

why have it at all?
Despite all of us collectively agreeing that the law is dumb/flawed, the 40 M residents of Cali should have the liberty to be able to use distros that depend on systemd, legally. And, the developers of these distros using systmed (whether you interpret the law to see them as OS providers or not) want to be able to provide these distros legally.
Now that this functionality exists, apps are going to start using it and requiring it
Yes, but not all apps. While the CA law mandates that app developers must use some API to get the age bracket, the merged code into systemd is not causually related to all apps actually implementing and using the API. Just because systemd merged this code does not inherently result in every single user application querying this, nor does it force you to install apps that do query the API. One may freely choose to not use apps that require it. If one needs an app that requires it, one may set a garbage DOB to their user. I don’t see this as an issue. Do you?
It seems you disagree with the law (so do I) but are blaming the wrong person here (author of merged systemd code). I maintain that complying with the law is harmless, and thus it is beneficial to add this DOB field to the userdb json, because in all cases of some distro user using their computer, they are not compelled to compromise their personal privacy.


I suggest looking at llm arena leaderboards filtered by open weight models. It offers benchmarks at a very complete and statistically detailed level for models, and usually is quite up to date when new models come out. The new Gemma that just came out might be the best for 1x GPU, and if you have a bunch of vram check out the larger Chinese models