Wandering Adventure Party

@ShadSterling @wwahammy @artemis @smn

For the Polish example, I probably wouldn't worry about it. For the Portland example, I might. If it's a US entity, and/or servers that host it are in the US, I imagine a "don't distribute OSes in CA law could be applied. Otherwise how does the law have any effect on Microsoft, which is also not headquartered or incorporated in CA? Possibly the mechanism is "sales to entities registered in CA" which indeed Linuxes don't have (well, Red Hat might, but I don't care about their ilk). But certainly the framework for cross-border prosecution is there. I'm not a lawyer, and I think asking an actual lawyer is the right thing to do if you suspect litigation might be possible. I think I saw in another thread someone say that at least one distro has done exactly that and said they aren't making any changes, so perhaps that's a good approach for some.

@wwahammy @ShadSterling @artemis @smn agree with your logic but sadly logic is often not relevant when it comes to bureaucracy.

To put it another way: a vindictive suit designed to take down a distro web server could happen merely because some silicon valley VC got mad (or bored) and decided to drop $100k on an AG race somewhere?

There are innumerable bad reasons for a suit to arise that could absolutely happen, and being "technically in compliance due to disclaimer" probably heads off some number of these. The "don't download if you're in CA" language has other upsides too, like getting a broad group of users pissed at the law and priming them for non-compliance, and setting a standard for your community that you'll stand up to bad laws by refusing compliance.

@ShadSterling @wwahammy @artemis @smn I actually think that the license change and/or a website note saying "don't download this if you're in $jurisdiction" is an excellent response.

It's not like CA or the UK or Brazil can actually police who downloads what OS, and it removes legal liability* from the distro without actually affecting access or changing the code to support surveillance. The distros *do* need a way to avoid legal liability.

If in the end this leads to a situation where most Linuxes are officially banned in most of the world but people routinely ignore that ban, that's a good thing actually because it trains people to ignore bad laws. If some jurisdictions escalate to more invasive measures that target users, that's where you'll actually find a political base to resist this.

* I'm not a lawyer, but I have seen decent-sized orgs go this route.

@fromjason this is a good thread but I'd quibble with this post. They were suppressed by the algorithms for sure and thus not as influential, but all of these things did exist on Twitter. I learned tons about Indigenous history and current causes in North America and elsewhere, plus about police abolition and Black oppression in America from Twitter around 2012-2018.

I intentionally sought out those voices because of early Black Lives Matter discourse making me realize I wanted to hear from actual Black people about what was going on, and on Twitter it wasn't hard to do that.

I can definitely buy that TikTok let those voices go viral in ways that Twitter didn't, but I think saying they didn't exist is going too far.

Doesn't undermine your broader points though, which I agree with. Thanks for this thread.

@sidereal I'm far on the anti-AI side of things philosophically, using LLMs only in extremely limited circumstances (creating assignments that show off their weaknesses).

Yet to Google, I'm a pretty regular AI user, because my 11-month-old regularly unintentionally triggers Google's AI "assistant" on my phone through some arcane multi-finger gesture I haven't yet been able to disable (nor have my attempts to uninstall/disable the assistant been successful).

@kneoghau @GossiTheDog sex discrimination, not harassment.

You're absolutely right to point out that there's some imbalance between believing victims when they're men vs. women, but there is no allegation of sexual harassment here.

Of course sex discrimination has a lot of the same dynamics, but given the mountains of sex discrimination against non-men for which nobody gets fired, I think it's very fair to claim foul play here.

Also notable: The priors in "woman's complaint of sex discrimination is fabricated" and "man's complaint of sex discrimination is fabricated" look entirely different. Men do occasionally suffer sex discrimination but regularly benefit from sexism. Women face something like reciprocal odds of harms/benefits. Women sometimes make up accusations, but far more off their allegations are real than fake, yet few are acted upon, or actually see justice. Men also make up allegations, particularly against female bosses.

To my mind, the Baysian truth here is that a disgruntled & sexist male worker had filed a complaint, which higher-ups were ignoring as spurious, until it became inconvenient to keep her on due to her reservations about the unsafe sex app plans.

In 6 months the stories of domestic violence & suicide provoked by the ChatGPT adult app are going to come out, this woman knows that, her bosses know that, heck we all can see that from here in the bleachers...

@r_alb in the case of an extremely stubborn libertarian (haven't encountered such myself thankfully) I might resort to: "You know this info gets bundled and sold around. Why should I be forced to give it up for free?" This is a terrible argument that cedes a lot of ground that shouldn't be ceded, but it could work for some freaks I imagine.

I think I'm more likely to just ask "You trust the government? In 2026?!?"

@ShaulaEvans okay, here are some fun/gross/terrifying bug facts about polycheate worms (which live in the ocean):

1. The Bobbitt Worm is a marine ambush predator that burrows in ocean sediment and then shoots out to grab prey with its mandibles, the force of which sometimes cuts prey in half. It grows up to 3 meters long in extreme cases, although it's only about 25 millimeters in diameter. At least one article I read mentioned toxic bristles, but I wasn't able to find a legitimate source for that and suspect it was sensationalization.

2. The Bearded Fireworm does have toxic bristles (as do other fireworms). They can cause a painful sting that lasts for hours. They're also quite beautiful.

3. The Palolo Worm spawns by growing tail segments filled with sperm or eggs, and then on a specific night tied to the lunar & solar cycles, releasing these segments to float to the surface, where they disintegrate into a frothy mass. They're apparently delicious fried in coconut oil.

In case you want to do your own deep dive () on segmented ocean worms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychaete