Meta calls its penalty a ‘tariff’

That's a retaliatory tariff. Meta broke the law, and the EU retaliated.

The fact is, currently, AI can't write good code. I'm sure that at some point in the future they will - but we're not there yet, and probably have some years still.

Imagine at some point in the future, where an AI can program any piece of software you want for you, and do it well. At that point, the value of code itself will be minimal. If you keep your code proprietary, I'll just get the AI to re-implement the functionality anew and publish it.

Therefore, all code will be permissive open source. There would be no point in keeping anything proprietary, and also no point in applying copyleft. But at this point the copyleft "hack" would simply be unnecessary, so permissive open source would be just as good.

Until then, me not using AI doesn't in any way prevent others from training AI on my code. So I just don't see training on my code as a valid reason to avoid it. I don't use AI currently - but that's for entirely pragmatic reasons: I'm not yet happy with the code it generates.

with a long tail of grumpy holdouts who adhere to free software principles

Nothing in the core free software principles - namely, the four freedoms - actually concerns the development process and tools used - or copyright. It's all about what you can do with the software.

The GPL is more of a "hack" that "perverts" copyright to enforce free software principles - because that was the tool available, not because the people who wrote it really liked intellectual property.

Was broken last I checked - as in, would regularly just crash.

Having to import my tariff management solution is a critical national security risk. Needs to be built-in. PEP soon, please?

What a great way to reduce external dependencies and mitigate supply chain attacks!

The platform where bot farms are still effective

Spoken like they're no longer effective on the other platforms.

Oh, no! Someone's publishing open models better than our closed ones! How are we going to make profit now? Do something! Quick!!!

How can someone support them in good faith? I'll focus on China, but here are some reasons:

For starters, I don't believe that it's possible to impose on a society from the outside to accept LGBTQ people. For example, making LGBTQ acceptance as a precondition on having good relations with China has literally 0% chance of improving life of LGBTQ people there. It's more likely to backfire. On the other hand, having good relations, and allowing cultural exchange to happen naturally, can - and I think, over the last few decades before relations soured, has - improved LGBTQ acceptance there.

Also, amongst superpowers, China has a relatively good track record when in comes to using military force. They have had conflicts with neighboring countries, but it's nothing compared to the wars the US or Russia (and USSR) have fought.

Finally (this one I don't share, but I think it can be held in good faith), someone might not care about human rights all that much. For example, if you consider government-sponsored murders to be just the same as any other - not better, but also not worse - then even if you include Tienanmen Square and other murders by the government, the murder rate in China is still lower than most of the world.

How does it compare to NixOS?

I'd be very skeptical of claims that Debian maintainers actually audit the code of each piece of software they package. Perhaps they make some brief reviews, but actually scrutinizing every line for hidden backdoors is just not feasible.

Maybe they though something like this: "Philosophy conference needs philosophers. Mathematics conference needs mathematicians. Obviously, an antisemitism conference needs anti-semites."

Any accessibility service will also see the "hidden links", and while a blind person with a screen reader will notice if they wonder off into generated pages, it will waste their time too. Especially if they don't know about such "feature" they'll be very confused.

Also, I don't know about you, but I absolutely have a use for crawling X, Google maps, Reddit, YouTube, and getting information from there without interacting with the service myself.

I would love to think so. But the word "verified" suggests more.

That makes me think, perhaps, you might be able to set it to exec("stuff") or True...

while allowing legitimate users and verified crawlers to browse normally.

What is a "verified crawler" though? What I worry about is, is it only big companies like Google that are allowed to have them now?

I agree that it's difficult to enforce such a requirement on individuals. That said, I don't agree that nobody cares for the content they post. If they have "something cool they made with AI generation" - then it's not a big deal to have to mark it as AI-generated.

Is that something new? As in, has WaPo not been willing to go after Meta in a similar manner before?

So, essentially, they wanted to enter the Chinese market so much that they were even willing to comply with the local rules and regulations!

This is such a big secret, we really needed a whistleblower to tell us that!