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Ephera

@Ephera@lemmy.ml

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Ephera ,

Mozilla has no traditional profit motive. The Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, is a 100% subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, which is legally a non-profit organisation.

So, if the Mozilla Corporation makes a profit, they cannot pay out that profit to shareholders. Practically all they can do with that money, is to pay higher wages or set it aside for future invest in their products.

That does not mean that they cannot stagnate or use money badly. And it does not either mean that they never need to make money. But it does mean that there's no shareholders demanding short-term profit above all else.

Ephera , (edited )

Firefox already supports Manifest V3. Crucially, though:

  • Firefox continues to support Manifest V2 for the foreseeable future.
  • Firefox will not adopt the arbitrary limitation of content/ad blocking rules in Manifest V3, which is what's bad about it.
  • Firefox offers APIs in addition to Manifest V2 and V3, with which more powerful extensions can be built. This is why uBlock Origin has been better on Firefox for quite a while already.

Source for the first two points: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manifest-v2-march-2024-update/

Ephera ,

Eh, they could have written it differently, each time hypothesizing that someone might wonder XYZ, but I appreciate the brevity of this format. And I do not think that the questions or answers are unreasonable.

Ephera ,

This doesn't show individual requests, but it shows the tracker libraries and permission demands: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.alarm.alarmmobile.android/latest/

Does this app itself do the security surveiling or why does it need access to the camera, microphone, location, user movement, biometrics, contacts etc.?

Boeing Will Launch Starliner With Helium Leak (www.extremetech.com)

Boeing and NASA are moving ahead with the upcoming Starliner demonstration launch despite an active helium leak. The launch is now on the books for Saturday, June 1, at 12:25 p.m. EDT. If all goes as planned, Starliner will rendezvous with the International Space Station the following day and return to Earth on June 10. If not,...

Ephera ,

Non-AMP link

Ephera ,

Have they considered submerging the spacecraft, to see where the bubbles come out? 🙃

Ephera ,

From what I've heard of colleagues that chose macOS, it mostly seemed like a pain in the ass. Like, that they can't run the actual software, because they have ARM hardware. Or lots of small differences between macOS and the Linux that we'll deploy to...

Ephera ,

MS Teams actually makes use of WebRTC. That's a standard for VoIP (and similar) via web browsers. Mozilla and Google standardized that a few years ago and implemented it in their browsers, so what Microsoft did, is that they basically shipped a whole Google Chrome to users.

I believe, they did rip some code from Skype for Business for the integration into Windows, though. In the early days, the OS would say that the Teams notifications came from Skype for Business.

Ephera ,

I don't have official information, but I doubt it. They tend to stick as closely to the Chromium experience as possible, with the exception of the ungoogled part, of course. Maintaining Manifest V2 support would also just be a massive amount of work, for which they likely don't have the manpower.

Ephera ,

I think, they just stopped caring about users instead. They've got enough market share. Might as well internet-explorer it for a while.

Ephera ,

It's Chromium under the hood.

Funnily, KDE's early KHTML engine got forked into WebKit, which got forked into Blink, which is at the heart of Chromium. So, we've gone full circle...

Ephera ,

Interesting, I kind of have the opposite problem with composing music. I do need to take a step back from it, to recognize that some new section sounds completely out of place. I guess, the two art forms (or we) might just be different, though.

Ephera ,

When the early European colonizers arrived in the Americas (Christopher Columbus and those who followed), they thought they had circumnavigated the globe and arrived in the lands east of India (which were referred to as East Indies at the time).

So, that's why they referred to the indigenous people of the Americas as "Indians" and the name stuck.

Ephera ,

Waterfox started out as a 64-bit fork, but then transitioned to being Firefox with a few different default settings for better privacy. Then Waterfox got sold to an ad company. Then last year, the solo dev bought it back. It's a bit of a weird history.

Like, ultimately I agree that there's not much of a point to it. It's better to configure Firefox. But it is not anymore just about the 64-bit build.

Ephera ,

I know of Rust, which is pedantic enough to not allow comparing integers to floats directly.

In certain situations, it even disallows making assumptions about equality and ordering between floats.

Ephera ,

Not sure, what blog post you're talking about, but there's only really three things you can be doing wrong:

  • Tons of cloning.
  • Running your application from a debug build rather than release build.
  • All the usual things one can be doing wrong in any programming language. Like, I imagine real-world raytracing is done on the GPU and uses highly optimized algorithms. I doubt a blog post would dive into those depths. And well, any kind of graphics programming is extremely slow, if you don't issue the exact right incantations that the GPU manufacturer optimized for.
Ephera ,

Unfortunately, that's not what it's about.

With Rust's language design¹, one could easily forbid ever comparing two floats via the normal operators (not just for literals), but they decided to allow that nonetheless. I'm guessing, because it would just be too annoying for generic implementations, if you'd always need special treatment for floats.

Rather, what I was referring to, is that they've split partial ordering and partial equality from their total variants. And integers are marked that they can do total equality and total ordering, whereas floats are not.

Honestly, it doesn't come up a lot, but I know for example, if you want to use something as a key in a HashMap, it needs to have total equality.
And in a BTreeMap (basically a binary tree, i.e. keys are inserted in a sorted manner), total ordering is required for the keys.

¹) Basically, comparison is typed and each type needs to opt into comparison with any type it wants to be compared to. So, if you define a new data type, then by default you cannot ask it whether it's equal to or less/more than anything else.

Ephera ,

It's an internet meme culture thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_(comic)

Particularly, the section "Legacy as an internet meme" is relevant.

Ephera ,

If you can find some TVP in the shape of a steak, that stuff is also insane to me.
Like, I'm kind of not qualified to actually compare it to a steak, but my body instantly gave me that vegetarian gag reflex when I first had it, because it has that same chewiness.

And yeah, it's really cheap. You can just have it in your cupboard for an eternity. And to prepare it, you just boil it in salt water / stock for a few minutes, press out the water and throw it into a hot pan to sear it like a steak.
The Maillard reaction does its thing and somehow this chunk of goddamn defatted soy beans does not taste healthy anymore.

Ephera ,

Recall uses AI features "to take images of your active screen every few seconds."

while true
do
    scrot
    sleep 5
done

(I know, what they actually mean is that the AI sifts through those screenshots for you.)

Ephera ,

Yeah, and I mean, even most car traffic doesn't fit into this ridiculous definition. People take their car to just do recreational stuff all the time.

I mean, holy fuck, how else would you get there than via streets in some fashion? Take the helicopter from your roof?

Ephera ,

Project founder Thorsten Försterling tells us that the team is working on a track-installed machine that will be able to lift individual pods off of one rail and place them on the other (without passengers in them at the time), keeping them from all collecting at either end of the route.

What the heck, can't you just have a Y at the end?

Ephera ,

Hmm, so your thinking is they're not allowed to modify the existing tracks at all?

It just seems like building and maintaining a machine that lifts these pods, that's gotta be a magnitude more expensive than a slight change to the rails...

Ephera ,

I'm not saying that it's hugely expensive. I'm just saying that a Y-shaped rail with a switch should be significantly cheaper.

Particularly, moving parts are a pain for maintenance. These kind of systems, you want to operate for 20+ years and the less bearings there are to oil, the better.

Ephera ,

Yeah, that's quite possible, that they offer it for marketing. Maybe also to give municipalities an option to try out the system for a few months and see, if it attracts much interest. If it doesn't, you can just pack up the pods and cranes, and market it to the next city.

I was mainly confused how off-handedly this gets mentioned in the article, as if that was clearly the logical method for moving a vehicle from one place to another...

Ephera ,

I'm definitely willing to believe that they've got monorail-like flanges. That would probably help with stabilizing. But where the hell are you able to see a picture of the wheels? There's a few angles in the video which quickly show the wheels, but I can't actually see much anyways. 🫠

Ephera ,

openSUSE pre-installs IceWM, for example, even if you select a full-fledged DE during setup, so that if your proper DE should ever break, you still have a (very minimal) GUI to do your troubleshooting in.

Ephera ,

They're making it sound worse than it is, in my opinion.

The problem is that it depends on which DEs you mix and match. Some DEs might do catastrophically bad things for other DEs, whereas others don't cause any problems.

Ephera ,

My thought was that it's an obscure joke about the two Washingtons in the USA. Like, the state in the north-west corner is called "Washington" and then there's the capital city of the USA on the east coast, called "Washington, D.C.".

But Washington, D.C., is further south from where the person is placed, so I'm guessing not...

Ephera ,

Can confirm, swimming diagonal is lyfe.

If I'm feeling particularly frisky, I'll sometimes also follow it up with a bit of a drift.

Ephera , (edited )

Difficult to prove whether acupuncture is placebo or not, because you can't really make a control group believe that they've been poked with needles without actually poking them with needles.

But at the very least, you are poking people with needles, so unlike homeopathy, it will have some non-placebo effect. The question is rather whether that's the medicinal effect you're trying to achieve.

Having said that, I've had acupuncture, because my mum dragged me there. I was not convinced that it'd help, yet it did reduce pain. That still does not fully exclude the possibility of a placebo effect, but it seems rather unlikely to me either way.

Ephera , (edited )

Because of the cost of the commute? Or because you expect to get a higher salary when applying for a non-remote job?

Edit: This is a genuine question, by the way, in case that's why this is being downvoted.

Ephera ,

Ah, of course, thanks.

I even used to be bothered by that quite a bit. Now I've been working from home for so long that it wouldn't cross my mind, even if I thought about commuting...

Ephera ,

I'm also hearing this notion for the first time, so there's probably more to it, but I guess at the very least, if you're treating all creatures as friends, you'll also definitely treat women as friends.

Ephera ,

I'm guessing, it won't be offset like that most of the time...? I mean, it is theoretically possible, if that hole isn't round, which is hard to tell from this picture, but that just seems rather inconvenient for a key chain.

Ephera ,

I mean, I won't agree with whatever reason they have anyways, but it feels like they could have followed that up with a second part and that could have been their cash cow (due to lower development cost and higher attention from journalists).

Feels to me like they're optimizing for short-term shareholder payouts, due to the two major flops they had last year, and sacrificing long-term profitability for it.

Ephera ,

It's only been 3 years since Microsoft acquired Bethesda, but I do wonder, if Bethesda on their own would have similarly lost their fucking minds during the pandemic, to build up developer capacity which would obviously not be needed forever.

Ephera ,

Maybe it's not just salad, but a just salad. 🙃

Ephera ,

Eh, my boss formally tells me this, too, but then the finances never allow for security anyways. It's easy to state something like this towards journalists and then never get it down in practice.

Ephera ,

...which often stands at odds with actual security.

Ephera ,

Long experience of producing garbage code...

Ephera ,

Well, that's a breaking change for usability. I'm talking e.g. not allowing any random process to access the clipboard.

Ephera ,

I mean, there is actually leaked source code of Windows XP out there, because, you guessed it, they had a leak of that, too.

But I actually said "garbage code", because I didn't want to say that everything they've ever done is purely garbage. I didn't want to claim that I have particular insight into specifically their code.

I have to assume, though, that their code quality is garbage, because:

  • Lots of MS software is buggy. In particular, all those security issues are bugs, too.

  • They keep backwards-compatibility to just absurd degrees. To this day, you can't create a file that's called "aux", for example, because at some point, they had to block that to retrofit filesystem support into their OS.
    At the very least, this is going to mean they'll have tons of such workarounds and gotchas, which will make it difficult for new devs, but also offer more surface area for bugs/vulnerabilities.

  • Well, and then there's some urban legends. For example, I've heard that the entirety of Windows is in one giant monorepo. I just quickly peaked into a supposed copy of the Windows XP leak and that did look the part...

Ephera ,

As part of these changes, Microsoft will also make its Senior Leadership Team's pay partially dependent on whether the company is "meeting our security plans and milestones,"

Isn't that the default? That the Senior Leadership Team gets bonuses or not, depending on whether they met company plans and milestones? Did they have security explicitly excluded from this?

Ephera ,

I'm guessing, cheaper than Silicon Valley, which is famous for high cost of living and high salaries.

Ephera ,

https://www.enworld.org/media/why-not-both-jpg.52474/full

https://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/

Ephera ,

Oh, yeah, I did notice that, too. It was created a decade ago and hasn't been maintained much. I assume, you can still find torrents of it, though.

Ephera , (edited )

Well, they wrote the "spirit of FOSS" and you pulled out a completely sterile definition, which has no spirit at all.

At the very least, even with that sterile definition, embracing the spirit would mean making all the software you're distributing FOSS. Instead, Google has been doing all kinds of bundle deals and whatnot to ensure that most distributions of their FOSS software come with their proprietary parts.

However, going further in embracing the spirit, particularly the "free software" part of FOSS is idealistic. It doesn't just fulfill that definition to fulfill that definition. Rather, it sees that definition as the baseline, to help ensure that the freedom of users is respected.

AOSP, despite being under an appropriate license, does not respect that freedom.
For example, many users would want their keyboard app (which has access to their typed passwords) to not have internet access. AOSP has a myriad of permissions, but not for internet access, since Google wants their ads to be displayed.

In theory, the license ensures that AOSP can be forked, and Custom ROMs do soft-fork it (i.e. make slight amendments to what Google puts out), but due to how much development Google puts into Android rather than there being a development community, it's effectively not viable for anyone to truly hard-fork AOSP (i.e. take it into a new direction, independent from Google).

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