I’m pretty sure you can donate to Mozilla, are you saying that donations to Mozilla don’t accomplish what we might want? I only know a little about how much Mozilla sucks so I’m ready to learn more.

I don’t know if this is true but I once read that people expected the cotton gin to improve slaves’ conditions because that part of the process was incredibly labor-intensive, so it would be saving them work. Instead it made cotton farming more profitable and boosted slave ownership. ☹️

Misaligned incentives. The people making bloated software are not the people buying the RAM. In theory the people buying the ram are the same people buying the software and so might put pressure on the people making the software to make it more efficient, but that is a very loose feedback loop and I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Jiu-Jitsu! Make friends, and smash them!

Could I, liked recolor webpages? Automate ublock filters? Detect SEO/AI slop?

This is an excellent point: there are potential features I wouldn’t mind trying out. But of course those features aren’t available, because aren’t the features that Mozilla leadership’s buddies in tech are pushing, and often work against what big tech wants.

Actually they’re using it to generate documents required by regulations. Which is its own problem: since LLMs hallucinate, that means the documentation may not reflect what’s actually going on in the plant, potentially bypassing the regulations.

This website is going to be very busy when the LLM-designed nuke plants come online. https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/

I understand that you might want to run your own JavaScript and not others’ JavaScript, but I had a brief laugh at listing “no JavaScript” and “MOAR JAVASCRIPT” together.

I agree, I’m sure those kind of manipulations happen all the time. Some are intentionally inflating the price and sometimes investors/fund managers have just drank the Kool-aid and are investing in ways that don’t make sense given the fundamentals. So yeah, stock prices can become completely unmoored from fundamentals because these days the money is in buying and selling, not dividends. In fact, I’d guess that stock prices are unmoored from fundamentals more often than not — when they’re high they’re too high and when they’re low they’re too low due to investor sentiment. But I remain somewhat confident that over the very long term (meaning decades) stock prices have some correlation to fundamentals, so they can’t remain artificially inflated forever. Sooner or later someone will make a killing popping the bubble.

Stock prices are set by what people think stocks are worth. Buying a stock is a bet that it will become more valuable in the future (and/or pay dividends). Even with the rise of algorithmic trading, those algorithms are betting the stocks are will rise in value. In theory the cost should be related to the fundamentals of the stock like the company’s revenue, but in practice they are also set by investor’s opinions about the stock’s future price.

So what causes stocks to go down is people thinking that stocks will go down, and selling before they lose any more money.

In the case of the AI stock bubble, it’s hard to know what will cause investors to say “this stock is likely to drop on value, or at least not grow as quickly as other investments I could make.” The fact that most AI companies are burning cash and not getting much revenue out of it hasn’t dampened the excitement yet, so I guess investors still believe there’s a way forward that will result in more revenue. Or at least they believe the hype cycle isn’t coming to an end so they’re holding on while the prices go up and hope to sell before their holdings lose too much value. It won’t pop until something deflates the expectations of enough investors to start a sell-off. What’s that going to be? Who knows. It might just be a herd mentality thing where a few people begin to sell and more people follow suit.

Seconding Miniflux! It’s my main RSS reader. I pay for the hosted version, it’s super cheap and works great. And since it’s simple HTML I can write Greasemonkey scripts to customize it a bit.

I got lucky: my back pain was from tight hamstrings and sitting in a desk chair for too long, then doing heavy deadlifts. I WFH and get out of my chair as much as possible and I’m religious about stretching my hamstrings, and the back pain is gone even when I deadlift.

So everyone with back pain should figure out why — sometimes it’s preventable. (Other times not so much ☹️)

What OS and browser are you using? I’m on Android 16 using Firefox and the music stops when I leave the peace using the back gesture.

Okay, what’s the truth then? Cite your evidence.

I was wondering recently if the idea of opportunity cost is the same for governments that can print their own money versus all other entities. I’m not entirely clear on how the that automaker bailouts were financed but would that money even have existed if they hadn’t used it for the bailout? It’s not like the government was going to create that amount of money and put it in a savings account.

A more appropriate way to look at it might be whether the money earned more than it cost the government to service the debt. IIRC servicing government debt is not inflation-adjusted, so it’s probably more informative to compare it to the cost of the debt not inflation adjusted-growth.

But this gets pretty weird since it’s not how finance works for entities that cannot print their own money.

Over 1 billion people use Microsoft products, but let’s all listen to @lefaucet@slrpnk.net 's anecdote about his IT dept. I genuinely believe your anecdote, but it’s irrelevant. And until OSS evangelists (of which I am one!) realize that other people exist and have different preferences and experiences, MS will keep winning.

Oh no, some crank who can’t understand that other people have preferences won’t take me seriously. This is a major loss. I am so owned. This definitely isn’t emblematic of the problem with the OSS community.

I started the name calling by saying “tech brained” so I apologize and I’ll ease off on that.

With that said, I have to strongly disagree with you. I use MS Office, LibreOffice, and Google Docs regularly, and IMO the ribbon was a huge improvement for word processors and spreadsheets over traditional drop-down menus. Drop-Down menus have their place but for document editing they are not ideal.

This an incredibly tech-brained answer. “Sure, lots of OSS is difficult to install, breaks frequently, and lacks key features, but did you know Microsoft sometimes moves a menu item?”

I love OSS and I want it to succeed but “an item moved” isn’t in the same ballpark as the barriers to OSS adoption.

The problem: our desire for convenience

Bring on the downvotes, but: When it comes to tools like computers, convenience is synonymous with productivity. People aren’t unreasonably demanding to have their hands held, they want to get stuff done. We need to stop acting like convenience productivity is just one of many concerns. It is the primary concern.

Freedom is nice but to most people it’s only important if it helps us do the things we want to do.