Yeah, and although it will be painful for Mozilla in the short term - it would be a good outcome. It was always bad that Mozilla’s main source of funding was from their most powerful competitor. It’s an obvious conflict of interest. And obvious way to skew decision making. … But that money is just so addictive.

There will be some pretty severe withdrawal symptoms if the money gets taken away, but everyone will be healthier in the long run… unless the overpaid CEO continues to suck in all the remaining money and leaves nothing for the people actually doing the work. That would be bad. In that case, if the corporate structure chokes the company to death, I suppose we’d be hoping for Ladybird, or something like it to take Firefox’s place.

I love how none of these comments account for fiber, something you won’t get from granulated sugar but which you will absolutely get from any actual fruit, which at least one of these yogurts actually references in its label.

It’s definitely true that eating fruit is a very healthy way to consume sugar. But the amount of actual fruit in those fruit yogurts is pitifully small. Advertising aside, it’s not like eating an fresh piece of fruit; and it is not why the yogurt has so much sugar it in.

I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what’s wrong with lifetime purchases?

This thread is about subscriptions. So I’d assume that when people talk about ‘rent seeking companies’ etc, they are referring to subscription payments rather than lifetime purchases.

I find Widelands to be slow and relaxing; but also challenging and engaging.

By default there is a shortcut to the terminal shortcut on task bar. From memory it is one of three default shortcuts. (File browser, Terminal, Firefox.) You can also find it by pressing the menu button (the ‘start menu’). From there the terminal has a prominent special position where it is always accessible. And if you don’t notice it there, you can always start typing to search for it - as with any other installed app. I find that if I type ‘t’, then “Terminal” is the top result; and obviously I can kept typing to eliminate the other results if I want.

So if your difficulty in finding the terminal is your main complaint about about Mint… I’m not sure what to tell you. Do you want it to auto-launch or something?

When I was young, I really valued the idea of technological progress. It was almost axiomatically the goal of humanity. Getting greater abilities to do more things more easily… it seemed like the ultimate goal.

But now that I’m older, I’ve seen what happens with technological power like that, and it isn’t great. Yes, we can do more things more easily than before. And what is the result? The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world’s resources are depleted.

• People can now connect instantly and effortlessly with anyone anywhere in the world - and the result is that enormous numbers of people shun their local peers and instead have shallow parasocial relationships with strangers who’s job it is to advertise products to them.
• Clothes are cheap and easy to create - and the result is mountains of waste created by fast-fashion low-quality throw-away clothes largely made from slave labour. Similarly for many products, in particular plastic products are now choking the world in waste.
• Cars are more efficient, and production quality is high - and the result is massively oversized monsters, completely negating the efficiency benefit and instead increasing the amount of space and maintenance required to handle the increased size and weight of the machines. The streets are basically filled with cars and spaces for cars, with less and less space for people to do people things.
• Half-decent AI has finally been created. It’s a long-held dream come true… except that the outcome isn’t quite what we hoped. There’s a lot to say on this topic, but just to keep it snappy, I’ll oversimplify it by saying that people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination.

Our silky-smooth hyper-connected ultra-convenient world is not leading people to be happier, or smarter, or kinder. And it certainly isn’t helping humanity survive longer. We’re burning out fast.

A lot of what we have superficially looks like ‘progress’, but in full description it looks more like a dystopia. Things are easier, but perhaps the good things were already easy enough; and so the main effect is that exploitation and manipulation got easier. Even when we agree that we’re going in the wrong direction, the messages are still muddied enough that we accelerate rather than change course.

Anyway… I don’t agree with my younger self. I no longer think that technological advances are intrinsically good. I think taking things a bit more slowly might have been more wise. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think a core part of it is that money corrupts. Unfortunately, money is very tightly intertwined with most of what we do - so that’s a pretty difficult problem to fix. So I won’t go into more detail about that now!

I’d say mastodon is a better choice, mostly so that you’re not beholden to yet another profit-focused tech corporation. I’m sure Bluesky is fine right now, but once they have their userbase they will shift to monetization - and you may regret letting yourself become entrenched in the world they control. They’re not doing it for your benefit.

That said, I’ve come to understand that a lot of people kind of like having their content feed controlled by others. When they only see what they ask for, they get bored. So I’m expecting Bluesky to always be bigger than Mastodon.

To this very day, I know nobody - NOBODY - who even comes close to Gmail’s spam filtering capability.

I disagree. Perhaps you need hard evidence for a claim like that.

I have a gmail account, and a proton mail account. My gmail account is packed with spam. It has so much spam its crazy. The account is basically unusable. Which is fine, because I no longer trust google. It’s been years since I’ve told anyone to use this account.

On the other hand, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve got a spam message in my inbox on protonmail. In fact, I remember. It’s 2. The account isn’t as old, but I’ve used it to sign up for at least as many things. It’s my main account now - partially because I’ve turned anti-google, but also because its not choked by mountains of junk.

(To be fair, I suspect the main reason that my gmail account is so bad is that it has a popular username, and other people have accidentally signed up for things with my email accidentally instead of their own. Nevertheless, the fact is that the gmail is spam-central, and the protonmail account is clean.)

I think modern AI would know that though, since it follows almost immediately from Fermat’s Little Theorem.

Yeah, especially given that so many popular vegetables are members of the brassica genus

And it is a license. I’m just responding to the comment about the law.

My understanding is that GOG is an exception to this. Here is a quote that I got from an Ars Technica article

California’s AB2426 law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom Sept. 26, excludes subscription-only services, free games, and digital goods that offer “permanent offline download to an external storage source to be used without a connection to the internet.” Otherwise, sellers of digital goods cannot use the terms “buy, purchase,” or related terms that would “confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good.” And they must explain, conspicuously, in plain language, that “the digital good is a license” and link to terms and conditions.

Since GOG does offer permanent offline installers that can be used without an internet connection, GOG’s sales are exempt from this new law.

I find it amusing that they “use cookies to give you the best possible experience”, but then ask you to pay to not have them.

Stay safe.

nar. HDDs don’t require power to maintain their state. So that’s an advantage they’ll always have over SSDs, which means there will be use-cases where HDDs are the better choice.

That’s true, Mozilla’s vision of ads is much better than Google’s. But is there any reasons it will be one or the other? Is there any reason to believe that Mozilla’s ads will displace Google’s ads? Or are we just going to end up with more ads: Google’s very bad ads plus Mozilla’s less bad ads.

[edit] Just to be clear - I don’t want to sound any Mozilla. Mozilla hasn’t actually acted on this yet. Firefox is still good right now, and will continue to be good at least in the short term. It’s just that Mozilla have stated their intention to work on making ad systems. So when that actually happens, it will be bad.

I sure hope so. I’ve been on team Mozilla for a long time, but right at this critical moment they are starting to wobble. Their CEO seems to be steering them in a direction that I don’t agree with.

(I still believe Firefox is the best option right now; but I’m a little concerned for the future.)

The name use to be closer to the truth, but then money corrupted it - as it always does.

I use to follow a subreddit called /r/degoogle, which was nominally for conversation about how to remove and avoid using google products. … But I ended up leaving because in pretty much every thread there was a whole lot of posts shitting on any and every suggested alternative, mostly for not being hardcore enough. It was as if the only acceptable approach was to never use any electronic device ever again. Firefox of course was constantly under fire for taking money from Google; which apparently made them worse than Google themselves. … Anyway, I strongly suspected that people were deliberately trying to destabilize the group so that it couldn’t grow or become functional. I had no other explanation for how counter-productive the bulk of the conversations were, and it would certainly be an easy and potentially useful group for pro-google people to target.

I’m less convinced that it is happening here though, but I’m certainly more suspicious of it after that experience with /r/degoogle. I reckon probably why we see a lot of any Mozilla stuff here is just that the audience on Lemmy is very interested in what Mozilla is doing - and negative news always gets more traction than positive news.

Nar, I don’t think that’s quite right. I reckon it’s more like nice looking cubicles (with normal walls) but also lots of cameras from all different angles.