cabbage

The hatred is partly fuelled by people in the open source community getting really riled up when they find out some open source projects are developed by organizations that need to earn money and pay their employees, be it Red Hat, Canonical, GNOME, Mozilla, or anything else. Female leadership will tend to push people over the edge.

In addition to the usual rage-fuelled misogyny of open source forums, there is however also valid concern out there. It can be difficult to hear through the noise.

Mozilla's job listings provide some insight to what many consider to be a red flag for the way forward. To work on FireFox, they are looking for:

• Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Director of Product, Firefox Growth
• Principal Product Manager, Generative AI
• Senior Software Engineer - Layout (CSS and ICU4X Support)
• Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Staff Full-stack Engineer - Generative AI
• Senior Front End Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Staff Software Engineer - Credential Management
• Staff Software Engineer - Release Engineering
• Senior Front-End Software Engineer, New Tab

For fairness I include every position, highlighting in bold the ones I think are likely to do more harm than good. This is not the direction I want FireFox to take, and I believe Mozilla are misguided to try to place themselves as the ethical AI actor. That said I'm not 100% against it all of the time - I do think the local in-browser machine translation feature of newer releases is great. But I don't think I want much more than that, and even this feature should probably have been an optional plug-in.

There's also some former empolyees voicing valid concerns.

In short, I think the legitimate criticism boils down to:

1. Buying into the AI hype
2. Flirting with "more ethical" ads and tracking, rather than being unquestionably on the user's side of just blocking it all
3. Doing too many things nobody asked for, arguably while not paying enough attention to FireFox
4. Appearing distant from the community and unresponsive to its preferences
5. Paying company leadership too much

I don't really buy into point 3 personally. I use FireFox every day and it's by far the best browser I have ever had. It never gives me any problems at all, and password sync with Android is really useful. I wish it would support JPG XL, but that's pretty much it in terms of complaints on my end.

New in this release:

• Separate audio and video streams, so that only one audio track is stored on the server even if there are multiple resolutions for a video, and viewers can choose only to stream audio. You can also do audio-only live streams. Cool.
• Browse subtitles, search them, click on them, read them to a friend
• Better video fetching from Youtube channels, in case you post there first
• Smaller tweaks to improve user experience

Cool stuff.

PS: My favourite way to keep up to date on PeerTube content is to go to Piefed, press the search button, choose "PeerTube" under Instance Software and sort by "Recent first". It shows content from all PieFed channels subscribed to by PieFed users, so it's a limited scope, but I still think it's a nice little feed.

The only redeeming feature about this is that it only looks about as awful as any other social media.

Which is not very redeeming at all, of course.

The comments on the post also aren't from Mozilla.social. It's not like they would have been happy to see Mozilla as a successful actor on the Fediverse either.

The trolls in the comment section at least hints at the fact that creating a more positive and constructive online space proved more difficult than they imagined.

I was curious, and joined the queue for the closed beta a long time ago. Never heard back. They explored something new in closed channels, decided not to go for it, backed out. I don't really think they need to justify the decision.

Running a social media is a huge effort, and there's a lot of trolls out there actively targeting Mozilla. I imagine it's just more trouble than it's worth.

Just read it for the first time now.

Wow.

Thanks for the recommendation!

The organisation that happily cooperated with fascism in Italy you mean?

The child raping one?

Yeah, it's not what he's saying. But the formulation - sending a child away from the womb of it's mother" - is fundamentally fucked up because it completely removes the mother from the equation. It doesn't even bother to explicitly deprive her of the control over her body - it simply doesn't recognise her existence at all.

I think, more than anything, that's why this line of talking is fucked up. It kind of assumes totalitarianism where no matter what, it's at least not the choice of the individual women/owners of the wombs.

What moderate Catholics will use as a defence is, I guess, the use of the word "child". No reasonable person would consider a lump of 30 cells a "child". But we all know the pope thinks it's a child as soon as the sperm hits the egg, so fuck that as well.

I'm this formulation it sounds like he's talking about government mandated abortion - it's like it's happening against the will of the owner of the womb.

Clearly that's not what he's talking about, but in a narrow charitable interpretation, he would be correct that the government has no fucking business controlling whatever is going on inside women's wombs.

The official story is that Meta is worried about being sued by people suddenly seeing their content pushed to some random website without their consent if it's enabled by default, so they won't risk enabling it by default. At least not before the fediverse is huge enough that everything you post going everywhere on the internet is the expected behaviour.

Fair enough really. I wouldn't want to be sued for that either, and they obviously cannot expect Congress to understand.. anything.

Love the sound of it! Are you making these on commission or just as a hobby?

I can imagine making bows is an incredibly delicate matter - I don't have time to fall into the rabbit hole of the history of bowed instruments right now, but I can feel myself slipping!

Judging character and identifying psychopaths are two wildly different skill sets, though arguably one depends on the other.

I'm slowly getting better (more experienced) at identifying psychopaths and narcissists, but holy shit it can be difficult.