I’m Canadian, but the point they are making is that there won’t be another election; VP is the backup for a dead president. Not to tinfoil too hard, but placing an obvious puppet in as VP with a clearly declining candidate who is popular seems like a strategy straight out of House of Cards.
Lots of immediate hate for AI, but I’m all for local AI if they keep that direction. Small models are getting really impressive, and if they have smaller, fine-tuned, specific-purpose AI over the “general purpose” LLMs, they’d be much more efficient at their jobs. I’ve been rocking local LLMs for a while and they’ve been great as a small compliment to language processing tasks in my coding.
Good text-to-speech, page summarization, contextual content blocking, translation, bias/sentiment detection, click bait detection, article re-titling, I’m sure there’s many great use cases. And purely speculation,but many traditional non-llm techniques might be able to included here that were overlooked because nobody cared about AI features, that could be super lightweight and still helpful.
If it goes fully remote AI, it loses a lot of privacy cred, and positions itself really similarly to where everyone else is. From a financial perspective, bandwagoning on AI in the browser but “we won’t send your data anywhere” seems like a trendy, but potentially helpful and effective way to bring in a demographic interested in it without sacrificing principles.
But there’s a lot of speculation in this comment. Mozilla’s done a lot for FOSS, and I get they need monetization outside of Google, but hopefully it doesn’t lead things astray too hard.
I think centralization played a big role in this, at least for software. When messaging meant IRC, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Xfire, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, or any number of PHP forums, you had to be able to pick up new software quickly and conceptualized the thing it’s doing separate from the application it’s accomplished with. When they all needed to be installed from different places in different ways you conceptualize the file system and what an executable is to an extent. When every game needs a bit of debugging to get working and a bit of savvy to know when certain computer parts are incompatible, you need a bit of knowledge to do the thing you want to do.
That said, fewer people did it. I was in highschool when Facebook took off, and the number of people who went from never online to perpetually online skyrocketed.
I teach computer science, I know it isn’t wholly generational, but I’ve watched the decline over the past decade for the basics. Highschool students were raised on Chromebooks and tablets/phones and a homogenous software scene. Concepts like files, installations, computer components, local storage, compression, settings, keyboard proficiency, toolbars, context menus - these are all barriers for incoming students.
The big difference, I think, is that way more people (nearly everyone) has some technical proficiency, whereas before it was considered a popular enough hobby but most people were completely inept, but most of students nowadays are not proficient with things past a cursory level. That said, the ones who are technically inclined are extremely technically inclined compared to my era, in larger numbers at least.
Higher minimum and maximum thresholds, but maybe lower on average.