I want them to bring back Slashdot subscriptions. I'll happily pay to support Slashdot, but I uncompromisingly reject advertising. Not to mention, the few times the newer ads have gotten through uBlock filters they've been atrocious.
I know the site has been on life support for a decade but subscriptions seem like a pretty easy way to make some money.
Clippy
Cortana
Copilot
Maybe they need to pick a new letter. Bring back Microsoft Bob?
I think the word Republican in the above should be spelled with a small r
To be fair, they capitalized all sorts of random words in the 1700's.
Nicely said.
A favorite quote by Christopher Hitchens, describing Martin Luther King, Jr:
This does not in the least diminish his standing as a great preacher, any more than does the fact that he was a mammal like the rest of us, and probably plagiarized his doctoral dissertation, and had a notorious fondness for booze and for women a good deal younger than his wife. He spent the remainder of his last evening in orgiastic dissipation, for which I don’t blame him. (These things, which of course disturb the faithful, are rather encouraging in that they show that a high more character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.)
Even though it sounds brusque, the first time I read it I found it to be incredibly encouraging and uplifting. And Hitchens was no opponent of personal vice, so it's really not quite the insult some might take it as. There are no perfect humans - every one of us is a physical creature with unique and personal baggage bestowed on us by our flaws, circumstance, and the times in which we live. The whitewashed saints often presented for emulation are uninteresting and useless as genuine role models.
Exactly this. Airlines are now essentially banks with a side hustle flying planes.
I want them to fix the JavaScript related memory leaks in Mobile so I don't have to kill it several times a day. I guess that's too much to ask since this has been going on for literally years.
I've used Firefox Beta as my primary browser on my Android phones for years and have never encountered this. Maybe there's an issue with some specific features used by sites I don't visit. Doesn't prove anything but I guess one anecdote deserves another.
> Sure, do this instead of better tech
Regardless of what you think of the new mascot, do you really think the same people responsible for drawing pretty pictures of foxes are the same ones designing "better tech" and writing code and fixing bugs? Groups of people can do more than one thing at a time.
And I'd guess this is also an attempt to raise some money and awareness to the browser. At this point it doesn't matter how great Firefox "tech" is, they have lost the popularity context against Chrome and Chromium knockoffs, and will never get it back. Google will do and spend whatever it takes to keep Chrome on top, so Mozilla is probably looking for ways to at least retain what they have and keep the lights on.
Whether artificial intelligence systems will end up being a positive or a negative force for humanity is still an open question. But we might find ourselves one day with AI embedded at every layer of our existence, living lives of toned down and diluted humanity with only our dreams for escape. Although I am not yet convinced of this worst case scenario, I believe it is important that we as software developers have at least the option to opt out of that system altogether, to be able to continue hacking, working, and tinkering in a space of our own in total absence of artificial intelligence systems, and share this luxury with our users.
I designed a software license for this purpose. It is called the Human Only Public License, or HOPL for short.
While a license like this is probably entirely unenforceable and goes against a strict open source ethos (both traits shared with the problematic "do not evil" JSON license), the appeal of continuing the tradition of one human creating something specifically for other humans is understandable. It also gives those developers who are concerned with the negative impact AI tools may have on software development as a field and career a way to push back.
The license is also published on GitHub.
Critics are always looking for deeper meaning, subplots, unexpected plot twists, and philosophical integrity. Regular people usually just want to see a fun movie.
Good movies have both.
The two goals are very different
Hard disagree. There's absolutely nothing preventing a fun movie from having decent writing (i.e., "treat your audience with some basic respect") aside from cheap studios and hack producers. Michael Bay and JJ Abrams should have been warnings, not instruction manuals.
Sometimes critics focus on silly or tangential things in movies that average people don't care as much about, but critics are also much less willing to let incoherent plots and repeated non-sequiturs pass just because CGI and EXPLOSION.
I'll wait for Sam Altman to reassure me that there is no bubble.
Ironically, Altman agrees that AI is a bubble:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks the artificial intelligence market is in a bubble, according to a report from The Verge published Friday.
“When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” Altman told a small group of reporters last week.
“Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes,” he was quoted as saying.
Altman appeared to compare this dynamic to the infamous dot-com bubble, a stock market crash centered on internet-based companies that led to massive investor enthusiasm during the late 1990s. Between March 2000 and October 2002, the Nasdaq lost nearly 80% of its value after many of these companies failed to generate revenue or profits.
Clever, because they know it is all monopoly money once the AI crash comes.
Not just once the crash comes, but this sort of thing will help cause the crash.
Cory Doctorow talked about some of it in a recent post that really helped me grok what I've been feeling about the inevitable AI bubble collapse.
The data-center buildout has genuinely absurd finances – there are data-center companies that are collateralizing their loans by staking their giant Nvidia GPUs as collateral. This is wild: there's pretty much nothing (apart from fresh-caught fish) that loses its value faster than silicon chips.
That barely scratches the surface of the funny accounting in the AI bubble. Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.
That's par for the course in AI, where it's normal for Nvidia to "invest" tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. It's the same chunk of money is being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).
AMD giving 10% of itself to OpenAI is almost entirely symbolic as OpenAI will turn around and "spend" that money on something like GPU hardware, probably AMD products. AMD is just paying itself via OpenAI and both companies will book it as revenue to try and obscure the colossal losses on AI spending.
It's all monopoly money laundering, and it's going to crash hard.
Netscape was not suicidal.
Some would argue that rewriting the entire browser - the company's crown jewel - from scratch was a suicidal move. At least in hindsight.
I used Netscape and was a total fanboy when version 6 came out. It was terrible and like many users, I stuck with version 4.x hoping they'd improve version 6, but eventually gave up and moved to IE 6, which itself was a vast improvement over IE 5.
Netscape's fate should be a warning to any dev teams arguing to throw it all out and redo everything from scratch (see also: Winamp 3). It can be done but the odds are not good.
It’s almost like having a little angel on your shoulder
What a horrific, and probably intentional, mischaracterization. Calling AI a "little angel" presupposes that it has the best interests of the affected humans guiding it, while the truth is that these systems are absolutely going to be designed to benefit their corporate overlords first, foremost, and always.
How long until Microsoft inks a deal with Delta so that its agents prioritize Delta when someone asks it for help booking a flight? Or directs inquiries about food nutrition and health towards companies that the packaged foods corporate lobbyists group promotes? Sends requests to watch a show to Hulu instead of Netflix?
Perhaps each request will trigger a real-time auction the same way Google does for ads, with the winner taking control over your agent. Every task you might request of an AI agent is going to be susceptible to subtle (or overt) manipulation, sponsored by undisclosed parties.
AI is not immune to enshittification. I'd argue it's going to take that path almost immediately because (1) it's a completely opaque system that nobody can peer into, (2) it's unbelievably expensive to operate and there will soon be a massive push to start recouping those costs, and (3) the tech bros are comfortably in with the Trump administration, which already tried to make it illegal to pass laws regulating AI.
You will never make fresh food cheaper than manufactured food, because the latter is shelf stable and can be made from poor quality ingredients which are cosmetically unsalable. Ultra-processed foods are cheaper everywhere.
This is comparing apples and applejacks. If you only care about cost per calorie, people may as just drink canola oil and take a daily vitamin pill. What we really need to do is look at the total cost of living when eating real foods vs packaged trash "food". If we were honest about adding up the related external costs of illness, healthcare, discontent, disability, etc and look at it more holistically, I believe the "cheaper" shit food starts to lose out fast. But nobody wants to do that. Hell, we can't even get people to agree that being a fatass is unhealthy.
And the idea that it costs a lot to eat healthy is a myth that needs to die. Some things are more expensive, sure, but you can make a healthy meal with cheaper options as well. The truth is that people are lazy and addicted to the results of 50 years engineering to create the mouth porn that line most store shelves.
Permanent UTC now.
Easy to say when you live in or near London (which as I recall, you do).
There's nothing wrong with local time, and there are good reasons humans have used it literally for as long as we've had clocks. You are trading one mental adjustment -- "what time is it where Bob lives?" -- with a different one -- "what time is it where I am when the sun is directly overhead?" Guess which one you need to worry about more often?
And if you think adjusting to time zones is annoying now when traveling, imagine needing readjust your entire mental model of the solar day - where sunrise, noon, and sunset are on the clock. But hey, I guess you didn't need to adjust your watch. Hurray?
Local time is a "human sized" solution to the problem of timekeeping while UTC is a planet-sized solution to it.
"The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do." -- Gregory Bateson
