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Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

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  • I truly couldn't give a single solitary fuck what opinions the devs of software I use have, no matter what that opinion is. As long as they're not trying to shove that opinion down my throat via their software, their opinions literally have no effect on me whatsoever. You either, whether you want to believe that or not.

    Exactly. How FOSS devs spend their time and money isn't my business, what is my business is foundation financials and whether the software is reliable and safe to use.

    I strongly disagree with Lemmy devs on politics and how they run their instances, but that doesn't impact me so whatever.

    As long as ladybird devs don't go out of their way to be jerks to trans people, I'm good. The worst I've seen is rejecting pronoun changes in code comments and docs, which isn't a big deal.

  • with a project named ladybird you'd think otherwise.

    I suppose, unless you've watched King of the Hill.

  • I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I'd rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don't want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

    Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I'm not going to take that into consideration, because that's not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

    Lastly, all other things equal, I'd rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let's be honest, especially developers) won't want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that's reasonable or not, it's hard to deny. It's certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.

  • Thanks for the context - I still intensely dislike the "political" reaction, but people can learn and change. I also don't like that Canadian arch-jackass Tobi Lutke is a major supporter of the project; he's a bit like Brendan Eich. I'll reserve judgment until the browser launches. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it.

    Brendan Eich

    I honestly don't understand the hate here. I get that he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that's terrible, but I've also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla. I honestly think he would've been a better CEO at Mozilla because he's interested in the tech. His largest problem was making a personal contribution with his own money to an unpopular cause, and someone dug it up looking for dirt.

    Isn't that exactly how people should act? Leave your politics at home and work well with others. I work in a diverse group with a mix of immigrants, likely gay people, atheists and religious types, Trump supporters and critics, and even a couple furries. None of that matters and we work well together. In fact, most of the turnover we've had has been over compensation because our company has been stingy recently, and they all say they wouldn't have considered leaving otherwise.

    You can disagree on very important things and still work well together, it's called professionalism. I dislike Eich's views, but I believe he had way more professionalism than his loudest critics.

  • i can offer some context to that, but first let's clear up that all the documentation has since been updated to use second-person pronouns, making it both friendlier and gender neutral. kling is fully on-board with that change.

    the issue came in right after the big wave of people doing drive-by "code of conduct" PRs. there was a plague of accounts that only did that, and had no other connections to either projects or people. this is obviously a form of political activism, and while it's not malicious, it does get in the way for volunteer developers of big open-source projects who are usually already swamped with work they're not paid for. so creating these giant documents that have not been pre-discussed with the team doing the project is disruptive and misguided. having a code of conduct is good, but it needs to match the project.

    anyway, in the middle of this a big PR comes in which changes shitloads of documentation. the standard PR view doesn't show each change, it just shows "n files changed, +n lines -n lines", and a description talking about "gender-neutral language". now, kling is not a "typical" developer. he's a former addict who started doing serenity and ladybird as therapy/rehab. i don't know what that's like, but i imagine it means you don't have a lot of mental overhead for things you don't want to do. so kling saw the description and the massive change set and didn't want to deal with it.

    it took a while but he was convinced to change it. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.

    This is very valuable context.

    For citations, the only references I see to "pronouns" in their github project is in a section called "Human language policy" in CONTRIBUTING.md (link). Here's the relevant part:

    In Ladybird, we treat human language as seriously as we do programming language. The following applies to all user-facing strings, code, comments, and commit messages: ... Use gender-neutral pronouns, except when referring to a specific person.

    That sounds pretty cash-money to me.

    There's one additional reference in a pull request discussing whether or not to use "we" when referring to recommendations of the engineering team (as in "we recommend" vs "it is recommended"). Minutia.

    I'm not as interested in litigating this matter than I am in putting it to bed (along with any and all definitive citations and evidence such that I can refer back to this comment thread in the future when the question inevitably comes up again.)

  • the ladybird devs have a history of major transphobia though

    Right, so what does that have to do with ladybird

  • the ladybird devs have a history of major transphobia though

    If that's true, shame on them. But it doesn't mean their browser isn't good.

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    Excuse you, I don't have a problem.

  • Why not just run a community build of Firefox, like IceCat?

    If Firefox doesn't keep up with web standards, neither will any of the forks

  • I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I'd rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don't want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

    Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I'm not going to take that into consideration, because that's not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

    Lastly, all other things equal, I'd rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let's be honest, especially developers) won't want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that's reasonable or not, it's hard to deny. It's certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.

    This article appears to be pretty even-handed.

    My assessment? Get fucked, Ladybird. I don't want to trust my web security to people who think like this, especially since web security is very political and will only become more so as the Trump administration continues.

  • i can offer some context to that, but first let's clear up that all the documentation has since been updated to use second-person pronouns, making it both friendlier and gender neutral. kling is fully on-board with that change.

    the issue came in right after the big wave of people doing drive-by "code of conduct" PRs. there was a plague of accounts that only did that, and had no other connections to either projects or people. this is obviously a form of political activism, and while it's not malicious, it does get in the way for volunteer developers of big open-source projects who are usually already swamped with work they're not paid for. so creating these giant documents that have not been pre-discussed with the team doing the project is disruptive and misguided. having a code of conduct is good, but it needs to match the project.

    anyway, in the middle of this a big PR comes in which changes shitloads of documentation. the standard PR view doesn't show each change, it just shows "n files changed, +n lines -n lines", and a description talking about "gender-neutral language". now, kling is not a "typical" developer. he's a former addict who started doing serenity and ladybird as therapy/rehab. i don't know what that's like, but i imagine it means you don't have a lot of mental overhead for things you don't want to do. so kling saw the description and the massive change set and didn't want to deal with it.

    it took a while but he was convinced to change it. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.

    Thanks so much for this layout of everything. I wasn't even aware of what was going on, and your comment put it all together. Cheers!

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    Called it

  • I can't keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don't get worse!

    I've been very happy with Waterfox so far. Made with the Gecko Engine but not maintained by Mozilla.

  • I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I'd rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don't want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

    Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I'm not going to take that into consideration, because that's not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

    Lastly, all other things equal, I'd rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let's be honest, especially developers) won't want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that's reasonable or not, it's hard to deny. It's certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.

    like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc

    That's valid tbh. Nice Muslims say Ilah. Mean monotheists say Allah.

  • I can't keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don't get worse!

    forks cant survive without firefox unfortunately

  • unless they start curating things like censoring specific words or searches.

  • This article appears to be pretty even-handed.

    My assessment? Get fucked, Ladybird. I don't want to trust my web security to people who think like this, especially since web security is very political and will only become more so as the Trump administration continues.

    After reading this, in particular the "The Facts" section, my understanding is: he got pulled into making a political statement about gender and he didn't want to get involved with that.

    Yet again, that "crowd" didn't like Ladybird's refusal to play, therefore that "crowd" does what they're known best doing: cry high and loud on the internet playing the victim.

    In a sense, that "crowd" shoved their political agenda down his throat, and that's the only thing I personally find reprehensible here.

  • let's ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000

    That feels like a dangerous argument;

    • 2000 = NT 5.0
    • XP = NT 5.1
    • XP x64 = NT 5.2
    • Vista = NT 6.0
    • 7 = NT 6.1
    • 8 = NT 6.2
    • 8.1 = NT 6.3
    • 10 = NT 6.4
      (Later NT 10.0 then 1507 for July 2015 when they made the switch to ‘agile’.)

    Unless you are prepared to argue that everything since has just been an updated version of Vista.

    Hot take. Under semantic versioning everything after vista has been in essence a new version of vista.

    Going from NT 5.x to 6.x was a major jump.

    The reason why Vista had no/terrible drivers was because they went from an insecure one driver bug crashed the whole system model to more secure isolated drivers that don’t crash the whole system model. Developers had to learn how to write new drivers and none of the XP drivers worked.

    They went from a single user OS with a multi user skin on top, to a full role based access control user system.

    They went from global admin/non-admin permissions to scoped UAC permissions for apps.

    Remember on Vista when apps constantly had that “asking for permissions” popup? That was the apps not using the 6.x UAC APIs.

    Given the underlying architectural situation everything since Vista has been vista with polish added (or removed depending on how you look at it)

    Things will go beyond vista when a new major release with new mandatory APIs shows up.

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    mozilla sucks

  • mozilla and firefox need to learn more away from ai and more towards ethical not for profit governance. be the opposite of big tech and stand for the internet as a public utility and force or good and decency. instead of going ai bro, y'all need to stand up against racism and discrimination while pushing internet for everybody, free of profits.

    Companies should be allowed to make a profit, you need that to cover bad years, invest in the future of the company, etc. A company without profit (unless it is a non-profit) will not survive.

  • Misogyny and Violent Extremism: Can Big Tech Fix the Glitch?

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    It is interesting that you are not answering my point... Good work
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  • Album 'Hysteria' Out Now

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    I thought we were going to get our share of the damages
  • Catbox.moe got screwed 😿

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    archrecord@lemm.eeA
    I'll gladly give you a reason. I'm actually happy to articulate my stance on this, considering how much I tend to care about digital rights. Services that host files should not be held responsible for what users upload, unless: The service explicitly caters to illegal content by definition or practice (i.e. the if the website is literally titled uploadyourcsamhere[.]com then it's safe to assume they deliberately want to host illegal content) The service has a very easy mechanism to remove illegal content, either when asked, or through simple monitoring systems, but chooses not to do so (catbox does this, and quite quickly too) Because holding services responsible creates a whole host of negative effects. Here's some examples: Someone starts a CDN and some users upload CSAM. The creator of the CDN goes to jail now. Nobody ever wants to create a CDN because of the legal risk, and thus the only providers of CDNs become shady, expensive, anonymously-run services with no compliance mechanisms. You run a site that hosts images, and someone decides they want to harm you. They upload CSAM, then report the site to law enforcement. You go to jail. Anybody in the future who wants to run an image sharing site must now self-censor to try and not upset any human being that could be willing to harm them via their site. A social media site is hosting the posts and content of users. In order to be compliant and not go to jail, they must engage in extremely strict filtering, otherwise even one mistake could land them in jail. All users of the site are prohibited from posting any NSFW or even suggestive content, (including newsworthy media, such as an image of bodies in a warzone) and any violation leads to an instant ban, because any of those things could lead to a chance of actually illegal content being attached. This isn't just my opinion either. Digital rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have talked at length about similar policies before. To quote them: "When social media platforms adopt heavy-handed moderation policies, the unintended consequences can be hard to predict. For example, Twitter’s policies on sexual material have resulted in posts on sexual health and condoms being taken down. YouTube’s bans on violent content have resulted in journalism on the Syrian war being pulled from the site. It can be tempting to attempt to “fix” certain attitudes and behaviors online by placing increased restrictions on users’ speech, but in practice, web platforms have had more success at silencing innocent people than at making online communities healthier." Now, to address the rest of your comment, since I don't just want to focus on the beginning: I think you have to actively moderate what is uploaded Catbox does, and as previously mentioned, often at a much higher rate than other services, and at a comparable rate to many services that have millions, if not billions of dollars in annual profits that could otherwise be spent on further moderation. there has to be swifter and stricter punishment for those that do upload things that are against TOS and/or illegal. The problem isn't necessarily the speed at which people can be reported and punished, but rather that the internet is fundamentally harder to track people on than real life. It's easy for cops to sit around at a spot they know someone will be physically distributing illegal content at in real life, but digitally, even if you can see the feed of all the information passing through the service, a VPN or Tor connection will anonymize your IP address in a manner that most police departments won't be able to track, and most three-letter agencies will simply have a relatively low success rate with. There's no good solution to this problem of identifying perpetrators, which is why platforms often focus on moderation over legal enforcement actions against users so frequently. It accomplishes the goal of preventing and removing the content without having to, for example, require every single user of the internet to scan an ID (and also magically prevent people from just stealing other people's access tokens and impersonating their ID) I do agree, however, that we should probably provide larger amounts of funding, training, and resources, to divisions who's sole goal is to go after online distribution of various illegal content, primarily that which harms children, because it's certainly still an issue of there being too many reports to go through, even if many of them will still lead to dead ends. I hope that explains why making file hosting services liable for user uploaded content probably isn't the best strategy. I hate to see people with good intentions support ideas that sound good in practice, but in the end just cause more untold harms, and I hope you can understand why I believe this to be the case.
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    I think a generic plug would be great but look at how fragmented USB specifications are. Add that to biology and it's a whole other level of difficulty. Brain implants have great potential but the abandonment issue is a problem that exists now that we have to solve for. It's also not really a tech issue but a societal one on affordability and accountability of medical research. Imagine if a company held the patents for the brain device and just closed down without selling or leasing the patent. People with that device would have no support unless a government body forced the release of the patent. This has already happened multiple times to people in clinical trials and scaling up deployment with multiple versions will make the situation worse. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2818077 I don't really have a take on your personal desires. I do think if anyone can afford one they should make sure it's not just the up front cost but also the long term costs to be considered. Like buying an expensive car, it's not if you can afford to purchase it but if you can afford to wreck it.
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    Oh this is a good callout, I'm definitely using wired and not wireless.
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    kolanaki@pawb.socialK
    Internet access should be a utility like electricity and water until all three, along with housing, medicine, and food, can be free to all.