's efforts to get R2R bills passed, I've started doing amateur lobbying for the Rio Grande Plan. It's surprisingly easy, but you will almost certainly have to take off from work or sacrifice many a lunch hour to be able to actually get to talk to people.

The commonality between all four of these incidents is that they correspond to severe supply shocks:

- During WWI and WWII, industrial supply was rerouted by force to the war effort, leaving normal consumer demand unfulfilled.

- During the oil crisis of the 70s, a critical energy input to the American economy massively increased in price due to sanctions placed on America.

- During the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant chunk of workers were paid not to work, as a form of deliberate supply destruction to avoid the spread of a novel coronavirus.

In a "normal" economy, supply is flexible enough that you can print money and nobody even notices. The supply curve is smooth and gradual, so prices only rise a little. When supply is constrained, however, prices rise to whatever value is necessary to curtail demand, because they have to. The supply curve is a brick wall.

Personally, I would have used all those tokens to generate synthetic data for IDA (iterated distillation and amplification) so that the more efficient 1000 token/answer chat model can answer more questions, but apparently that doesn't justify an insane datacenter buildout.

To be perfectly clear, bots don't eat food, and we don't need a market to tell us otherwise. Even an individual having Google Duplex reserve ten tables in advance isn't going to be able to eat ten dinners. But if reservations actually cost money, then any restaurant doing the smart thing of just skipping no-shows to keep the kitchen running is now defrauding reservation holders. Capacity has to be reserved and left fallow for the sake of optionality.

Bringing this back to market terms: if reservations are so in demand that restaurants have to charge for them, why don't they just raise the prices on the actual food instead?