I would like to offer as a counterpoint that everything is political. Tech is no exception. Tech is a tool, a tool comes with a specific affordance and an affordance suggests to the wielder a certain worldview. To wilfully ignore the social and political impact of one’s work does not protect it from the world’s turmoil.

It’s kind of bleak. The web was supposed to be for everybody. I hadn’t realized that in the last two decades we had lost the ability for neophytes to chug out HTML pages from desktop in a visual manner and upload them to a server for the world to see. Only non dead software I found that came close was Pinegrow, but it’s proprietary.

Apparently they have!

I know you’re not alone with the opinion that a website asking an email address to create an account is dangerous, but frankly I still don’t understand the slippery slope argument attached to it. There are laws governing email marketing nowadays (CAN-SPAM in the US), as any actual business fucking around will find out.

In my humble opinion, an important lesson we can take from the last decades of the web is to be wary of a private free lunch. The Google search engine has never required an email and yet today they sit on an empire based on the exploitation of our data. In that sense, paying for a service is much more honest than mining the users’ privacy and selling it to advertisers (as mentioned in some hermetic Terms of Agreements & Conditions). The system may not be perfect, but asking an email address is the least invasive way to recognize someone that paid for a service.

Also, what do you mean by “self-protectionism”? It sounds like a derogatory euphemism for “making a living”. It’s fine for four journalists to live from their profession. I think paying human sized businesses for services is quite different than doing the same with disruptive, market devouring corporations.

I wish I shared your confidence. Mozilla jumped on the VR hype, then the Metaverse hype and now they’re specifically betting on generative AI. It’s leaving me feeling as suspicious as the article’s author about Mozilla’s latest ventures.

Someone knows any good Firefox hard forks?

Man I hope Servo pans out. I’m hopeful since it’s seen increased activity lately.

Is everyone living a life of sin()?

Kagi is a meta search engine though. They just do calls to Google, Yandex, Brave, etc. cut the ad rot and sprinkle some secret spice on top.

EDIT: source, https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html

For anyone wondering about how they’ll eventually address financial sustainability if Stract takes off:

Stract is currently not monetized in any way, but its website says it will eventually have contextual ads tied to specific search terms but that it will not track its users, which is similar to the system DuckDuckGo uses. Stract also plans on offering ad-free searches to paying subscribers.

I’d pay for independent, non meta, ad-free search. I bet a more straightforward approach is more energy efficient as well. In the meanwhile the big tech are running a gazillion processes on our data to suck every bit of wealth they can out of our existence through their free (in it’s littlest sense) products.

It’s a free account, like the one you made so you can write your comment. I’d hardly call it paywalled.

I had a colleague perform a similar experiment on ChatGPT 3. He’s ecoanxious and was noticing how the model was getting gloomier and gloomier in accordance with him, so he tried something. Basically he asked something like “Why is (overpopulated specie) going instinct in (location)?” The model went on to list existential threats to a specie that is everything but endangered. Basically it naively gobbled the loaded question.

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I wish the assignment operator wasn’t the equal sign.

Ink jet cartridges dry up when they’re not used often enough though, which screws people who don’t print much as well. HP just screws everyone equally.

Yeah, it’s the “loss leader” strategy. Some HP printers are very cheap, sometimes cheaper than the cartridge you need to put in it. They’re doing it ridiculously aggressively.

I would bet that the war on the transgender is entirely thought by those monsters in a machiavellian manner. The transgender will always be a minority and yet they can never by collectively eradicated. As long as there are people, some will be transgender. Moreover they are very easy to frame as an “other”. This makes them a very fine enemy to generate fear and hate from. No risk of significant backfire, no risk of running out of them either.

I shan’t!

I can’t even

Robotics and AI algorithms make total sense in factories. I’m very surprised they’re making them humanoid though. It’s stated that’ll make them dextrous or something, but I don’t see it.