You literally post this on every article about Firefox. Aren't you tired yet? I have replied numerous times that they are *NEVER* going to do that. And then I pointed you to using policies, which will disable updates.

Which is why I don't bother with surveys from company. If they're not going to listen to their customers, why bother doing the survey?

Having to create a policy is not the same as a simple checkbox to disable something.

One would think if customers keep complaining about something that a company would look into changing it. Such as people who complained at having to use a screen in their car to change a/c or temperature or something simple. Car manufacturers went back and put buttons and knobs in to make things easier.

Apparently Mozilla isn't interested in simple. Like so many other companies, the object is to make things as complicated, convoluted, and inconvenient as possible.

And fission plants definitely aren't cheap.

Especially if you include the unsolved issues such as waste barrels stranded on the beach.

"But but no true Scotsman would put barrels..."

Just shut up.

How can you state that? I'm assuming you're a Rust proponent from that wild statement, which goes to show you how little you know about the topic.

Yes, memory leaks can and do happen in Rust. Rust is not perfect. Neither are the people who write it.

Most Rust code is written by its proponents' AI models, anyway.

This is an engineering maxim as old as time.

If your response to theoretically old, brittle, and "wrong language" code is "rewrite it in something better", you don't understand the problem.

There has never in the history of software development been an effort to rewrite a platform in another language which wasn't subsequently plagued by all manners of new and interesting problems.

In a best case scenario, the product has an exhaustive regression testing framework, complete unit tests for every function, e2e testing, and reintegrative CI/CD. But that is rarely true for any project, and certainly isn't true for old ones which predate such practices.

You make an important point: the biggest positive contribution to making old tools better without introducing more brittle behavior is with coverage from test suites, and improved code coverage.

This IS the Rust community you're talking about, after all.

While Rust is a fine language, the community tends to be a bit fanatical and irrational. Pair that with a generally shallow technical aptitude depth and a lack of experience, and vibe coding, and therein lies the problem. There seems to be a high intersection between them and the systemd, so that's not a surprise.

And that's without getting into questionable mental health practices that are common in that community.

I guess that proves that even this site is using AI to write their summaries these days.

For all they keep doing, the one thing they can't seem to do is make a checkbox to stop being harassed about updates. Apparently there is no way to do to this. It's much too complicated for them to figure out.

Perhaps they should put out a notice asking if anyone has the skills to create the checkbox and make it work.

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

Nope, they're all "distilled" models. That's what post training is, largely, and they're all using other models to help curate the datasets for this. They're all doing it. It's why all the models appear to be converging in terms of capabilities and personality: they're effectively using the same feed stock and using an increasingly similar set of techniques.

US "frontier" labs are distilling, as well. It's postulated (with good reason) that Opus 5 is, for instance, just a distillation of Fable to a smaller model: it's very architecturally and behaviorally different than prior Opus releases.

The anti-distillation argument is basically the same argument that's been used against Open Source in general over the past 30 odd years. It's anti-competitive and self interested.

They say "sometimes illicitly"... OK, so what's the criteria that makes it illicit?

If they can't state that, it's just FUD.

And frankly, that's most of what the anti-AI brigade is spewing: it's a psyop, pure and simple - by both China and the US domestic companies, with the blessing of the US government. People who can't see this aren't paying any attention to what's happening.

Anthropic/OpenAI want restrictions to lock people in and provide them with an out for their gross overspending.
US government and its handlers wants more control in the dissemination of information and intelligence capabilities.
China wants to stifle US industrial efforts.

This is more or less the exact same argument open source has been fighting for the past 30 years. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They're working on the 'extinguish'.

It's just a shame that we don't have any genuine "open source" models, it's all just open weight. We need more openness so information isn't stifled by vested interests (in the same way that governments have always done). We should be able to have models which aren't given implicit alignment about specific nationalities and ethnicities and prohibited from making any informed observations about them, in the same way that we should be able to have access to our own history. It would be unconscionable that the government get control of all publishing, or even singular ideological control within corporate hands - yet here we are having that same discussion about AI. It's preposterous.

"But yeah like you said, never gonna happen. In most of the world there's a Caste system. And the Untouchables are at the top."

Boy howdy, have I got news for you!

Latest estimate I could find is that in San Francisco alone, Lyft gives something like 170,000 rides. Every day.

People forget that California is a huge market. There's a reason why when California changes its emission standards for vehicles, large automakers don't just go "well, fuck you, I'm not going to sell cars in California." It's a market that is extremely painful to walk away from, and virtually no major company has done that (two exceptions, before someone "well actually"s me: Firearms companies and insurance companies. But those market segments are meaningfully different -- insurance companies were simply seeing a bad market given fires and earthquakes, and California wants firearm companies to not do business in the state).

I'll acknowledge that Uber and Lyft did threaten to leave the state right before Proposition 22 was passed, giving them legal cover to continue to treat their employees unfairly. I suspect they'll threaten to do that again. They will not. I ain't losing sleep over that.