I do use it, but you are quite right I don’t tend to mention it unless asked.

IRC prank from the 2000s: if you type /quit playing games with my heart you’ll hear a cool pop song.

2020s: if you type quit into Google it will understand this as an AI prompt.

It just has more of the web in its index than competitors do, so there are good practical reasons on occasion.

On the terminal yes.

On GUIs I generally use an IDE or VSCodium with vim keybindings.

If we’re going to wildly speculate, hey, isn’t this what we have AI for nowadays?

I asked ChatGPT: “give me ideas what the abbreviation WLBR might stand for if that is the name of a piece of image editing software”. Here’s the result:

🧠 Professional / technical-sounding

• Wide Layer Blending & Rendering
• Workflow Layer-Based Retoucher
• Weighted Light Balance Renderer
• Wavelet-Based Light & Blur Reconstruction
• White-Level Balance & Retouch

🎨 Creative / artistic branding

• We Love Better Retouching
• Wild Light & Bold Retouch
• Wavelength Brush
• Wonder Lens: Blur & Refine
• Whitelight Brush

⚡ Modern / software-product style

• WizLayer Build & Render
• WarpLab: Blend & Refine
• Web-Level Bitmap Renderer
• Workflow Lens & Brush Renderer
• WLB Renderer (treat WLBR as a stylized acronym)

🧩 Slightly abstract (like many real apps)

• Wavelength-Based Rasterizer
• Layered Bitmask Refinement
• Light Balance Reconstruction Engine
• Wideband Luminosity Brush & Retouch

🧠 If you want it to feel like real software naming

Most image tools (like Photoshop, GIMP, etc.) don’t strictly spell out acronyms anymore—they use:

• suggestive tech words (Layer, Light, Render, Brush)
• or abstract brand terms

So something like:

WLBR = “WaveLight Brush & Render”

feels believable without being overly literal.

(end of ChatGPT response)

Out of these, I think “Workflow Layer-Based Retoucher” works best. But interesting that ChatGPT thinks “GIMP” doesn’t “strictly spell out” an acronym anymore, or that “Photoshop” ever did?!

Is WLBR supposed to be an abbreviation for something? I realize it is a reference to the mascot Wilber, but apart from that?

As long as Google is doing a better job maintaining AOSP than a nonprofit would, what’s the point?

If they ever stop doing so, then this might be an option.

It’s a fairly widespread Internet meme, I think in order to make fun of France, though I’m not sure exactly where it originated.

I actually dislike the term “social media” in the first place, only used it above for convenience…

I (seriously) discovered that there were websites that allowed the general public to participate in the mid-2000s when I was a preteen. I immediately liked that concept and started to participate on such sites (first forums, later wikis) myself and found that fun.

Then around 2008, everyone started to insist that such sites were now called “social media” and the most important ones were Facebook and Twitter, both of which I hadn’t heard of until around that time, and both of which didn’t seem like very fun or appealing places at all.

Now I keep hearing about the horrible things apparently caused by “social media” and wonder, what do you even mean, what could possibly be wrong with web forums.

Hurray! People stop doing stupid shit!

you certainly have a high opinion of your own activities, eh?

I agree that the kind of “social media” that is popular among the general public (i.e. sharing information about one’s own life) is fairly stupid. But Lemmy too is “social media”, any support forum is “social media”, even wikis are “social media”, and I do not think that those are stupid things to do, at all.

set it to sorting by “new comments”, it’s what I did to make sure I see somewhat different things most of the time I refresh it

So you’re agreeing with me that this was supported by both parties…?

(I’m actually Austrian, not German; I have however read enough about US politics that I’m fairly confident in my statement above.)

Garuda Linux will not implement any age verification measures, since Garuda Linux’s legal jurisdictions have no laws mandating age verification.

Yes. That’s how it should be, that on the Internet you only have to comply with laws where you or the servers you are hosting things on are based, and all other places can piss off when it comes to enforcing their laws.

And it’s how it mostly used to work, but we now live in this world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel_Durov

One of my childhood dreams was to run my own successful web forum. Now that we live in this world where that means countries might prosecute me because my users have been doing things that are illegal somewhere in the world, that dream is officially dead. >:(

The big deal is that it’s on the heels of age verification bullshit that fascists are pushing through with the help of tech bros, so that they can eventually push all of us into a scenario where we have zero privacy.

That’s a bit difficult to argue in a world where the most prominent of such laws was passed in California, where Democrats control the entire legislative process.

I have not looked up the voting record for it, but would suspect that, like most of the worst laws in the US, it was enthusiastically supported by both parties? Am I wrong about that?

The harm this law aims to address is grave and real. For the 99% of the population who aren’t compiling their own kernels, the ability to “age-lock” a child account to prevent young children from accessing doomscroll brainrot on Instagram is an amazing and valuable feature.

I disagree even with this premise. I reject the idea that it’s legitimate to want to keep young people from seeing, watching, reading things that they actively want to see/watch/read simply because we have a vague idea that “it’s not good for them”.

My parents too unfortunately agreed with your idea, and I remember being a (teenaged) minor and worried that my parents might find out too much about what I’ve been reading and doing on the Internet and punish me for it, I don’t wish that on anyone who happened to be born after me. I hereby resolve that if I ever have children, they will not have to worry about this. I think it is a very good thing that modern technology makes it somewhat harder for parents to oppress their children in such a manner.

But there’s nothing inherently wrong with OS developers implementing such a feature if that is what their customers want. There’s a lot wrong with the government mandating it.

The principled “linux source code is free-speech, and no government mandates can compel changes” stance is quite divorced from reality.

No, it’s an exactly correct legal analysis; at least morally, and should be legally.

Are crypto-exchange founders likewise free to implement whatever fraudulent schemes they like, as their source code is their speech to freely dictate?

I’m not sure what scenario you have in mind. Distributing software (even software that can be used for illegal activities) is free speech. Running and using software isn’t (automatically) speech, it’s an action that can be declared to be criminal. Anyone can use Thunderbird to send phishing emails, but it would be absurd to prosecute the developers of Thunderbird for that.

I agree with the idea that a user account with an age field is less bad than actual (biometric or ID-based) age verification.

The rest of your post is so full of meaningless buzzwords that it’s impossible to write anything coherent about it.

https://xkcd.com/810/ was oddly prophetic

With chat control we actually have to distinguish two different things that people sometimes confuse:

• voluntary chat control (“chat control 1.0”), which is currently already the law in the EU
• mandatory chat control (“chat control 2.0”), proposed in 2022

Voluntary chat control is about letting operators of communication services voluntarily scan messages for certain illegal activity (without this constituting a violation of data protection laws). This doesn’t break encryption and isn’t a part of a war on general purpose computing. While there are many good arguments against it, it’s not especially catastrophic. It’s a detail of business regulation.

Mandatory chat control is about forcing them to do so, which must necessarily break encryption and impose limits on software freedom. This is what is most important to oppose.

The most recent win ended up rejecting even (most) voluntary chat control, which is a good sign that mandatory chat control won’t get a majority either.

Yes; recent news have made me somewhat optimistic that the resistance to it is winning though.

Age verification laws currently look like a much greater danger to freedom.

2000s: war on general purpose computing because of copyright

2020s: war on general purpose computing because of child protection

In the 2000s the forces of freedom mostly won, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital_Television_Promotion_Act didn’t become law. So far it seems that we are currently losing. :(

Yes. There are several sections on gnu.org that talk about this, these are the ones I was able to quickly find.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html

The freedom to make and distribute exact copies when you wish. (It is not an obligation; doing this is your choice. If the program is free, that doesn’t mean someone has an obligation to offer you a copy, or that you have an obligation to offer him a copy. Distributing a program to users without freedom mistreats them; however, choosing not to distribute the program—using it privately—does not mistreat anyone.)

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html

Free software is a matter of freedom, not access. In general we do not believe it is wrong to develop a program and not release it. There are occasions when a program is so important that one might argue that withholding it from the public is doing wrong to humanity. However, such cases are rare. Most programs are not that important, and declining to release them is not particularly wrong. Thus, there is no conflict between the development of private or custom software and the principles of the free software movement.

Nearly all employment for programmers is in development of custom software; therefore most programming jobs are, or could be, done in a way compatible with the free software movement.