bad_user

So what questions are LLMs good for?

Judging how the US administration has turned against its historic allies, while pandering to authoritarian regimes, I'm pretty sure that it's by design, not reckless.

> They say the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship

I asked who is "they" from this sentence.

You can ask these questions about NATO as well, and while USA has been the greatest contributor, in a confrontation with China, it wouldn't stand a chance without its NATO allies.

I know that many like to complain of Europe's bureaucracy, but we're talking about half a billion educated people, with enough resources and with an existential crisis, which we're surely facing, the EU+UK, joined by allies, can be a force to be reckoned with.

The problems EU is facing come from within. We have far right movements as well, aided by propaganda, the pandemic and the immigration waves. The far right are more contained than in the US apparently (due to US having just 2 parties), but it can lead to government paralysis. Seeing the US administration ally itself with Russia to dismember the EU wasn't in my cards.

So, it's going to be an interesting year.

Who is "they"? People that don't know any history?

Safari's ad-blocking abilities are no more potent than what Chrome's Manifest v3 gives you. In fact, the changes in MV3 were inspired by Safari.

I used to work adjacent to a team working on anti-ad-blocking tech. Safari's protections are fairly easy to circumvent, with Adblock Plus not being great either. It was uBlock Origin that was making this team sweat, and they didn't even bother with it.

The reason is that whatever you can do in the browser, e.g., via JavaScript, uBO can inject scripts with stubs and protections to fool any anti-ad-blocking tech that ads are, in fact, being served. There's no way to combat uBO without a degraded user experience, even for users that aren't using ad-blockers. Compared with uBlock Origin, other alternatives looked like toys.

Note that many people are happy with just DNS-level blocking, even if it's the easiest to circumvent. That's because many publishers don't bother with circumventing ad-blocking protections, either because it's too expensive, or because they don't want to piss off users. But that doesn't mean that the available solutions are equivalent. They aren't.

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Note, if an ad-blocker also works “inside other apps”, on iPhone it's only because the same blockers can be activated inside web views. But not in all apps and not even in all web views, e.g., try it in Facebook's app.

Android has a solution that actually works in apps, but to achieve this, it requires root, and it will act as a man in the middle, and that's not something that I can trust:

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-android/overview.html

Thinking that funding forks, like LibreWolf, would save said forks from dying if Mozilla goes under, is naive.

The development of Firefox costs around half a billion $ per year. Estimates for Chrome range from 1 to 2 billion $ per year. In other words, take the donations of something like Wikimedia, which is arguably very successful in asking for donations, and you'd still be very short on the money needed to fund a web browser. And if you bring those costs down to something more manageable, like say, 100 million $, and assuming you can convince people to donate (IMO, when pigs will fly), then you'll have a browser that may be completely unable to compete with Chromium.

All the browser “forks” survive because Google and Mozilla are doing the hard work.

Dollars, current estimates ranging between 1 and 2 billion.

Firefox is currently developed with half a billion, but IMO, that is why there are only 3 browser engines left, with all the “forks” depending on the upstream.

Chromium browsers can't make that pledge and those that promised have red flags in my book.

1. These browsers can barely add their own functionality on top of upstream, and maintaining Manifest v2 compatibility may be expensive. Consider that the development of Chrome exceeds 1 billion per year.

2. They all use Chrome's Webstore as a distributing channel, except for Edge, but IMO, Microsoft has an even bigger interest in seeing uBO die.

Brave itself has ad-blocking built-in, which won't be affected, and it's fairly capable, but promising that they'll keep compatibility with uBO is a lie, if they ever made that promise.

Firefox-based browsers exist, notable ones for me being: Tor, Mullvad, LibreWolf, Zen.

They did try some extra services, such as VPN or Pocket. I think at this point a Pocket subscription is how one can fund Firefox.

But indeed, even if they ensure that donations go towards Firefox development, instead of other crap, that would be a step forward.

You're overestimating people's willingness to pay for software when free and arguably better alternatives are available. Preferring Firefox to free Chromium alternatives requires a level of nuance and tech literacy that most people will never have, and even with that tech literacy, people may still prefer Chromium.

You're basically talking about asking for donations from people that prefer to ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.

DNS-level blocking doesn't work very well. It only blocks requests to 3rd party domains; however, publishers can just turn to 1st party solutions, and many do just that.

E.g., DNS-level blocking will not block the sponsored links in Google's Search or the ads on YouTube. And while my NextDNS has blocked ads on my Samsung TV, it was unable to block ads on the new Max streaming service (former HBO).

I guess it depends on why we're ad-blocking. If it's for privacy, I guess it's fine, but 1st party requests can and do share your data with first parties, with just one more level of indirection.

I, for one, block ads because ads can be dangerous for my family and even for myself. I don't want ads because I don't want behavior modification, or malware. I also don't want my son to watch ads for services that should be illegal, such as gambling services. And don't get me wrong, I'm one of those people that actually pays for subscriptions to avoid ads, I'm against freeloading as well.

So, DNS-level blocking is just not enough, unless you're happy that you're at least blocking some ads on the scum of the Internet, but then I'm personally not interested in those websites anyway.

Exactly what I said.

So you're OK with YouTube hosting Joe Rogan while they also maintain a monopoly and not giving a damn in general, because they are too big for that.

https://www.youtube.com/@joerogan

Tell me, how does that work out for you?

Comments such as yours are missing the point.

Mozilla's ToS applies for Firefox's use, and this is literally written by Mozilla themselves:

“Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy”

There's no distinction between the browser and Mozilla's online services here.

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And even if it were referring only to features such as “profile syncing” (and it doesn't refer only to that), does this mean that people can't have bookmarks to porn? And why would Mozilla care about how people use profile syncing at all? I thought it was e2e encrypted.

Does it matter?

I am concerned about the periodic attacks on Spotify, while the elephant in the room, YouTube, escapes unfettered. Everything from artist royalties to hosting the Joe Rogan show.

And as it happens, Spotify isn't a FAANG or a US company, so isn't that convenient?

> Morally wrong, legally not so much

Of course, but then, the legality of it is irrelevant.

Free markets work because consumers can exercise their freedom to choose, and in such instances it's easy, given that the reason for why many such projects see wide adoption is their FOSS nature.

I'm from Romania, and IMO the comparisons with the US make no sense, as the actual comparison should be what happened to the countries in the Warsaw Pact before and after USSR's collapse.

Well, those that entered the EU are now far better off by all the metrics that count, and you can take your pick from GDP, income or life expectancy. This didn't happen for all the countries under USSR, depending on whether they stayed within Russia's influence. Obviously, when you have Russia invading a country or threatening to invade, that country won't do well. But even in countries left out of the EU, such as the Republic of Moldova, you can see progress and a strong opposition to regional Russian influence. And Russia does what Russia always did. But it's pretty telling that Eastern European countries like Poland or Romania now have a higher GDP per capita than Russia, lower poverty and higher quality of life included.

In defense of the US, I will say that the Marshall Plan has rebuilt Western Europe after WW2, while USSR's response, the Molotov Plan, was designed for extracting resources. And that Pax Americana did the West, at least, a lot of good is an understatement. ALAS, it appears that world is ending, helped in no small part by the changing views of western citizens, “informed” by the Internet, and guess what will happen next.

Anyway, it's baffling to me to see such a changing tide in opinions on HN, now that the US administration has changed. I mean, I've seen stupid opinions denying reality on HN before, but now it's on a whole new level. I get it, we had cancel culture and all that, but such opinions don't change overnight, so I'm amazed at how many uneducated cowards the world has, even on HN.

Your general understanding is wrong, as there's nothing in either BSD or MIT that allows for re-licensing, and nothing else gives you that right.

You can incorporate MIT/BSD code in a proprietary project, but that imported code itself remains BSD/MIT licensed. For many projects, this is a technicality, but no, you can't claim copyright on MIT/BSD code that isn't yours.

There's nothing wrong with building proprietary software of a couple of thousand lines of code, including themes. And people should be able to ask for money in exchange for their work.

What's wrong is the bait and switch, as these projects end up being popular because of their FOSS nature.

European armed forces should know best, given that Signal has seen actual use by Ukrainian military personnel, with Russian forces trying their best to target those encrypted communications (right now mostly by getting those smartphones from dead bodies).

The idea of EU funding Mozilla is naive, and if this is the best people can come up with, I'm not blaming Mozilla going for ads.

For one, Mozilla is still a US entity. As an EU citizen, I'd rather have my taxes go towards funding EU entities, especially in this climate. And I'd rather have that EU entity fork Chromium, starting to contribute to its development, as that would be a wiser bet.

And also, governments funding projects such as Firefox is a bad idea because the citizens of those governments come first. As one example, many online BBC shows are geo-blocked in my country. The EU is meant to serve its citizens, not the world, and you don't want the open Internet to depend on whom people vote for in the following election cycle.

The only way to fund a project that has global reach is via a sustainable business model, not taxes.

I'm not familiar with that many languages, but I'm pretty sure that romance languages have words for both.

“Security” refers to active protection against existing threats, whereas “safety” refers to the state of being protected.

Firefox has been literally funded by Google's Ads, that Search deal having kept Mozilla alive. With all due respect, Firefox not being connected to AdTech is a hallucination.

Actually, all 3 major browser engines are directly funded by Google's Ads. And while you may have noticed that Mozilla and Apple have been singing the privacy tune, you should've also noticed that they never did anything to upset their cash cow.

Mozilla diversifying their revenue would be an improvement IMO. But whatever they did in the past, people got mad, because many imagine that such a complex piece of software could be developed for free or from the donations of individuals that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.

You're not wrong, but lately, criticism of Israel includes its right to exist, and while anti-Zionism isn't technically anti-Semitism, in practice it is. Furthermore, the pro-Palestine crowd includes many textbook anti-Semites.

Name it X because old Twitter is dead.

> The people involved probably should not be using Twitter/X for this sort of thing in the first place.

Usernames don't necessarily link someone with their real identity, and phone numbers can be hidden.

This isn't the weirdest apology I've ever heard for the behavior of Elon Musk and X's censorship policies, but it's definitely in the top 5.

One can argue that this is implicit in FOSS licenses, including the GPL. If the author can be held liable for any defects, then they can't really share their contributions, and FOSS contributions would only be possible by entities with well-paid lawyers. This is against the spirit of both Open Source and Free Software.

Furthermore, similar clauses have existed for patents. E.g., if you use an Apache licensed library, but sue one of the contributors for patent infringement having to do with the library in question, then any grants of the Apache license terminate, so you can then be countersued. The way you framed your text, this would qualify as an interference with Freedom 0, as you can't eat your cake and have it too.

Lest we forget, here's what the MIT license, one of the most permissive ones, have to say:

"THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE."

So the MIT license already says what you think is against Freedom 0.

In a democracy, the government is an outcome of elections, however they represent the majority and you may not be in that majority. This is why you can't talk about democracy without a strong culture focusing on the individual's rights, aka liberalism, otherwise all you have is a tyranny of the majority.

You're also deeply wrong. The fundamental difference between a state and corporations is that the state has a monopoly on violence and anything that a corporation is doing, and that harms individuals, can only happen with the complicity of the state. For example, there is no such thing as a natural monopoly, all monopolies are granted by the state in one way or another.

And the differences should be obvious, given the state can deprive you of freedom, it can starve you, it can inflict physical violence, and can even kill you. Corporations can't do this, unless the state commands it, obviously.

> It may be harder to influence corporations.

Actually, depriving Apple of the money you'd pay for an iPhone has more impact that your democratic vote. And even if you disagree with this, consider that you can vote for politicians promising to regulate Apple. And switching to Android or Windows has a lower cost than switching countries (and yes, that's an oligopoly, but that's because your state granted it via IP laws).

The Brave browser also has a setting in “Privacy and Security” -> “Site and shields settings” -> “Additional permissions” -> “Autoplay”

You can block globally or per website.