@selfisekai@pl@nitrofurano@bladecoder Fennec F-Droid also has arbitrary extension support in a stable release! (Standard Android Firefox only allows extensions from a supported list by Mozilla in stable, and arbitrary extensions in Beta.)
You have to do a weird thing called a Custom Collection to make extensions available to it then, but it'll support 95% of Firefox extensions then. (Some will have UI weirdness on phone.)
@mckra1g@lrvick I'll never forget when my mother finally got hearing aids and was so pleased with them and her quality of life only to have the IoT enshittification raise the rent on "Hearing as a Service" and she had to give them up. I've not seen her that depressed before in living memory.
You need to stop using Chrome NOW. It’s not hyperbole: Google just rolled out a change to Chrome that tracks the sites you visit, builds a profile, and shares that with any page you visit that asks.
Ex: you’re a teenager living in a highly conservative state. You’re visiting sites your ultra religious family don’t want you to. Google tracks you NATIVELY IN THE BROWSER and informs 3rd parties of your interest in LGBTQ sites.
The failure of the Internet to deliver its promise is particularly noticeable when you hunt for repair manuals for a product from the 90s. Used to be, the information would either be there or not there, finable or unfindable.
Now, there are hundreds of algorithmically generated sites claiming to have it just because it appeared in their search logs, generating potemkin village content traps with endless paging, broken-thumbnail named-like-the-file-you-want but actually-just-ebay-photos bullshit
Even if you find the manufacturer's site it’s more likely than not broken, with a search feature that pulls up what it claims are results but empty divs instead of links, or busted jQuery code from 2013 that prevents anything from loading.
Is it a real but broken site? Is it just another click farm? Does it matter?
@eaton This is also why it's such a problem that independent websites are now falling so far down search engine rankings. When I was younger, if you had a problem with A Thing from a larger category of Things, you'd go to a website run by some Thing Enthusiast or group of them, and look your Thing up in the site's index or inbuilt search box. If it wasn't there, you'd post on the site's forum and another Thing Owner might help. But now... good luck even finding out that indie site exists.
Oh my goodness I've just learned a thing about The Matrix that causes it to make a lot more sense: In the original script the humans were used as neural network compute clusters by the Machines and as a crucial component of The Matrix itself.
Which is why humans who were aware of the simulation could control aspects of The Matrix - their minds were part of its foundation.
Unfortunately the test audiences had trouble understanding this concept so the studio changed the human role to "batteries".
It also shows an origin for the neural net, rather than battery version: Neil Gaiman @neilhimself wrote a story in the universe, and didn't like the battery explanation, so he switched to the neural net explanation.
I'm a totally blind software tester with previous testing experience. I know there are many of you in the #Fedivers working on many cool projects, I'd love to test them for accessibility if you're looking for an accessibility tester or any accessibility consultancy please get in touch :-) if everyone could repost this, that would be great thanks very much :-) #a11y
@soundwarrior20 If you have the interest in taking a look at my project (A fediverse server for static web sites) feel free... though given the nature as an arbitrary static site generator im not sure it will be terribly relevant except in the situation where someone uses the default styling.
@auschwitzmuseum I would also like to suggest that you temporarily cease the feed of Holocaust victims from the previous century and begin broadcasting the names, photos, and stories of Holocaust victims from Simhat Torah
Your organization has no other purpose than to prevent the horrors which Israel experienced on Simhat Torah. Now that you have failed in that - now that we have all failed in that - the least you can do is support the war effort with every resource you have.
To understand Musk's renewed obsession with X and focus on financial services, you REALLY need to understand the X/Confinity merger that became PayPal.
And, particularly, the Peter Thiel-led coup that kicked Musk out as CEO/Chief Strategist.
Having drummed up support, he founds a new company to take this forward. He immediately buys the x.com domain off Pittsburgh PowerComputer for 1.5 MILLION shares of A-Stock in his new company, X.
Advisors express concern over X as a brand. Elon loves it. /3
Hopefully you can see the roots of this whole X pivot thing now. Musk has decided that the way to save Twitter and regain his genius status is to fall back on his unrealised vision from 1999.
Build "the world's financial nexus" as he described it then. /23
A broken clock fixed by taping a working clock over it is a metaphor for every codebase you’ll encounter in your professional career as a software developer.
@carnage4life The working clock uses one of the gears in the broken clock to advance the hour hand, but only on odd numbered days. Also, one of the four AA batteries in the broken clock needs to be hooked up in series to the four batteries in the working clock to increase the voltage slightly, because power is being sent from the new clock's batteries through a resistor in the old clock for reasons nobody understands, but it's definitely true that if you just send the power to the new clock directly, it runs backwards.
@carnage4life I have been occasionally scolded for my 'messy' PRs that muck out disfunction, realign ancillary internal methods & data structures and/or otherwise embrace my inner Fowler. The PR diffs are ugly AF but some of them are things I am most proud of.
To the topic: lately I feel sometimes our PR/user story approach encourages the employment of duck tape by encouraging change that fully satisfies stated requirements, makes for easy-to-read PRs, but loses the plot along the way.
Also, a reminder for everyone the many ways that Meta and their properties are not to be trusted.
EDIT: Let me add that Mastodon is not encrypted either--including DM's. It is upfront and open about that fact and you should not use social media for any sensitive exchanges.
Pillaged from BlueSky:
"20 years ago we were suing teenagers for millions of dollars because they were torrenting a single Metallica album and now billionaires are demanding the free right to every work in history, so that they can re-sell it.
The law only ever serves capital."
@AlisonCreekside Also, society can survive without ChatGPT and many of the AI tools being created. What actual value do the models of AI bring for society as a whole that isn't, in fact, negative value and harm? (This does not mean we couldn't find useful and actually constructive uses for these technologies but that's not what we're doing.)
Dungeons and Dragons is a role-playing game that lets you live out such fantasies as:
• Having money
• Making close friends as an adult
• Travelling the world without crippling debt
• Being able to change the world
• Getting better at something with practice
• Getting 8 hours of sleep each night
"Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things," Huffman said. "We are not in the business of giving that away for free."
You and me, we're just data sets. Years of interaction with fellow human beings, building community, sharing insight and creativity…it’s all just data. Data to be mined and monetized.
Huffman's not mad Reddit was scraped for a chatbot. He's mad he wasn't paid for the privilege. It's his data, you see. His. Not yours.
@Jyoti@jaredwhite What you say could be argued on a theoretical level. But the way our societies operate today, profits are an important element. For instance, as a business owner I am legally required to intend making a profit, otherwise I might lose my business license.
From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.
There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.
All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.
Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.
@fullfathomfive this! If only people became aware that's the same for Google Maps, video game mods, etc.
I only contribute to project when the project is legally designed to be a common. Maybe you could find such a project about learning langage? Like, I don't know https://librelingo.app or https://tatoeba.org 🤔
Under-the-radar late night launch: RSS Parrot is live! It talks like Mastodon, but it doesn't walk like Mastodon. BUT! It will relay any RSS feed straight into your timeline.
Turn Mastodon into your very own feed reader. Follow anything that has an RSS feed and get a toot about new posts.
How? Mention @birb with the address you want to follow.
A couple of weeks ago, @shazbot made this post about a project that they were working on. Since then, @shazbot, @ori, @minnieo and I have been hard at work, and we are excited to finally announce the official release of kbin Enhancement Suite (KES)!...
If for whatever reason you never wish to interact with #Threads, you can personally block it for your account. This hides all posts and profiles from Threads, prevents anyone from Threads from following you, and stops your posts from being delivered to or fetched by Threads. Simply click the "Block domain threads.net" option on any Threads profile or post you see in Mastodon.
It's just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you.
