Recovering skooma addict.
Just think of all the juicy benefits of replacing journalists with machines. They’ll never stumble or cough while presenting the news, they’ll never call in sick, never age, never get mad as hell and decide to not take it any more, never resign from the editorial board in protest no matter what garbage you tell them is the news. Machines are just better suited to the job, it’s inevitable.
Too long to read? I get it. Here’s the summary. Download Firefox.
Yes. One option is to download it from here: https://librewolf.net/
Isn’t this basically just the old trick of estimating (x * y) as (x + y - 1) when x and y are somewhat close to 1?
I missed the Internet Archive yesterday when @pluralistic@mamot.fr casually mentioned “Keppler illustrations for Puck” as if we’d all know what that meant and the best-looking link that came up on search was to a collection of them there.
… but you know, it’s not difficult to think of possibilities. They could have a shiny new line of business providing hosting, spam detection, admin, support, moderation, and other services for whatever new and improved flavour of fedi instances they can create in accordance with all the principles they used to talk about. They could use their marketing team, their money and connections, to become the provider of choice for corporations, governments, and NGOs who don’t yet realize that they need their own instance.
Would’ve been worth a try. Instead, after so much fanfare, they ran a small mastodon instance for a little while and then cancelled the project. I suppose it’s likely that the same kind of fate will befall the new ad tracking stuff before too long.
Not really. It’s just an aside for the bean-counters.
It serves here as an example of what an Internet without ads might look like. Mozilla has the kind of resources that could’ve really helped its development if they’d been capable and determined enough to succeed in turning whatever crazy project they had in mind when they launched mozilla.social into something practical. If they’d built something good it could have earned them much goodwill and prestige, maybe brought in a little money somehow or other, and gone some way to ridding the Internet of the infestation of adtech that currently afflicts it.
Meh. It’s not a problem of scale. It’s a problem of we have no idea how the fuck to do that. Scaling up existing techniques is neither necessary nor sufficient.
Spare a moment to think of the poor technofeudalist serf working hard to put food on her family.
I think the fediverse has a better chance of doing more good, and Mozilla should’ve stuck with it.
Mozilla: For the foreseeable future, there’s a lot of money in advertising, and we want some of it. It’s all over the Internet. Why shouldn’t some of the profit go to people like us, people who wish things were different even while bravely facing the harsh reality that there is no other choice but to devote ourselves to commercial advertising?
We know that everyone in our community will hate the idea, but surely this too is a sign that we are on the right path. By doing unpopular things, we demonstrate the courage that’s needed to save the Internet from the kind of future where Mozilla can’t get a piece of the biggest market on the Internet, the only one that matters, the market for advertising.
You’d be correct to point out that not all of them waste energy like Ethereum did until later in 2022 and Bitcoin still does, but wrong to pick Monero as an example of one that doesn’t.
If you can’t handle the shocking reality of someone choosing unusual pronouns to refer to themselves, fediverse may not be the social media for you.
Whether or not Mozilla chooses to issue some kind of meaningful statement about what happened beyond the boilerplate “oops, it was an error” is not up to Gorhill.
AI seems like a possibility. I find it slightly easier to believe that someone in management was stupid enough to replace human reviewers with bots than that someone in a position to decide what gets accepted had never heard of UBO and didn’t realize that it’s an important one.
Either way they really ought to explain themselves.
It’s not “handy.” It’s badly-written arrant clickbaity tendentious anti-Firefox garbage. Mozilla does plenty of stupid things. I do not understand this desire some people have to invent more. It appears that many of them have simply decided based on Mozilla’s now-discontinued efforts to improve social media that Mozilla is too “woke” and therefore the enemy, or something like that.
It looks like your opinions about Linux are outdated and need an update.
The consequences for users of this thing in itself are fairly minimal for now. It’s the consequences for Mozilla which are something of a disaster.
On the one hand, Google sucks. On the other hand, if people are unable to a) understand how those two snippets are not contradictory, and b) read at least one very short simplified-for-laymen Mayo Clinic article about the topic before thinking they’ve learned anything at all about medicine, it’s hard to see the problem as being primarily due to Google. There is something deeper, and worse, going wrong when people habitually take that kind of extreme shortcut to thinking that they know the right answer about almost anything, and it has little to do with whether any one-sentence snippets they’re given are biased or accurate.