The Digital Age Assurance Act is a disaster both in concept and in its statutory language. Its author(s) seem to be entirely unaware of how software is distributed outside of walled gardens like Apple’s ecosystem. If I’m understanding the law correctly, then even software like Homebrew would have to implement some kind of integration with macOS to detect a user’s age. On a naive level, I’m surprised such an obviously flawed bill was passed and signed in California, where there are so many tech companies and lobbyists. The realist in me, however, realizes that tech companies don’t care about the privacy and software supply chain impacts and might even want these impacts to happen as a way of consolidating their control over the market. As an American progressive, it disappoints me that the only thing progressives and conservatives seem to agree is stripping ordinary people of any semblance of anonymity or privacy in the name of “safety”.
TikTok’s stance against end-to-end encryption is unsurprising but still concerning. TikTok is a source of information on many topics, such as the genocide in Gaza, which traditional media underreport and many governments try to suppress. The network effect of big social media platforms means many people will likely talk about these topics in TikTok DMs. No matter what legal controls TikTok claims to enforce, there is no substitute for technological barriers for preventing invasions of privacy and government overreach. This is yet another example where corporations and governments sacrifice people’s autonomy and privacy in the name of security.
Banning sexual materials is such a vague idea, and the wording of this bill is so vague, that it can be used to justify withholding funds to force schools to ban anything. A book where two characters of the same assigned gender kiss? Banned. A book where the main character expresses thoughts of gender dysphoria? Banned. A book where a male character dresses up in heels and applies makeup and dances? Banned. Meanwhile the same content but presented in a heteronormative way? Totally fine!
It’s honestly terrifying that efforts to ban books and restrict what teachers can teach have made such a big comeback in the US. When I was in school, we always discussed banned books from the perspective of “we used to ban things that made people uncomfortable in the bad old days, but that could never happen in the 21st century”. Obviously that glossed over a lot of nuance, but it still shocks me as an adult seeing repression we discussed only from a historical perspective make its way back into the legislature.
Part of the purpose of education is exposing students to strange, uncomfortable, and even frightening ideas and giving them the tools to critically think about and even empathize with such ideas. They don’t have to even be “useful” ideas, since it’s important that students are given the tools to grow and become anything they want. It seems like a lot of groups around the country just want students to grow up to become drones working to prop up the economy. Anything that might make people question the nature of society or their role in it must be suppressed according to them.
I imagine if the current administration does, Europe could retaliate by withholding ASML’s tech or even doing a mass sell off of US treasuries. Europe is admittedly not in a position of strength compared to the US, but there are still a lot of levers they can pull.
I can’t imagine how any country would think the US is trustworthy enough to be the place where everyone stores their data. If companies cannot comply with data sovereignty laws then they shouldn’t exist at all. Personally, even as a US citizen, I’m hoping tech companies in Europe and Asia become independent enough to no longer be beholden to US interests. It’s clear that the era where any one country has global hegemony should end.
The money is not coming out of the billionaires’ pockets. Tariffs are ultimately a tax on American consumers and small businesses. Large businesses owned by billionaires just increased prices. Now, if the government is forced to repay tariffs, then they will be refunded to the companies. Consumers and small businesses who were forced to close will get no benefit. In the end, whether the tariffs are kept or the tariffs are struck down, the consumer gets screwed and the billionaires get richer.
Whenever I bring up the idea of taxing the rich via unrealized gains, people oppose it by saying it’ll hurt investment. The reality is that years of huge stock market returns haven’t made life easier for the vast majority of people who actually do the work that makes companies successful. At least in the US, wages haven’t kept up with housing, healthcare, or basic costs, and I’m sure European workers face these kinds of problems too. At some point, it’s fair to ask why protecting unlimited tax-free growth for the top 0.1% should matter more than the financial stability of the workers actually doing the hard work to drive that growth. If the Netherlands finds that people avoid taxes by investing into real estate rentals, then maybe there should be laws covering those loopholes too.
Even if what you’re saying is true, this just goes to show how badly we need to rein in the ultra-wealthy by taxing their unrealized gains. Like I’ve pointed out elsewhere in the comments, letting billionaires (some of whom will soon be trillionaires) get away with having tax-free spending power disenfranchises the many people who labor for a living. The very fact you so casually say “their media outlets” just goes to show how their concentrated wealth threatens the public discourse. As a society, we can’t allow people to use their wealth to influence government and civilization as a whole without at the very least being able to tax said wealth. The solution to taxing the rich isn’t to downplay the issue for electoral convenience. It is to educate and build a grassroots movement that can oppose the power of concentrated media ownership. The very points you make kind of undermine any principled opposition to taxing unrealized gains.
Many ultra-wealthy individuals borrow against their holdings to avoid having to sell their assets and therefore paying taxes. They shouldn’t be allowed to have their cake and eat it too. Relying on “realization” for taxation stops being reasonable when access to cash is basically the same as income. If anything, not taxing unrealized gains essentially punishes people who labor for income and unfairly favors people who use asset appreciation as a form of income.
I refuse to indulge in the false fantasy that a household where each parent(s) works multiple minimum wage jobs is “lazy” for not preparing homemade lunches for their children. Also, in the US, many lower-income households are in “food deserts”, where there is a lack of grocery stores selling fresh food and a preponderance of convenience stores selling processed foods. In a country where the top 1% of households possess a third of the country’s wealth and the bottom 50% of households only possess 2.5%, poverty, malnourishment, and undereducation are choices made for the poor by the rich ruling class.
1. Does this mean it’s a little disingenuous for the Homebrew maintainers to claim that this change has anything to do with app signing, given that they reference the impossibility of unsigned applications in the issue?
2. Does this mean that if a developer self-signs their app but doesn’t notarize it that it will meet Homebrew’s criteria of “passing Gatekeeper checks”?
Can someone explain why disallowing Gatekeeper bypass via Homebrew is related to macOS disallowing unsigned ARM64 binaries to run? My understanding is that `—no-quarantine` just removes the `com.apple.quarantine` attribute from a downloaded application. If the application is unsigned then removing the attribute wouldn’t allow it to run anyways. There’s no way to disable the signature check because it’s a kernel level check. However, macOS will accept an adhoc signature. Because of this, to me it seems like Gatekeeper bypass and unsigned software are orthogonal topics. No matter if I remove the Gatekeeper signature or not, unsigned code still won’t run unless I add an adhoc signature. On the other hand, if I distribute software with an adhoc signature, macOS wouldn’t prevent someone else from running it as long as they remove the quarantine attribute. Am I missing something?
Could you clarify what you mean? I understand why the DoD partnership is ethically dubious, but I don’t understand why SB 53 is bad. It seems like the opposite of a military partnership.
The solution to homelessness is not to bring in the military and “send the homeless far away” (to paraphrase what Trump said). The solution to homelessness is to provide housing and support.
The U.S. government has been broken for years (under both parties). We can’t sweep our problems under the rug by making D.C. look good. Also, I’m pretty sure the majority of people from Wisconsin or Idaho who vote for Republicans don’t do it because they went on a trip to D.C. and thought it was terrible.
The criminal justice system is racist. The solution to crime is more complicated than “let all the criminals go” but sending in the National Guard is definitely not the solution. Also, given the current state of affairs, this will be forgotten about — because Trump will do something even more outrageously authoritarian. And your $100 won’t help when the regime kidnaps me out of my home.
I’m not sure if I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying but I think it does matter. First of all, the police shouldn’t be militarized, so the fact that they already are doesn’t make it any better. Second of all, the military is fundamentally different from the police, who are at least nominally controlled by the city (yes, I know the President can and has taken control of the D.C. police). The people of D.C. shouldn’t be policed by a force that doesn’t answer to them, especially since the vast majority of them didn’t vote for the federal administration that’s currently seizing control of municipal law enforcement.
I think a more important question is not whether AI will make economic growth explode but rather who that economic growth will benefit and in general how those benefits will be distributed.
I would believe it was an accident or bug if it was any other administration under any other circumstance. Given the vandalism that’s already been committed against basic U.S. government functions, I have to conclude it’s malice until proven otherwise.
It’s terrifying that data US taxpayers paid for, collected and analyzed in the name of public health, can be removed on a whim. While there are a lot of efforts to archive said data, it would still make it unavailable to Americans who are not tech savvy. Unfortunately, that seems to be the idea, I think.
I love using this technique, but developing these scripts has always bothered me because there’s no code completion without an actual `venv` to point my editor to. Has anyone found a way around this?
I'm a full-stack software engineer with a passion for backend development and a strong track record in building high-performance, high-traffic microservices. I'm adaptable, eager to learn, and always excited to tackle new challenges. I'm also very passionate about developer experience and best practices. Currently, I'm open to any opportunity but I'm eager to increase my experience with distributed systems, databases and/or compiler development. I'd love to build something impactful with your company!
I’m no expert, but my understanding is without this you cannot avoid the need to create /nix using sudo.
On a tangent: I’m a big fan of Homebrew, but Nix’s deterministic builds are more isolated than Homebrew’s. Last I heard, Homebrew also tries to avoid keeping around any but the latest version of a formula, which would force you to upgrade. With Nix, your installed libraries are isolated, so I can (for example) open a shell with GCC 5 and Python 2 and another with GCC 12 and Python 3.12 with absolute confidence there’s no “contamination” so to speak. With Nix you come a lot closer (even on macOS) to achieving the dream of having your entire system declaratively managed, so you can get a brand new machine, pull in your config from GitHub, and have an identical setup with minimal hassle. I think even with `brew bundle` it’s not that easy to achieve this.
The solution is not to prevent workers from getting better wages but to punish companies for profiteering. It can be argued that the current spike in inflation is because companies are raising prices despite record profits
This is sad but not surprising. Capitalists will not do anything until it hurts their bottom line and they can’t find a way to pass the cost onto their employees and/or their customers. Even the capitalists that might care just think “not my problem” and move on. The younger (and more socioeconomically disadvantaged) generations will suffer for our predecessors’ greed and mistakes.
I am surprised there wasn’t a bigger backlash. However, I’m not certain about the permanence of their growth in subscribers. After a few months, will these new subscribers decide the content is not worth the cost? Netflix’s biggest issue is in its inability to produce “sticky” content now.
The (relatively small) percentage of people that generate the bulk of the content on Reddit do rely on third party apps (and therefore indirectly on the API). A lot of the mods crucial to the site also rely heavily on the API or tools which are built on the API. Reddit has shown no signs of improving the mod tools, and without the ability to moderate NSFW content using the new API, Reddit will get objectively worse. It doesn’t matter if leadership remods subreddits and forces them open; mods and content creators now objectively have a worse experience and will produce worse content/decisions.
Anecdotally, a lot of people are deleting their accounts and quitting Reddit. I myself am archiving all my data, editing all my comments to something useless, and deleting my account.