The AI part is what makes this fuck up special and international news.
We are used to human fuck ups, but a in person event where the organizers where so lazy that they used AI to create the content and that it sucked is something novel.
AI generated pictures, blogs and books are old news, generated in person events is new.
Well, there are also the mobile variants of Firefox, which are more of their own thing.
IMO Mozilla limited itself a bit too much on Firefox. Which results it their web engine not attracting many developers for it outside Mozilla.
Embedding gecko in your own app was much easier in the past. This is now mostly taken over by CEF and WPE for Blink and WebKit respectively.
Also stuff like B2G (Boot 2 Gecko) or FirefoxOS are dead as well.
A goal of open source should be to be hacker friendly as well, were currently Blink/WebKit is leading. There are so many more projects around those engines than Gecko, which is sad.
IMO the whole byte stuff is pretty confusing, people should have just sticked with bits, because that avoids implementation details.
One bit is the smallest amount of information. Bytes historically had different amounts of bits, depending on the architecture. With ASCII and the success of the 8 bit processor word of the Intel 8080/8085 processor, it is now defacto 8 Bit long.
But personally, byte seems a bit (no pun intended) like the imperial measurement system.
True, private companies are generally more focused on customer satisfaction, but that can suddenly change, for instance when the owner dies, and the new owners don't share the same ideals.
Private companies have a certain single point of failure built-in by having often just one or sometimes a small number of owners.
Nobody really knows what will happen when Gabe dies.
I just hope that valve becomes a worker cooperative... That would be the most stable form of company that probaly stays focused on customer satisfaction long term, since workers tend to favor providing long-term profits via good service instead of short term gains, for high frequency traders.
I would like to trust doctors more, however they often offer stuff like homeopathic treatments or over prescribe medications, where I am wondering if they are just payed to do so by the pharma industry.
IMO the financial incentives of doctors sort of run counter with offering the best treatment of patients, which then in turn destroys the trust in them.
The question is who is the other Democrat candidate? I have the impression that putting fourth a popular candidate goes against everything the DNC stands for.
What kind of comparison is that? sudo is setuid while Firefox and its extensions run as the user you started it as.
Also sudo has just one very specific and limited use case, while Firefox is more of a platform for web content. I could argue that sudo itself is an 'extension' to a Linux system, like every application.
You also don't have to install all of those extension, you can choose which you trust, similar to a Linux system, you don't have to install every application in the repository.
If you say that the Firefox add-on repo should be more managed like a repository of a Linux distribution, where developers cannot simply upload their own software, but need to find a trusted maintainer first, I could agree to that. But that would mean more work and overhead.
Luckily in many European countries it is not used.
I would credit institutions like the chaos computer club and other non-profits, which where instrumental in convincing the government about the dangers. It was a difficult battle against the corporate lobbyists, and is understandable that other countries could not fight against the corporate interests or corruption and succumb to use them.
There where and still are so many issues with them, one of the most fundamental is described by Ken Thompson in his Reflections on trusting trust, which is especially effective for electronic voting machines, where no other way of verification is possible.
The secret to better tech is rebuilding everything from scratch. The internet wasn't designed with security and bad actors in mind. Plenty of corporations are running a Frankenstein system that contains code older than most millennials, botched modernization efforts, buzzword laden over-engineered applications, and bugs that aren't features just permanent residents in your code base.
Rebuilding everything from scratch will take ages and cost everyone a lot of money, because you have to replace all your hardware (router boxes, PC s, phones, smart watches, ...), because the internet protocols are often designed into the hardware itself, and changing them fundamentally means a lot of trash. Also there is no system that guarantees that the result will have fewer issues or will not required to be succeeded by something else a couple of minutes later, because some new issue was discovered.
Also software is highly complex and need to adapt to many different scenarios, while maintaining compatibility to each other, which the other disciplines of human engineering don't have to deal with as much, they are much more purpose driven.
It is like trying to create a universal building code (for building houses) that simultaneously works on every country on earth, hell, maybe even on multiple planets, with wildly different and constantly changing environments and is guaranteed to result in save houses. Not really possible in one shot, only possible by constantly trying to adapt. That is what software has to deal with. I am talking about fundamental software like the Linux kernel here, for example.
I think with BG3 it worked quiet well as well. It let the devs get feedback on the game mechanics, but limited the story so that the full release still offers something new. It was a good demo, that let people see the direction of the game. And it also let people get familiar with the game engine so modding tools and some release compatible mods where available very early after the release, that allowed to customize the game experience somewhat.
I have not read anyone serious stating that the game was dead, while it was in early access, but maybe because that is a bigger title.
If you want a tolerant society, you cannot tolerate the intolerant.
If you want democracy, you must suppress anti-democratic ideas.
You have to fight for want you believe in, and not let antithetical ideas fester and subvert yours, just because they exploit your tolerance and use the space you give them to fight it.
It is also a commercial distribution. If you ever used a community distribution like Arch, Gentoo or even Debian, then you will notice that they much more encourage participation. You can contribute your ideas and work without requiring to sign any CLAs.
Because Ubuntu wants to control/own parts of the system, they tend to, rather then contributing to existing solutions, create their own, often subpar, software, that requires CLAs. See upstart vs openrc or later systemd, Mir vs Wayland, which they both later adopted anyway, Unity vs Gnome, snap vs flatpak, microk8 vs k3s, bazar vs git or mercurial, ... The NIH syndrom is pretty strong in Ubuntu. And even if Ubuntu came first with some of these solutions, the community had to create the alternative because they where controlling it.
I mod my games on my PC and sync it to my SteamDeck. I also sync the save files back and fourth, to continue playing on different devices. Mostly non-steam games.
I also sync my eBook collection to my eink reader with syncthing.
Everything is also mirrored to my always-on NAS, so syncing always works.
The AI part is what makes this fuck up special and international news.
We are used to human fuck ups, but a in person event where the organizers where so lazy that they used AI to create the content and that it sucked is something novel.
AI generated pictures, blogs and books are old news, generated in person events is new.