Phones try to emulate PC refresh cycle. Is it healthy? You get new generation of CPUs / GPUs roughly once in two years. I'd say it's OK.
You can easily skip a generation and upgrade say once in 4 years or even less frequently. But at the same I think it's good that there is an option to get newer hardware at that cadence.
> You get new generation of CPUs / GPUs roughly once in two years. I'd say it's OK.
If you look at sustainability, it is obviously not okay.
And for what? Websites and mobile apps that get bulkier and less efficient slightly faster than the refresh cycle. I recently replaced my smartphone - not because I wanted to, but because the main app I use (like banking, nothing that should require a big CPU) were lagging so much that they were unusable. A banking app is supposed to print a few numbers to the screen, and yet it doesn't work on a 5 years old smartphone.
Copyright has overstepped its initial purpose by leaps and bounds because corporations make the law. If you're not cynical about how Copyright currently works you probably haven't been paying attention. And it doesn't take much to go from cynical to nihilist in this case.
There's definitely a case of miscommunication at play if you didn't read cynicism into my original post. I broadly agree with you, but I'll leave it at that to prevent further fruitless arguing about specifics.
(to clarify, OpenAI stops refining the image if a classifier detects your image as potentially violating certain copyrights. Although the gulf in resolution is not caused by that.)
Right, and as a hiring manager, I'm more inclined to hire junior devs since they eventually learn the intricacies of the business, whereas LLMs are limited in that capacity.
I'd rather babysit a junior dev and give them some work to do until they can stand on their own than babysit an LLM indefinitely. That just sounds like more work for me.
Undermining the claims of giving control back to individual states is of course the real truth of the matter, which will eventually bite the conservationist groups currently supporting this move in the ass:
> Mr. Trump has made oil and gas production a centerpiece of his presidency and sought to strip away environmental regulations that impede development.
Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they don't go toward funding Firefox; instead, they fund advocacy campaigns.
> Firefox is maintained by the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.[1]
>I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding.
I have nothing against this, but at best it would be a modest side hustle. The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. Tor is another one, but off the top of my head, I think it's maybe 1/20th of what Wikipedia raises.
If Firefox stood up a donation drive for the first time I would guess Tor-level revenue and maybe it might crawl upward from there depending on how things go.
Also, my understanding is their organizational structure is what legally enables them to do the search licensing which is their biggest revenue stream. But it means that their browser development is done to generate commercial revenue. If they moved the core browser development under the Foundation, it would unravel the ability to do search licensing deals to support development, which are much stronger than whatever their prospect for user donations would be.
I'm a bit out of my depth here but I believe it's all about the search licensing.
>The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets.
All this shows is that Mozilla is even less efficient than Wikimedia! There are projects such as Rust and LLVM that rival Firefox in complexity with 1/10 the combined expenses. Of course Rust has a selling point and Firefox doesn’t, but whose fault is that really?
Firefox replaces more code in a month than Rusts' entire codebase even contains. Rusts' expenses are massively subsidized by donated staff time from over a dozen major tech companies.
Wikipedia is a fundamentally different beast serving static content with practically zero of the engineering overhead associated with Rust let alone with Firefox.
>Firefox replaces more code in a month than Rusts' entire codebase even contains.
Point taken. Rust + LLVM is almost half of Firefox though, and probably at least equivalent in terms of necessary skill. It is also not clear how much of that code could be removed without much loss of functionality.
>Rusts' expenses are massively subsidized by donated staff time from over a dozen major tech companies.
This is called having a selling point. If Firefox offered anything besides not being Chromium, people would work on it without getting paid by Mozilla.
Okay. KDE is absolutely comparable to Firefox according to https://openhub.net/p/kde. Tiny fraction of the expenditure. I’m not even sure what their selling point is, but it’s a lot better than Mozilla’s.
> Rust and LLVM that rival Firefox in complexity with 1/10 the combined expenses
You could argue LLVM is technically of a similar level of complexity, but operating a browser requires far more actual business than developing a compiler.
More to the point, those organisations get enormous amounts of "free" labour in the form of contributions from large corporations that benefit from them, in a way that Firefox absolutely does not.
>Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they don't go toward funding Firefox; instead, they fund advocacy campaigns.
Yes, charitable donations go to charitable causes, not development of a browser which produces profits for a for-profit entity. There's no legal way to channel charitable donations back into a business. To do otherwise would be tax fraud.
This is not a "gotcha", this is a persistent misunderstanding of what is and is not possible in tax law.
> Make the browser development the charitable work
They probably cannot do this. The IRS generally does not consider writing open source software to meet the requirements of a 501c3, for example [1]. They aren't super consistent about it so some groups have gotten 501c3 exemption in the past, but for the most part there is a reason that 501c3 open source foundations focus on support activities, conferences, and not software development.
> accept funding to non-charitable company
They could do this, just like they did for Thunderbird, and I wish they would.
Maybe we can make a deal with the government. In exchange for making the development of open source software a tax exempt charitable work, we remove private jets from the list of purchases that can be deducted from income taxes. Seems like a win-win.
Why would the government wish to remove private jets from the list of purchases that can be deducted from income taxes? Why would they be unable to do this without making a deal with people who want open source software development to be designated a charitable purpose? How would making a deal with people who want open source software development fix this?
> Why would the government wish to remove private jets from the list of purchases that can be deducted from income taxes?
To bring in tax revenue to pay for things we actually need.
> Why would they be unable to do this without making a deal with people who want open source software development to be designated a charitable purpose? How would making a deal with people who want open source software development fix this?
Because my comment is this thing we call a joke, it was meant to highlight the absurdity of the fact that some obviously charitable work gets taxed, while toys for billionaires are tax exempt because...reasons?
Search revenue minus the cost of a CEO (slightly more than 1% of that goes to the CEO) is still an amazing deal, dramatically more than what's likely on offer in terms of charitable giving. They would basically have to execute the largest donation drive in the history of the internet and replicate it on a yearly basis to replace search licensing.
Frankly, that level of pay is disgusting and I would prefer the Mozilla Foundation just fold. Firefox can move over to ASF or OSI. They'll do a better job.
I don't think there's a legal way to fund development form the profitable venture and also accept charitable donations.
I'm sure if donations were more a better bet than search licensing they might go that way, but as I said in a different comment, the biggest annual donor drive in the world is probably Wikipedia, probably a best case scenario for that kind of drive, and it brings in less than half of what their search licensing gets.
I don't have any input on direct user funding for Firefox, but Thunderbird is also developed by a for-profit entity and accepts direct user funding with no charitable tax deductions as well. [0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/
Exactly, and to my knowledge the receiving party needs to pay profit tax on them. It's called a donation, but technically more of a pay-what-you-want model. Several businesses do that.
It's probably too late now... but IMO, what should have been Mozilla's most natural progression towards financial security would have been with Thunderbird. Basically, they were in a position to offer what Outlook/Office365 email does a couple decades ago.
Integrate better calendar and contact management, then create a best of class commercial email service platform, and commercial hosted services around that.
I thought it would have been a great option long before Gmail was even a thought. Even today, they could work with or create a service like Protonmail or another system to offer these services. 10m users at $4/mo/user is $480m/year and that wouldn't be an unreasonable expectation just for the US market in 3-5 years given where they were in 2008.
Of course, I had similar thoughts about Blackberry when iOS and Android hit the market... since they were already entrenched in corporate email at a lot of places, they could have created a best in breed mobile client for their integrated usage ahead of MS playing catch up.
But with Mozilla, it would have been a natural extension as a commercial offering without disrupting the good will behind Firefox and Thunderbird as they were...
it's particularly strange to see Mozilla engage in these silly machinations when the Thunderbird team has moved on to the model of direct user funding.
In one of your other posts, you talk about their merch sales and others also talk about their bundling of services such as vpn and etc., which all also sound like small potatoes. Does that not sound contradictory? Why bother with any of this if search licensing covers their costs many times over? And if merch and mozilla branded bundles work, then why not also let the users fund them like Thunderbird allows instead of enraging these users by signing them up unsolicited for things such as "privacy preserving ads" and such?
Where did you get the impression that I endorsed merch sales as a major diversification of revenue? I think it is a rounding error. I was replying to someone seemingly claiming $50 keychains were the key to solving all their revenue issues as if it presented a new and untested idea.
Meanwhile, practically everyone claiming Mozilla should just start collecting donations seems like they are suggesting that it's a revenue panacea that can take the place of search. So that's the key difference.
Also, if you're following what I'm saying I'm other posts, you should note I explicitly said I have nothing against donations. I said they were likely to be a modest side hustle rather than a replacement.
Imagine what it's like from my perspective to go out of my way to say I have nothing against donations to have an internet rando claim I'm contradicting myself by not acknowledging their usefulness on the margins.
I never said you endorsed the donations, just that it seems to me to pointless to mention, as a response to my original post, given the ad/search revenue. My question remains why Mozilla (not you) seems against taking direct donations when they engage in other donation collection activities. I don't think we are taking opposing points here - I would like Mozilla to take donations to provide a clean browser to its fans (including me). Further, it just seems strange that the ad/search revenue number seems to be some line in stone - can't they operate a browser without the hundreds of millions of ad/search deals?
It seemed strange to me that Zimbardo inserted himself into the experiment as a participant, and not to mention figuring out what he was actually trying to measure; too many variables.
Rest in peace, Burger Becky! I really enjoyed her interview with CoRecursive a few years ago about porting DOOM to the 3DO[1] and highly recommend a listen.
Agreed. Although if you enjoy this very specific type of puzzle, I’d recommend a game called “Connections,” which, as the name suggests, is all about making these mental connections between words.
I used to try and optimize my distraction-free writing setup, until I realized that by doing so I was distracting myself from writing. I’ve come to realize that if you want to write, then just write. It sounds oversimplified, but that’s the crux of it. Once you get over the initial hill and form the habit of writing, tools no longer matter.
There are a lot of hobbies like that. More than half of woodworking discussions are not about woodworking, but how to setup a great shop and what tools to put into it. Musicians often talk about and trade guitars more than play. Sewing is often more about collecting fabric than doing something with it. That is just a short random example, there are plenty of more.
None of the above are bad things. There is nothing wrong with the above so long as you are honest about it, but it starts to consume time that you think you are spending on something else. Woodworkers need a place to work - while must great things are made in a kitchen that not an ideal location (OTHO I have a nice shop but still work in the kitchen because it is faster to get there). Likewise, your guitar is a part of your sound and so you really should try others from time to time; sewers should have some fabric to work with. Many "woodworkers" changed their goal is restoring old tools as well, which again is fine but not what the hobby it about.
So back to the question: what is the goal? If the goal is to write, then you need to write most of your time. Once in a while it is fine to ask "would a better keyboard be worth it", but if you are not spending the majority of your time on writing tasks (which is mostly editing) you are not a writer.
there was a great passage in jerome k jerome's "three men on the bummel" about how riding bicycles and tinkering with bicycles were both great passions, but any given person could do only one of them.
There was a point in university when I was trying to find the "best" note taking system to be organized and as efficient as possible. Tried some tablets, did latex live during lectures, markdown, you name it. Each time I wanted to do something I'd get blocked on deciding where to write.
Then I realized that I spend more time about thinking about how to organize my notes than actually taking the notes, or even more importantly focus on the content.
That was a freeing realization that got me unblocked. Now I do not have a "system". My thoughts go wherever is most convenient at that moment, I have papers lying around, docs, Apple notes. If they turn out to be important, they'll naturally become structured.
That being said, whenever I see some tool like this, I still have a passing thought - ah, that's a great system I should have it, it will enable me to be more productive :)
5mm (cheap) A4 Pad on my desk and a pen - nothing important/with duration longer than a day or two goes in there (but I write the date at the top right of each page and keep them on a two month sliding date window), I tried taking a photo of each page but realised I never looked back more than a couple of months so just stopped bothering.
Everything else I just throw around on the filesystem wherever makes sense for the thing I'm doing.
I agree with this. I would add that the important part of the practice of writing is not the tools, but once you are writing you can try tools that help you continue. For my creative writing (that I do mostly as a hobby) I have a nice notebook with a nice pen that I use to write short stories and world building excercises, and characters, etc. I don't need the nice notebook, I did not get it before starting, but it does feel nice to come home having thought of what to write and have a pleasant notebook and pen.
My job includes writing technical documents but I use latex and emacs because that's what I have always used.
I thought about it when I read Charlie Stross getting one last year [0]. Then thought, what is essential about it? And decided to try something related, even if it was likely to be just another distraction:
This is the simple "just-write" function I wrote in emacs, and it also needs the olivetti package and the wmctrl program.
To my surprise, it actually did the trick. I've written more and more pleasantly since then. I feel it's better than if I had gotten a Writer Deck or similar. So I thought I'd share in case it does the trick for anyone else.
(I also use a font and a color scheme that pleases me, but that's minor.)
Seems similar to people who keep buying tools, say for woodworking, and never really start a project. Like a kind of procrastination. Although there are people that are aware of that, but they have just pleasure with it. I guess is ok.
Pad plus paper works best for me. Although truth be told I did fall down the fountain pen/ink/fine paper rabbit hole, so honestly there is no escaping it.
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