They want to harvest your data and sell it.

Well, yes. But they’re doing this anyway. If you’re paying with a card (and most people do), they’re using your credit card number as an identifier to track you across all the purchases you made across all their stores. These days, they may also be using facial recognition for the same purpose, to even catch the people paying with cash. Making rewards program memberships and the like illegal would barely slow down their data collection at all.

Well, you (and everyone else) are paying for it through retail markups and profit margins … but you’re going to be paying that anyway under capitalism.

What the store gets out of it is:

A) They hope their rewards program will motivate you to shop at their store, rather than going to any competitor’s, since you have a rewards card for their store and hopefully not the others. So the rewards program could increase their market share a bit, at the cost of a few discounts.

B) They’re using it to track you, of course. It provides more analytics for them to further optimize selling you shit, and they might also be selling the data to 3rd parties.

Why only for groceries?

In the interest of keeping markets fair, it should be illegal across the board to change prices depending on who the customer is*. The price is the price, as it should be in a free and fair market.

*Though I think I’d still allow for rewards/loyalty card programs and coupons given to frequent customers and that sort of thing – with the distinction being it’s something that the customer explicitly opts in to. And a restriction that these programs can only ever lower prices, never raise them.

You could also just not use these services.

I do need RAM, though.

Fortunately, I got pretty well stocked up before this shit, but the hardware I’ve got now will fail eventually.

Allegedly.

I didn’t examine the body.

Doesn’t matter. 100 more just like him are coming tomorrow.

I moved my library over to codeberg recently. So much better of an experience. Its really too bad, I have 15+ years in Github but the AI bots are going to push me out.

If AI can finally kill Github and get repos to move to open-source alternatives, maybe AI isn’t that bad after all.

As an actual professional creator, yes. Fuck copyright.

As we all know, more code is almost inevitably an unmaintainable buggy mess.

…and 10x longer than it needs to be.

Citing Xitter posts as sources. Indefensible.

And once they do that then they are basically admitting that AI is overvalued and they overinvested in it and wildly overspent.

Their own terms of service state that AI is “for entertainment purposes only”. They’ve really over-invested in and over-committed to something that’s just an entertainment novelty.

It achieves invading customer privacy.

Oh, and selling a lot of their scanner-ball hardware things. Because now anybody who ever buys tickets to any concert or any other live event will now also need to buy one of those little fuckers.

It’s fucking Linux.

If you really wanted to, you could make a fork of your favorite distro and remove the age-gating shit yourself.

this horseshit is only happening because adults have let computers - more specifically, iPads and phones - become their children’s babysitters.

This horseshit is only happening because Meta is lobbying hard for it and throwing tons of money at it, because they want ‘protecting children’ to be the OS’s responsibility, not the website’s.

Gets even more absurd when you start to dig at the definition of an ‘operating system’.

Besides computers and phones, lots of small electronic devices have a rudimentary OS built into them, including (among many other things) a lot of appliances these days. Forget needing to verify your age in order to use your computer, say hello to needing to verify your age in order to use a refrigerator … or a gas pump.

Pineapple

Windows in general is EOL.

Good luck trying to install Win11 on my 2016 Chromebook that was a piece of shit when new.

I’d be interested to try their distro when it’s done…

I’ll just need to remove the french language pack first. Let me look up instructions for that real quick… Oh no…

With the resources they have – and the goal of having security and control over their digital supply lines – I don’t see why they wouldn’t roll their own distro. Maybe heavily based on an existing distro (looking at you, Debian) but something that’s completely under their control, so they can choose for themselves exactly what packages are included, what security settings are used as defaults, when and if to update things, etc.

Edit: after (gasp) actually reading the article, it seems that each department within the French government will be responsible for their own implementation, which means they might all end up using different distros in different departments.