29,995 karma · joined September 15, 2008
That the current administration is also purging viewpoints it doesn't like, adopting the same authoritarian mindset, but having it enforced by the government (which is worse, IMO), that goes to show horseshoe theory is true.
Compare that to the parodies made by someone like "Weird Al" Yankovic. And I get that these tools will get better, but the best parodies work due to the human performer. They are funny because they aren't fake.
This goes for other art forms. People mention photography a lot, comparing it with painting. Photography works because it captures a real moment in time and space; it works because it's not fake. Painting also works because it shows what human imagination and skill with brushes can do. When it's fake (e.g., not made by a human painting with brushes on canvas, but by a Photoshop filter), it's meaningless.
Maybe some day I will, but I find it hard to believe it, given a LLM just copies its training material. All the creativity comes from the human input, but even though people can now cheaply copy the style of actual artists, that doesn't mean they can make it work.
Art is interesting because it is created by humans, not despite it. For example, poetry is interesting because it makes you think about what did the author mean. With LLMs there is no author, which makes those generated poems garbage.
I'm not saying that it can't work at all, it can, but not in the way people think. I subscribe to George Orwell's dystopian view from 1984 who already imagined the "versificator".
As an EU citizen, I'm not concerned about your need to observe my behaviour or to prevent ad-click fraud. What I care about is websites sharing my navigation history with Google or the rest of the advertising industry, so yes, I'd like to be informed of it.
Personally, instead of having banners, I'd just ban the practices altogether (e.g., targeted advertising, 3rd party analytics), which would certainly simplify business.
https://opensource.org/definition-annotated
I agree partly with the article about entitlement, but you need to define what "open" means, and "access to source code" doesn't cut it due to IP laws. It can't be "open" if it's a legal landmine.
And yes, Open-Source does mean "FOSS", always. The definitions of Open-Source and Free Software being very much equivalent.
Stop overloading terms for your own gain.
With enough propaganda, it's easy to blame whatever self-inflicted problem on others.
Huawei famously shipped devices without Google Play and many were fine with it. And Samsung's devices, AFAIK the most popular Androids, can have the Google account removed. Play stops working, but you can still use Samsung's own app store.
That may not last, of course, Android could become closed source, but in the meantime I dare say it's strictly more open than Windows. And I hope Microsoft gets slapped by EU's DMA.
It's simple: global trade is good, isolationism is bad. It's as simple as that.
The “EU common classes” don't want higher prices or poorer services. This is a fact that the US's elites in power will soon discover. And it's easy to see why this trend is a train wreck in progress: unemployment, in both the US and EU, is at an all-time low, and if you significantly lower imports via tariffs and economic wars, who do you think will work on those local products and services? Never mind that US's investments and exports are also crashing as a direct result of this administration's policies, so I'm guessing they rely on future software developers that end up unemployed to become lumberjacks.
But yes, now that the US is no longer a trustworthy ally, I want the EU to cut its tech dependencies from it for as much as possible, while strengthening ties with all of our other allies, such as Canada, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, India. There's no conflict in this reasoning.
If the future can't be predicted that's because one can't predict when Trump and his imbeciles will be stripped of power.
For bookmarks, I recommend Linkding: https://linkding.link
Couldn't the US government also kill all Windows workstations, iPhones or AWS servers? Of course they could.
Smaller companies or individuals may not care, but governments or bigger companies that are risk averse? Of course they'll care.
If you're talking about Mahmoud Khalil, that was probably unlawful, and you should wait for your judicial branch to pass judgment before reaching the conclusion that fascism is lawful.
The surveillance laws, no matter how often you repeat the word "draconian", are irrelevant because…
Email isn't safe, and most of your email probably ends up on Google's or Microsoft's servers anyway, in which case US companies can be coerced by the US government to give them everything they have, while not being able to tell the public about it. And they do just that, a fact that came to light with Snowden's revelations. Australia cannot be worse than the US.
For emails, the government surveillance is irrelevant, as it happens anyway. And solutions like Proton Email are just privacy theatre that also happen to interact poorly with established standards (e.g., SMTP, IMAP).
I also fear Australia much less than I fear the US these days. I have always feared the US, especially due to their massive security apparatus, but at least I considered them valuable allies. These days we'll just add some extra fear points due to the techno-fascists in charge, voted-in by the people with a popular vote.
Whenever I see such comments on popular forums, such as HN, I lose faith in humanity a little, either because people don't think about the threat model (this being vibes-based) or the consequences of boycotting the underdogs, or because they are disingenuous about it.
Fastmail is a fine service, built and operated by trustworthy people, which also contribute to standards (e.g. JMAP) and to open source. A service that's also not monetized by ad-tech, unlike what the Big Tech email services are doing.
Also, DMA specifically targets monopolies and it will most likely encourage innovation. I mean, let's be honest, legislation isn't the reason for why Apple's AI sucks.
Nevertheless, US's Big Tech can either comply or GTFO.
I also have a feeling the Five Eyes agreement is about to end.
If you don't want surveillance, you'd better not use email.
Today the concern is war, both economic and literal.
From that perspective, I'll gladly use Australian, or Canadian online services, while avoiding using US ones for as much as possible. Note, I don't think it will be long before services like Fastmail will start moving their servers. Again, yesterday the US was an ally, whereas today the writing is on the wall.
https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
I'm an EU citizen and I worry about the US as well, but we need to be careful about this migration to EU services, as in some areas the European alternatives aren't good enough and people will go back to Big Tech, instead of preferring a FOSS solution that happens to have US dependencies.
While the law has flaws, it's very frustrating to see people misinterpreted it, instead of reaching the correct conclusion that the vast majority of websites are spyware. And that it's not EU's law to blame, but rather standard internet practices related to analytics and the serving of ads.
In 2024, Microsoft generated 12.58 billion dollars in revenue from advertising, which is nothing to scoff at.
And we also have to look at future opportunities — the share of the advertising market may be small, but they represent THE alternative to Google's ads, including on all alternative search engines.
If they aren't concerned about ads or ad-blockers, then why are they so aggressive about pushing Edge on Windows users? And in the EU, when people first open up the Edge browser, why do they inform people that Edge will share their data with the entire advertising industry?
Furthermore, at this point, that legalese talks about features that the user expects. Otherwise, in the EU, Firefox would be forced to ask for explicit consent. GDPR is so strong that when Firefox will actually sell your data, you'll know it because in the EU it will have to tell users exactly how or why.
Note that Mozilla was already hit with a privacy complaint in the EU due to PPA [1] because it's opt-out instead of opt-in. Whether they'll be found guilty by EU's DPAs, it really depends on whether they actually anonymize that data, as they claim to do, or not. Note here that the GDPR doesn't accept pseudo-anonymization as being valid anonymization.
Of course, it may take a while to find the outcome of such complaints, just note that as far as the GDPR is concerned, that Privacy Policy of theirs doesn't count for squat. It really doesn't matter what they claim in their Privacy Policy, unless they are lying, i.e., if they actually “sell the data” of users in a way that users don't expect as part of the service, then the GDPR asks for explicit consent (opt-in).
Technically speaking, they've already sold user data since 2006 because they've been installing Google's Search as the default, used, for example, for search suggestions. So everything you type in that address bar, goes to Google, and they get paid for it. Of course, search suggestions are part of the service that the user expects, but note that the user's search history can also be used for user profiling by Google. So as far as the CCPA is concerned, that's selling user data. And, very importantly, Firefox has been funded by ad-tech since 2006, much like all Chromiums and even Safari.
What's actually new is that Mozilla wants to diversify. Which is good, as the Search deal is in jeopardy and those hundreds of millions of $ they need to fund the browser aren't going to come from donations. So they would like an alternative to cut the middleman, i.e., Google. If that alternative is also privacy preserving and at the very least opt-out (though I'd prefer opt-in), then that's even better than the status quo.
People unhappy with this deal are people that hate advertising, or any reasonable monetization strategy, as if a viable browser with an independent engine could be funded via the donations of people that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.
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TLDR:
1. Nothing actually changed, and that Privacy Policy doesn't count for squat.
2. Results matter, not words, results such as that wonderful offline translation feature, which is a great showcase of privacy preserving AI tech that only Mozilla pulled ;-)
PS: Isn't it odd that whenever the underdogs get boycotted, the winners are always the Big Tech solutions that are far worse in every aspect?
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/25/mozilla-hit-with-privacy-c...
And Firefox is still the only browser engine with support for uBlock Origin, on Android too.
Sure, but they gave up on developing their own engine, so why would they?
Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies can't afford.
To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their ground and proposed Asm.js: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js — out of all this effort came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least smells like a good standard.
Other examples that Google would've wanted to push as de facto standards — Dart, and AMP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and Windows.
Yet another example that should speak for itself — the deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers work: https://ublockorigin.com/
And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.