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.

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).

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

> The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal

That behaviour in itself is believed to be morally wrong, and dystopian. That still doesn't answer the question why people just accept this. How can "we" deem ourself more moral than the Nazis, and literally do this.

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

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.

But why? Why do so many companies choose garbage?

I hope you're aware AI vendors are running the exact same playbook these days. Don't want AI? Fuck you here's some AI on your toothbrush

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.

> 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.”

Does that need new law? The problem we have in the UK is that Trading Standards has been starved of funding for the last 16 years so they can't do their job. If they had funding I'm pretty sure they have the power to tackle this.

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.

This is why it would be so nice to have an EU that actually made law, instead of just handing over the right to oversee things to the commission.

Imagine if we actually had real regulations, instead of these negotiated things. Then we could just sue and normal courts could handle it.

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.

Sometimes good people are able to think like villains and predict their next moves, sometimes villains themselves declare their intentions via proxies.

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

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

Seems like many films and books have been taken as inspiration for making "hypothetical futures" true. E.g. Her - take AI as your girlfriend... was creepy then, still is now.

"Drink verification can to continue"

Normally one practical solution would be to cover the front-facing camera on a phone.

Of course with face identification for unlocking, there is now a power incentive to not do so…

But it's still bad as fuck, deplorable, despicable and many others adjectives. And it doesn't change GP point, even if the patent sucks at being a patent.

It's just a delousing room

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Isnt this just baked into the idea? The French are building an OS for internal use for their own interests.

If we then try to extend that or the Dutch OS to other countries we have the original problem of dependence.

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

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.

> 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.

one can use direnv, nix-direnv and flake.nix to get an immutable and reproducible build toolchain protected from nix garbage collection, while keeping the llama.cpp branches and/or compiled binaries mutable on the local filesystem. https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv

for agentic execution sandboxing, preventing 'rm -rf /home' nix or nix-direnv doesn't help, podman could be used next to nix. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-is-sandboxing-and-what-do...

llama.cpp has a flake in-repo that I often use for trying out different branches and patches. I also have yet to have an issue just replacing the src and build number attribute in the nixpkgs build (in one cases I wanted to add an additional CMake flag but that was also easy).

IMHO this is way easier than without Nix in many cases as figuring out the upstream build process and getting it running can often be quite the chore. With Nix it is all set up for you.

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?

They have "migrated to codeberg" which is written in the repo itself.

However Codeberg actual "fuzzy" policy is less strict than "no LLM used ever".

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...

They block some user-agents, maybe that's it?

From [1]

> We must regularly implement temporary security measures to ensure the availability of Codeberg's resources and prevent abuse.

> The 403 you have received is expected based on the UA.

From [2]

> What is the version of your chromium? AFAICT <=137 gets 403 Forbidden: [...] while >= 138 works ok: [...]

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3084

[2] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3078

Had that issue with HTTP accessed repo, switching to SSH solved it for me.

They use both. https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK?q=dawo&sort=alphabetically as the official source, and https://codeberg.org/DAWO for the community parts.

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.

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.

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

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

Point taken, trimmed that. I do take issue with their position but not the place to start a new discussion.

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

This is less about the code and more about load. It's community funded so allowing agents to willy nilly push and pull will be very expensive.

I've seen so much commentary on the apparent strictness & extreme nature of Codeberg's approach & no actual examples of it.

They have a strict policy (which many have rightly pointed out is impossible to fully enforce), & their "enforcement" has mostly relied on good faith contributions to date. They're also accounting for the fact the ToS change came without advance notice for many of their users who were already making active use of agents, hence there remains many AI repos (I have yet to hear of any removals).

To me that seems like the best approach one can hope for - a lax policy is a slippery slope (presuming dissuading AI contrib is your goal), & wouldn't satisfy their legal concerns (hosting code of questionable copyright status), & strict enforcement isn't viable in any case (especially at their scale), so this seems to me to be the best compromise.

It may be more a measure against explosive growth than being anti-AI in principle.

AI generated code is allowed on Codeberg, but not if it's mostly ai generated

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.

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

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.

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.

>but not to achieve anything of merit

Educating oneself to provide better quality of work still requires writing code by hand, and by extend is an achievement 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?

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.

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.

Guix users can just add the Fearware Guix channel which is just the nonfree firmware and blobbed vanilla Linux kernel, no propietary software it's added, just the necessary firmware to run your hardware (3D Radeon support, Nouveau+reclocking, some audio chipsets, and most of non-ant9k WiFi cards). That's it.

As usual, it's federated*1 login*2 between countries*4*5 in EU*6*7*8

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

No, Sweden.

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.

Well what I wrote was not on the homepage of nixos.com, or obvious after a few clicks. Claude summarised it very nicely. I now know I don't need NixOS.

Perhaps the real meatheads are the ones who spam threads with anti-ai memes, rather than looking at the utility of what the ai provided?

The history of the Netherlands is all about making things unnecessarily complicated.

When lesser nations rally around the flag and elect dictators we have meetings and consultations.

That's the nice part, as an admin you are familiar with the complexity and use it for good. As a user, you never have to see it. (And you can even have some freedom for installing apps using flatpack/snap if needed.)

How would you role out the same config to thousands of Arch systems? Sure Valve does it, but I still think that is a "bolted on top" solution. Bootc could be another option though, but Nix solves reproducibility more elegantly, imho. Nix went back and asked "how can this be done better", where many modern solutions took what was already there.

Arch is easier to start of with, NixOS is easier to maintain, especially at scale

Each nixos rebuild creates a snapshot. While I also eventually moved off of nixos, I've yet to get a system that was as stable as it.

I would image in corporate / government deployment, declarative configuration is more efficient.

When you have that many users, you don't really configure individual system, you deploy up some per-configured module or setup.

Repeatable builds also make troubleshooting lots easier - and you can hand those task to front-tier helpdesk staffs.

So far I have broken every Linux distro I used except NixOS.

And if I were to break it, i could just reboot into the previous system snapshot.

And I haven't read 1000 pages of docs - from my experience id doubt it even has that many docs.

The problem with Arch is that configuration is by hand so you have to do it every time. With Nix you configure it once and then you can deploy it anywhere. Also it's pretty much impossible to break since the system is immutable and you can boot to a different revision any time.

I can imagine. Those are often the sort of projects that struggle to put a one line description of what they are on their homepage. I inferred it was an OS, inferred it was Unix adjacent...but no answer on the rest. It could have been BSD or open Solaris based for all I could tell.

Yeah I also wonder about going for NixOS for this. For servers maybe, but for user focussed desktops? The support requirements will be complicated.

It looks like a lot of nothing. All the READMEs are empty. What is being contributed here?