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It was before the invasion of late stage capitalism in computing, creating the attention economy.

Computing was a thing by geeks, for geeks. It was revolutionary. It was fun. Now it's the lowest common denominator. Instagram.


Oh yes, totally worth it to risk THE FREE INTERNET because of that.

He's not defending "THE FREE INTERNET" at his new place.

(Which for the record, is less important than physical freedom).


Maybe that has to do with Brave not getting a free check to the tune iof $500M Google every year.

That makes it more difficult to create "free internet" type projects.


> risk THE FREE INTERNET because of that

Come off it, as if he is the only one who can save us. Spare me.


I will eat my hat if Google had nothing to do with the demise of Mozilla, what an absolute disgrace.

How incompetent can they be, how out of touch with their core (and arguably only) product ?

Nobody wants AI in firefox.


Nobody wants three or four corporations manipulating and controlling information (with a mix of hallucinations) all behind a subscription. The large tech companies have nearly universally lost all trust.

The models I've run recently on Ollama seem to about as good as the models I was running at work a year ago. The tech isn't there yet, but I see a path. I would be fine with that enhancing, not replacing, my usage.


I want a good AI integration with Firefox. The current chatgpt shim is horrible, something more refined would be nice.

Would you pay $20 a month for it? Like Cursor but for your browser?

Why though?

>I will eat my hat if Google had nothing to do with the demise of Mozilla

One has to be truly naive to think they get half a bi a year from Google "just because." They have less than 5% of desktop market share and ZERO mobile presence.

IMHO, they wouldn't get this kind of money if they had a competent, technical C-suite that actually cared about creating a truly competitive free browser. The money is flowing because, not in spite of, the current C-suite.


Leaving XSLT in web standards and in Firefox would let it keep some comfy useful niche.

Is that right if Google don't want to keep it - then no one can have it ?!

BTW JavaScript (to replace it all) _is not_ a _web standard_ (but it is Oracle trademark).


Do we know for a fact that 'nobody wants AI in Firefox'?

We know for a fact that whenever Mozilla solicits feedback for AI additions, it heavily leans negative.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-f...


Yeah, but there's a selection bias present in most feedback like this, isn't there? People are more motivated to submit feedback when something annoys them. This is speaking as someone who is also annoyed by AI features.

And a 15 second look at that page makes it extremely obvious that (as expected) all this feedback is coming from the 1% of extremely vocal terminally online losers who haven't left their house in the past 6 months and spend their free time consuming furry porn and "tooting" on Mastodon, and for whom hating AI is 75% of their personality. Not actual normal people.

Please don't fulminate or sneer like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Every place has been unstable at some point.

And every place actively destabilized by an empire is definitely unstable.

The amount of coups directly planned and executed or supported by the US military/intelligence/lobbying apparatus in south America and the rest of the world is incredible.

And then the presidents have the audacity to say that it is the right and responsibility of the locals to govern (as said by biden on Afghanistan exit).

It truly has been the most exploitative empire ever. I hope the Chinese do better. We'll find out.


I see no evidence at all they will do better. Rather the opposite.

At least so far, they have been expanding economically and not militarily, as the US. China could easily start wars with anyone they wanted, and they haven't done so. The US on the other hand, has wars all over the place.

I don't know, and I cannot know. I can only hope.


They could not easily have done so, because the US was undisputed top dog. And they are spending huge sums militarily, including on nukes.

You're replying in good faith to someone who ignored the main point of GP (an empire actively disrupting a region) and just said "every place has been unstable" (without even taking century-level timescales into consideration).

> an empire actively disrupting a region

> century-level timescales

Doesn't sound very scientific or predictive. Is also ignorant of history. Ottoman empire lasted many centuries. So did Roman empire. Which crushed and oppressed and destabilized a lot of Europe. China famously had their "century of humiliation" which was "century-level timescale" of "empire actively disrupting a region".


You are right, but I felt morally compelled.

Yeah that's marketing. There's no such thing as aerospace only CFD, and all tolerances are subject to cost/benefit trade offs.

They might be great designers and talented engineers, sure.


What does the orange-utan has to do with this ?

The free rein of the CIA and associated atrocities have been the same under every US president.


No, it hasn’t. The CIA didn’t do this under Clinton because it’s a war crime, and Cold War Republicans prided themselves on saying we were better than e.g. the Viet Cong. The Bush cadre broke the U.S. law written just a few years before by their own party[1] by adopting techniques American forces were trained could be used against them if they were captured, not things which were previously sanctioned.

Obama’s greatest moral failing was not having war crimes trials. There is a direct line between the Bush-era embrace of torture abroad and the mistreatment we’re now seeing domestically.

1. War Crimes Act of 1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Crimes_Act_of_1996


Which other president directed the rounding up of Americans and non-Americans to put them in a camp?


Out of curiosity, do you know if these events get taught in history lessons in American schools? I'm by no means throwing shade here - I'm a Brit and our history lessons barely mentioned the unending list of atrocities Britain committed in the name of empire.

Yepper. Trail of Tears, German/Japanese internment are all primary education topics. Now interestingly, I don't think Bush has made it into the history books yet, but I don't have kids, so can't verify current day education materials.

What I find interesting is the bits we leave out. Like we touch on the Banana Republics, but the annex of Hawaii and how that was skulduggerously done is completely skimmed over.


> German/Japanese internment are all primary education topics.

There wasn't any German internment. White people got a pass.


> There wasn't any German internment

There was, in fact, but the proportion of German (and Italian, also) nationals and citizens of German (and Italian) descent interned was far lower compared to the population of such foreign nationals and citizens than was the case for Japanese nationals and citizens of Japanese descent.

> White people got a pass.

Relatively speaking, yes, but there still were internments, including of US citizens based on German and Italian descent. (But with more individualized review before internment or eviction from coastal areas than was true of citizens of Japanese descent.)



Remind me what the German equivalent of Japan's attack Pearl Harbor was on US soil.

A bit, but it varies some by state and most skip at least some things (do any cover labor struggles in the early 20th century?)

Ours stopped after (an extremely cursory coverage of) the ‘50s and ‘60 civil rights movement because there was no way to cover Vietnam and Nixon and such basically at all without greatly upsetting Republican parents. Anything newer than ~30 years (at the time) was treated as about as handsome-off as religion. Dunno if that’s changed.


TDLR: Very little.

> What does the orange-utan has to do with this ?

Alligator Alcatraz is a Trump original.

> The free rein of the CIA and associated atrocities have been the same under every US president.

You are absolutely right, but not always is this kind of stuff that directly supported by the president.


Don't be so inconsiderate. Humans increase costs. The silicon valley oligarchs do not have enough. They need to reduce costs. Replace everyone possible with "AI". They are on the race to the first trillion after all.

Good luck trying to reach a human for support on google, one of the most rich companies in history, that permeates virtually every aspect of life.


Depends on the region. MISRA is widely adopted, and then there are the US MIL standards, ECSS for european aerospace stuff, do-178C for aviation..

/?hnlog awesome-safety-critical

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562815 :

> awesome-safety-critical: https://awesome-safety-critical.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

From "Safe C++ proposal is not being continued" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45237019 :

> Safe C++ draft: https://safecpp.org/draft.html

Also there are efforts to standardize safe Rust; rust-lang/fls, rustfoundation/safety-critical-rust-consortium

> How does what FLS enables compare to these [unfortunately discontinued] Safe C++ proposals?


DO-178c is not a coding standard, it's a process standard. Projects following DO-178c processes would adopt a coding standard as a part of the process, reviewing software deliverables adhere to those standards.

Are you talking about downloading reddit, which is infested with the weirdest pornography that exists ?

While I am very much against facial scanning etc, it is quite clear that something needs to be done about the access of porn to kids. It is a drug like any other that we do not allow kids to consume.


I dont know why porn companies arent just sued into oblivion. There are already laws against distributing porn to minors in most places and porn companies do it routinely without any controls.


Virtually nobody has been able to demonstrate any tangible harm outside of weak "ooo morality" type arguments.

I get that intuitively porn is bad, but we are creatures with thousands of years of baggage. Practically every institution, everywhere, has spent trillions of dollars across hundreds of years to convince people sex is bad as a control mechanism. We don't even know if sex is addictive, there's a lot of disagreement about that among experts, let alone porn. All we have, really, is some anecdotes from people on Reddit that they stopped touching themselves and now they're not suicidal. Frankly, I don't think that's much of anything.

I'm not sure it's worth it giving up everything for a problem that we're not even sure exists.


All it takes is a cursory search on google scholar to find papers discussing the addiction potential of online pornography.

So what is your plan on dealing with wikipedia? I accessed porn in 2011 when I was 11. I played Postal 2 when I was 10. But no English skills at that age means not much came out of that game at that time except cat silencers.

How many kids these days play 18+ rated games?


> So what is your plan on dealing with wikipedia?

Im not sure I understand. Are you saying wikipedia has porn?


Yes. It even has articles dedicated to specific sex positions. I definitely looked at those articles fairly often as a young teen.

But should I need to upload an ID to view that? I guess some people think North Korea has the right mindset with information control, so showing an ID to see who's seeing what makes sense. But I'm not of that mindset.


Yes. Not necessarily on any pages. Go to the commons and search with some obvious keywords.


Do a few nude photographs on wikipedia hold the same addiction potential as an infinite stream of short form HD videos - specifically optimized for attention capture - on platforms like reddit ?

I am not even sure whether I should take you seriously.


> a few nude photographs on wikipedia

It’s a wee bit more extensive than that. Videos, more than a few, and most of them not tied to a wiki page.

As someone who tried to run a clean BBS and later a web forum, I’ll never be surprised at the lengths people will go to share porn.


It is still incomparable for all intents and purposes to platforms like reddit etc.

Of course people go to great lengths to share porn. But we should also go to great lengths to protect kids (and adults) from incredibly addictive things like hard drugs, porn, gambling, lootboxes etc.


In Germany a fixed wheel does not count as a brake, and passionate fixie drivers will have a rear brake installed but never use it.

The signs on the rim of a brake that has been used is frowned upon by o̶b̶s̶e̶s̶s̶e̶d̶ passionate fixie drivers.


Sounds like the rules are the same actually

In the UK a bike is required to have 2 brakes, and a fixed wheel counts a single brake, i.e. you can't ride a fixie with no extra brake but you can with a single brake


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