I have been using #mozilla's #firefox for decades. But it now feels that I need to start making contingency plans for the "day after".
Their tainted monetary life-line from #google is well known and may or may not last. But instead of doing something with it, they squandered their last chance following hypes like the #metaverse and now #AI. Even the #fediverse they did wrong, apparently spending big on... running a #mastodon instance.
Deeply sad, but are there any promising alternatives?
@phiofx Well... I'm quite pleased that Firefox has stayed away from all those overhyped metaverse and AI stuff. I do not want to be annoyed from those inefficent energy-wasters, do you? I mean, we're litterally running out of time, energy and resources. Should we solve that by wasting even more energy?
My unscientific, high level, impression from (virtual) attendance of #fosdem2024 is that we are entering a third period of the "movement".
The lone hacker #foss years are fading away, the #bigtech#opensource embrace is currently very dominant but we are slowly getting into yet another era where the public sector is involved.
There seems to be a trend of people declaring on the profiles what shade of #doomerism / #optimism they feel attached to. A sign of our times I suppose.
My sense is that this more an emotional / character aspect than any purely rational argument.
But I am justifying my own (mostly) optimistic stance by stealing Pascal's timeless argument:
Even under the assumption that there is no hope, the potential benefits of thinking there is hope are so vast as to make betting on it rational.
Many people use #github for visibility and discovery of their projects. Alternative patterns that make network effects of "winner-takes-all" centralization less oppressive are great.
Another win is simply more eyeballs and brains to push the federation vision technically.
Maybe most importantly, this trend will help expand the #fediverse beyond meme sharing echo-chambers into meaningful, long-term valuable content.
But it no longer feels so. Maybe it was a case of "you have to move fast to fix things" and as incumbents raise their game the window of opportunity closes. The vast investment in established stacks incentivises patching the most egregious weaknesses.
One exception seems #golang, which found a network niche
@phiofx I think there is also improvements in the original languages. For example Typescript or typed Python.
Rewriting from scratch even in a "better" language is expensive and fraught with problems - you risk reintroducing bugs without perfect understanding not only of the original code, but the original context. But gradual improvement over time is better.
Question is whether new ecosystems are adopted for new projects. Maybe that is more an economics question.
They could indeed hijack the technical developments. When you print billions per quarter you can attract serious technical talent (though obviously low on moral values). Open source projects like react for frontend or pytorch for ML have redefined the respective domains.
But their commercial interest is fundamentally misaligned with a (re)democratized web. Not clear how they could extract rents if they support building the tools that empower people not to.
I agree, and here I will also refrain on brainstorming ideas that can only serve them. Right now the entire Fediverse is one big stakeholder feedback collection space for them anyway. The entire ecosystem is Royal Free Beer Provider, as it were 😬
On the occasion of the #dropbox fiasco Simon Willison raises the debilitating issue of (lack of) #trust in the so-called #ai industry.
I think he is being naive about the amount of spying that goes on on mobile. Maybe Meta doesnt do it in the in-your-face way others do, but most people have dozens of popular apps from various operators (I have witnessed first hand live conversation showing up as ads minutes later).
The "tech" industry right now is a moral cesspool.
Wow, TIL that #eigen, the powerful #cpp library for all sorts of numerical computing started as a #KDE project to support visualization. Eigen is now a building block in various #machinelearning efforts.
The magic of #opensource development is that pieces evolve, recombine and are re-used in novel contexts, almost like a biological process.
Some confused and naive human made the terrible mistake (i suppose around 10000 BC) of domesticating some feline species or other and now the #fediverse has to endure #caturday on an recurring seven day pattern.