Awesome! I believe NixOS is perfect for systems you just want to work and track reproducibly, like appliances (which a lot of server software is supposed to be). I’m glad people smarter than me are actually able to realize its advantages =)

In the same space, also check out openDesk initiated by the German Government (https://www.opendesk.eu/en) and La Suite by the French one (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).

AFAIK, there has been some collaboration with the German government on La Suite, not sure about the others.

This realy would be a great way to foster collaboration within the EU. To create an own independant Ecosystem outside of the microsoft world.

Isn't it counterproductive for every European country with a bit of extra money to develop its own open source software stack?

Don't the stakeholders perceive this as a problem, too?

Or is it inevitable, given how differently these bureaucracies are structured?

I recently got my feet wet with Nix for the purpose of agent sandboxing, and it's a really great concept!

The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software, so I ended up just managing it outside of nix.

But this could be user-error, I've only spent a couple of weeks with it.

The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software

May be. I'd guess it probably does it in a high-friction way compared to what you expect.

e.g. in a typical linux distro, you can just replace the (globally installed) version of the package and use that.

With Nix, you've got a declaration of how to build a package, including its dependencies; and each of those dependencies is also a declaration of how to build that package, and so on. -- And so, "just change this version" results in rebuilding the full chain of dependencies.

If you want multiple readily-available versions of llama.cpp each with different configs/patches, then using Nix would make this easier I'd think. But for "I just wanna try this, then try that", it's going to add overhead.

It’s also the easiest if you want to make your own “distro”.

A “distro” is ultimately just a prebuilt configuration.nix file. NixOS itself even has tools to provide ISOs and QEMU images based on the build.

I've been thinking for years now that most distros could be replaced by a system config for NixOS or Guix System. I wonder if we'll ever see things go in that direction.

A note to the developers in the project, if anyone is reading: your repositories are in violation of the new Codeberg policy that forbids AI-generated code [1].

[1] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...

And Codeberg also blocks real people from accessing it, for who knows what reason. I just get "Access denied." with no more info.

But they do let me visit blog.codeberg.org

Is it on Codeberg? I looked self-hosted to me.

https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS says:

DAWO Core has moved from https://code.overheid.nl to Codeberg to facilitate community collaboration.

Does this mean European governments have or will have an alternative(s) to GitHub as well?

Fair note, but I'd avoid the cheap shot "more open". You'll just bring up the old flame wars about whether the MIT-style or GNU-style licenses are more open.

The same applies here, is it really "more open" to allow corporations to profit by removing the openness of your work?

It’d make the most sense for the Dutch government (or DAWO) to have their own Forgejo instance if the goal is data sovereignty.

edit: looks like this was originally the case and then they moved?

clearly shows the need for federated forges, where you get to decide on your own rules but you still benefit from interacting with a broader set of collaborators.

Yeah, waiting for this too, feels like the final piece of the puzzle. Tracking issue from Codeberg + more general information about the effort around the the ecosystem:

- https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59 ("[FEAT] implement federation")

- https://forgefed.org/

Given how slowly it progresses in Forgejo, there are better alternatives - Radicle[1] (full decentralization, not a federation) and Tangled[2] (federation).

[1] https://radicle.dev/

[2] https://tangled.org/

Man I was so excited about Tangled, until they announced they sought and got VC investments, which makes it not even worth looking into for long-term projects. I still wish them luck and hope they'll be the lonely 0.1% that can resist enshittification even during pressure from investors, but realistically my hope is fairly close to the bottom.

Radicle seems better in that regards, but instead is on top of their own cryptocurrency, which comes with its own issues.

Personally my best hope is still "real" federation across centralized services, ala ForgeFed, but ideally we can make all these approaches interoperate in the future, that would be really awesome.

That's likely to end up Balkanized like the fediverse, where every instance has a list of other instances they refuse to federate with, often because politics or petty drama. Though to be fair to the fediverse, sometimes it's because those other instances are full of child porn and most people just don't want to see that.

It amuses me that Mastodon Central uses corpo-friendly labels for the sites they won't federate with, e.g. (https://mastodon.social/about)

    tsundere.love   Suspended (Hate speech)
    you**.**ve      Suspended (Inappropriate content)

Whereas the more free-wheeling sites, like the ones Mastodon Central blocks, tell it exactly how it is: (https://tsundere.love/about)

    nadeko.pw      CP
    mk.fedcast.ch  Spam
    youjo.love     hosts at least one admitted pedo

A lot of such issues could likely be resolved by a better thought out protocol. There are certainly plenty of self righteous people who would refuse to federate purely on principle but more typically the issue is simply that one does not wish to be exposed to or traffic in any way the content in question. A well thought out self categorization system could largely address that need - you'd only need to refuse to peer with those who failed to apply it. AI also makes any such effort easier than ever.

If you want to follow some CP poster on nadeko.pw then you can ask your admin on tsundere.love to unblock it and he will probably just ban you for admitting you like CP.

Where did we get this idea that federated instances should never block anything? Even warez sites have rules.

Where did we get this idea that federated instances should never block anything?

I'm not sure, but the OP was postulating that Forgejo instances could federate to solve the problem that the Dutch government runs its own instance to develop its software (including using AI extensively) but wants to engage with the wider community so is currently hosting things on Codeberg's centralised instance of Forgejo, and Codeberg's administrators hate AI.

Adding federation doesn't solve that problem, it just moves it one level up. To collaborate with the Dutch government, you either need to directly register on their site, or set up an entire copy of Forgejo, publicly hosted, so you can federate your one-user instance with them, or you need to find a different instance that someone else hosts, and be at the mercy of that instance's admins, who may be even more cruel and capricious than Codeberg's.

What I predict is a future codeberg.org/about saying

    code.overheid.nl  Suspended (slopfondlers)

And a future code.overheid.nl/about being full of dodgy Forgejo instances that host porn games

We can insist everyone self-hosts everything, but is it worth it? Do you have your own email? It's quite normal for a government agency to contract a third party to supply e.g. furniture, instead of chopping its own wood.

But furniture is a one time sale, not an ongoing service. That's a bad comparison.

Codeberg are going to have issues in the future when all code is AI generated (except for artisanal code of course, written for the love of the craft but not to achieve anything of merit).

Assuming writing code by hand is slower (which I agree with), why can't it still have merit compared to code written via llm harness?

Because no one is going to hire developers who write code by hand, apart from a few niches. For the same reason that no one hires a courier who delivers by horse anymore, or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain, or a cooper who continues to use wooden staves and iron hoops instead of forming plastic or metal containers, or...

Yeah yeah, except LLM code is absolute dogshit and is not on a trajectory to ever not be dogshit.

or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain,

Huh. For all the "traditional", "organic", "hand crafted", and other "things" I've encountered that isn't one of them. I wonder why no one is advertising fair trade hydropower stone ground organic flour?

Your analogy is terrible.

The act of verifying that parcel is delivered, that the grain is correctly ground, or that the container is up to spec is far easier than the act of delivering/grinding/making in the first place (and in the latter case, there's perhaps even an argument to be had that the modernized process eases verification).

For a lot of coding, this is simply not the case. And so people will retort that that's fine, LLMs will help with verification and maintenance too. I think you're seriously misguided – you're accidentally trying to turn human prose into a programming language, and it's a terrible terrible idea!

At any rate, I find it extremely worrying that people like you keep reiterating this point as if it's a fact. If it's true, then surely we'll very soon see the evidence. The way you speak of the "near future" with certainty, as if everyone agrees, gives me the same sour taste as cryptobros or MLM conmen. Yuck.

Policies are enacted for current reality, not fantasy futures. If your magical fantasy becomes reality (it won't), they can just... change their policy. Of course, you aren't thinking about practical effects of policies on platforms, only on how it's an insult to your LLM-bro way of life.

If your magical fantasy becomes reality (it won't)

Keep huffing that copium my friend. I've set an alarm to follow up here in a couple of years.

Sure. You can come gloat about how you're unemployed because nobody needs a prompt monkey when they can just prompt the LLM to produce dogshit code themselves.

I climbed out of the code trenches years ago - I have multiple small companies, I'll be fine.

And yes, they both have moats that will take AI at least 5 years to erode, at which point I'll just retire.

Regarding the dog shit code comment: this is the problem with your whole line of thinking. Customers don't care if the code is dog shit. They care if they get value from the product.

As I mentioned, there will still be some demand for devs who code by hand, similar to how theres still demand for blacksmiths who make ornamental weapons.

Dogshit code doesn't give customers value from the product. You can get away with enshittifying your code/product if you already have an iron grip on the market and network effects make it impossible to escape, eg. Windows/appleOS/Android, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Discord, etc. At that point, you're relying on the inertia of community lock-in to replace product quality. However, this strategy does not work if you aren't a FAANG-scale monopolist. If your code and product is dogshit, you will never get off the ground. You need not only a better product but an overwhelmingly superior product to the competition to defeat inertia. And we see this playing out in reality: there are no vibecoded software disrupting the market. At most vibecoded software is carving out a new MLM-style pyramid of vibecoding tools, but it is not replacing hand-crafted software.

This is just wishful thinking.

Building the product was never the hard part. Getting it in front of people is. That will continue to be true, except the build stage will be even easier.

You sound exactly like the cryptobros of yore. Just stop.

If you're right, the evidence will bear that out. Stop evangelizing. It's insufferable. And it's paradoxical that so many who believe this technology to be absolutely world-changing also feel that the technology needs to be pushed onto people actively. It reminds me of religious people ("my god is all-powerful, but if you meaningless mortal insult him he'll be mightily upset").

I also hate preachy sermons about new tech with a deep passion and that transfers somewhat to the tech they preach about.

Despite this, there is a reality that LLMs for coding can create pretty decent results fast. There is something real and usable hidden in all that mess. It's like the dot com bubble in some ways: the bubble died with all the overhyped "x on the web" BS that had no real substance, but the web itself stayed. This time around, LLMs and agents will stick around as tools, but the hype will likely die a loud, messy death.

Did you actually read through that post you linked? You realize not every project that was ever touched by a LLM is being thrown off? Read the "Some early, but informal guidelines" particularly, as you've seemingly missed that.

They're targeting slop and essentially spam, not everything that could possibly have been built by LLMs.

Not OP, but I stand corrected. Thought it was 100% no generated code. Now I know better, thanks! Looks like codeberg aren't as mad as I thought.

Quoting from the post:

    > If you see yourself on this list, you don't need to move right away, but
    there might be other places that better fit your needs:

    - Projects written and maintained with heavy use of LLMs

All of the commits I browsed here seem to be LLM-assisted, so these projects are in this category. The policy being fuzzy is in itself a problem - "likely to be tolerated" is not a great policy to have your entire government depend on.

Personally, the refusal on "Projects heavily tied to the LLM ecosystem, e.g. LLM-written tools to ease LLM usage" is enough reason, as that's a good chunk of what I've been working on.

Codeberg is trying to solve the right problem with the wrong solution. But hey, it's democratic!

I like Codeberg's solution (hard written policy, light good-faith based enforcement), what would you suggest as a better solution?

Their contention seems mainly focused on the heavy resource use of AI tooling.

They run a service: they could impose limits on the number of submissions, builds, branches, scans, etc, and give additional usage credits to the large community projects they want to encourage.

Hard policy, light enforcement in practice means there is an actual shadow policy that you don't know, which is pretty bad to the point that it would be illegal if the government did it.

Curious about your comment on two counts (genuinely, not being argumentative):

1. how is this bad, in Codeberg's case, practically speaking?

2. in what cases is this illegal for governments to do? In practice no legislation is perfectly enforced, & even judiciaries have varying degrees of exactness across countries - to the point that things such as desuetude are densely studied legal topics.

(note: I'm aware of the negative ramifications if desuetude but not aware of any negative ramifications of Codeberg's specific ai policy)

in what cases is this illegal for governments to do?

It's legal certainty principle and equality before the law principle and also prohibition of discrimination principle.

For the law to be lawful (weird, but it's a thing, right) it should satisfy certain criteria. Me, being subject to the law should be able to predict whether my actions are allowed or not when I plan to do or not do them. If I can't predict the outcome of my actions, the law isn't valid. One of the outcomes of it is being able to read the law -- it's published and it's comprehensible, it has advance notice, etc.

If the rule says "don't host LLM generated code", but everybody hosts LLM generated code and then I say mean things about one of the people providing the hosting and suddenly I'm deplatformed for hosting LLM generated code, then I'm not deplatformed for LLM generated code, I'm deplatformed for saying mean things about people with fragile ego. Or being part of a specific group. You are often explicitly prohibited to make certain decisions based on belonging to a certain group (religious, ethnic, sexual, trade union, health, criminal record based), but it could happen that somehow the outcome of the shadow policy correlates with those. Since we don't know the shadow policy and the stated policy doesn't seem to be applied equally, this is not great.

See example about weed in a different comment.

how is this bad, in Codeberg's case, practically speaking?

They look silly for stating it and not following (loss of credibility), then once they suddenly start following it, there will be different interpretations, including "I'm banned because I'm $protected_thing_that_you_should_not_be_banned_for", which is bad press.

Governments have a lot of laws that they don't enforce, or enforce only lightly. For example, weed is still illegal in Netherland, despite many decades of tolerating its use.

I predict that Codeberg will soon realize that they have no choice but to loosen and allow AI generated code.

There is no point in being on the extreme end around banning all code generated by AI.

Regardless, there is AI generated code in many repositories on Codeberg anyway.

People who act out of ideology very very rarely change their opinions.

Did you read the actual policy? It isn't extreme in the slightest.

I don't think they're banning all AI generated code, just projects that are primarily AI-generated. They'll probably also object to PRs that are entirely AI generated. Or at least they will when they become a problem.

I predict that Codeberg will soon realize that they have no choice but to loosen and allow AI generated code.

I predict that eventually people will read the linked blog post and realize Codeberg already allows AI generated code. But this requires reading and nuance of course, which is hard to come by sometimes, so I guess we'll continue see misinformed comments like this until eventually the web is only autonomous agents.

It doesn't really. It allows it in very limited context which has overlap with other existing tools that predate AI.

It's self-hosted on https://code.overheid.nl/ & they mirror a subset of it on Codeberg.

That might still be in violation but I would imagine it's low on Codeberg's radar since they're not making primary contributions there (& if I were DAWO I'd also be interested in limiting direct community agentic contrib).

Codeberg does not forbid AI-generated code. It forbids AI-generated projects. You would know this if you read the policy.

The specific language is:

projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools

And "mostly" here seems egregiously undefined to me

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...

What do you think "mostly" could mean?

This is great, would love to understand why Nix over Lix or Guix.

1. You can run NixOS with Lix (I do)

2. Because Guix is less mature and more, ehm, opinionated, than *ix + nixpkgs

Site doesn't work for me.

www.dawo.community took too long to respond.

Are you in the US? Hehe

No, Sweden.

Your forgot to pay your local mafia to maintain the glass wires this week, so they sent a 12 year old with a grenade and scissors to throttle it to pre-2000 level

Nixpkgs should reduce package count. Waiting 2 days for unbound CVE patch merge is unbearable.

There needs to be another repository with less stringent standards, nixpkgs should be for core libs and system applications

What is it that they need/add above NixOS defaults?

They likely offer at least some of:

* typical deployments

* training/consulting

* compliance with Ditch regulations

* shared infrastructure for custom builds, and CVEs

Any move away from the abusive big tech that exists in USA is a good move in my book. Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads, and per ads viewed, you then earn credit to be able to use your program/game. It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

Black Mirror has unwittingly been offering a lot of nice, horrible ideas.

Too many people seem to have taken it as a todo list instead of a warning...

I'm sure Black Mirror could offer up a cautionary tale like Don't Create The Torment Nexus

(https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538)

Well I'd like to think Charlie Brooker, like many of us, could clearly say where humanity was heading. Some of the episodes that were considered far fetched 15 years ago are probably considered plausible at best and likely at worst now.

It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.

Well of course I wouldn't expect corporations to know what ethics or human decency is even if it stared them straight into the eyes, but I would expect governments to establish laws and regulations such that the psychopaths wouldn't be able to abuse people to no end.

Currently it looks more and more like goverment itself consists of a lot of psychopaths who want to abuse people. Like abusing people is the main reason people go into politics. And then voters select those who want to abuse the outgroup, but don't know that politicians consider everyone as underclass, therefore even their own voters are ripe for abuse.

It is possible to argue that basically all modern governments are inherently "abusive", in the sense that, to my knowledge, all modern governments will use the threat of violence to extort wealth from the population, in the form of taxes.

Now, in theory, these taxes are spent for the benefit of the taxpayers, in a philosophical tradition that can be traced back to at least the French revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen [1], and possibly earlier (the "no taxation without representation" [2] of the American Revolution, possibly other examples I'm unaware of). However, in practice, the ruling class has been known to help itself to that sweet, sweet tax revenue [3][4], and if we look at history, governments such as the Bourbon monarchy/Ancien Regime [5] whose claim to legitimacy rested not on "the will of the people" but "the divine right of kings" would do things like extort money from the populace to pay for foreign wars merely because their belief system held that the will of God was that everyone did whatever the King wanted, whether or not it appeared to be good for them.

We can compare modern governments with modern corporations - both will take your money and in return give you a service (you pay taxes and get police + an army to protect you, courts to resolve disputes, etc, you pay a Spotify/Netflix subscription and get access to streaming audiovisual content), but the modern corporation can't really force you to take that deal - Spotify can't put a gun to your head and force you to pay your subscription, while the government does force you to pay your taxes.

As such, if you believe that any transaction that is not freely consented to by both parties is abusive, then all modern governments are, by virtue of forcing people to pay taxes, inherently abusive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_M...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representa...

[3] (in French) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_des_emplois_fictifs_de...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Sarkozy_corruption_tri...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancien_r%C3%A9gime

Corporations need to deliver lots of value to their customers to get somewhere in the first place. If you want power it's much easier to become a politician and just blame corporations and spend the money they make and take the credit.

... Until they reach a certain size and then "customers" are just an annoying detail in the quest to maximize share holder value.

I don't want to challenge people's deeply held faiths, but I don't think we need the silly "maximise shareholder value" chant in every single conversation thread.

But we do need “taxes are theft”?

(They’re not.)

The quality of the government reflects the quality of the majority.

The lowering of the quality barrier of entry to power for the politicians enabled by the glorification of stupidity via the megaphone of social media and the resultant divided electorate has given rise to the assholes nakedly profiting from it.

No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.

It is basically downhill from here.

I refuse to use 'teams', it's a pile of garbage and spyware to boot.

I recently found out that several researchers, departments... buy a personal subscription for zoom (out of the own project money) even as our university as a MS Teams subscription. Despite if it is effectively "free" for them, they do not use it. So much on public money spend wisely and the quality of the MS Teams software...

Can confirm, my boss has his own paid Zoom while I’m using Teams to save research money. Another assistant professor I know pay for Slack as well.

I think Teams improved and Zoom regressed in the last 3-4 years to the point the garbage level is not that different nowadays. Most of the annoyance is related to finding your way in a different interface.

Avoiding Office 365 is so annoying due to everyone in academia using it that I’m using macOS instead of Linux at work just to interface with others better. I got used to it but I need Linux as soon as I’m home, I feel observed and vulnerable otherwise.

I thought everyone on academia used LaTex, or at least in STEM?

Are people really making hundred-pages thesises in Word?

I suppose it is not that bad if you don't have a lot of charts/pictures/formulas, but still...

Not everything is papers and theses. Not an academic but I can imagine Excel being quite useful.

I thought everyone on academia used LaTex…

LaTeX absolutely sucks for proofing. Typos end up being buried in tags, and you end up with a document that looks pretty but possibly not fully edited.

If you are collaborating with advisors, they may wish to add comments to your copy as you work through your thesis. There is no clean way to do this in a TeX source file, so the only way to do this would be to export your work-in-progress into a DOCX, and then work your changes back into your source.

Versioning-by-hand sucks balls. When you’re approaching various deadlines with other obligations at hand, all open-source kumbaya ideas go out the window and you just make do.

For your manuscript_final_FINAL_v2.docx file, manual layout tuning ends up being not too bad and likely takes less time than troubleshooting LaTeX which might not have as much documentation.

Don't most people use git for their latex (or even markdown) version control? All the tools that have been developed for code collaboration work really well for documents compared to messing around with word's undocumented format and binary blobs.

Disagree. Hunspell and aspell have tex modes that understand well what needs to be checked and what doesn’t.

Comments can be added with ‘%’. Just make sure to have a linebreak at every sentence and it’s cleaner than anything. Services like overleaf also exist for collaboration.

You can use any versioning system you want. From git to dropbox, its plaintext.

I do agree that layout can be very time consuming, but it helps once you learn to not care about it till the absolute end of working on the content.

Agree with the quality, unfortunately not everyone has the privilege to take such position.

That means basically not getting a job, or a consulting gig, among most large corporations.

Also "just go get another job" isn't a position many of us can take in current times.

No argument there, but annoyingly since they killed Skype (it’s own lovely pile of garbage and spyware), the only thing my parents will use to chat online is Teams.

I have tried to get them to use Discord or pretty much anything else, but they have been unreceptive.

I am on Linux and so I just use the browser version, which at least sandboxes stuff for me, I think.

Yeah, although, the word “just” is doing a lot of work here.

I am sorry, but that can't be the only reason. At my job we are free to choose. Some have MacOS, almost everyone else has Windows, I am the only one using linux. But the joke is that Windows users are heavy users of WSL and RStudio. We are not forced, or even suggested to use Teams, Office or whatever tooling Microsoft has, and in fact meetings were I am invited had to be done in Zoom instead of Teams only because of me.

I believe that it is more a familiarity issue, and seeing Linux/Mac as an obscure tool only usable by gurus.

My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.

Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose. Decline -> Your subscription will be terminated, no further monies will be debut from your account, are you sure?

I'm more interested in the cases where you buy your phone, for example, and after purchase you are asked to agree with terms and conditions. Money is paid already. If you do not agree, you cannot use the device. Worse still, if 2 days after thre is mandatory update that forces you to agree to new version. If you don't like them, you should be compensated for it, as it is hidden information from you as a buyer.

I've always viewed those as entirely invalid, at least from the standpoint of the spirit of our various legal systems and cultures. I recognize that any "binding arbitration" bits are enforceable (and an injustice). But the rest of it? Literal make believe. I will do as I please with the hardware that I paid for, its firmware, and any software that it came with. I will actively aid and abet anyone who seeks to reverse engineer same, circumvent associated technical measures, or evade the law while doing so. And all of that is good and virtuous behavior that improves society as far as I'm concerned.

In other words - go ahead and click "I agree" without reading it, then proceed to dump the firmware or whatever else it is that you want to do. You aren't lying or otherwise doing anything wrong. The legal system is just broken.

The fact that such a legal reality has been permitted to reach this point has to be one of the clearest illustrations that western systems of government remain highly flawed despite all that they get right.

As Gamer's Nexus said, if you're drunk you can't consent to any contract.

Money is paid already. If you do not agree, you cannot use the device

Well, you can always return the phone. For online purchases you have 14 days to return it just because (you don't need to provide a reason).

Where in the UCC does it say that? There may be a State regulation or a company policy, but I don't recall anything in the UCC about a "free" 14 day return policy. I can return a used car, no questions asked, after 14 days? Good luck with that.

That's an European thing. Anything bought remotely (mail, phone or the internet) can be returned up to 14 days for a full refund.

Some minor exclusions apply, eg hygiene products can't be returned after they've been opened.

Well, not really. If you have unpacked the iphone - I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be easy to return even within the 14 day window. You can return unpacked though, which is not the point of what I'm saying. Also for the benefit of the argument, change 2 days to 15 and you end up at the same place- you cannot legally return the device, User agreement has changed in ways you don't accept and you are forced to use device, for which you have paid or accept loss and buy another device. Oh and also, you cannot change OS to the alternative one for which terms might be more acceptable to you. How is this not a subject of investigation- I don't know.

My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.

Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...:

“Where the contract provides that the digital content or digital service is to be supplied or made accessible to the consumer over a period of time, the trader may modify the digital content or digital service beyond what is necessary to maintain the digital content or digital service in conformity in accordance with Articles 7 and 8, if the following conditions are met:

[…]

2. The consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract if the modification negatively impacts the consumer's access to or use of the digital content or digital service, unless such negative impact is only minor. In that case, the consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract free of charge within 30 days of the receipt of the information or of the time when the digital content or digital service has been modified by the trader, whichever is later.”

I expect this is already covered by existing regulations but the only enforcement avenue is a lawsuit. They know you won't sue them for $20.

I believe that’s why class action lawsuits can serve a purpose…

In a class action they give $1 to every user they scammed $20 out of, and the lawyers charge $2 per user so you actually get nothing.

This makes me happy. The more enshittification the sooner the first pillar of Big Tech will fall down.

Meta and Google will follow soon after.

P.S.: just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.

just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.

That's true, of course, but the fact that there are people in the company thinking like that to begin with, enough to think it's worth patenting such anti-human stuff, is plenty enough for me to never want anything to do with them.

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/microsoft-patents-s...

Patent: https://patents.justia.com/patent/20260260258

The mic/camera aspect doesn’t appear on that patent, it seems to be from an abandoned Sony patent filing from 2006 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070261077A1/en?oq=US20...

"Drink verification can to continue"

It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

It's just a patent.

It's just a delousing room

It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

Here's a (bit dated) list of the US companies which rake in the most bucks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...

Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?

Theory:

Treating your customers well is part of one strategy for corporate growth and profit. There are other strategies, which also can work very well - and don't require all the hassles and expense and non-evil of treating your customers well. Naturally, Capitalist propaganda stresses that first strategy, and doesn't talk so much about the others.

Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?

Almost all of them.

I don't like this idea, but I do like to get my facts right. If it is the patent linked elsewhere on this page, then

  - I can't find the bit where they monitor you via camera and microphone. (I think the "track your eyes to make sure you don't look away during ads" is already patented for mobile, but has never been deployed as far as I know.)
  - "block" your game/program to show ads - I think "pause" would be a better word here, perhaps. That's how ad breaks/popups work, for example on youtube and on many mobile apps, even on the radio in some sense. Scummy? On mobile apps, probably. New? no.
  - The part being patented here is some kind of machine learning system to decide the optimal time(s) to show ads. 
  - Patent doesn't mean it's going to happen.

Apart from "we inserted some ML into the ad pipeline" there's really nothing new that I can see here.

It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

There is a couple more wild things here:

1) That there is an agenda, demand and total legal abetment from the top of the power/monetary hierarchy for such corporate policies

2) That there is a horde of individual employees working to those ends without any shadow of doubt, often even vice signaling their intent to be the first to attain the figurative A-bomb or full-blown BB telescreen.

A lot of that has to do with the fact that the people who decide to use it fall into two camps:

1. People who do not have to use it themselves (political decides, bosses, ..), but get lobbied to the max

2. People who have to administer it and know nothing else and endure the lasting pain over the perceived infinite hurdle of changing the system

I gladly can use Linux at work, so I have had a stable, reliable and unchanging system since the past 6 years, but others have to go through major pains for each version of enshittification of their OS update. In my case the OS just got better slowly and incrementally.

3. People who play games.

Because alternatives are bad. After decades of being great, Linux gaming community finally gave up on it working and accepted emulation of Windows as the way to go. (No need to nitpick on tech specifics of how Wine works)

You're saying this as if emulation (which Wine isn't really, more of a Win32 API compatibility layer; WINE literally stands for 'WINE Is Not an Emulator') was a bad thing. In reality, a lot of games benchmark better on Linux than on Windows today.

Bad take, what actually happened was the realization that games wouldn't be released on Linux unless there were enough users there to warant it. Just as with ARM Windows not getting a single usable software when first released. What happened was Wine/Proton and FEX, with a lot of monetary input from Valve.

By allowing a lot of people who are willing to take a performance-hit to transition to Linux, they sow the grass-roots necessary for the game studios to release native games on Linux.

What happened was Wine/Proton and FEX, with a lot of monetary input from Valve.

So it took decades to understand that things aren't working and then investment from multi-billion company to finally start getting anywhere.

Meanwhile on Windows you can play today, could play 10 years ago, could 20 years ago. That should answer how it's still in business. It just works.

That is true. We see that with Trump, where he tries to force the EU to open markets to the US corporations who will just steal data from EU citizens.

Why can't the EU learn more from Canada? Canada realised that with Trump there is no way to make a deal. So cut things down where possible, diversify - the EU still has to learn this lesson. In particular Germany is totally US-addicted - no idea why, other than, of course, the obvious answer ("we need to export into the USA", aka selfish greed from Germany here).

Microsoft just recently made a new patent

Microsoft has done a lot of super shady things, and they are domiciled in a hyper-corrupt, lawless threat to humanity (one that elects quite possibly the stupidest human alive -- a rapist abomination halfwit clown -- to the highest office), however people do make far too much of the patent thing.

A lot of firms reward groups and employees that get granted patents. It doesn't actually matter if you're spitballing the most absurd nonsense that no one ever asked for and is nowhere on the product map, someone writes the application and gives it a shot. A patent being granted doesn't mean that a single person ever envisions doing this or asked for it implemented, and honestly the idea that they "invented" this is just how farcical the patent system is.

In this case the patent is held by Microsoft's "Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC", which is their "patent extortion" racket. So they literally wrote this hoping to catch someone doing something found in a single claim so that they can use the legal system to rob from people.

Microsoft has done a lot of super shady things, and they are domiciled in a hyper-corrupt, lawless threat to humanity (one that elects quite possibly the stupidest human alive -- a rapist abomination halfwit clown -- to the highest office),

I generally dislike Microsoft because they make crappy products, but does this add to your point? I don’t think so, and it’s largely incorrect.

For example I despise Donald Trump but you can’t be the stupidest human alive and be president. It’s just objectively false.

The US is one of the few (arguably the only) countries holding the barbarians at the gate - the ones who are a threat. Frankly, the Dutch have historically been the greater threat to humanity and we saw the devastation and destruction wrought by their colonialism (which the Dutch haven’t paid reparations for in total) unleashed upon the world.

but does this add to your point?

Yes? Donald Trump, and the fact that he is the symptom of a fallen empire that has reverted to being an idiocracy, flailing around and trying to bully its way to a lost dominance that is fading away, is precisely why the Dutch government is doing this. It's quite literally the subtext of this discussion.

And for that matter, it's why all American companies are going to find their reach shrink. Visa and Mastercard are worldwide systems whose days are numbered, for instance. The US banking system is being ejected everywhere it is found.

but you can’t be the stupidest human alive and be president. It’s just objectively false.

I mean, I guess people actually vote for this pathological liar / megalomaniac who is a lifetime failure in every dimension, so true. They're even worse. But Trump is objectively a profoundly stupid person. It's actually astonishing now how he is basically a simpleton in the White House, lying with every utterance, and it's just another day. It isn't even newsworthy. Oh yeah, his big TrumpTM Arch is now going to have drones and snipers! Also, how about that fantasy deal with Belarus for all that potash that doesn't exist, was farcical nonsense on its face, yet everyone reports it because this foolish liar just makes up stuff endlessly so it isn't even notable. Aren't Americans just unbelievably ashamed at how pathetic this loser is, or that he lies -- usually in the cause of pushing his greatness -- with every other word?

Seeing Xi mog this pathetic chimp yet again was amazing stuff. The world is yours, China.

The US is one of the few (arguably the only) countries holding the barbarians at the gate

This has to be a joke. There is no way anyone on this planet is so deluded and misinformed.

> The US is one of the few (arguably the only) countries holding the barbarians at the gate

This has to be a joke. There is no way anyone on this planet is so deluded and misinformed.

No kidding. Donald Trump just opened the gate.

I’ll have to respond to the parent OP but on this point - can you explain how the US opened the gate? What are you referring to?

The patent does not include monitoring using a camera or microphone. https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

Yes you're right, that's my bad. I interpreted the "audiovisual" wrong. They are actually just monitoring the screen and system audio.

The patent does not include monitoring the screen and system audio.

get with the times man, sensationalist kneejerk reactions are more important than nuance

Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads,

You got the important details of the Microsoft parent wrong (the patent doesn’t use camera and microphone monitoring), but more importantly the existence of a patent is not the same as intent to deploy a technique.

Every few years news outlets will generate controversy about a patent they’ve discovered, implying that the company is going to force the evil thing on everyone. If you’ve worked at a tech company with a patent incentive you realize most of these patents are just resume padding junk or people gaming patent incentive systems. I was at a company that had a modest bonus for submitting ideas that could be patented and you wouldn’t believe the junk that people were trying to push through without any intent to ever use it.

As further proof, the patent you’re thinking of where cameras monitor the user is actually from 2009 and was patented by Sony. US8246454B2

France government has announced NixOS based systems some months ago:

- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix a hardened/secured os

- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example an example to use securix to build an office deployment (with some packages https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example/blob/main/co... )

I’m looking with so much admiration what France has been building in this space, especially the latest gendarmerie transition into open source OS from windows.

The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost, despite the fact that is the most popular language in Europe.

Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this. If all the countries in Europe just keep pushing their nationalist ideology instead of truly believing into a united and solid Europe Union, we won’t go any where.

Frenchman here. French companies and organization, in my experience actually really like the English language (at OVH for example, most official docs are in English), but I do think it makes sense for a government funded by people who speak mostly French (ie the French taxpayers) to do stuff in French, the language most of its citizens will be most familiar with.

Putting stuff in English will tend to exclude the less educated, or people who struggle to learn foreign languages.

EDIT: and actually, from looking at the README of https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix

Ce README est en français mais le reste du code, les issuers et les PR sont en anglais.

The README is in French but the rest of the code, the issues (they wrote issuers, but that is a typo I suspect) and the PRs are in English.

So. :P

Hi (Sécurix developer), we wrote our documentation in English and in French: https://cloud-gouv.github.io/securix.

Maintaining both languages is hard but we will do our best.

The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost

Interestingly, a French-speaking Canadian who has spent some time in France told me that his right to use the French language is better protected in Canada than it is in France. He thinks that this is a consequence of the reciprocality implied by having more than one official language: French speakers in Canada get the same rights as English speakers, so people are happy to grant rights in return for getting them, whereas in France everyone gets screwed and you end up with a situation in which a French person wanting to do a PhD on French history at a French university has to write their grant application in English.

Quebec gets weird with their french rules. Parents are not allowed to send their kids to English speaking schools if both of the parents did their own schooling in French.

That’s not weird.

That’s pretty judgmental of you.

The same Dutch who voted on the eAIDS... ahem, sorry, eIDAS and ADDW car spyware? I'm not particularly excited about our new benevolent OS.

eIDAS is federated login between countries in EU. What is wrong with that?

It's a mechanism to legally force web browser vendors to install government issues root certificates (which they already did btw). And EU pinky-promises that not a single independent EU member won't use them to do MITM attacks on their political opposition and journalists. Like Orban 2.0 or Fico won't use Hungarian or Slovak root cert for nefarious purposes, no-no-no. It's only to protect the children, see, and definitely not to help murder journalists investigating drug smuggling cover-up. :)

eidas is an EU thing and is like 15 years old, what is this even about

eIDAS 2.0 is 2 years old. An intentional dark pattern to confuse people.

Unlike your vague posting, which is meant to be illuminating. If you have a critique, please let us know what it is.

I’m really curious to see what the answer for MDM and Group Policy is on Linux. The SSO part is mostly figured out, but the reason places use Windows is often manageability.

Is there anyone doing MDM or policy enforcement on Linux other than Google Workspace + chromebooks?

It's Nix so you just push the new generation to the device. It's probably the easiest possible way to do device management. It's also generally like two lines of extra config to wrap a block into a container if you want to hide some of the underlying OS tools completely, which I've never tried with a full desktop environment but I'd assume should basically just work if you pass a couple things like GPU?

The hard part is finding enough people working for the public sector salary who know those two extra lines and where to put them, and then making sure they are not getting bored or disillusioned enough.

You don't need someone who knows those two lines anymore. You can just ask codex to make it so that users can't do whatever. It's highly competent at just reading the nixpkgs source, or it knows how Linux works and can write its own modules.

Nix happens to also set you up with a working build environment so if a program doesn't expose the necessary options to manage it the way you want, I bet Codex would have no trouble patching it as part of your nix config.

The highest problem is the office suite. If you think Libreoffice/Collabora can replace Microsoft 365 without friction the project could be a success. Honestly I do not think so as of today.

https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ is the French government's office suite. I think this can work as long as the devs are responsive to users' needs.

They don't need to reimplement all of MS Office, just the parts they need to serve their constituency.

The challenge is engaging with external orgs. They will send you office docs and it creates friction when they cannot be reliably edited and returned. Even just opening them can be unreliable.

Yeah, especially Excel.

LibreOffice Sheets doesn’t compete with Excel 2024, it competes more with Excel 2003. Granted, this is fine for a lot of (most?) people but it’s still not a “replacement” in my mind.

I ended up just building a Nix Flake to properly run Excel. At least then the operating system itself isn’t MS.

I kicked Excel to the kerb in 2005 or something like that and have been a happy Apple Numbers and Wolfram Mathematica (and SPSS, PSPP, and R, and Python) user ever since.

What version of Excel does your Nix Flake package out of interest? Is it current?

We really need investments from large public institutions in LibreOffice Sheets.

What DAWO stands for

DAWO brings public values and technology together. The community pursues five primary goals.

But fails to state what the letters in D.A.W.O. stand for

Do we even need to have a suite of tools for users to create spreadsheets, paste images into them, save them as a PDF, download to their local machine, sync to sharepoint, change permissions to include everyone in the entire universe to be able to see the file, email the link to another human in the company who opens it, uses a PDF editor to copy paste it back into excel, barely scratch the surface of tools within Excel to sum a column, reply back in a password protected word doc saying looks good to me.

I would much prefer to be using something like NixOS and not be depending on Microsoft etc but I can't imagine what the stack will look like if we don't revolutionise the work. Sensitivity labels, DLP, etc. are relics of people treating information on computers as if they are physical documents, and I can't see how I will have been paying for BP/E3/E5 licenses for users and then suddenly start to argue we don't need those features anymore after spending so long insisting users need to use them.

Guix has reproducibility. Instead of Nonguix, which bundles tons of propietary software, they can just add the Fearware repo, which just has the tainted non-free vanilla Linux kernel with closed blobs and firmware, just enough to function your machine well (especially with 3D support for Radeon cards and wireless devices) and nothing more.

Do you have a link to this ‘Fearware’ channel? I’ve only heard of nonguix.