About $500/person on average for those not up for doing division

It’s a joke about accents

It was shut down a while ago, but apparently the domain and trademarks were sold at auction and the new owner is planning a relaunch of some sort

Who decides what the corporation votes for?

She’s an American conservative/fascist, and this was a speaking tour. The Australian government denied her VISA because she had the “capacity to incite discord”, so the tour was canceled. But the tour was managed through a shell company that seems to have existed for essentially this exact eventuality: There are no refunds because the company is now bankrupt, and the money was successfully grifted.

Captain Picard was bald

I know someone who works for a major insurance company in the US, in the appeals department. I don’t know the intimate details of everything about their job, but one thing I always remembered is if you have an expedited appeal (for a medical emergency), and they’re requesting documents that you don’t send within the 72 hour deadline an expedited appeal has, the denial gets an automatic administrative overturn - the appeal is approved. Presumably for liability reasons, combined with that the company gets fined if an expedited appeal takes over 72 hours to process. Potentially a usable strategy if you have an expedited appeal that’s weak enough to have a chance of the denial being upheld in the end, and they’re also requesting documents. Probably a pretty rare combination of factors though.

But I’ve also been told by them that most denials end up being overturned on appeal in the end. And that they see people appealing denials on a daily basis, where they were denied the absolute stupidest reasons - people who obviously should never have been denied in the first place. Hard to say if this means most denials are bullshit, or if it just means people only bother trying to appeal the most obviously bullshit ones.

While the downturn went from gradual to rapid when ChatGPT released in late 2022, it looks like they’d been on a steady / gradually accelerating decline for a few years beforehand - they lost all their gains from 2012-onward before GenAI really became a thing.

Anyone know why? What was killing StackOverflow slowly before GenAI killed it quickly?

They can pass a bill all they want, but if they’re trying to regulate things like what a federal officer wears while on duty, it’s going to get struck down by the courts, in this administration or any other.

States have virtually no authority to regulate federal agents in that way. That’s why you don’t see laws like that.

“All issues have only one sensible side and the rest are insensible” is not the takeaway from their comment. Some issues have multiple sensible sides. Other issues might have one sensible sides and several nonsense sides. All their last comment did was provide an example of the latter. They seem to take no stance on what type of issue their first example is.

It says you’re bound by “opening and using” the product, rather than “opening or using”. Have someone else open it for you. Then neither of you have done both.

Firefox now includes safeguards to prevent sites from abusing the history API by generating excessive history entries, which can make navigating with the back and forward buttons difficult by cluttering the history. This intervention ensures that such entries, unless interacted with by the user, are skipped when using the back and forward buttons.

Nice

He’s saying they’re wrong for not currently being open.

I think the key to survival and growth of federated platforms is that the onboarding experience for new users be simple and stable. If a new user has to understand what federation is and how it works, then the system is already failing them. Federation needs to be transparent to the fullest extent possible. There’s a lot of value in telling a user “You can sign up on any of these proven-reliable instances, and your choice doesn’t overly matter, because they’re general-purpose and stable, and you’ll still fully interact with users from every other instance either way.” There’s a lot less value in giving them a 30 minute presentation on federation, then overwhelming them with a list of 500 instances to pick from, half of which are hyper-focused on one topic or run by extremists.

At the same time, if they end up being led to an instance that has issues with stability, absent admins, political extremism at the admin-level, or if that instance is topic- or region-specific, or if that instance has defederated from a huge portion of the fediverse, or if that instance just shuts down and stops existing in a few months… Chances are that user’s going to get a bad impression of the platform as a whole, and never come back.

To me it just seems like the instances which don’t offer those issues - the general-purpose instances with long-term support plans, experienced teams, and sane admins - will just naturally end up as big instances, as survival of the fittest. And I don’t see that as an issue at all.

Like, sure, the fediverse is designed around decentralization, but there’s a point where decentralization hurts more than it helps. I don’t think anyone would disagree that if we had maximum decentralization, with every single user self-hosting their own instance, that things would be awful for everyone - and I don’t think anyone would disagree that the opposite, with 100% of users being on one single instance with no alternatives, would also be undesirable. There’s benefit to having consistent user experiences, consistent rules, consistent expectations.

In short, yeah, I think the way forward is having a few flagship general-purpose instances that vacuum up most new users, with a wide plethora of smaller instances that are less general-purpose, or region-specific, or just try out new things with rules and moderation policies.

I do think there should be an extremely simple way (for the end user) to migrate your entire account from one instance to another. Something you could do in just a minute or two.

Thatâ™s⠀rea​lly cool. � Ꭰо уо𝗎 𝗍һі𝗇𝗄 уо𝗎’ӏӏ со𝗇𝗍і𝗇𝗎е ᖯ𝗋о𝗐ѕі𝗇𝗀 ӏі𝗄е 𝗍һа𝗍?

By default they do block quite a bit. The “Standard” tracking protection option in their Settings page says it blocks Social media trackers, Cross-site cookies in all windows, tracking content in private windows, cryptominers, and fingerprinters. They have a strict option with a disclaimer that it may break some sites or content that does a bit more.

So they’re already blocking as much as they reasonably can without affecting legitimate functionality, and they have an option to block even more.

As for “Why offer them anything?”, my guess is pragmatism. They’re a lot more likely to succeed if they propose a system where the users give up nothing but companies can thrive anyways, vs. a system where the users give up nothing and the companies in charge of everything just burn to the ground and die.

I notably don’t have a strong opinion on whether or not I think they’ll succeed with this feature. I think their intentions are pure, though, and that it legitimately offers no privacy risk to users at all. I think the best chance it has is something like government mandates. Maybe there’s also a future where they somehow get Google on board for PR reasons or something. I wish them the best of luck.

I look at it as a pragmatic attempt to work within the system we have to shift the internet away from its current nightmare dystopia of user tracking and information selling, and toward a system where all parties can be reasonably happy, with companies being able to receive aggregate anonymous data that helps them operate efficiently, without compromising even a tiny bit on user privacy.

Editing to actually respond to your question about who Firefox is built for: Definitely the user. But users don’t exist in a vacuum. Mozilla can and does consider the entire ecosystem their products and users exist within, and can take steps to make that ecosystem, the internet, a better place for users. The best part is that their actions often make the internet better for everyone - not just Firefox users.

Nothing here is incompatible with the principles of free software. The feature isn’t for the “sole benefit” of advertisers - it’s beneficial to users specifically because it attempts to shift the paradigm from one where they have essentially no privacy regarding their online activities whatsoever, to one where they give up literally nothing about their privacy.

And they are not selling data - I believe that to be a straight-up lie. I’ve searched extensively to find out if anything is being sold here. I have no doubt at all that if they were, the headlines would be about Mozilla selling user data, rather than about tracking users.

From their FAQ:

The system is designed so that neither the advertisers, nor the websites with the ads, nor Mozilla can ever tell which specific users had their activity contribute to the data being reported.

The current paradigm is that the vast majority of internet users have their activity tracked across a vast majority of websites. It’s that dozens of large companies have access to information about which websites you’ve been to, when you visited them, and what you did there. That they can and do sell this information to other companies, who usually have as their primary goal using that data to somehow extract money from you to them. Users who block tracking like this are a tiny minority.

The new paradigm would be that the companies in question know none of that, and instead get told information like “approximately 7 out of 487 people who saw your advertisement on [x] went on to purchase your product on [y]”.

I would call that pretty paradigm-shifting. The only absurd thing here is that this is somehow being used, loudly and repeatedly, to make it seem like FIrefox is somehow worse for user privacy than its competition.