Basically all of the AI companies get away with violating basically all IP laws and norms, and manipulating the PC hardware market to the detriment of consumers. I believe that’s what he meant by “getting away with murder”. As a point of comparison to this relatively minor kerfuffle.

I hate the culture war stuff. I also hate that the Rust core utils rewrite was done under an MIT license instead of GPL.

A gain of memory safety with a poison pill of permissive licensing is no gain at all.

I wouldn’t mind a web browser being part of a broader system of trusted software, but shoving an AI chatbot into my web browser does not make me trust it more.

What have they decided based on market data?

I think in this particular case at least Mozilla decided to introduce something that their users didn’t want without asking, and our backpedaling and are being mocked for having done the thing in the first place.

Frankly I don’t know what’s going on in their collective brains. What Firefox needs more than anything else is refinement. There are no features that it’s missing as far as I can think of.

Absolutely insanity.

It’s kind of crazy that the company whose name is synonymous with the product category is going into bankruptcy. It would be like if Skype, which is synonymous with video calls, was out competed by every other video call platform.

I use Windows at work and it reminds me of how much I love Linux.

I think it’s certainly possible for us to move away from Windows and Mac, but convincing people isn’t easy. The end users would be easiest to convince because most of them are just using the limited array of applications required for the business and don’t much care what’s under the hood. The people who really need convincing are the reat of local IT support and maybe vendors.

I think the path to broader business adoption of Linux runs through IT support.

Holy shit that’s fantastic.

Because when you talk about protection or safety for children or animals or [insert vulnerable group here] you can short-circuit a lot of people’s reason/skepticism.

AI creating jobs by requiring more human intervention for validation of previously reliable forms of information?

Okay cool, I’m here for it.

I think this kinda points to why AI is pretty decent for short videos, photos, and texts. It produces outputs that one applies meaning to, and humans are meaning making animals. A computer can’t overlook or rationalize a coding error the same way.

I mean, if I felt I could control the little computer in a smart fridge without expending excessive effort to do so, I might be interested in getting one myself. Absent other concerns, a tablet integrated into my fridge could be handy to monitor the appliance, make quick or even automated grocery list updates, etc. Not earth shattering, but still marginally useful.

Wait, you can access it via IMAP?

And just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical.

My concern is that they’ll include the equipment for spying on you, and just enable it later.

I bought a Hue because it said “no online account required!” Later they changed their mind.

I want the promise plus open standards and a base of libre software. I want them to tie themselves to the mast.

TFM is best found in the form of the man (manual) files, which you can see for any given program by running:

$ man program_name

Archwiki is good too, even of you don’t run Arch

There are plenty of people who are sociopathic around you right now. What they usually lack is the power/opportunity to do harm. Under capitalism the crimes of capitalists are made normative and legal. All sociopaths are human, and depite what some may think, you can’t just punish/shoot your way out of a systemic problem.

Surveillance, yes. By forcing you to maintain control of a physical token they can more easily associate you with the account.

They are as human as anyone else. We should be cognizant of that. They are human beings within a human system. Move beyond anger and hate, and ask what must be done to end suffering and injustice.

For all the quips about guillotines, the first fix needs to be removing their excess wealth, not their heads.

Sony so mad at Cox for not cutting off someone’s Internet for downloading they’ll take it to the SCOTUS, but they won’t even use the frankly abusive laws they already have access to to just sue the end user? What is even going on?