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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Even of they reduced everything down to just Firefox, Thunderbird, and all in infra to run those products (Mozilla accounts, addons stores, hosting, dev/build services…), as well as continuing to pay for dev time on open source they use/contribute to, and the time their employees put into w3c and other foundation/standards/steering initiatives, I don’t think you’d want to see the cost of a monthly subscription.

    This stuff costs way more than people think it does, and behind the scenes Mozilla does a lot of work (with google, Microsoft, apple) on web standards, and trust me, you want them still involved seeing as each other browser group involved is well… You know… Much worse for privacy generally.

    YouTube premium and kagi aren’t even remotely in the same league for comparison when it comes to the cost and value a “Firefox” or “Mozilla” subscription would be.


  • If Mozilla starts being aggressive to ad blocking, I’ll agree with the common opinion on this post. But for now I’m more less neutral. If the choice is Mozilla dies or they do some ad stuff, I’d rather the latter. Whether the current and former people running Mozilla have made the right decisions or not to get to this point is kind of irrelevant, because people do not want Mozilla to disappear (even if they claim otherwise) because Mozilla is still a major driver of privacy-oriented work in w3c and web in general.

    Aside from that… The only real way to stop ads and tracking, or at least prevent selling and sharing of data outside of the 1st party collector, is a legal path. Whether Anonym/Mozilla is as private as they are claiming, their intent is at least what a realistic legal solution to web tracking would condone that would continue to allow for revenue via ads. There is no way ads will ever go away in a capitalist economy, so it’ll need to do something, blocked or not.


  • I’ve also had struggles with arch with printing, more so than debian-based distros. EndeavourOS is where i did the most troubleshooting, but its also a problem on my manjaro install (whicj ill move to endeavour… Someday) But learning how to use cups directly was worth it.

    Currently, printing via GUI is like 5ppm and very low dpi so… Not great. But at least I can print for the casual use cases out of the box and could work out a terminal solution if I needed to in the meantime.

    I don’t print much so haven’t put time into getting things working better for bigger jobs, but printing is definitely going to be a more hit/miss experience with arch. Its looking like better GUI experience for my specific model will require a driver from the AUR or scripting the Debian install from brothers drivers site. But my model is apparently not as widely used and just hasn’t gotten as much community support I guess



  • The central point of that article is certinally valid. Something that was worked on for a while with broad congressional support and public support getting vetoed isnt ideal for a democratic process. No resolution on issues is not a good thing since another 3-6-12 months of no regulation for a theoretically netter bill to work through the system will allow for continued abuse by AI behemoths. Newsom is a corpo dem, so idk what people expected, anyway.

    I don’t buy into the AGI FUD. These are word calculators. But these tools are being hooked up to all sorts of things they shouldn’t be hooked up to and the lack of broad privacy regulation in the US puts LLM usage that handles sensitive data and/or decisions firmly into dangerous territory. Business decisions made by irresponsible management with no regard for data privacy or human safety are already a massive problem that actively cause harm, and hooking current AI tools onto these processes only seems to make the problems worse, especially while AI usage is in this gray space where no one wants to take responsibility for the outcomes.




  • Personal experience bias in mind: I feel like owners and managers are less interested in resolving tech debt now vs even 5 years ago… Business owners want to grow sales and customer base, they don’t want to hear about how the bad decisions made 3 years ago are making us slow, or how the short-term solution we compromised on last month means we can’t just magically scale the product tomorrow. They also don’t want to give us time to resolve those problems in order to move fast. It becomes a double-edged sword, and they try to use the “oh well when we hit this milestone we can hire more people to solve the tech debt”… But it doesn’t really work that way.

    Its also possible I’m more sensitive to the problem now that I’m in them lead/principal roles rather than senior roles. I put my foot down on tech debt a lot, but sometimes I can’t. Its a vicious cycle and it’ll only get worse the longer the tech sector is stuck in this investor-fueled forever-growth mindset.

    Too much “move fast and break things” from non-technical people, not enough “let’s build a solid foundation now to reap rewards later”. Its a prioritization of short term profits. And that means we, the engineers, often get stuck holding the bag of problems to solve. And if you care about your work, it becomes a point of frustration even if you try to view the job as just a job.







  • Manifest v3 extensions work in Firefox, too. Its just the new thing. Its way easier to build cross-browser extensions with, too. V3 is actually a good thing overall, as its led to a lot of extensions being available for Firefox when the devs might have just targeted chrome. Way more feature parity between browsers with v3.

    Chrome dropping support for v2 doesn’t merit a response from Firefox because nothing changes for Firefox users and they’re not going to drop support. Any one who actually cares (and they should) will move to Firefox on their own, so why waste advertising money on that? Eventually Firefox and any other browsers who want to allow stuff like ublock will probably have a way to do the same tasks in v3 (and the Firefox Dev team has said as much in blog posts for ages), then it’ll just be a feature that doesn’t work in chrome. V3 just simply doesn’t have the API that ublock uses in v2.

    There have been discussions for years in the w3c standards group about this whole shitshow and this is one the chrome team have basically refused to budge on despite all the other browser teams. Its honestlu a mirscle they delayed it as long as they have. This was originally supposed to happen at the start of 2023.

    Chrome is kinda like a country with a overrule veto vote at the UN when it comes to w3c working groups since they can just do whatever they want anyway, and nothing will change until they no longer have that power. That said, browser feature parity is at an all time high recently and its because all the browser teams are working together better than ever. There are just these hard limits chrome chooses to stick to.