Yeah, it was top notch, right up there with Nova for a year or two. Oh how the great have fallen!

I think we’ll also see more of a differentiation between things grounded in open source ideology, like the FSF, and more corporate open source. I can’t blame coders for any ideological impurity because I don’t imagine that “buy me a coffee” button exactly fills up their bank vault with gold coins. That said, I appreciate the free software heroes who visualize what the world should be and work towards that. Maybe in the coming decade, we’ll see FOSS hardware make some leaps and bounds. I choose to remain optimistic, but the software world is threatening to catastrophically implode at the moment and it’s a bit hard to think positive.

Software like Firefox is designed in a modular way for humans to be able to reason about its correctness. It is complex, but not arbitrarily complex.

So take out the free VPN and Pocket and it’ll be less complex! ¯\(ツ)/¯

Nova was so customizable. I used those same group, tab features a lot over the years. Categories like: Network, Games, PIM, Storage, Images, Comms, etc, can take a lot of clutter out of your main drawer, not to mention Nova let you customize the visuals to a extensive point.

I remember using one called Apex around the days of early Nova and the two of them would swap who was in the lead and who was the better launcher. I haven’t found an open source launcher that gives me what I want.

I’m going to support local anti-authoritarian punk and hip hop until they do away with this.

There are a lot of angry, religiously brainwashed, abused, hurting, failed by the education system, willfully ignorant, racist, sexist, authoritarian, bandwagoning, sociopathic, narcissistic, confused, regressed, selfish people out there. That’s why I don’t think we’ll fix our country without first fixing our relationships with our neighbors. Getting Grandma Geraldine to log off Facebook and touch grass is probably a good thing. But can we wake everyone up to the technofascist plan in time? I think we’re very close to finding out and it makes me uncomfortable.

All the sheeple say “baaaaahhhh”!

There’s a lot of people on the Mozilla hate train, and they do deserve a bit of ire for some of their more puzzling decisions. All I wanted from Firefox was a configurable browser with sane defaults, that lets me block ads and does all the normal browser things without being a total black box of corporate telemetry and profiling. To a large degree Firefox has been the best mainstream browser for people who can’t dance with the devil and use Chrome. In many aspects, it has made better decisions than Chrome.

With that said, I didn’t want Pocket, I didn’t want AI, and I’m mildly annoyed that this sort of thing is in the default build. It feels like a windows installer asking you to install 10 additional programs, but the ticked boxes are greyed out. I just want a browser, no crypto wallets, no ai assistants, no built-in mail client, no biometric scanning.

Firefox has been around long enough to have been both god tier and trash tier at different points. I don’t think the AI focus is going to go well for Mozilla. I’d like them to focus on browser stuff.

I’ve started to realize that early gen products are often less enshittified, even if they are frequently rough around the edges, and can often be hacked into a useful state unlike the newest hardware. By a few gens in, nearly everything is a giant plastic paperweight that only wants to phone home, download “updates” all the time, and probably needs multiple SSO sign ins and a subscription just to work. I’ll keep my old Kindle 4th gen with KOreader until it breaks.

We need a “right of retrieval” where,once encoded, it must be free to decode and play back. If we’re going to allow proprietary media, all the prices should be clear and up front. No charging on the back end after everyone has already encoded their baby vids to avc; no changing prices after the fact.

People will literally take any excuse not to pay attention while driving. All this iPad on wheels stuff has gone too far. I was driving a newer car recently, in a foreign country, on unfamiliar roads, and had to figure out how to use the defrost VIA THE FUCKING TOUCHSCREEN while driving. A moment longer an I would have been driving with my head out the window trying to find a space to pull over. Give me a spedo, tachometer, and some knobs for the air and I’ll be set. What beats the good old three knob (direction, fan speed, temp) combo? It’s practically perfect. All these distractions should be banned. If there is a radio, steering wheel controls should be mandatory and they should test them by putting average folks in the driver seat and asking them to perform basic functions. If it’s not intuitive, if it’s not distracting, it shouldn’t get manufactured.

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I agree. I’ve thought a lot about how valuable signing a simple message with a key can be. In an age where machines can appropriate your likeness, how do you accumulate and shed reputation, how do you prove it was you? One low tech version was taking a photo with a newspaper to prove you are a real person. Another is exchanging a public key with a person in real life so you can have reasonable certainty that communications signed with that key are legit. Since this boils down to denying what our eyes have seen, governments and businesses who are very keen on control reality are making their plays. Even identifying yourself cryptographically is only a temporary fix to maintain an existing identity. Your kids will be profiled and mimicked from day one. This whole slippery slope we’ve been sliding down lately seems very foreseen. It feels like these traps were engineered a very long time ago.

I think education is the absolute most important thing for a functioning post-truth society. Kids need to smell shit from 20 miles away because the world is full of traps for your mind same as it is for your wallet and your physical body. We also need to be able to verify and trust our tech stack. We need to pass down the stories of the times common people lost and the times common people won. We need to read and discuss philosophy. We’ll also have to tackle American religion head on. Also excessively addictive entertainment designs. We are a deeply flawed society and I’m not sure where we should start except for taking some of our time back so people actually have the opportunity to think about these things.

It would be pretty cool. I doubt EVs enjoy being ground up in a hardcore woodchipper.

…and one of those giant pneumatic crushers. I bet if you crushed enough cars they’d work a little harder to keep it from happening.

No real mention of the parents other than a line about how they’re lining up to sue too. When I was a kid, my parents made me log every moment I spent in front of the computer in a book along with what I was doing. I got into some stuff, but I also got sat down and talked to a few times. Many of my friends had to share phones with siblings. The computer was in a public space and we were all told to never use our real name online. Where did things go wrong and why?

I dislike Meta an FB a lot, but I think it’s ridiculous to make them responsible for every kid in America. Isn’t there a confirmation dialogue that says you’re not allowed to use it if you are under 13? The parents gave them a tool that can be used to look up >>>almost anything<<<. Thats like handing your kid a metaphorical RPG and sending them out the door to go play. Making sure kids have guidance and help in developing media literacy is at least partially the parents job.

Having said that, I do think there is a lot of other bad stuff META did that should have already put them out of business. In my opinion, they’re obviously a bad actor but blaming them infantalizes everyone else. Poor little Americans, powerless against the big bad Meta. Also, why is it okay to manipulate adults? If anything, these feeds should be boldly labeled as “does not reflect reality”, or “this content has been algorithmically selected to be addictive, take frequent breaks, touch grass”

I read that the one of the differences between Organic Maps and CoMaps is that the server side code for CoMaps is FOSS, while some of the server side code for Organic Maps is not. I hope I understood that correctly. I have Organic Maps installed because it was in the GrapheneOS app store.

If CoMaps has open server-side code, could I create my own map tiles with the best bike routes in my area and self-host them for myself and my friends? I find that google, bing, OpenStreetMap, etc all suck at recognizing good bike routes in my area and hand-curated routes are much better. I’d prefer to hand-curate the best routes color coded based on perceived safety and whether they are daytime only routes or acceptable for nighttime travel. Is something like this doable with CoMaps?

"You have selected ‘Caucasian Christian’. Permanent light mode has been activated and you can no longer look up porn on Sunday.

You have selected “Arabic Muslim”, sensor access has automatically been granted to determine when you are facing Mecca. If you have too many friendly fire incidents in CoD, the US will deploy reaper drones to your IRL GPS location.

On a more serious note:

There’s been a lot of talk about protecting kids, but none about protecting grandma from scams and AI misinformation if her systemd age field indicates she’s 65 or older. Why is that? Is it because kids don’t have rights, so who cares if by protecting them we prevent them from developing a shred of digital literacy? Or is it because the over 65’s can vote and kids can’t?

So in other words, “Sure we built the people-crushing machines, but we didn’t wire them up or turn them on.”

I’m sure the trees appreciate the AI sicofancy. /s

Protip, you can use your hostsfile or your router to block google so you don’t get tempted. If you may have to bypass, you can use some blocking extensions to allow an override after a nag screen chastising yourself for being weak willed. I rarely reach for the goog nowadays because I have a whole workflow I go through before giving in.