ilinamorato @ ilinamorato @lemmy.world

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2

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1,844

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yep. I'm furious at Mozilla right now. But when the Firefox Phone was in development, they were one of the web's heroes.

I wonder how many of these "credible threats" are actually credible vs. how many of them are actually just made up by Patel to make sure they stay in line.

Well, he only just took office this week, and this crop of death threats have been reported for a month or so now. But I absolutely believe that Patel is going to try to return the FBI to its J. Edgar Hoover days of gathering komprimat on every single person in the country. We're gonna need another MEDBURG soon.

The Firefox Phone should've been a real contender. I just want a browser in my pocket that takes good pictures and plays podcasts.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but "weaker locks" feels like something you can make allowances for or work around. "Extra keys" feels like the Damoclean threat that it is.

"Misinterpret" says ye. "Willfully misrepresent" says I. (And, in fairness, the article body says it too; the headline is the outlier here.)

I just think that (upper) age limits will quickly become rather myopic, and this may happen sooner than most people think.

I don't think it should be a set number. I think it should be pegged to the average life expectancy in the US. That gives them an incentive to make policy that improves lifespan.

I also think term limits is usually a stalking horse for the far right for other matters

Even a broken clock can want the right thing for the wrong reasons twice a day. (I think that's how the saying goes?)

and I don't think those outside the far right should fall for it. I think term limits solves nothing

I think it makes politicians more expensive to bribe.

and I also think that robs people of incumbents that they love. If people keep choosing the same people to put into office, why the hell not?

In a functional democracy, sure! But an incumbent has a massive advantage over any challenger, and primarying them almost always fails; even for remarkably unpopular candidates. "Better the devil you know..."

I think if we solve the actual problems, age and term limits fall by the wayside as the red herring they are for several reasons.

Maybe. But I don't know if those problems can stay solved.

100%. I can't decide whether I think the organization being dissolved completely is a good idea or not, but I'm at least open to it.

Sorry, I realized I'm using my personal jargon in public again. When I said "AI," I meant this overhyped put-it-in-your-mouse garbage. When I'm talking about the actually useful stuff, I usually call it "ML."

Of course you have no reason to know that or care. My apologies.

Overhyped AI is going to fail, and it can't happen soon enough. The Mozilla leadership really needs to pay attention to that reality.

Nope, but that in and of itself can be something they can campaign on; albeit for a much smaller group of reps.

You really didn't address the sunk cost problem, but honestly I don't really care anymore. You think what you want.

Since it's unlikely to pass, the real value is in getting Republicans' names attached to a "no" vote. Then Democrats can campaign to red areas and show how anti-veteran the Republicans have been this session, which plays a lot better in those areas than an "all" bill that doesn't mention veterans.

You're ignoring everything else I said because you don't agree with one semantic point of a partial response, so here it is again.

Most of the time, a company can't afford to just not release a product they worked on. They talked about why it didn't turn out the way they wanted to in the announcement stream (the laws of physics), but assuming they had already done the investment into the R&D to produce the box, they can't just decide "never mind." If they do it too much, they go out of business.

EDIT: also, you said "bit by bit" in your original message. You don't do things bit by bit if you're not trying to be sneaky.

...yes? It is?

Sorry. It's not just marketing if you can buy them.

And that means they should?

Of course not! What do you think I'm arguing for? I'm saying that if they were trying to make some kind of sneaky change, they wouldn't have taken five minutes to talk about it in their big event.

"Aw sorry, we really tried to make something" doesn't cut it. If you can't do it, don't do it. Simple as.

This ignores the realities of running a company. Once you've sunk development dollars into a project, you can't just walk away from it. You have to recoup your investments somehow, or you just end up hemorrhaging money and go out of business and can't do anything ever again.

How many products that are antithetical to their entire stated purpose do they need to make before you see that as a red flag?

Well it needs to not be a single component in a product that's a tiny minority of their business, for one thing.

What exactly can you upgrade iteratively?

At the price point, being able to upgrade memory, storage, and motherboard is unique. And I know you say that it's the "vast majority" of the cost, but I just bought a Framework 13 last month (I know, great timing) and the mainboard was right around half the total cost. So sure, the most expensive single component, but it means that I can upgrade to a better-performing machine in the future for half the price and not need to junk everything else.

Framework laptops just use USB C dongles for everything.

Correct. But honestly, having the swappable I/O is fantastic; over the last five laptops I've owned, I've only upgraded because I wanted new capabilities once. For the other four, it's because a component failed; and in two of them it was a USB port, while in a third it was a charging port. Being able to replace those would have extended the lives of those machines substantially.

fewer vendors to buy a dongle from

Actually, they're open-source (not proprietary). And since they're USB-C, you could probably just take out the card and plug a dongle right in there if you really needed to (I have not tried this).

Framework: 999 + 399 = 1398 for two generations of a laptop

I'm planning to hold on to this device for a whole lot longer than two generations. If I can, I'd like to hang on to it for 15-20 years. The laptop I upgraded from was five years old or so (and would still be going strong if it didn't have a port that was about to die and un-upgradeable RAM and storage), and my desktop is 13 years old and still going strong, so this isn't terribly unreasonable. I would estimate that I'll end up pouring about $2000, all told, into this laptop over that time period, likely replacing 3-4 laptop purchases and giving me a better machine during that time period.

that assumes that your display and keyboard held up and didn't need replacing,

Both of which would be cheaper than a new device. A new display is $150 and a new keyboard is $30. I don't know about the longevity of each component, but based on the research I did it's definitely not worse than an off-the-shelf machine.

you liked all the default dongles Framework gave you (which is apparently just four USB C ports... to plug into the four USB C ports on the laptop),

There aren't any defaults. When you spec out your kit, you choose which cards to purchase. Replacing them costs about $10. (EDIT: The USB-C ones cost $10. The other ones are variously priced between $10-40, and then there are some storage expansions that cost more because they're basically SSD in the expansion card form factor).

and, most importantly, that Framework didn't change their form factor

They've only done that once since they launched, across six updates to the components. When they made that upgrade, they offered a $90 top cover to bring first gen devices up to second gen specs.

(I am not sure if they did for the 16 inch laptops to support the "modular" keyboards).

There's only been one generation of the 16 inch laptops, and they've always had the modular keyboards. The refresh they announced yesterday is just to components, not to chassis.

Every spare dongle or repaired/upgraded part costs money.

Yep, and I'm fine with that because it means that I can spec it out the way I want; I don't have to pay for I/O that I'll never use. My old laptop had an SD card reader and a DisplayPort output; I literally never used either. The one I had before it had a SATA connector on the external I/O, and a couple of other pieces of nonsense that I didn't want or need. Actually, thinking back, I don't know if I've ever owned a laptop (until this one) where I actually used all of the ports.

And I don't really fault them too much for not letting you actually swap CPUs since that was basically something only the sickest of sickos did

Yeah, I think swappable CPUs on a laptop are a thing of the past. I hope I'm wrong, but I just don't see it coming back.

I do worry that this just encourages people to hoard parts

I DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM

I CAN STOP WHENEVER I WANT TO

Its called marketing.

They're actually building those devices. It's not marketing if you can buy them.

Why wouldn't they?

Because most companies do. They gloss over the shifts so that they can focus on other stuff.

Why does being clear about why they've abandoned their mission excuse anything?

Because it shows that they haven't. They talked about the work they put into trying to make it modular.

That's the opposite of what's happening though.

For this one product, maybe. But again, this was one of the four products they announced yesterday.

They weren't. They were responding to the FAFO comments about the people who resigned in protest.

One good thing about a phone over a camera is automatic backup. If you have a burner smartphone uploading all of your images to Dropbox (or whatever) as you take them, and then you think your phone is about to get taken, you can wipe it or even destroy it without losing the photos. Not so a camera.

Also, a cheap burner phone is way cheaper than pretty much any standalone camera on the market. It's hard to find a point and shoot digital camera (or any type of film camera) these days that isn't super pricey, because they've become hobbyist items.

If this is it happening bit by bit, then why is most of the news about them doubling down on their principles? Why did they make clear what they were doing and why, and talk about their work to make it modular, instead of trying to hide it or sweep it under the rug?

This sort of doomerism and slippery slope purity test nonsense is exactly why niche companies that do what people value eventually go under, leaving us with just the awful ones. This isn't a betrayal of their values. This isn't the beginning of the end. It's just a choice they made, and all of the other choices they made confirm that they're still doing stuff the way they were.

Edit: I'm not saying you have to buy it, or that you shouldn't make clear to the company you don't think this comports with what you want them to value. But writing them off forever based on this one product seems so self-defeating.

their pricing means it is basically never worth buying and upgrading versus just buying a new laptop (seriously, run the numbers. You basically save 10 bucks over two generations of shopping at Best Buy).

Maybe so. But the big difference is, you can upgrade iteratively rather than taking the entire hit of a new device all at once. So I can buy all of the individual components of my next laptop a few hundred dollars at a time over the course of a couple of years, and use them as I get them. By the time I've ship-of-theseus'd the whole device, I may have spent the same amount of money on that new computer, but I paced it how I wanted it. Then I put all of the old components into an enclosure and now I can use it as a media center or whatever. Plus, if something breaks, I can fix it.