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I’d point out it’s a little late for that, but I guess it’s one of the two missed deadlines.

Lemmy is very much not gigantic. It has tens of thousands of acitve users. Reddit has hundreds of millions. Librewolf is even more niche than Lemmy is. Librewolf isn’t even really a browser, it’s just a small patchset for Firefox. It only has it’s own name and logo because Mozilla doesn’t like people distributing modified versions of Firefox with their branding attached. Librewolf is very cool, but jumping straight from that to full on taking Gecko maintenance on completely is just a silly idea. I hope that if Mozilla does fail someone takes over Firefox from them, but Mozilla isn’t running out of Google money any time soon, and Librewolf isn’t even likely to be who takes it over if it does happen. It’s way more likely to end up in the hands of a big Linux distro, or even a new organization formed specifically for the purpose of taking Firefox over. All this talk of Librewolf being the savior of Gecko based browsers is completely disconnected from the reality of what Librewolf is.

Librewolf is a tiny niche within a tiny niche. No one at Google has even heard of it, and they’re certainly not going to start throwing money at a tiny obscure browser fork with zero web engine development experience if Firefox dies. Librewolf is a cool project, and I will gladly recommend it, but it dies with Firefox. It only even makes sense to consider the possibility if you have absolutely no self awareness of how small of a community we are at all.

Yeah, and using those is pretty good, but they don’t really do anything you can’t do just by changing settings in Firefox, and if Firefox doesn’t have any users those die right along with it.

Is that really even true of emulators of old consoles? There’s not a lot of new features coming out for the original PlayStation. Either way, part of the reason that SwanStation is dead is that it’s not even the best libretro PS1 emulator anyway.

True, but I do unironically know libertarians like this. Minus the Texas patch. They’re not so much into cheerleading for governments.

I mean, it’s not a group famous for their high rate of desktop computer use, but the ones that do actually make that a significant part of their life tend to be pretty likely to use Linux in my experience.

All the security updates are in the microcode loaded by the bootloader even before the kernel is loaded, so unless there’s some new feature, bugfix, or hardware support you specifically know you need it’s not important to update your BIOS anyway. Which is good, because as far as I can tell you’re just screwed by a bad hardware vendor.

I do all those things, but how are you planning on convincing my mom to? I’ve tried. She doesn’t care. The vast majority of people are more like my mom than like you or me. We are weirdos here, and if your plan doesn’t involve a better first step than “do a whole bunch of work to change something you’re already used to” then it is not actually going to change anything for anyone other than a few weirdos like us.

I do not care if something is useful to advertisers. I care if it reduces harm. Refusing to reduce harm to chase some distant ideal that most people don’t care about while not effectively convincing them to care is counterproductive to everything that actually matters.

If you’ve got a better solution then feel free to share, but magically making everybody on Earth simultaneously decide to suddenly stop paying attention to all advertising everywhere forever is not an actual solution.

Oh, also, it’s a common misconception that publicly-traded companies are required to maximize profits. They can have whatever goals their shareholders want. It’s just that the way modern publicly-traded companies work, most of their shareholders are people quickly buying and trading shares based on who they think will earn them the most money this month, so that sort of inevitably becomes the goal of any publicly-traded company.

It’s not really direct cause and effect, but yeah. The incentives for a publicly-traded company make enshitification far more appealing then it would be for most other organizations.

I don’t know why people keep saying that flatpaks don’t support cli apps. They do. I know it’s awkward to type out flatpak run io.github.zyedidia.micro or whatever every time you want to use a text editor, but aliases fix that pretty neatly, and that example wasn’t hypothetical.

I mean technically yes? There’s kind of a post pandemic return to normal still going on, and before that there were consistent record low crime rates for the first half of the 10s, so they’re not that low, but they’re still pretty low. Nowhere near as bad as the terrifying dark ages of the 90s.

Yeah, and none of them can actually design bridges. Some of them can be useful tools for engineers to use while designing bridges, but this isn’t tech bro fantasy land. You’re gonna need some engineers. That’s gonna take more than a day.

Engineers using a specialized AI to make a design slightly lighter and then using a 3D printer to print that design isn’t a 3D printer using AI.

Did you actually even read the article you linked? It’s about a type of generative AI that’s slightly better than humans at finding the most efficient way of providing structural strength with minimal material. If you think that’s all there is to designing a bridge I can only hope you aren’t allowed anywhere near a bridge I need to drive across.

So uh… how exactly does a 3D printer use AI? Is the AI running the stepper motors? Or is this person actually suggesting that an AI could design a bridge? Because, uh, no. No it can’t. Maybe someday in the distant future, but large language models aren’t structural engineers. Those aren’t even remotely the same thing.

It’s really only more secure in the sense that in general more complicated programs have more things that can go wrong with them. Either bugs, or just user error.

That is a valid concern, and most people don’t need or use any of sudo’s extra features, so it’s completely reasonable to switch to doas because of that, but it’s not like there’s some glaring security flaw in sudo that most people really need to worry about. Especially if they’re not doing weird things in the config, which would mostly be the same people who could easily switch to doas anyway.

The point was never that any group of people should always be perfect. The point is that you have to search out and get rid of the bad apples to prevent spoiling.