Oberlin Luddites Reject "Year of AI Exploration" Adopted by School Dear President Ambar, We are writing to you on a typewriter that is over 70 years old; this is a machine that we all know well. With it, we misspell words without the crutch of spell check or generative AI and we think intently about every phrase we pound out. As we force ourselves, for once, to slow down, we engage in a cognitive dialogue with ourselves. We do not seek perfection because we know that education is about the growing and challenging of our young minds' potential, not the chasing of inititurtonal 'gold-star' approval. We do not believe that your so-c alled 'Year of AI Exploration; providing enterprise ChatGPT and Google Gemini sub scriptions to every Oberlin student aligns with our college's founding principles. You claim that this year will be one of experimentation, not adoption. But even just one semester of accepted (encouraged even) chat bot use will jettison our student body down a lazy and irredeem able tunnel of intellctual destruction. We are a college grounded in learning and labor, which now risks straying from these rooted ideals. With ChatGPT at the helm, our emails, essays,and discussion posts will be generated for us, not by us. And let's not fool ourselves. This is precisely what these platforms will be used for by our busy, anxious student body. We see your vision for this year as advancing the college's 'businessification'--an alarming trend also seen in the takeover of our beloved library cafe by a 'bookstore' With no bools in stock (just shiny merch) and an app replacing customer service. In one instance, the college assumes we want efficiency at all cost through automated rather than hand-pulled coffee. In the other lies the false belief that we simply desire to turn in an essay, regardless of how little we've written of it. We need not stand by and witness the further atrophy of our liberal arts education. As you embark on your year of AI, we'll embark on our own year of self-actualization, of realizing the fruits of our labor and embracing human imperfection and raw inquiry. We will boldly reject information technologies operating out of data centers ghat guzzle water and energy sources(that simply must contradict our campus's carbon-neutral devotion). We will turn instead t o ourselves and embrace our natural intelligence, intentional hard work, and generative sweat rather than generative AI. We urge anyone who feels similarly to risk disapproval, perceived backwardness and the outward appearance of naivete and join us. Let us not ask what AI can do for Oberlin students, but what Oberlin students can do ourselves, while we still have the brain capacity to think on our own. Yours truly, The Luddite Club of Oberlin College, Logan Lane, CharLie McLaughlin, Mary Claire McGreivey, Sawyer Van Dyck, Simon Puchner-Noel,and Marlowe Blantz

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

I expect to have a trip to Europe in May - June. The start and end dates remain to be decided.

If you would like to invite me to speak during that trip, please write to me now so we can start discussing it. Write to `-invitation' following my three-letter username.

California law shut down a leaky, polluting pipeline under the Pacific Ocean from Santa Barbara, after it spilled a lot of oil on a beach. so the oil spiller in chief gave the pipeline's owner, as a favor, an "emergency order" to restart it immediately.

California and the federal government continue legal action over whether the pipeline will be allowed to operate. What is clear is that having one more oil pipeline operating is not overall a benefit for the world.

Democratic candidates that are backed by AIPAC are now reluctant to admit that.

Google has deactivated an online dis-service that until recently offered medical advice based on applying Pretend Intelligence to what users with no medical training said.

This may have been the wise course, since Pretend Intelligence does not actually understand the text it inputs or outputs.

How Oakland, California, greatly reduced homicides.

The board of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, newly altered by the saboteur in chief, voted to close down for two years of "renovations".

I can imagine what the building will look like after that remodeling: every 20 feet along any wall there will be a molding depicting his face. It will be necessary to spend more money to undo that.

In the mainstream press, even criticism of streaming platforms takes for granted that they are entitled to the power to control what you can do with a recording, and thus reinforces that assumption. Here's an example.

Once you recognize that that power is based on Digital Restrictions Management, which means using nonfree software to control what users can and can't do, you can resist that implicit argument in favor of subjugating you.

Eight protesters in Texas, allegedly supporting of the alleged organization "Antifa", were convicted of "material support for terrorism". In their trial, prosecutors cited the fact that some of them wore black clothing, used Signal, and/or carried guns.

Right-wingers also carry guns at protest, and use Signal, but somehow do not get prosecuted for that.

Many infants start practicing deception before they can talk, at an age of less than one year.

The US Department of Health quietly ignored the administration of Title X, which provides birth control and sex-specific medical treatment for females, and the system may soon collapse.

I have a suspicion that this mysterious failure was engineered by right-wing extremist Christians who seek to force females to have babies.

Back in 2021 we finally received some federal grant money to keep us alive and cover the enormous costs of having been completely closed for 18 months starting in early 2020... This was the COVID-19 Shuttered Venue Operations Grant (SVOG) which I think is the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) wearing a trenchcoat. The money was incredibly helpful! And it was incredibly difficult to get. The amount of paperwork needed to apply for and receive the grant was insane. We just about had to allocate someone to babysitting that paperwork full-time for six months. The effort and complexity was far beyond the reach of most small businesses, which is why most of the money for these grants went to billion-dollar corporate grifters instead of to the people it was supposed to help, notable examples being Ruth's Chris Steak House, Veritas (SF's biggest landlord), Shake Shack, Nestea, RealNetworks, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, Marshmello, Steve Aoki and Alice in Chains. And of course multinational superpredator LiveNation who managed to steal millions in Federal aid meant for independent venues.

Anyway, it took more than a year from when we applied to when we got our first check. A year with zero customers. And then in late 2024 -- nearly four years later -- they did some kind of rule-changing rug-pull on us. They were "reviewing our file" and demanded that we submit an "audit report consistent with 2 CFR 200 Subpart F".

Just more dumb bureaucracy, right? Well.

Hiring someone to do that audit report correctly cost us $20,000. TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. And had we not done it, they would have demanded we pay back all of the money we got in 2021.

In 2021, they literally told us, "You have to spend all this money. If you don't spend it all within a year, on these things, then you can't keep it." So we didn't even have the option to sit on twenty grand to pay for the eventual audit, even if they had told us that was going to happen, which they did not.

Couldn't they have just given us $20k less and paid for the audit with that? No, apparently not.

Anyway, the auditors decided that we had done something slightly wrong. Let's say we had expenses A through Z, and we said, "We are using the grant to pay for A, B and C." The auditors said, "Oh, you can't spend it on C. But you are allowed to spend it on D through F, so all you have to do is file an amendment, and it all comes out the same."

So we do that... and... crickets.

See, in between when this audit crap started, and the auditors finished, DOGE had dismantled the Small Business Administration, and they just... stopped answering their phones, or email. Even the auditors could not get hold of anybody and that's their entire business.

So between October 2024 and March 2026 we were unable to get anyone at SBA to respond to our request to amend the grant! They didn't say "no" (if they said "no" they would have demanded that we pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars) but rather than saying "yes" they just kept sending us monthly automated emails from a "noreply" address noting that "your Audit Report is still outstanding" and that "Your timely response is anticipated and appreciated in order to resolve any compliance issues."

For two years.

And then today -- the rains have come and the crops are saved!

The Small Business Administration's Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Program (SVOG) has completed its review of your audit submission package. SBA has determined that your organization has fully and materially complied with Federal grant audit requirements for fiscal year 2022.

Our accountant and the auditors wasted so many (billable) hours just trying to get someone on the phone to respond in any way, so the total wasn't just the $20,000 we had to pay the audit firm. It also included all the work our accountant did. Fortunately accountants are boss-level note-takers:

• 43 emails with SBA;
• 286 emails with the audit firm;
• 4+ multi-hour zoom calls with the audit firm;
• Calling SBA every Wednesday to inquire on the status of our amendments, for at least a year -- 50+ calls lasting at least 30 minutes and getting nowhere, so that's 25 hours right there.

So besides the audiors themselves, babysitting this also cost us somewhere north of 250 hours of labor from our own accountant.

For nothing.

Nothing.

To get us right back to zero.

It's impressive how Apartheid Emerald Mine Space Karen and Cheeto Mussolini have made our government so much more "efficient".

This is where I mention that if you would like to help out with the DNA Lounge Accountancy Defense Fund, you can make a one-time donation or join our Patreon, which by the way is a really good deal.

• The Bluff (2026):
  An excellent little pirate movie. Which isn't quite right, because though it's about pirates, there's not a lot of pirating, or even sailing. It's more one of those "I was retired and you had to pull me back in" deal -- you know, a Statham Situation. Bloody Mary's ex wants the gollllllld. Anyway, fun characters, very good -- and parsable -- stunts, and the stunts felt very practical. I saw a number of Texas Switches going on, so I think a lot of it was done old-school.

• We Bury The Dead (2026):
  A decent road-trip zombie movie. The US accidentally nukes Tasmania with a zombie bomb, and people volunteer to clean up the corpses, including a bunch of people handling their grief in totally normal healthy ways, such as our hero who is looking for her husband and either hoping he is dead or hoping he is a zombie, it's not clear.

• Greenland (2020) and Greenland 2 (2025):
  These are both stupid disaster movies with absurd physics and geology, but more than that, they are movies that hate people, and believe that people are fundamentally awful, vicious monsters. Their thesis is that if anything goes wrong, everyone will immediately fuck each other over as quickly and as hard as possible, and there's nothing wrong with stepping on someone's face if it gets you into the boat one second earlier. It does not brook even a second's reflection. It was very hard watching this bullshit during the weeks when the people of Minnesota were presenting us a realtime rebuttal to this cynical, evil worldview. Besides that, it's amazing how any time there are like, 10 people who made it into the boat/car/bus/whatever, the ones who are not the 3 main characters are just ... absent ... in the next scene. Did they vaporize? Did our heroes eat them? Such script writing wow. I hated the first one but I hate-watched the second one because I had to know if it got even worse and yes, it did. I need an intervention.

• Cassandra (2025):
  Instead of haunted house stories, now we get them re-skinned as "smart-home automation turns evil" stories. The twist on this one is that the evil smart home is implausibly-vintage 1970s/80s tech. The show is just ok, and I really only even go that hight because of the retro styling. Which is pretty. Since it is Netflix, there's 90 minutes of plot dragged out to 5 hours over 6 episodes and it does the Episode Seven thing (but in ep 5) in the most predictable way. The writers for this definitely believed that you were half watching it while reading something else on your phone, so they have to repeat everything five times.

• The Damned (2025):
  Trapped in the ice, shipwreck, possible haunting. I dug it.

Then I went on a Ghost in the Shell binge, because it turns out there were like twice as many serieses as I realized and I hadn't seen most of them:

• Ghost in the Shell, Stand Alone Complex (2002):
  On a rewatch, this is still good! The animation is beautiful and the characters are well written. The Laughing Man is an interesting villain, and the signature move of being able to hide his face with a logo because every person and camera has mechanical eyes that are hackable is just epic. The eventual reveal of his identity is kind of weird and dumb, and overall the show suffers from several problems: A) it's a cop show and ACAB; and these C truly are B and have never met someone who told them "no" who was not a "terrorist"; and C) they do a whole lot of straight-up domestic political assassination; and D) it's weirdly racist for a cartoon where every character looks like a big-eyed Japanese pop star. You're all Sneeches! Much of the plot is about "immigrants" and "refugees" and how much of "our" taxes should be spent on "those parasites" and the difference between the "good guys" and "bad guys" seems to mainly be "should we deport them" or "should we murder them". So let's say that it doesn't age well.

• Ghost in the Shell, Stand Alone Complex, Second Gig (2004):
  Also a rewatch. Also still good, but kind of more of the same. Same weird anti-immigrant plot; the big bad "Individual Eleven" starts off as the same kind of maybe-hivemind as Laughing Man but then does a fake-out to something else which isn't as clever as they wanted it to be. Much more fun stuff with the emergent-personality Tachikoma smart tanks, which was a fun sub-plot.

• Ghost in the Shell, Solid State Society (2006):
  This was fine. At least they stopped shitting on immigrants and focused on billionaire vampires kidnapping children instead.

• Ghost in the Shell, Arise (2013):
  I never saw this the first time around, and reviews led me to believe that the story and animation were both vastly inferior, a bullshit cash grab. But actually I think it's quite good, possibly even better than SAC. It's a prequel, "here's how we got the gang together". In SAC Motoko was what, 35 to 50?, so she was wearing a 25 year old big-boobed robot porn star body. In this one she's 25-ish? (how old do you have to be to get promoted to Army Major?) so she's wearing a 15 year old robot body instead. Oh, anime, never change. But since she's not old and jaded she's allowed to have emotions and make mistakes instead of just being an always-right killing machine. And they aren't bottomless-funded cops just yet, so out of self-interest they have to actually care about consequences and accountability. They are still all temperamentally murderers, but without immunity, and that's what passes for ethics I guess. Less immigrant hate. Not none, but less.

  I hate that current events have made it impossible for me to enjoy stories about righteous vigilantes.

• Ghost in the Shell, SAC_2045 (2020):
  I never even heard that this came out, and... it's pretty bad. It's much more "3d" so it just looks like a video game cut scene. Section 9 has been disbanded and are working as vigilantes in Los Angeles, and The Major looks like a teen pop star now. Also the environments and especially the cars look very contemporary and out-of-place in the GitS universe. Someone involved really loves cars. The plot is... maybe not completely terrible but I really dislike the look of this show, and the character writing is just off.

  That said, S02 is better. The art is still jarring, but the plot is less "immigrants, amirite?" and more "super-cyborgs are freaked out by a secret society of even-more-super cyborgs." The plot hooked me, despite. Also there were some quite well choreographed fight scenes. Which feels like a weird thing to say about a cartoon but I assume it was a lot of mocap. But as always the Tachikomas are the real stars. The ending is confusing and incoherent, which is how you know it's a GitS show.

Ok, GitS diversion over:

• Night Patrol (2025):
  What if the (real) gangs inside LAPD were actual monsters. Very strong first act! Bogs down a bit in the third. Mostly black cast and they start off setting it up as a "white savior" plot but (spoiler) then they're like, "LOL no". It's fun. Not as good as Night Teeth, which I keep recommending.

• Primal S03:
  RAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

• Shelter (2026):
  I have simple needs. "Jason Statham was in hiding but then the commandos found him" -- shit man that's all you had to say. This time he's in a lighthouse.

• Monarch Legacy of Monsters S02:
  I continue to love everything about this show! Previously. Every time I tell someone this they say, "You're kidding." I am not kidding. It's great.

• Whistle (2025):
  Aztec Death Whistle summons your fate. It's basically a Final Destination movie, with the same dumb rules-lawyering. It's alright I guess.

• Umamusume Pretty Derby (2018):
  Ok wait hear me out. We have this recurring event at the club that plays "anime music", which is mostly indistinguishable from happy hardcore, and is some of the worst shit you'll ever hear (and I include "riddim" in that) and at the most recent event, everyone was wearing horse accessories and they left carrots all over the club, so I had to look up what the actual fuck this was all about. Anyway I watched like half of the first two episodes of this and it's some of the worst trash I've ever seen. It makes Sailor Moon look like Shakespeare. And like Rembrandt. Plot: sometimes genetic mutants are born with horse tails and once they grow into big-boobed teenagers they encounter a biological imperative to run in circles, very very fast; and then do karaoke. Oh anime, never change.

• The Beauty (2026):
  I started watching this knowing nothing about it, and the first episode was like: "Oh it's X Files body horror, I'm down", followed by, "This is a straight-up rip-off of The Substance, stop reminding me of better movies that I'd rather be watching instead", and then I soon realized that it's by the American Horror Story guy, and yup, by episode 2 he's back on his usual bullshit: "The only way I know how to write women is as cunty drag queens, aren't they just the worst? Girlfriend!" But, it had body horror and some billionaires get murdered so I kept hate-watching. The season ended with literally nothing resolved.

• Is This Thing On? (2025):
  Will Arnett and Laura Dern get divorced and he works out his trauma by doing standup. It's kinda just a romcom but it's really sweet.

• Young Sherlock (2026):
  This is some bullshit.

  The first thing you need to know about this show, which should have been a damned title screen, is that it is not a prequel, it is an alternate history that in no way lines up with the books or any other Holmes story. And knowing that would have saved me so much frustration and annoyance.

  But it's still some bullshit.

  I appreciate how some people might be here for "will twentysomething Sherlock and Moriarty fuck" but I can't get past "they didn't meet until Sherlock was like 35 and Moriarty was like 70, what even is this."

  I have been a Sherlock fan for a little while now. I still have the copy of Hound of the Baskervilles that I bought on a whim at a flea market when I was like 9 years old, and it imprinted on me hard. I assume I paid 10¢ for it. It is absolutely falling apart to dust but the latest copyright on it is 1904. The thing about Sherlock is, there's only like 1700 pages total, that's barely 5 novels, but it launched a thousand ships. This ship though, this "shipping", this is some crap. I might have enjoyed this show if the characters all had different names like "Steve" and "Brian" instead of "Sherlock" and "Moriarty" but as-is, I JUST. CAN. NOT.

  One of the things about being a lifelong fan of Sherlock is that when you are a child you think "This guy is the greatest guy ever and I love him" and then when you are an adult you think "This guy is an absolute piece of shit and I love him" and if you never made that transition, everyone else in your life has my sympathies.

  Anyway, as movies and TV go,

  • The Cushing movies -- honestly I'm not into them.
  • The Seven Percent Solution -- pretty great and nuts.
  • The Downey movies -- first eh, second hard pass.
  • House -- yes to S01, strongly diminishing returns after. Probably didn't age well.
  • The Cumberbach shows -- mostly fun, overall unsatisfying.
  • Elementary -- middling.
  • Enola Holmes -- Fun and I appreciate it as criticism.

  It's not a great track record.

• Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die (2026):
  A pretty fun low-budget riff on Terminator, but with the dirtbaggy lunacy of 12 Monkeys.

• Scream 7 (2026):
  This was definitely a Scream movie. It was fine. Always good to see [SPOILER] again. Has some AI hate.

• Scarlet (2025):
  King Hamlet's daughter dies and goes to hell, which is somehow the Middle East but underwater, gets a 21st Century paramedic as a sidekick, and goes on a revenge-quest, fighting an endless series of Deadites. And then, I dunno, the planet explodes into love or something. The animation is great; it's a weird mix of photorealistic 3D-rendered backgrounds with cel-style anime characters, but the motion in the sword fights and dance routines (plural) feels rotoscoped, it has a twitchy Bakshi feel. Weird-ass incoherent movie, but pretty.

Previously.

"The U.S. Strategic Oil Reserve is a series of vast, subterranean salt caverns in four different sites in Louisiana and Texas. Many are enormous -- the average cavern holds about 10mn barrels [...] This network of tunnels, grottos, pumps and wells can in total hold about 715mn barrels of oil, or enough to supply the entire U.S. with all the oil it needs for over a month" -- but those salt caverns were only designed to be drained and refilled five times.

The Financial Times calculates that we are already at the cavern's ninth historic drawdown, suggesting that "catastrophic structural damage," including dissolution of the salt caverns, is now a viable risk. This could mean, among other things, that the reserves can no longer be drained in their entirety, as "a minimum level of oil... must be kept in the salt caverns" to avoid this fate, with the result that the reserves' effectiveness in a time of future national emergency will be reduced.

Of course, this could also mean that someday the caverns will simply collapse.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

I’m releasing Manyana, a project which I believe presents a coherent vision for the future of version control — and a compelling case for building it.

It’s based on the fundamentally sound approach of using CRDTs for version control, which is long overdue but hasn’t happened yet because of subtle UX issues. A CRDT merge always succeeds by definition, so there are no conflicts in the traditional sense — the key insight is that changes should be flagged as conflicting when they touch each other, giving you informative conflict presentation on top of a system which never actually fails. This project works that out.

Better conflict presentation

One immediate benefit is much more informative conflict markers. Two people branch from a file containing a function. One deletes the function. The other adds a line in the middle of it. A traditional VCS gives you this:

<<<<<<< left
=======
def calculate(x):
    a = x * 2
    logger.debug(f"a={a}")
    b = a + 1
    return b
>>>>>>> right

Two opaque blobs. You have to mentally reconstruct what actually happened.

Manyana gives you this:

<<<<<<< begin deleted left
def calculate(x):
    a = x * 2
======= begin added right
    logger.debug(f"a={a}")
======= begin deleted left
    b = a + 1
    return b
>>>>>>> end conflict

Each section tells you what happened and who did it. Left deleted the function. Right added a line in the middle. You can see the structure of the conflict instead of staring at two blobs trying to figure it out.

What CRDTs give you

CRDTs (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types) give you eventual consistency: merges never fail, and the result is always the same no matter what order branches are merged in — including many branches mashed together by multiple people working independently. That one property turns out to have profound implications for every aspect of version control design.

Line ordering becomes permanent. When two branches insert code at the same point, the CRDT picks an ordering and it sticks. This prevents problems when conflicting sections are both kept but resolved in different orders on different branches.

Conflicts are informative, not blocking. The merge always produces a result. Conflicts are surfaced for review when concurrent edits happen “too near” each other, but they never block the merge itself. And because the algorithm tracks what each side did rather than just showing the two outcomes, the conflict presentation is genuinely useful.

History lives in the structure. The state is a weave — a single structure containing every line which has ever existed in the file, with metadata about when it was added and removed. This means merges don’t need to find a common ancestor or traverse the DAG. Two states go in, one state comes out, and it’s always correct.

Rebase without the nightmare

One idea I’m particularly excited about: rebase doesn’t have to destroy history. Conventional rebase creates a fictional history where your commits happened on top of the latest main. In a CRDT system, you can get the same effect — replaying commits one at a time onto a new base — while keeping the full history. The only addition needed is a “primary ancestor” annotation in the DAG.

This matters because aggressive rebasing quickly produces merge topologies with no single common ancestor, which is exactly where traditional 3-way merge falls apart. CRDTs don’t care — the history is in the weave, not reconstructed from the DAG.

What this is and isn’t

Manyana is a demo, not a full-blown version control system. It’s about 470 lines of Python which operate on individual files. Cherry-picking and local undo aren’t implemented yet, though the README lays out a vision for how those can be done well.

What it is is a proof that CRDT-based version control can handle the hard UX problems and come out with better answers than the tools we’re all using today — and a coherent design for building the real thing.

The code is public domain. The full design document is in the README.

Subscribe now

Four years ago I asked whether "Google Pass" was a thing that I needed to give a shit about and consensus was, "no, nobody uses that." But I have heard anecdotally, recently, that this might no longer be true. Thoughts?

The goal here is, "reduce the amount of time it takes for someone standing in front of my nightclub to wave their QR code at the door staff." On iOS, Apple Wallet supports that goal very well.

Note: I don't use Android and know as little about its ecosystem as possible, so please use small words.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Configuration Tiers: Three Levels of Infraction

TIER 0, "The Pamphlet" ~$6
Minimum viable violation. A bootable Linux device with a display, network connectivity, and an app store. No battery, no keyboard -- just proof that this constitutes a regulated device under AB 1043. Good for bulk handout at conferences (50-100 units).

Legal status: Arguable. The 128×64 display introduces fuzziness. The AG could claim it's a dev board. That's fine -- ambiguity is instructive too.

TIER 1, "The Computer", ~$12
An unambiguous general purpose computing device. Color display, keyboard, WiFi, Linux, app store, user setup. The core product. There is no interpretive gap between this device and the law's definitions.

Legal status: Unambiguous. This is a computer with a color display, keyboard, WiFi, Linux, and an app store. It does not collect age data. It is handed to a child. The maximum fine is $7,500.

TIER 2, "The Appliance", ~$18
A self-contained, battery-powered pocket Linux computer. The educational device angle -- a modern descendant of the Acorn BBC Micro and the original Raspberry Pi.

Legal status: Beyond unambiguous. A pocket computer with a color screen, keyboard, battery, WiFi, 8GB storage, and an AI accelerator. It costs less than a large pizza. It fits in a child's hand.

Every tab on this site is gold:

How Distros Are Responding: We track how Linux distributions are responding to age verification mandates, and we provide tools to undo whatever they implement. If a distribution adds an age collection prompt, we will publish a script that removes it. If it ships a D-Bus age verification daemon, we will publish a package that replaces it with silence.

How One Bill Becomes Every Bill: AB 1043 was not written in isolation. It is a template. ICMEC published the model text as a ready-to-introduce statutory draft, and its Global Head of Policy presented it directly to Virginia's Joint Commission on Technology and Science. The same organizations that drafted the model bill are now deploying it in state legislatures across the country. The companies that benefit from the compliance moat fund the advocacy organizations that draft the bills that create the compliance moat. [...]

The Door That Stays Open: AB 1043 requires only self-declared age -- a birthdate field, not government ID or biometrics. Industry analysts have described this as "an initial implementation designed to get the door open." Self-declaration today. Biometric verification tomorrow. The infrastructure is the same; only the input changes. Once every operating system has an age collection interface and a real-time API for transmitting age data to applications, upgrading from a text field to a face scan is a configuration change, not a new law.

Penalty Comparison: Cost of Giving a Child a Computer:

Cost of one Ageless Linux device: $12-18
Maximum combined US penalty for one device given to one child: $46,000
US penalty-to-cost ratio: 3,067:1
Brazil penalty for one violation: up to 522,222:1

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

On the need for a censorship API for legal compliance reasons in some countries and U.S. states

From: FloofyWolf <debian-devel-list@floofywolf.net>
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2026 20:38:08 -0800
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Cc: xdg@lists.freedesktop.org, ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com, debian-legal@lists.debian.org, legal@lists.fedoraproject.org, devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
Subject: On the need for a censorship API for legal compliance reasons in some countries and U.S. states

Recently, a proposal has been made to implement an API for a new California censorship regulation, "On the unfortunate need for an "age verification" API for legal compliance reasons in some U.S. states" by Aaron Rainbolt. I believe the approach outlined to be very short-sighted, in that creating a bespoke API for each of the hundreds of government censorship requirements that debian will presumably now be following will result in much duplication of effort and an unreliable user experience in which important censorship restrictions may be missed and not implemented. As such, with people now supporting the idea that debian should implement government censorship requests, even creating new standards if needed, I propose the creation of a censorship framework to speed implementation of current and future censorship regulations. [...]

Systemd units will be created for every desired censorship function, and will be started based on the user's location. For example, a unit for Kazakhstan will implement the government-required backdoor, a unit for China will implement keyword scans and web access blocks (more on this later), a unit for Florida will ban all packages with "trans" in the name (201 packages in current stable distribution), a unit for Oklahoma will ensure all educational software is compliant with the Christian Holy Bible, a unit for the entire United States will prevent installation of any program capable of decoding DVD or BluRay media, and a unit for California will provide the user's age to all applications and all web sites from which applications may be downloaded. As can be seen, multiple units may be started for a given location. [...]

To prevent users from bypassing censorship requirements, debian will need to switch to being a binary-only distribution with signed binaries, signed kernel, and signed kernel modules, with mandatory secureboot, and controls to prevent any non-signed software from being installed, written, or compiled, as any foreign sources of software may fail to query systemd-censord or may fail to respect the permissions it returns.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

By training their AI systems on public GitHub repositories (though based on their public statements, possibly much more) we contend that the defendants have violated the legal rights of a vast number of creators who posted code or other work under certain open-source licenses on GitHub. Which licenses? A set of 11 popular open-source licenses that all require attribution of the author's name and copyright, including the MIT license, the GPL, and the Apache license. (These are enumerated in the appendix to the complaint.)

In addition to violating the attribution requirements of these licenses, we contend that the defendants have violated:

• GitHub's own terms of service and privacy policies;
• DMCA § 1202, which forbids the removal of copyright-management information;
• the California Consumer Privacy Act;
• and other laws giving rise to related legal claims.

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Phillips spoke "on multiple podcasts" about being teleported against his will, which he has described as "evil." As director of the Office of Response and Recovery, Phillips oversees billions in funds, and is deeply involved in rapid response efforts in the aftermath of disasters.

"Teleporting is no fun," Phillips said last year. "It's no fun because you don't really know what you're doing. You don't really understand it, it's scary, but yet so real. And you know it's happening but you can't do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride. And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was."

Phillips in the same interview described "teleporting" to a Waffle House 50 miles away. "I was with my boys one time and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House," he said. "And I ended up at a Waffle House -- this was in Georgia and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was."

Now, do not mistake Phillips description for something like a medical episode or a black out of some form. He insisted that he was traveling from location to location without experiencing the passage of time. When his friends asked him where he was, he replied that he was at the "'Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.' And they said, 'That's not possible, you just left here a moment ago.' But it was possible. It was real."

Phillips also claimed that he had once felt his car "lifted up" and teleported forty miles to a ditch near a church. [...]

At FEMA, Phillips, who lacks any sort of professional experience related to disaster response, has been successful in the sense that his lack of qualifications fall in line with the Trump administration's apparent goal of kneecaping the agency.

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