They do have a history of such things happening, yes, which is why my comment exists in the first place. Normally, I would assume this to just be the result of regular shitty management practices paired with regular shitty profit motives.
The history makes it look like they might genuinely have a higher motive here, and I’m saying I still don’t think so, because it would be far too petty and I don’t see them benefitting that much from it.
Most of it?
Google is blocking popular instances these days, so yeah, you basically need to find an unpopular instance, which usually means it’s new and may not live for long, or it will quickly become popular, because it works, which will cause Google to block it.
Yeah, Google started blocking popular instances of Invidious and Piped in May this year: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3822
Every so often, it may start working again when those instances get a different IP address, but it usually doesn’t last more than a few days…
The thing is, I really don’t think, Google would care about Firefox. Firefox is sitting at negligible percentages of usage share. The only real competitor to Chrome is Safari and that’s because of iOS.
I guess, they might impact Safari on macOS with this, but someone would have to try this out to actually see, and ultimately, this could still just be a dumb mistake.
Having said that, Google holds a near-monopoly in both video content and web browsers. They have a special duty to not disadvantage competitors and even if this was an honest mistake, I do think, it deserves a slap on the wrist.
I don’t think, there’s currently any plans to introduce a non-JS API for accessing the DOM. It would just take an insane amount of implementation work + documentation.
But frameworks can generate access code for you, so you don’t actually need to write any JS yourself. Rust is quite far ahead in this regard, thanks to the wasm-bindgen library.
I mean, so far, all of them require tons of humanly produced data.
Discriminative AI (deep learning et al) requires humans to label data for hours on end, per use-case.
And generative AI (LLMs et al) require just insane amounts of human works to copy from, albeit not necessarily limited to individual use-cases.
I guess, what I’m saying is that the ratio of how much labor humans (involuntarily) invested into AIs, compared to the labor these AIs actually perform, is likely a lot higher than 70%.
It’s a thing here in Europe. I’m guessing, because our walls are generally concrete, we usually either throw on decorative plaster or a wallpaper, to make it feel a bit warmer and have a uniform surface which accepts paint more readily.
It’s even quite common that if you rent an appartment, that the walls have wallpaper on them, which is painted with a fresh coat of white paint every time someone moves out and the next folks move in.
And then some people, after they move in, will just paint (some of) the walls in a different color, if they feel like not living in pure white…
I mean, at this rate, I’m imagining Microsoft will have hollowed out OpenAI in a few years, but I could see them buying Boston Dynamics, too, yes
If we’re talking passwords, that’s a no. If we’re talking enough personal data that you could use it for spear phishing, identity theft or targetted malvertising, that’s a no.
Honestly, no matter how innocous the information you want is, I would be extremely suspicious why you’d want it. And I’m certainly not turning off my ad blocker either.
Ah, true. Thanks.
Theoretically, it was supposed to be pseudo-code, secretly inspired by Rust, but I did get that one mixed up.
And I am actually even a fan of the word unwrap there, because it follows a schema and you can have your IDE auto-complete all the things you can do with an Option.
In many of these other languages, you just get weird collections of symbols which you basically have to memorize and which only cover rather specific uses.
I enjoy this:
return a.or(b);
But yeah, that requires an Option type rather than null pointers…
I certainly don’t want to dismiss any individuals as tech bros. Tech broism is more like a natural phenomenon, which occurs when you lock exclusively privileged people into a room for long enough and then let them discuss user needs.
At some point, they’ll ask themselves questions like “Why do we need privacy?” and everyone else in the room will agree that they’ve never needed it either and then they’ll found Google.
I am very much at risk of this, too. I have to constantly go out of my way to try to re-adjust my perspective, so that I don’t completely miss the ball on what users actually need.
And places like Hacker News naturally form, because of course, we all do want to only talk about topics that we consider relevant. And folks whose needs are not generally considered relevant by the Hacker News community will look for different places, too.
I guess, a question you can ask yourself:
If you’ve ever interviewed a senior engineer who was for example black, gay, trans and/or a woman, did they frequent Hacker News?
Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve been there, but my impression was the polar opposite. That it’s filled with business folks and tech bros. That their unbalanced voting system unearths controversial takes rather than informative comments. Every now and then, you’ll genuinely see a comment from someone with expertise, but that was not worth sacrificing my mental health for.
Well, those will work in Firefox just fine…
Yeah, people will use anything, if it comes as default…
Sure, yeah. The way I imagine this would work out best for humanity, is if companies are forced to open up platforms they provide, when they have e.g. more than 40% market saturation with that.
Most small platforms will want to strive for interoperability with the dominant platforms anyways, so this threshold is just to keep the burden of regulation low.
In practice, this might mean that Twitter would be forced to allow federation with Mastodon.
Or that Microsoft is forced to open-source the code for the Windows API.
Or that Reddit is blocked from closing up their third-party API.
Ultimately, I don’t think, it even needs to be as concrete. I feel like even a law stating that if you’re providing a platform, you need to take special care to keep competition alive (along with some detailing what this entails), and then leaving it up to a judge to decide, would work.
The GDPR is implemented like that and while most larger companies are IMHO in violation of the GDPR, I also feel like most larger companies actually did go from atrocious privacy handling to merely bad privacy handling, which is an incredible success.
That’s effectively all I’m hoping for, too. That dominant platforms can’t just stagnate for multiple decades anymore. That they do have to put in at least a small bit more effort to stay in that dominant position.
Yeah, I could imagine their legal department actually making up a sizeable chunk, with how much the music industry loves to sue.
Well, the F-Droid team may in theory permit it, but it’s also the F-Droid team that has to actively build and distribute the new version. If they don’t feel like distributing a newer version, they can absolutely do that.
I came into this comment section wanting to make the same argument, but I guess, you could also be carrying around a USB-C-to-audio-jack adapter in addition to your wired headphones…