Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
A few years ago, maybe a few months after moving to the bay area, a guy from my high school messaged me on linkedin. He was also in the bay, and was wanting to network, I guess? I ghosted him, because I didn’t know him at all, and when I asked my high school friends about him, he got some bad reviews. Anyway today linkedin suggests/shoves a post down my throat where he is proudly talking about working at anthropic. Glad I ghosted!
PS/E: Anthro Pic is definitely a furry term. Is that anything?
I thought about the "anthro pic" too, but it feels like a low hanging fruit since the etymological relation of anthropic and anthropomorphic (from ancient Greek ἄνθρωπος) is so obvious.
Enjoy this MoreWronger cosplaying as Barney Stinson
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a4tPMomzHhCunwqLX/you-can-just-wear-a-suit
"Even teenage delinquents and homeless beggars love it. The only group that gives me hateful looks is the radical socialists."
Last time I wore a suit I kept track of the way everyone around looked at me and five of them looked hatefully. The first one was reading Lenin and nodding approvingly. The second one was trying to covertly plant a comically oversized microphone with Russian markings and a hammer and sickle on it. The third one was handing out militant union agitprop and advocating for a good work strike among transit workers. The fourth one was wearing a Zhōngshān suit (which is technically also a type of suit, so that was quite hypocritical of him) and proudly proclaiming to be Maoist Third Worldist. The fifth one I made up just to feel a little more persecuted so you can imagine the proof of their radical socialism by yourself.
Ah yes, socialists. Famous for wearing only identical jumpsuits with their ID numbers on the back next to the picture of Lenin. Or something I don't know what they think socialists believe anymore.
so Firefox now has terms of use with this text in them:
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
this is bad. it feels like the driving force behind this are the legal requirements behind Mozilla’s AI features that nobody asked for, but functionally these terms give Mozilla the rights to everything you do in Firefox effectively without limitation (because legally, the justification they give could apply to anything you do in your browser)
I haven’t taken the rebranded forks of Firefox very seriously before, but they might be worth taking a close look at now, since apparently these terms of use only apply to the use of mainline Firefox itself and not any of the rebrands
The corporate dickriding over at Reddit about this is exhausting.
When you use Firefox or really any browser, you're giving it information like website addresses, form data, or uploaded files. The browser uses this information to make it easier to interact with websites and online services. That's all it is saying.
How on Earth did I use Firefox to interact with websites and services in the last 20+ years then without that permission?
Luckily the majority opinion even over there seems to be that this sucks bad, which might to be in no small part due to a lot of Firefox's remaining userbase being privacy-conscious nerds like me. So, hey, they're pissing on the boots on even more of their users and hope no one will care. And the worst part? It will probably work because anything Chromium-based is completely fucking useless now that they've gutted uBlock Origin (and even the projects that retain Manifest v2 support don't work as well as Firefox, especially when it comes to blocking YouTube ads), and most Webkit-based projects have either switched to Chromium or disappeared (RIP Midori).
related, but tonight I will pour one out for Conkeror
NGL I always wanted to use IceWeasel just to say I did, but now it might be because it's the last bastion!
Sigh. Not long ago I switched from Vivaldi back to Firefox because it has better privacy-related add-ons. Since a while ago, on one machine as a test, I've been using LibreWolf, after I went down the rabbit hole of "how do I configure Firefox for privacy, including that it doesn't send stuff to Mozilla" and was appalled how difficult that is. Now with this latest bullshit from Mozilla... guess I'll switch everything over to LibreWolf now, or go back to Vivaldi...
Really hope they'll leave Thunderbird alone with such crap...
I often wish I could just give up on web browsers entirely, but unfortunately that's not practical.
Yeah...that could be a real deal breaker. Doesn't this give them the right to MITM all traffic coming through the browser?
legally, it absolutely does, and it gets even worse when you dig deeper. Mozilla is really going all in on being a bunch of marketing creeps.
I hate how much firefox has been growing to this point of being the best, by a smaller and smaller margin, of a fucking shit bunch
after Proton’s latest PR push to paint their CEO as absolutely not a fascist failed to convince much of anyone (feat. a medium article I’m not gonna read cause it’s a waste of my time getting spread around by brand new accounts who mostly only seem to post about how much they like Proton), they decided to quietly bow out of mastodon and switch to the much more private and secure platform of… fucking Reddit of all things, where Proton can moderate critical comments out of existence (unfun fact: in spite of what most redditors believe, there’s no rule against companies moderating their own subs — it’s an etiquete violation, meaning nobody gives a fuck) and accounts that only post in defense of Proton won’t stick out like a sore thumb
@self @BlueMonday1984 I really wish I hadn't moved to Proton - something I did partly because they had a presence here, and seemed to be a Mastondon sort of business.
I would change again, but that is difficult.
@self @BlueMonday1984 For those who missed it: https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
The brilliant minds at the orange site have discovered what's stifling research: Academics don't know how to use JSON! Surely, forcing every graduate student to go through a webdev bootcamp is the solution.
Tim Burners-Lee
(snerk)
From elsewhere in that thread:
The physics of the 1800s had a lot of low hanging fruit. Most undergrads in physics can show you a derivation of Maxwell's equations from first principles, and I think a fair few of them could have come up with it themselves if they were in Maxwell's shoes.
Lol no
old lecturer at my maths-for-chemists* course used to say something like this before exam: "Please don't try to invent new maths, I won't stop you of course, but it's a sign of great hubris to think that you'd outdo three thousand years of development in four hours. Just learn beforehand, it'll be easier"
* a bit of linear algebra and calculus, just enough to get absolute basics of group theory as needed in spectroscopy and to solve one-electron Schrödinger equation for intro to computational chemistry
You know how we feel despair when our subjects du sneer break containment? We have hit the big leagues now seems the Democrats are now aware of NRx. Non zero chance our sneerings get read by AOC.
somehow it makes it worse to see people getting radicalized about this. it makes the fact that we're in the nightmare scenario acutely real
I'd feel better about this if I believed the democrats were willing to do anything about it
You think it was supposed to make you feel better?
But yes, ow god yes. I'm staring at the USA going 'wtf'.
Hey, all I’m saying is, abject despair is worse than despair with a lil’ hope
Aww thanks, kind of you to say that.
Good point
I hear you. I feel weirdly guilty about seeing this coming for so long.
