.fart because decades of growing up haven’t quite cured my potty humor.

Software like Firefox is designed in a modular way for humans to be able to reason about its correctness. It is complex, but not arbitrarily complex.

So take out the free VPN and Pocket and it’ll be less complex! ¯\(ツ)/¯

There’s a lot of people on the Mozilla hate train, and they do deserve a bit of ire for some of their more puzzling decisions. All I wanted from Firefox was a configurable browser with sane defaults, that lets me block ads and does all the normal browser things without being a total black box of corporate telemetry and profiling. To a large degree Firefox has been the best mainstream browser for people who can’t dance with the devil and use Chrome. In many aspects, it has made better decisions than Chrome.

With that said, I didn’t want Pocket, I didn’t want AI, and I’m mildly annoyed that this sort of thing is in the default build. It feels like a windows installer asking you to install 10 additional programs, but the ticked boxes are greyed out. I just want a browser, no crypto wallets, no ai assistants, no built-in mail client, no biometric scanning.

Firefox has been around long enough to have been both god tier and trash tier at different points. I don’t think the AI focus is going to go well for Mozilla. I’d like them to focus on browser stuff.

We need a “right of retrieval” where,once encoded, it must be free to decode and play back. If we’re going to allow proprietary media, all the prices should be clear and up front. No charging on the back end after everyone has already encoded their baby vids to avc; no changing prices after the fact.

I wonder how far one of these would fly if it wandered onto a road and got hammered by a semi doing 55mph.

How about a 24 hour waiting period for me to harden my OS before Google slurps up all my data.

The personification of AI is increasing. They’ll probably announce their holy grail of AGI prematurely and with all the robot personification the masses will just buy the lie. It’s too easy to view this tech as human and capable just because it mimics our language patterns. We want to assign intentionality and motivation to its actions. This thing will do what it was programmed to do.

I remember my original Moto G. It was a good phone for the time. I will follow Graphene wherever they go until a Linux phone is ready.

This is a cool tip. Not the autoexpanding tiling that Pop has, but still very useful. I wish I had had this on my work computer.

Yeah, hopefully Patron doesn’t roll over and just removes the option to do it in iPhone. Taking away functionality will make Apple look bad, which they deserve.

If they truly believe in their AI offerings, they should release them as an extension so users can choose to install them. You only bundle shit people don’t want. If it’s good, you distribute it stand-alone.

Not a mean question at all. I haven’t had more difficulty keeping a working system than I did on Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc. I get everything I need in Arch and the packages are always fresh off the grill. I also like the emphasis on text config files and a ground-up install. That helped me better understand my system and how it works.

No idea about performance. My performance recommendation is “don’t run Windows!” :)

Doesn’t matter if it’s a D or an R because they all want this gross shit. Can I get at least one real American who believes in privacy and liberty please!

" the pro-Putin posters known as CopyCop, aka Storm-1516, use self-hosted, uncensored LLMs based on Meta’s Llama 3 open-source models to generate at least some of these fictional news stories" - the Article

So what? This quote is written in a way that makes it seem like that is the problem and the solution is that we need censored LLM’s hosted by massive corps (who definitely have our best interest at heart) using closed-source models and that’s how we end up with Real News™

The issue is that we’d surrounded by morons who never learned critical thinking. To be fair, we all have our own blind spots. How about instead of trying to top-down legislate truth, we focus on teaching research skills, vetting processes, and learn to better identify and label misinformation and common misinformation sources.

Maybe in 2025 all news articles should be voluntarily citing public and detailed source material so that people can better substantiate what is real?

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.

The wildest part of this to me is the politicians exempting themselves. It may be different in Europe, but in the US, the politicians are often the child predators this legislation claims to protect against.

The politicians claim “professional secrecy”, but shouldn’t you be increasingly auditable the more power you are given. Private individuals should have an expectation of privacy. Politicians, and those with power and influence should live in the open to protect from abuses of that power.

They’re just making a market for someone to compile a 1TB “Best of the Best Cumpilation”, copy it to a handful of cheap terrabyte drives and resell them (to legal adults) in a verification state.

• This comment should not be read as condoning copyright infringement, but rather as a commentary pointing out that prohibition instantly creates very easy to serve and lucrative black markets that will be filled by someone.

To me this sounds like a fundamental problem with their business model. Private vehicles used for public transportation by people who aren’t well-trained commercial drivers.

I have always thought it was sketchy that we let random people in the US be commercial drivers for Uber without forcing them to get a new type of license or earn some kind of state certificate because most people are absolutely shit drivers and beyond that, there are rules for dealing with people (in this case disability stuff) that you should know if you drive the public.

Would you get in a car with that dude “Chad” who hangs out behind the bowling ally, or that chick “Tammy” who learned to drive from her highschool boyfriend who was a year or two older than her and basically got a rubber-stamped license because the US doesn’t actually take driver safety seriously?

Lame, Colorado is usually one of the most reasonable states. Polis is a decent Governor too. I never saw any of the bad stuff that was allegedly supposed to happen after we forced employers to post pay ranges with jobs, so I don’t really expect anything bad to come from regulating AI.

If we put strict guardrails and penalties with teeth around AI companies, they may go elsewhere, where they can act more unethically. That’s fine with me because Colorado already has water issues and I feel like we manage to be progressive without trampling all over personal liberties. I also feel like a good portion of people in this state are real people who haven’t had the idealism trampled out if them completely and still give/get good intentions.

Shit, I’m getting the itch to submit a citizens initiative to make the whole state an AI free zone right now. As for the AI decision-making, how about real, concrete, enumerable criteria. Vibes are not a suitable way to make big decisions. Fuck-off with your AI datacenters and opaque algorithms. Coloradans deserve to know how they’re being treated. Anything that complicates that or makes it harder to understand is a tool of tyranny.

Yes, that’s going a bit overboard, but so is hammering me with AI propaganda from the moment I wake up until after I go to sleep every day.

I hate how VPN access is the scaffolding holding the building up making things look normal. You can visit all your normal web sites, you can bypass georestrictions, you can be a little less tracked than you might otherwise be. But what happens when they decide to do away with that scaffolding and we all find out they tore down the house behind it while we were enjoying “normalcy”. Too much of making the web functional depends on vpns and adblocking. We shouldn’t have to do this stuff and Chromes adblocking scandle should impact millions of users all around the world unilaterally removing adblocking from the web. I fear for the day we have a US only internet and a global internet, not just on paper, but in actual practice.

Good for them. If it works, it works. I wouldn’t connect it to the internet though.