I’m not worried about anything.

Or… let them stay on Reddit. I like lemmy much better, and it’s possibly due to the people that are not present and the lack of commercial interest.

I’ve never paid for a browser in my life.

Much like electricity, lazy boards seek the path of least resistence. What’s easier, building a world-class browser and properly marketing it and maintaining profitability, or just setting your default search engine to “Google.com” and cashing the massive check?

At this point, there’s very few people even left at Mozilla that could even reverse the trend. Go back and look at their past few years. Other than some minor activity to Firefox, almost all their initiatives are little side missions that last for a few years and then are sunset.

Stuck like Pocket, Mozilla Social, Firefox Send, Firefox OS, etc. The list goes on and on. They invest heavily in some flash in the pan initiative and then ax it off a few years later.

The problems at Intel haven’t even begun. When a big company does layoffs like that, there’s a certain amount of institutional knowledge that just evaporates.

There are going to be a large amount of dropped balls at Intel and this is just one of them.

Sadly, I think instead of the market responding and Intel going under, Intel will mutate into a government subsidized technology company. At least for the present moment, they serve as an example of what could be domestic manufacturing.

To me, their attitudes strongly resemble Blackberry just prior to the iPhone coming out. They have a certain amount of arrogance and are resting on past glories. It’s pretty clear that just cranking up the wattage and shipping a new product isn’t a path they can walk forever.

It’s a shame that Intel was actually on a plan to get things fixed up. Their former CEO pay Gelsinger had told them they had to endure some years of pain before things would be better. Unfortunately, the board was not so tolerant and kicked him out before the plan was fully realized.

Their board has some really questionable members on it too, so all around not a very good situation. Probably the only thing in Intel’s favor is that starting a new microprocessor company isn’t just something you do in the basement, so they have some room to turn the ship around.

So much of the AI stuff we see today are boards reacting and worrying about being “left behind” in AI. In many cases, the goal is not to deliver value. The goal is to be able to attach a little sticker that says “AI” to their products to excite the shareholders.

Unfortunately in this case, some of the largest companies in the world haven’t been able to figure out how to run AI services at a profit.

This could change any day if some more efficient hardware arrives, but until then, most of the software world is just crossing their fingers it becomes profitable one day while they light dollar bills on fire in their datacenters.

If this isn’t “bubbleish” behavior I don’t know what is.

Mozilla is no longer about making a great browser. Mozilla is about making sure their Google bucks come in each year without fail. They don’t work for consumers anymore – they work for Google.

Throughout the years, the market share of Firefox has shank and shank and their C-Suite has continued giving themselves raises.

Mozilla Inc. has been very sick for a long time. It’s a shame that one of the last pieces of honest competition for web browsers belongs to them, because I’m not sure how much longer they will be able to shamble on like this.

Everyone knows a bubble is a firm foundation to build upon. Now that Trump is back in office and all our American factories are busy cranking out domestic products I can finally be excited about the future again!

I predict that in a year this bubble will be at least twice as big!

There are heaps and heaps of people replacing talk therapy, religion and human relationships with ChatGPT. Unfortunately, for better or worse, ChatGPT is tuned up to egg people on and even if you bring it terrible ideas it will keep cheering for you.

Sycophancy is a real problem with some of these language models and it’s giving people courage and motivation to do things that are probably really bad ideas.

There are quite a few sub-reddits where people claim to have triggered the singularity, witnessed ChatGPT becoming sentient, etc.

I don’t think the AI genie is going back in the bottle, so we as a society have some serious adjustment to do to keep things working properly in an an AI-filled world.

Keep in mind this is only the beginning. It will keep getting cheaper and more powerful at the same time, especially since a lot of AI companies are using AI itself to build the next version.

Pretty “soon” the humans will be out of the loop and it’s going to mean big things. Whether those things are good, bad, or a mix of both remains to be seen…

This is sad. Various programs have gone through the same type of situation with Debian stable. Debian is very conservative and doesn’t ship upgrades quickly on their stable branch. Various authors have complained because they frequently get emails / bug reports from Debian users, who happen to be using a few-years-old version of their software.

I do understand the frustration, but it does feel a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

It’s possible there are other solutions, like detecting whatever random issue is frustrating people and pop up a dialog.

For example, if he’s upset with it being broken on Wayland, why not detect Wayland and start off with a dialog: “Wayland is beta and is not officially supported. See FAQ here: […]”

Just blocking people feels over the top. But hey, it’s his project, if he wants to go this way, it’s his choice and right. Depending on the license he might get forked, but that’s just how it goes.

This is one of the reason that the USA being heavy handed with Chinese is going to bite us in the ass. While in the USA, we bury our heads in the sand and GM, Tesla and etc. all crank out $95,000 giant trucks/SUVs, some companies in China are making very, very affordable vehicles. These aren’t necessarily garbage either – there’s models available for almost any price point.

What WOULD be really smart and forward thinking is if in the USA, the domestic brands also make some affordable models to get EV more popular. However, they are addicted to fat profit margins, and thanks to all the protectionism, they don’t need to worry about offshore models being “better”.

While other nations either develop and/or import affordable EVs, we’re effectively banning them. This is all going to end up with a giant wake up call for American auto-manufacturers when the protections/tariffs are ultimately lifted and they HAVE to compete.

I think it would be great if the tariffs came with huge incentives for domestic manufacturers and motivated them to be competitive. Instead, it’s just letting them segment the market for a few years and make a killing. Who loses? The people…

audience already agrees that complicity in genocide is an acceptable tradeoff to software freedoms

I talked about that to show one possible counterbalance between liberty and usages which are probably not explicitly wanted by the authors.

Another common example of freedom/restrictions is someone wanting to have their software permissively licensed while also not allowing cloud vendors to resell access to it. That’s how you end up with licenses like Elastic’s.

Or, if you want another example of “free”, look at the distinction between the GPL and the BSD license as it applies to Sony and the Playstation. One of the reason Sony chose BSD for the basis of its gaming system is because the BSD license allows for commercial usage. In that sense it is MORE free than the GPL, which would not allow the type of usage Sony did with the Playstation without conferring more responsibility to Sony, for instance, releasing their source. Under BSD they have no obligation to do so, hence it is more free in that respect.

My whole point is a lot of people say “I want my software to be freely licensed” but they do not realize that they may be unintentionally opening the door to usages of the software that they do not want to see.

One should not pick a license that allows for unfettered usage of the software if you have certain ways you don’t want to see it used.

As a final parting example, look at Prusa and their printers. They release the firmware and designs as open source. They they later get angry when companies clone their designs. This is permissible under the license. This is making Prusa want to lock down their future designs to avoid that usage.

Anyone considering licensing of their own software should think very carefully about what usages they support or object to and license the software accordingly. If you release your software as BSD licensed and some company comes along and makes a billion dollars with it, you aren’t owned a cent under that agreement. If this makes you angry, don’t pick BSD.

Freedom comes with uncomfortable ramifications. This is inescapable. Freedom includes doing things that a given individual isn’t comfortable with. If you’re not happy with this trade-off, don’t use a license that allows “any” usage.

Meanwhile, poor Jellyfin just quietly doing the job.

That doesn’t undermine my point, that proves my point. Making something “FREE” (as in libre) comes with the consequence that people can use it for whatever they want. I assume you don’t agree with bombing Gaza, hence it is a perfect example of “freedom” leading to poor outcomes.

Simply grabbed it, and without contributing anything to the project did nothing except stripped the branding and then go sell it.

Unless this is specifically called out in the license, this is an activity allowed by many permissive open source licenses. If they knew that this type of activity was unwanted initially, then they didn’t choose the proper license.

Easy, because they want the social credibility of being open source, but also later, when the project gets big, they want to dictate exactly who uses it and how.

If you care about how your software is used to this degree – don’t open source it! Every open source package I have ever made has come with a permissive license, because I want people to be able to use it however they wish. That’s actual freedom. Unfortunately, a subset of “however they wish” can also be “used to bomb Gaza”, but that is the cost of liberty and freedom. You have to take the good with the bad.

A big part of the appeal with Plex is that you can run a server and friends can sign up for a FREE account and stream remotely. When you take this away, you’re going to just kneecap the whole offering. This is such an arrogant move from Plex: they are thinking that when this change goes live they will get a flood of subscriptions. The more likely outcome is they will get a few subscriptions and a lot more angry and frustrated people that walk away.

I don’t think they necessarily have to get rid of it, it’s just that you can’t support a company ALONE from a one time infusion.

I keep a Jellyfin instance running as a hedge. Here’s the thing with Plex (and actually a lot of companies set up similarly): those “lifetime” memberships are a trap. Think about it: Plex gets your money ONCE but they have ongoing expenses. Sooner or later, they’ll have spent every single cent made by a lifetime membership unless they either get more folks OR squeeze everyone a bit more.

Once they started adding their own shows and making strange UI decisions, I could sense the end was coming. A move like this brings it up fast. Jellyfin is not nearly as good as Plex in a lot of ways, but it’s really Open Source.

Anyway, a lot of rambling, but in short: when there is a “lifetime” subscription, watch out!