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Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

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  • 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.

  • 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.

    It's just a versions list. And I'm mostly joking. Rather that the "feel" of using Windows between 2000 and XP didn't seem to change much. (I prefer 2000)

  • Spotify X Mod APK

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    Niemand hat geantwortet
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    spankmonkey@lemmy.worldS
    I'm aware of what you are saying and disagree. You apparently take disagreement personally as most of your comments in that post to various other users are hostile too. Please be aware of how you are approaching discourse.
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    it becomes a form of censorship when snall websites and forums shut down because they don’t have the capacity to comply. In this scenario that's not a consideration. We're talking about algorithmically-driven content, which wouldn't apply to Lemmy, Mastodon, or many mom-and-pop sized pages and forums. Those have human moderation anyway, which the big sites don't. If you're making editorial decisions by weighting algorithmically-driven content, it's not censorship to hold you accountable for the consequences of your editorial decisions. (Just as we would any major media outlet.)
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    I think both peace and war are profitable. But those that profit from war may be more pushy than those that profit from peace, and so may get their way even as an unpopular minority . Unless, the left (usually more pro peace) learns a few lessons from the right and places good outcomes above the holier than thou moral purity. "I've never made anyone uncomfortable" is not the merit badge that some think it is. Of course the left can never be a mirror copy of the right because the left cannot afford to give as few fucks about anything as the right (who represent the already-haves economic incumbents; it's not called the "fuck you money" for nothing). But the left can be way tougher and nuancedly uncompromising and even calculatingly and carefully millitant. Might does not make right but might DOES make POLICY. You need both right and might to live under a good policy. Lotta good it does anyone to be right and insightful on all the issues and have zero impact anywhere.
  • One-Click RCE in ASUS's Preinstalled Driver Software

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    Yeah, Lemmy has a VERY large Linux user base, which means Windows discussions tend to get mocked or dismissed. But the reality is that Windows is still the dominant OS for the vast majority of users, by leaps and bounds. Linux runs the world’s infrastructure, but Windows is what the average user boots up every day. “This exploit only works on the average user’s OS. And it only works if the user clicks the “yes” button to escalate permissions, which they have been conditioned to always do without question. Obviously this isn’t an exploit to worry about.”
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    It's not new technology you numpty. It's not news. It's not a scientific paper. Wireless energy transfer isn't "bullshit", it's been an understood aspect of physics for a long time. Since you seem unable to grasp the concept, I'll put it in bold and italics: This is a video of a guy doing a DIY project where he wanted to make his setup as wireless as possible. In the video he also goes over his thoughts and design considerations, and explains how the tech works for people who don't already know. It is not new technology. It is not pseudoscience. It is a guy showing off his bespoke PC setup. It does not need an article or a blog post. He can post about it in any form he wants. Personally, I think showcasing this kind of thing in a video is much better than a wall of text. I want to see the process, the finished product, the tools used and how he used them.
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    I remember an Arthur Clarke novel where a space ship needs water from the planet below. The easiest thing is to lower cables from space and then lift some ice bergs.
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    https://archive.org/details/swgrap