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Not sure about today, but historically I’m sure Katharina Nocun would disagree.

The headline makes it sound as if this was a new development, or as if that’s about all the tracking Amazon does. Neither is true.
Several people in the past decade have investigated what exactly Amazon has on you by asking for their private data.

That said, this really could be news to Verge readers, esp. those that are unable to look for news sources outside the USA’s borders.

tl;dr: it’s about the timezone database (edit: among other projects) which is “maintained by a group of volunteers. Originally founded by Arthur David Olson, the project is now led by Paul Eggert and Tim Parenti.”

I know that this usually comes down to one person doing a lion’s share of the work. This applies to so many FOSS pojects, especially when their impact bleeds over into the non-FOSS world (and by now I think we can include Android in that). Yet the world of FOSS has never broken down even when one of these "one person"s quits. We know. But it might be scawy for people who live in proprietary la-la-land.

Don’t get me wrong, this is important. But I find the article with all its dark javascript magic a little hyperbolic, sensationalist. Even the “plain” reading page is. Gigantic headers, large numbers etc.

I will also add that the tz database isn’t huge, and it isn’t prone to constant change. It makes for great numbers but the whole issue is pretty pedestrian if you look a little closer.

How many parts of closed systems that many people rely on are maintained by only 1 person (who would promptly be replaced by corporate if they quit)? I guess we just don’t have so much data on that because - surprise - they’re not Open.

I could’ve written a similar article, but I would have written it differently.

edit: I stand corrected on the crossed-out bit.
I’ll also state very clearly that I agree with the topic, just not the way it is presented.
And that I was fully aware that this is not only about the TZ databse when I wrote this.

I’m feel you’re jumping right into the problem from some tutorial or not-so-common knowledge. We do not have that context.

Is “x11-user” defined anywhere? sddm must know what to do with that setting.

You can’t say “we have no AI apps” if you don’t have a way to constantly be checking and guaranteeing that.

Huge parts of society rely on mostly unenforceable honor rules and it works. Never 100% of course, but it does.

Answering myself wrt F-Droid:

tl;dr: the situation appears very similar to what I describe in my OP.

• They seem very focused on fighting Google’s recent shenanigans and getting funded, and FOSS of course.
• I found no mention of AI whatsoever in their CoC
• I found no mention of AI whatsoever in their list of anti-features, and this seems to be the biggest indicator to me.
• Not in their Blog either (by title, going back one year) but my search engine gave me this article, which seems to have been removed since: Home much of F-Droid is LLM-generated.
• There’s a forum post asking a similar question with some very predictable drama. Straight out the door some “contributor” ridicules OP’s reasonable question in that typical, passive-aggressive smiley emoji coder way. Just what I have experienced. Thankfully other “contributors” at least see the value in pondering these things. While the question is never fully answered, the thread contains some interesting links to how other FOSS projects position themselves.

I found an important clue in the latter:

the watered down "Open Source AI Definition” that Mufelli pushed through the OSI.

https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

Straight away I don’t agree with it:

Why we need Open Source Artificial Intelligence

I’m guessing this is to be seen as a quasi-official stance to AI that most F(L)OSS will adopt or at least base their own policies on…

apps seem like they were most likely made with AI.

Thanks but I was thinking about their actual policy, regarding.

that means somebody would have to be manually monitoring it and investigating

I don’t think we have to go that far just yet.
Speaking from experience, there’s quite a bit of self-policing within such communities; a clear positioning from the project helps a lot.

pretty good

I’m not sure what compromise I would strike if I was in their position, but I don’t like how everybody in IT basically accepts that some AI usage is fine.

I know why and I don’t want to argue about it.
It just makes me sad: “ethical arguments aside, you have to admit that there is some benefit…”

What people used to say about Google. Took over a decade to discover that maybe these things they “put aside” for something that delivers convenience for free, were pretty important after all.

At least I wait for it on company time.

You think I didn’t?

And yes, the story above was about getting them all up to Win11. It’s sad that IT-illiterates see “let’s do what M$ says” as the only option wrt security.

I remember that too! My crappy old computer. I bought the cheapest SSD they had and it was so much faster.

And I’ve been thinking about the latter too.

BTW I truly hope your Windows takes 5min for a cold boot, and not your Linux, because that would mean there’s something wrong with it or the hardware.

WINDOWS 11 IS GREAT IF YOU DONT VALUE YOUR TIME

Even with that caveat I wouldn’t agree.

But there’s something to it.

For me, a decade of Linux user, having been forced to work with a bunch of Windows laptops recently, even the difference between 10 and 11 was palpable. Not only in resource usage but also in just getting around the system, running updates, trying to disable the stock ticker (?WTF?) etc.

I’m glad this is getting at least a few upvotes.

You can still play around with it, but the base should be boringly solid and widely compatible.
Then make it unique.

And I don’t mean to say that distro developers or even users shouldn’t be creative.

autonomous drones

They really thought that sounds like a plus