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Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

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  • 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)

  • Did you read the thing?

    The fact that it's aiming to be stable doesn't mean it is. It's still a work in progress unlike other browsers.

  • 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.

    Ok but XP was literally 2000 with a prettier default theme

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    No, I don't mean prompting users. Typical ways to increase conversion rate are locking popular features behind the subscription (like you need premium account to comment), making some content available only to premium users or limiting the amount of content you can access as a free user (like only 2h per day). So far I'm still watching videos on youtube without even creating an account and without ads (ad-block).
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    Not our. i talk, and you talk. it is our discussion. It’s a discussion you are trying to have i am not trying to have, i am having it. here you are, replying to me. why are you trying so hard to prove that a discussion is not a discussion? it does not make sense. I labeled as a layman’s guess. yeah. and since i am more knowledgeable than you in this particular regard, i contributed some information you might not have had. now you do and your future layman's guess can be more educated. that is how the discussion works. and for some strange reason, you seem to be pissed about it.
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    I’ll probably never trust anything they’ve touched until I’ve taken it apart and put it back together again. Me too. But the vast majority of users need guardrails, and have a different threat model. Even those that also care about privacy, if they just want a solution that comes by default, this adtech 'fake' or 'superficial' solution does provide something. And anything is more than nothing.
  • 85K – A Melhor Opção para Quem Busca Diversão e Recompensas

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    Oh I agree. I just think is part of the equation perhaps the thinner and lighter will enable for better processor? Not an AR guy , although I lived my oculus until FB got hold of it. Didn't use it ever again after that day.
  • OpenAI plans massive UAE data center project

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    TD Cowen (which is basically the US arm of one of the largest Canadian investment banks) did an extensive report on the state of AI investment. What they found was that despite all their big claims about the future of AI, Microsoft were quietly allowing letters of intent for billions of dollars worth of new compute capacity to expire. Basically, scrapping future plans for expansion, but in a way that's not showy and doesn't require any kind of big announcement. The equivalent of promising to be at the party and then just not showing up. Not long after this reporting came out, it got confirmed by Microsoft, and not long after it came out that Amazon was doing the same thing. Ed Zitron has a really good write up on it; https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/ Amazon isn't the big surprise, they've always been the most cautious of the big players on the whole AI thing. Microsoft on the other hand are very much trying to play things both ways. They know AI is fucked, which is why they're scaling back, but they've also invested a lot of money into their OpenAI partnership so now they have to justify that expenditure which means convincing investors that consumers absolutely love their AI products and are desparate for more. As always, follow the money. Stuff like the three mile island thing is mostly just applying for permits and so on at this point. Relatively small investments. As soon as it comes to big money hitting the table, they're pulling back. That's how you know how they really feel.
  • Apple Watch Shipments’ Continuous Decline

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    i mean as a core feature of a watch/smartwatch in general. garmin is going above and beyond compared to the competition in that area, and that's great. But that doesn't mean every other smartwatch manufacturer arbitrarily locking traditional watch features behind paywalls. and yeah apple does fitness themed commercials for apple watch because it does help with fitness a ton out of the box. just not specifically guided workouts.