Mordikan

I think the supply chain issue is probably the most pressing out of all of them. The other points people have are either non-issues or a result of dropping usage hogs into existing electrical infrastructure. Infrastructure can be updated, though.

Supply chain is different. There isn’t a supply shortage of chips, its that profitability dictates you should sell them to datacenters or adjacent industry. Unlike infrastructure where you can just build out more, adding more supply for chips just means you have more to sell to datacenters. Since the demand is there, end of day profits will always win.

Saw it was already commented about CO2, so I thought I’d counter-point your environment claim regarding water usage (since that is something I’ve seen a lot of too).

The ISSA had a call to action due to the AI water use “crisis”: https://www.issa.com/industry-news/ai-data-center-water-consumption-is-creating-an-unprecedented-crisis-in-the-united-states/

68 billion gallons of water by 2028! That’s a lot…right? Well, what I found is that this is somewhat of a bad faith argument. 68 billion gallons annually is a lot for one town, but those are numbers from a national level and it isn’t compared to usage from anything else. So, lets look at US agriculture (that’s something that’s tracked very well by the USDA): https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_Irrigation_4.pdf

That’s 26.4 trillion gallons of water annually. So, AI datacenter represents 0.26% of agriculture consumption. If AI datacenter consumption is a crisis, why is agriculture consumption not a crisis? You could argue that agriculture produces “something useful”, but usefulness doesn’t factor into the scarcity of a resource. So, either its not a crisis, or you are cherry picking something that has no meaningful outcome to solving the problem.

We aren’t talking about publishing side groups like Youtube, FB, etc. We’re talking about advertisers like DV360 or Tradedesk (the largest ad firms). COPPA has vastly decreased value on the demand side. And user data isn’t stored for 20+ years expecting to capitalize on it. After several weeks that data becomes stale and useless. In the 11 years I’ve worked in adtech engineering, I can confirm that how you think this works vs how this actually works is not the same thing.

And what you are talking about for responsibility is part of the Section 230 amendments being made to force liability on hosts for the “sake of the children”. These amendments have nothing to do with children though. They have to do with opening hosts up to liability in defamation suits raised against them to force silence of political critics (this has been WELL documented).

I totally get what you are saying, and I don’t think we are really in disagreement about anything here. This is just my personal point of contention.

Its opening a can of worms for xdg-desktop-portal and systemd for something that they don’t need to or shouldn’t need to act on. If they make this change then: If the Afghani govt issues a request for gender, they should include that in userDB as well then. If Colorado’s new law requires age data to be held differently or different format, they will need to include that as well then. COPPA already exists, so do they need to further change how they store this data? If a new federal law is passed for age verification, they will need to support that on top of the existing state laws. Should it be jurisdiction specific? EU laws might state you can’t arbitrarily store this data, so now you need to check operating geo. Which jurisdictions do you honor? Which do you ignore?

Its optional until made so convoluted that its required. I think what’s so interesting to me is how this all goes back to a 30+ year old debate on the UNIX philosophy.

Collecting data on kids is extremely valuable to these companies, because kids grow up to be consumers.

This is not true. From an adtech perspective, child user data is virtually worthless. Because COPPA exists, most demand platforms (including those outside COPPA jurisdiction) simply will not issue any bid for that type of traffic. To try to bypass this, sketchy publisher groups will try to issue a regs.coppa=0 in their bid requests with the justification of “we couldn’t determine that info”. COPPA is largely self-reporting based if you didn’t know.

Outside of that, what you are describing is called the Chilling Effect. It is were legitimate activities on a site are restricted out of fear that they may break a vaguely worded law. This is a genuine concern and one that federated services had when Lemmy first started to take off. Instance owners were faced with the possibility that without CSAM detection processes in place that they could be held liable for that material being present on their instance.

I think the issue outside of capitulation is the matter of systemd’s obligation or lack thereof to make this change. Systemd by law isn’t required to do anything. xdg-desktop-portal more so is, but that raises a bigger question: Why is a jurisdiction specific requirement being rolled into this? Do all jurisdiction specific requirements need to be loaded for optional use? Why is this being shunted to xdg-desktop-portal to handle the brunt of this?

Ultimately the PR was closed and for this very reason:

That amounts to a short-sighted decision to tune the specification to one state’s law, without taking into account that other states and countries can define different age brackets, and without the ability for an application to know which age bracket classification (California, Japan if/when they mandate it, etc.) applies.

Expanding on that, the outright shortsightedness of the request is made more clear further into that discussion: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/40974#issuecomment-4018655808

>Gender plays a role on whether you could use a computer and what sites you can access?

In Afghanistan, all forms of higher education are not permitted for women. Furthermore, the Taliban have a reputation as gentlemen who are not used to repeating themselves.

Define “location data”.

Systemd stores location data for unit files, it does not store geo lookup data. Again, why does systemd need to store user age?

I think the point people are making here is why does systemd need to store an age for the user.

An equally valid question is why does a glorified scheduling service want to act as my UEFI boot manager?

bchunk can do conversion to build these all out as .iso files. I think cdemu, given your mention of Daemon Tools, is a better option though as its effectively doing the same thing DT did. It would load the image to /dev/sr0 (the CD/DVD device) which you would then just run the previous mount command to bring up: sudo mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/cd

I think you mean MDF/MDS instead of MKV (I haven’t seen those in like 20 years - but I think that’s what you mean). That was the old Alcohol 120% proprietary format. I don’t think any tools directly work with that extension, you’d have to convert those .iso first.

If the .img file does not contain partition table info, it should just be a matter of mounting:

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/img
sudo mount -o loop path/to/file.img /mnt/img

The only time that becomes a problem normally is if its like a partitioned SD card (had a netbook I booted from SD card before and that happened).