Hi, I'm choosing this comment to reply to everyone at once, since there's a lot of overlap in the comments.

I'm sorry for not following the etiquette of the community. I've updated the post to contain a blurb to explain why I liked the article. I hope it's ok but if there are any problems I'm happy to amend it or change the focus of the blurb.

I was careful to check the rules before posting, and in all other communities I actively participate in, link-only posts are completely fine, so I didn't even stop to think it could be a problem. I now appreciate that this is not the followed norm of this community though. I can see that it could be easily misinterpreted as self-promotion, since I didn't state I wasn't the authour of the post. I have subscribed to this community for a while and made a couple of comments, but this is my first post here and with the posts mixed in the rest of the feed, I guess I didn't build a good sense of the unwritten norms of the community.

I am not the authour of the blog post. This is the personal blog post of someone who works for the Sovereign Tech Agency. I appreciate their posts because they took a very thoughtful approach to why they are self-hosting certain things. Their technical approach is an extension of the "why" they are doing it and this is very clearly and explicitly laid out. This is something I quite like, and at least in the blogs I follow, relatively unique.

I am based in the UK. I always catch up on my RSS feeds before i go to bed, and if I see something interesting, I tend to share it on lemmy. I only woke up again now because of the heatwave here! Another lesson learned, if posting to this community again, do it while I'm available for the next few hours.

I'm actually ok with this, if it only applies to the biggest social media companies (10million+ UK users) who have algorithmically ranked content. And it should apply to what gets weighted in the feeds, not whether the content exists on the site at all.

I think big tech companies shouldn't be held responsible for all user generated content on their site, but they should be held responsible for the content they actively promote via the feeds, if they do so algorithmically. I think this article (from a US perspective) presents a good framework for moderation. The more you are a "dumb pipe", the less moderation you should have, and the more you actively make user-facing decisions about content, the more oversight and moderation you should have. And, if you are a small provider (like the fediverse 😜) then you should be exempt from these regulations to encourage competition.

We have public service broadcasters who are regulated by Ofcom. It's not perfect - Ofcom should be strengthened, made more politically independent and should have much more teeth, and they've been woeful in dealing with GBeebies - but the regulated public service broadcasters are among the most trusted news providers in the UK.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that any kind of restriction is a slippery slope. And I know the public service broadcasters are not perfect, there are problems of political interference that need to be dealt with, and of course they don't appeal to everyone. But they are also among the most trusted news outlets?

I'm also sympathetic to the idea that the government is solving this the wrong way round. That they are trying to fix this on the supply side when really it's a demand problem - people just don't like the regulated news providers enough so they don't get promoted by the feeds on social media. But that argument presumes that the tech companies' feeds are purely responding to consumer demand; social media companies are now mostly owned by people who want to, or are careless about, interfering with our democracy and promoting particular ideologies. So I think the era of trusting that whatever the algorithms promote is just based on what we want is over.

No, I won't. If it was cheaper, I'd consider it.

My partner plays games on steam and uses my old gaming PC, running Bazzite and unfortunately with an nvidia GPU. Some games like The Last of Us II has lots of graphical glitches and we have to play around with the steam launch settings a lot.

It'd be awesome to buy a plug-and-play solution as I never know when there are issues with our PC whether it's to do with our specific setup, or the game's linux support in general.

As it stands we'll probably look to get an AMD GPU when we can afford it. Which I think will be in quite a while.

For me it comes down to trust, since the distro maintainers have root on your system. You'd better trust their competence and alignment with your values!

It's cool on a technical level, but I don't think it's a good idea. The end goal is to get people cycling. As soon as politicians caught wind of this happening, it would then discredit all the numbers that were collected.

I'd use that effort to bug some friends to go on a ride with me instead!

I think they can use remote attestation on the mobile device to prove that it's a physical device. They do that through Google Play Services or whatever the equivalent is on iOS. So, for instance, scanning the QR code on a custom ROM like lineage or GrapheneOS doesn't work.

If you were Starmer, and wanted to keep any chance to hold onto power but also not completely tarnish your legacy, what would you do?

I reckon I'd set out a timetable for departure, with a default of Andy Burnham, say "I won't start a contest, but if anyone else does, I'll put myself forward" and then wait to see what Streeting does.

That way, if Streeting (or anyone else) does challenge, you can stay in with a shot while also not being the person who caused all the chaos.

Whether or not it's optional it's still pretty dystopian. And I think we've seen the path before where something optional but "more secure" becomes mandatory and everything else gets shut off.

There were many crazy things, but the one that affected me the most was my RE teacher's insistence that all non-Catholics would go to hell. My best friend's dad, who was an atheist and a very kind person, had died a few days before and it made me really upset. My parents complained to the school about it.

Personally, I donate less to more projects. But, if you don't have a strong opinion of what to donate to, you can get the best of both worlds by donating to NLnet.

They fund open source projects up and down the stack, from open source CPUs all the way up to applications like Lemmy, and everything in between. Some are quite speculative and others are tangible improvements to existing projects.

Because they're probably doing ok, and they don't want to think about how much is out of their control, and how easily they could be in the same situation.

The idea that success is just down to hard work is comforting, because they think "if I just keep working hard then I'll be ok", and "I'm deserving of this lifestyle". It also lets them not feel any guilt or spend time thinking about those less fortunate - they can simply say "well it must be their fault".

Will you be allowed to lie about the age? If yes, then it's a pointless law. If no, then whoever is checking needs to have more control over your device than you do, DRM style. That's gives them an entry point through which they can put whatever they want without you being able to control it.

Time and again it seems that the entire purpose of the royal family is to seem a bit mystical and special to the Americans.

I'd like their constitutional role to be completely removed from the UK, but we should just not tell the Americans them and keep sending them over.

You can trust the software in your distro's repositories (if you run a distro with well-maintained repositories). This is because, generally only well-known software gets packaged, the packager should be familiar with both the project and the code, and everything is rebuilt on the distro's own infrastructure, to ensure that a given binary actually corresponds to the source.

It might still be possible for things to slip through, but it's certainly much safer than random programs from online.

They use the classic AGPL + license assignment CLA combo.

This lets them relicense community contributions however they want, including making them proprietary. Everyone has to abide by the AGPL terms, apart from them. This puts them in a privileged position compared to the rest of the community, which I don't like.

Edit: @[email protected] pointed to a commit that removes the CLA from many places in the repo. They didn't (forgot to?) remove it from the LICENSING.md file, which is where I found the requirement when digging around the repository.

When I saw the requirement in LICENSING.md, I took that at face value. I think that was a fair assumption to make, but I'm still sorry that I got it wrong, especially as this became the top comment.

My partner, dad's partner, and so many colleagues at my job, wasted so many weeks cramming for this stupid, irrelevant test. If you add up all the people who have to take this, how many person hours have we wasted as a society, all to be forgotten anyway, because it's useless information.

We really need to get rid of this test, or at a minimum strip it down and make it about how to vote and access public services. But even then, if someone wants to learn that, they will of their own accord and in their own time anyway.

It's an alternative to Lemmy with some different features. Since it uses the same protocol under the hood, its instances federate with Lemmy. There's more info on the differences here.

I was hoping we wouldn't have to deal with another summer of this bullshit.

What's the best response to this? Put up flags of other countries alongside? Use their move against them and see if they take yours down?

I'm wary of taking them down because 1) you get assaulted and used for content and 2) I feel they're looking for a provocation and an excuse to dog whistle "I'm being censored and can't even be proud of my country anymore". But then maybe you should just take them down anyway because you can't win either way.

NHS England is demanding that data workers across the NHS, from local hospitals to national teams, put huge amounts of sensitive health data into Palantir's FDP. Meanwhile, Palantir's UK CEO, Louis Mosley, publicly confirmed that if Reform UK wins the next election with a “clear public mandate” to share health data for the purposes of mass deportation efforts, the company will adhere to this.

Many very small services will just not bother with compliance. And the risk of enforcement on them might be low.

If you use a federated alternative, you can switch to a server that doesn't bother with compliance without losing your contacts.

Many of the laws don't specify how the age check should be done. There are more privacy-friendly ways to comply, like running a server for your friends or family and already knowing they're over 18.