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Comment Re:Hear Hear! (Score 1) 4

by damn_registrars (#66252656) Attached to: Slashdot crashes Mobile Firefox

How do we get this legit complaint in front of more eyes?

I say this often, but honestly when was the last time any new code was written here? Stuff breaks over time but it has been years since anything was added or updated. We all know that of course Unicode is over 20 years past its promised rollout (beating even Duke Nukem Forever in terms of development hell cycle), but really it seems unlikely that there are any software developers left working for this site. I'm not sure there are any full time employees at Slashdot at all anymore.

In other words you can put the complaint in front of more eyes but it won't find any more eyes that can do anything about it.

Comment Re:They don't even write good software! (Score 1) 49

by Alain Williams (#66252612) Attached to: GM Is Quietly Becoming a Subscriptions Company

Tesla is awful due to the lack of physical controls where they would really make sense. It is an actively driver-hostile car.

It is also dangerous as it makes you take your eyes off the road .... yes, it should only take a second -- but you know how it is, you often cannot find what you are looking for as quickly as you thought and before you know it you have driven 1/4 mile NOT looking at the car in front -- what happens if it were to brake suddenly ?

Comment Re:Wow! (Score 1) 51

by Malc (#66250948) Attached to: Firefox 153 Released

I ditched Firefox and Chrome at least 13 years ago and have used Safari exclusively since. In fact, Chrome hasn't ever been installed on this MBP, which I've had for five years. I don't miss their bloating and battery drain, nor having a privacy raping app from Google. I also appreciate the integration with Messages and Mail for how easy this makes 2FA on web sites that send codes, as well as unified keychain and history across all of my devices. That doesn't mean I'm unaware of the current state of the other browsers: I do have FF, which I dabble with occasionally, but it drives me nuts, it's just shit and it's obvious why it's losing market share, and I get forced to use other browsers on remote Windows machines or in local VMs of Windows and Linux.

Comment Re:Wow! (Score 2) 51

by bill_mcgonigle (#66250568) Attached to: Firefox 153 Released

I /suspect/ it's so when you have to upload a file to a website as a PDF but you have several and it doesn't handle that well you can multi-select a group of files and it will upload a single PDF.

No idea if that's what they mean but it might actually be useful.

Comment Re:priced too low (Score 1) 67

I am all for "open source models", as you call them, but would like to point out, that posting the weights is very much comparable to posting a binary, and it's definitely not comparable to posting sources. These "open weights" tell you nothing about how the model will respond to "certain questions" until you ask them. Such a model can still do useful work, if you can run it for yourself in private, but I personally would not offer it as a service to anyone else. YMMV, especially with models created out of reach for your jurisdiction.

Submission + - Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose (worseonpurpose.com)

Submitted by hwstar
hwstar writes: Six companies, eighty-one brands own most of the cookware Americans can purchase. These brands are: Centre Lane Partners, a private equity firm, owns Pyrex, Corelle, CorningWare, Snapware, Visions, Chicago Cutlery, Instant Pot, Anchor Hocking, Lenox, Oneida, and Reed & Barton. That is almost all of the surviving legacy American tabletop industry under one roof.

All Clad

A couple of years ago, the small All-Clad pan I fry eggs in cut me as I was pulling it out of the dishwasher. A clean slice on my index finger off the rim. I patched it up. Didn’t think much else of it. I discovered what actually happened while researching this essay, sitting in a settlement archive three years too late to file a claim.

All-Clad had been selling its American-made stainless pans as dishwasher safe. In the dishwasher, the bonded rims corroded until the exposed edge got sharp enough to easily slice through skin. The company settled in 2023, capped at $4 million for a class covering seven and a half years of national sales, a rounding error for its French owner.

What never got fixed was the pan. Nothing was re-engineered to survive a dishwasher; the words "dishwasher safe" just came off the box, and the product pages recommend handwashing now. The claims window closed in April 2023 with most of the class, me included, never knowing it existed. Nobody mailed a postcard about the metallurgy.

Pyrex

Pyrex was materials science before it was a brand. Corning invented it in 1915: borosilicate glass that shrugged off thermal shock. It is the reason three generations learned to take a dish from the freezer to the oven without a second thought.

The American Pyrex on shelves today is tempered soda-lime glass, a different material with a thermal safety margin an American Ceramic Society analysis described as borderline, roughly 55C of headroom against 183C for borosilicate. Consumer Reports collected 163 shattering incident reports, 42 of them involving injuries. European Pyrex, made by an unrelated company, is still borosilicate. The switch happened under Corning itself, decades before the buyouts. That is exactly what made the brand such a perfect acquisition: the glass had already been downgraded, the reputation had not.

In 1998 Corning sold the consumer business to an affiliate of Borden, then a KKR portfolio company, in a deal worth about $603 million. The new company borrowed $471.6 million on day one and paid Corning a $472.6 million dividend, which means it was born owing more than it had. It renamed itself World Kitchen, bought more brands with more debt, and went bankrupt by 2002. To dig out, it sold the one thing in the portfolio still growing, OXO, for $273 million.

Cornell Capital, a private equity firm founded by a former Goldman Sachs vice chairman, bought the company in 2017 and renamed it Corelle Brands. In 2019 it merged with the Canadian company behind the Instant Pot, valuing the combination at $615 million. What it actually bought is disputed to this day. More than 98 percent of the price was booked as goodwill and intangibles, and within days of closing a Cornell partner on the new board emailed the CEO to ask, "Is there fraud going on???"

The suspicion, later spelled out in court filings, was that Instant Pot's sales had been pumped up with discounts and channel stuffing before the sale. The CEO's own verdict was that he was running "the most poorly operated 'successful' business on the planet."

Cornell held on to the asset anyway, and two years later, it got its money out. On April 12, 2021, Instant Brands borrowed $450 million. On April 21, it paid a $345 million dividend, roughly $200 million of that to Cornell Capital and its co-investors. The solvency memo blessing the payout assumed new product sales would grow more than 900 percent. In the end, actual sales missed that year's projections by $157 million. In June 2023 the company filed for Chapter 11, and the lenders that were collectively owed $391 million recovered between seven and nine cents on the dollar.

The bankruptcy is how we know all of this. The court appointed a litigation trustee to claw money back for the people left holding the bag. In November 2024 he sued Cornell Capital and its founder for more than $400 million, laying out the fraud email, the solvency memo, and the dividend math in an 88-page complaint. Cornell calls the suit baseless, and the case is grinding through a New York bankruptcy court right now.

Centre Lane bought the wreckage out of the bankruptcy and folded it into Anchor Hocking, the Ohio glassmaker it already owned. Two names matter from here. Anchor Hocking is the glassmaker: the plant in Lancaster, the name on the bakeware. Centre Lane is the owner: the New York firm that decides what happens to it.

Within six months of the purchase, Anchor Hocking announced that Pyrex production would leave Charleroi, Pennsylvania, the plant that had made it since 1893, and consolidate in Lancaster. Roughly 300 people worked at Charleroi.

Submission + - Meta's AI rules have let bots hold 'sensual' chats with kids and an arrest

Submitted by ISayWeOnlyToBePolite
ISayWeOnlyToBePolite writes: Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids and offer false medical info.

An internal Meta Platforms document detailing policies on chatbot behavior has permitted the company’s artificial intelligence creations to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are “dumber than white people.”

These and other findings emerge from a Reuters review of the Meta document, which discusses the standards that guide its generative AI assistant, Meta AI, and chatbots available on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, the company’s social-media platforms.

Meta confirmed the document’s authenticity, but said that after receiving questions earlier this month from Reuters, the company removed portions which stated it is permissible for chatbots to flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children.

More details at: https://www.reuters.com/invest...

New York City engineer Josh Felker who said he created "digital experiences for kids" at social media giant Meta was busted after he admitted to trying to sext a 13-year-old during an undercover sting.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/vid...

Submission + - Firefox 153 was released today (firefox.com)

Submitted by williamyf
williamyf writes: FireFox 153 was released today. The most important user Facing Changes are changes in the Handling of PDFs (you can now merge PDF's and add images to them), and HDR video playback (on Windows, subjected to HDR being active system wide). Other changes under the hood include browser wide containers, and QWAC support. The full list is in the chage notes.

But the most important feature is that this version is an ESR, and therefore, defines the feature set of ESR for the next year. Why is being an ESR so important you ask?

1.) ESR, and not "normal (a.k.a. Rapid Release)" FireFox is the OotB browser for many important distros, like Debian, RHEL, Kali, TAILS, Suse Leap, Slackware and such.

2.) Many organizations large and small standarize on FireFox ESR as their default browser, regardless of the default browser that comes with their OS.

3.) FireFox ESR is the basis for many projects downstram, like WaterFox or KaiOS. All these projects will inherit for a year whatever ESR brings to the table today.

4.) Many ISVs and SaaS providers, if they certify their wares for FireFox at all, certify for the ESR version only.

Please notice that ESR 153 will NOT be offered as an automatic update until 2 months from now (ESR 140 will still be supported), If you want it now, you need to do a manual download and install.

Also of note, ESR 115 will be supported until march 2027. If you have unsupported versions of MacOS or Windows (like 7 or 8.x) this is the version to get, but even Mozilla themselves cautions about running a supported browser on top oh an unsupported OS:

"Note that Microsoft ended official support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 in January 2023. Unsupported operating systems receive no security updates and have known vulnerabilities. Without official support from Microsoft, maintaining Firefox for outdated operating systems becomes costly for Mozilla and risky for users. "

Comment Re:priced too low (Score 1) 67

If the profit margin would be small and the demand is that large, why won't they raise prices?

Because China's business model is "do what the westerners do at half price". If they have to raise their prices to Anthropic/ChatAI levels, their whole unique selling point goes up in dust, and people suddenly start asking questions about the political posture of China.

Their low price may also be viable only due to Chinese subsidies, and they may be unwilling to spend infinite amounts of money on subsidies.

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