antisol

From TFA:

    Implementation complexity: 
     h264 Stream: 3 months of rust
     JPEG Spam: fetch() in a loop

I don't see how it could have taken 3 months to read up on existing technologies. And that "3 month" number is before we start factoring in time spent on:

* Writing code for JPEG Spam / "fetch() in a loop" method

* Mechanisms to switch between h264 / jpeg modes

* Debugging implementation of 2 modes

* Debugging switching back and forth between the 2 modes

* Maintenance of 2 modes into the future

Just wait till the next version.

Mozilla love re-enabling stuff you've explicitly turned off a hundred times. Terrible hamburger menus, threaded messages in thunderbird. I've seen it so many times.

Multiple factors, e.g the perceived lack of an immediate need, and also Mozilla's control of the firefox codebase.

For instance, one improvement that a more user-respecting group might contribute is ripping out all the AI slop. But as pointed out in the article, Mozilla like the AI slop and wouldn't accept those changes.

If Mozilla was to disappear, orgs like those I mentioned would likely see a more urgent need to take over in order to break the chrom(ium) monoculture.

This, 1000%.

I've been saying for over a decade that Mozilla decided to abandon their core demographic - power users, instead going after people who "really like chrome, but think that it’s just too fast and doesn’t use enough memory".

I always questioned how big that demographic was. Looking at a chart of Firefox's market share would seem to indicate that I might have been on to something.

But Mozilla just keep doubling down on trash. They're not actually interested in hearing what people want. People like me tried to tell them before we abandoned Firefox. But they weren't interested in listening. It's been this way for 10 years or more now.

I've long been of the opinion that the best thing for Mozilla would be for it to die, so that some other FOSS group (maybe the FSF, or debian, someone like that) could take its place with a firefox fork. And maybe even start actually improving the software again.

    So this is my word of warning:
    Don’t put all your eggs in the Wise basket.

You've taken the wrong message away from this.

The lesson you should have learned here is: Don't put all your eggs in any one basket.

If you are relying on a single provider for some critical business function, then your business is at risk. Period. I don't care how long you've been working with them and how nice their current sales support rep is. Things change. People leave. Companies get bought by other companies and restructured. If you're relying on any single one for anything mission-critical, that's an existential risk.

I agree that your wise story is ludicrous and terrible and hilarious. I particularly love how your bill was rejected because it was labelled as a "Tax Invoice" (we have the same requirement here in AU).

But TBH this is pretty typical of online services these days, and you should have expected this to happen. Google will happily lock you out of your account for no real reason and give opaque reasons why they won't unlock it. I've seen cases of this happening to google employees. Paypal are notorious for freezing funds during product launches.

IMO there should be regulations requiring businesses to have a way for customers to speak to an actual human with decision-making powers. If I was you, I'd be taking legal action against wise and complaining to the government department responsible for regulating these things.

oh wow, port scanning with websockets! Interesting! Thanks for the link! :)

If someone is in your LAN then you have bigger problems than them snooping on you while you talk to your fridge.

Impressive. I don't need to post my opinion on this anymore - you did it so much better than I ever could.

Or another way of saying it would be that I've "cherrypicked" literally the majority of Scots wikipedia.

    > Not even done by a bad actor, just someone misguided?

I'm not sure how the actor's good intentions makes the information on the wiki accurate?

    > quickly corrected

As others have pointed out, it was certainly not "quickly" corrected. And to clarify on "corrected", about half the content on that wiki was simply deleted. A bunch of actual useful edits were definitely removed. And that didn't happen before the Scottish government used it as a source.

    I bet now you’d kill for a senior thesis based on my free, multilingual, publicly cited, text-based articles, motherfucker

Yeeeeeeeeah.... Not if it's written in or about the Scots language.

(see: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ ) (see also: that time the Scottish governmment used Scots wikipedia as a source)

which of these requires my government to not be transparent?

it does, however, point out that there's not been a valid security context listed where secrecy would be necessary.

This reminds me of when Australia tried to force twitter to block a video globally: https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/elon-musk-wins-latest-c...

In one of the more enlightened things Elon has done in the last few years, he fought back, and he won.

Interestingly, here in AU, there was a storm of media outrage at the time, saying all kinds of nasty things about Musk, making all kinds of assertions about how he was super arrogant and wrong to insist on upholding american's freedom of speech, with no attempt to justify why. It was almost like we were just expected to assume that AU law applies everywhere on earth.

Here's a fun sample of a totally unbiased article from the time: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-20/elon-musk-reacts-to-e...

Strangely, when the court order wasn't upheld because AU laws don't actually apply outside our country, and the gubmint that was so outraged and "ready to take him on" lost badly on every point, there was no huge storm of media coverage about that.

That doesn't actually mean that they're not correct.

I'm not at war with anybody though.

  > we all would agree that there's some functions of government related to war and security that should not be transparent

Yeah I don't know that this premise is true. For a lot of examples you might give WRT war or security, I feel like some will take the approach that "if you can't do it transparently then you probably shouldn't be doing it at all".

  > I feel that if the FSF recognizes that there's some areas that are ok to have closed source, then they could be taken seriously, otherwise they will just be ignored and leave room for precisely the kind of misuse of closed source that they fear. This is especially noticeable when they fight against projects that precisely do a lot for open source, like github (See GitLab/Savannah), or Android, they are 99% of the way there, give them a break.

Yeah but the problem here is that the FSF has this annoying track record of being proven correct, over and over again. Two of your examples are github and android: github got bought out by microsoft, and android is about to be hobbled to the point that f-droid won't work on it anymore. If you want to go and look at the history you'll see a bunch of other instances of Stallman and the FSF saying things that sound paranoid at first, but which turn out to be correct in the long run. It's genuinely annoying, life would be easier if they were wrong occasionally.

Does it still count as a cult if they're right? Do they still count as extremists if they're empirically correct? Maybe it's a good thing to have that type of extremist out there, fighting for everybody.

Yeah I was part of a group that was involved with a bulk shipment of one of the very first batches, we got all the warts.

Another thing that's worth mentioning was that at first, openmoko were very much over-selling the capabilities and readiness of the device: The Freerunner was initially supposed to be a "consumer-grade" device, with the neo1973 being the prototype / developer version. When I first contacted openmoko I was told that it would be totally usable as a phone out of the box with all the phone functionality you expect. They walked back on those claims and updated their website/wiki pretty quickly after the device actually came out. But not before a bunch of us had handed over our cash.

I'm glad to hear that the stack did get to a somewhat usable state. And I'm even more glad to hear that the librem is better. The experience I had with the Freerunner put me off foss phones for a long time, and the pinephone....didn't help. Maybe I'll take another look at the librem.

  (which still works, BTW!)

Yeah my freerunner still mostly powered up the last time I tried, a year or two ago. I think maybe nand had corrupted and I might have had to re-flash it, or something like that. It wasn't in a healthy state but seemed to be mostly OK with a bit of tinkering.

It does deserve some credit as a cool little portable linux device - once I gave up on using it as a phone, I hacked it into a pretty useful GPS and music player device. I was still using it to record GPS tracks for trips in 2016, and I was running it as a second display attached to my workstation for some time after that. It did last quite well, I do have to give it that... But what I bought was supposed to be a phone.

I tried SHR too. That original 2007.2 distro that it shipped with was almost usable as a phone before OM released the much worse one.

Interesting to hear, I never managed to get anything like that many hours out of mine - as I say I never managed a full day because it wouldn't wake from sleep to ring. And I spent a LOT of time trying to eliminate the echo but never quite managed it (though I think it might have been gone in qtmoko, it's been a long time so hard to remember exactly).

Still I'm glad to hear that it was usable for someone, I guess.

> Things have changed meanwhile ;)

I wish. But my experience with the pinephone was somehow even worse.

I have to second this. I've bought two of these devices over the years: first the Neo Freerunner and then a Pinephone Pro.

I spent over two years persisting, trying to get the Freerunner to a state where it was usable as a phone. Openmoko were more interested in rewriting from scratch and making sure it had pretty animations than things that some might consider more important, like working power management and phone calls.

For a long time I called the Freerunner "the worst phone ever made"...

...but then I bought a Pinephone. Which couldn't even play mp3s without stuttering - something even the freerunner could manage over a decade earlier. Don't get me started on the "quirkiness" of trying to use it to make and receive calls. Also the keyboard attachment I bought with it never worked. I tried multiple distros and whatnot, but I didn't get to spend a huge amount of time experimenting, because less than a month after I started to try actually using it, I dropped it, and it was so fragile that the screen was destroyed, despite me having bought a screen protector for it.

I've looked at a lot of these devices over the years and been tempted many times. I was very put off by the freerunner experience. The pinephone experience was actually almost impressive that it managed to be somehow worse.

I've just been scanning the postmarketos wiki looking at how that works with a few different devices. The number of devices that have some feature like calls / gps / camera / etc "partially working" is dismaying, particularly for open devices like the pinephone and librem.

Personally I switched to using lineageos on phones a long time ago. It's not ideal but at least it's usable as a phone.

Which software stack were you using on the Neo Freerunner that was usable as a phone and had working power management?

I tried to use a Freerunner as a phone for well over 2 years before I gave up and just bought another nokia. As far as I'm aware, it was never really usable as a phone, partly due to the power management never really working properly (there was a point where we finally got power management and a battery life of >4hrs, but the phone often wouldn't wake to ring when somebody called). When using several of the available distros I was frequently mocked by my friends for using the "echophone", due to their own voice being echoed back at them, making it extremely disconcerting to talk to.

I tried a bunch of different distros. And I spent hours and hours and hours trying to tweak settings and test to eliminate the echo. qtmoko was the best distro IIRC, but it had its own issues.

To say that "they sure were usable by a determined person" severely overstates the usability of the freerunner IMO - I'll be extremely curious to hear about the software stack that you characterise as "usable", particularly with regard to the ability to make and receive calls and the ability to have the phone on standby for more than about 4 hours away from a charger.

lolwut

define "malware".

Agreed. I read

   built-in 5-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 800×600, delivering sharp and bright vector graphics

And my first thought was "but if it has a resolution of 800x600, then they're not vector graphics, are they"

That's not unreasonable. I perhaps could have worded it more neutrally. Though IMO scumbags need to be called scumbags.

It's not about "taking revenge", it's about setting the record straight. As mentioned, I don't think this person should be lionised. And I think that the constant idolisation of this (bad) person does the industry and history a disservice. And I think that there are people who might be curious about the facts of this person's track record if they were alerted to them. By a comment like mine.

With respect, I'm not sure which of these guidelines you think my post violates? Could you clarify for me? I'm particularly interested in your "destroys what it is for" comment, I'm not sure I understand. If you could elaborate that would be awesome.

I think it's important to point out that this person who is lionised by so many was actually an objectively bad person who did reprehensible things.

[flagged]

Can you point me to a picture of Linus Torvalds' car parked in a handicapped space?

This is very very cool. And also the second worst abuse of the browser I've ever seen ;) I doff my hat to you!

> leave it broken

The whole point here is that on X it's not broken at all. And if it was, it would only need to be fixed once.