Just a stranger trying things.

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  • 143 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • I fully understand this to be a controversial take, but I think it is important to acknowledge that not all advertisement is the same. While I dislike all forms of advertisement, I only take issue with non ethical ones, which are based on surveillance. I don’t have any ethical concern with contextual advertisement which is how some search engines provide advertisement, such as giving advertisement for food when searching for food.

    But it is also critically important that extensions remain a part of the browser, to give a certain level of control to the person navigating the web instead of just allowing any website to freely track our activities.

    I don’t know what the path forward is for Mozilla. Google is unlikely to be able to fund Mozilla the way it has until now as a recent ruling which has deemed google as a monopolistic actor clawing at its default status everywhere it can. This was a major founding source for Mozilla. They need to figure out financing and while it is easy to criticize, we must also recognize the challenge it is to give sustainable and important funding sources to Mozilla. I really wish I had an answer… Can it somehow depend exclusively on its users for donations? Should It sell support services? Should it branch into more lucrative areas? If yes, which ones? It may need to be a combination thereof but for now, I’m personally blinded. We need to get together on this, because if we can’t help Mozilla, can we help anyone who might fall into this situation?








  • I question why anyone would have a monopole or exclusive right to a topic of conversation :)

    But I actually disagree due to another fundamental point: USA politics are in fact involving and impacting the rest of the world. The USA leads NATO and has previously threatened to drop it, as well as the WHO, they get involved (sometimes violently) in foreign affairs (afghanistan). They are a huge economic market to which many foreign companies try to sell or get funding. They are the biggest stock exchange (still today I guess).

    The influence of the USA exceeds its borders since quite a while now. It is only normal for people to feel involved, despite not being from the USA. Same with Russia, same with China.


  • In the deep learning community, I know of someone using parquet for the dataset and annotations. It allows you to select which data you want to retrieve from the dataset and stream only those, and nothing else. It is a rather effective method for that if you have many different annotations for different use cases and want to be able to select only the ones you need for your application.