What was the problem again?

You’d be correct to point out that not all of them waste energy like Ethereum did until later in 2022 and Bitcoin still does, but wrong to pick Monero as an example of one that doesn’t.

The discourse about Mozilla is ridiculous, here and most everywhere. You’ve got people taking every perceived opportunity to attack them for things they do, things they didn’t do, and things it’s imagined they might’ve done. And then another crowd of equally determined people doggedly defending them for every idiotic blunder they make, such as this one.

Meanwhile Mozilla itself has nothing substantial to say. This is not the first time a prominent extension has mysteriously gone missing from amo with Mozilla telling us nothing about its role in the incident. @mozilla@mozilla.social needs to be in the discussion giving us a real explanation of what happened, why they got it wrong, and what they’re doing to improve things.

If you can’t handle the shocking reality of someone choosing unusual pronouns to refer to themselves, fediverse may not be the social media for you.

Whether or not Mozilla chooses to issue some kind of meaningful statement about what happened beyond the boilerplate “oops, it was an error” is not up to Gorhill.

AI seems like a possibility. I find it slightly easier to believe that someone in management was stupid enough to replace human reviewers with bots than that someone in a position to decide what gets accepted had never heard of UBO and didn’t realize that it’s an important one.

Either way they really ought to explain themselves.

It’s not “handy.” It’s badly-written arrant clickbaity tendentious anti-Firefox garbage. Mozilla does plenty of stupid things. I do not understand this desire some people have to invent more. It appears that many of them have simply decided based on Mozilla’s now-discontinued efforts to improve social media that Mozilla is too “woke” and therefore the enemy, or something like that.

It looks like your opinions about Linux are outdated and need an update.

Indeed. But cups-browsed isn’t necessary in order to be able to print things, it’s for automatically discovering new printers on the network.

cups-browsed <= 2.0.1 binds on UDP INADDR_ANY:631 trusting any packet from any source

Well that would explain why I didn’t have it installed (although I did have other parts of cups until jwz coincidentally reminded us two days ago that it can all be removed if you don’t have a printer.) I clear out anything that opens ports I don’t need to be open. A practice I would recommend to anyone.

The consequences for users of this thing in itself are fairly minimal for now. It’s the consequences for Mozilla which are something of a disaster.

I am fine with that.

Okay, but I imagine that you being fine with it will have very little bearing on the decision of the Data Protection Authority as to whether or not it violates articles 5, 6, 12, and 13 of the GDPR.

Maybe some day after we’re done replacing X11 people will collectively find the will to do something about systemd before it gets too much worse. I wonder which will be easier: Throw it all out and start again, or split it up into parts of more manageable size with well-defined interfaces between them.

Dogshit, yes. Authoritarian, no. Word choice matters.

Where is it? It’s in the 1970s. Tempted by Lucifer to get brighter and brighter, we collectively chose to leave it behind.

Horse experts: “Realism and Practicality”

Skyrim:

I took notes for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t like their info in video form. My attempt to summarize what Linus says:

He enjoys the arguments, it’s nice that Rust has livened up the discussion. It shows that people care.

It’s more contentious than it should be sometimes with religious overtones reminiscent of vi versus emacs. Some like it, some don’t, and that’s okay.

Too early to see if Rust in the kernel ultimately fails or succeeds, that will take time, but he’s optimistic about it.

The kernel is not normal C. They use tools that enforce rules that are not part of the language, including memory safety infrastructure. This has been incrementally added over a long time, which is what allowed people to do it without the kind of outcry that the Rust efforts produce by trying to change things more quickly.

There aren’t many languages that can deal with system issues, so unless you want to use assembler it’s going to be C, C-like, or Rust. So probably there will be some systems other than Linux that do use Rust.

If you make your own he’s looking forward to seeing it.

2017 and 2021 it stayed mostly stable at 190 million users

Interesting that they almost managed to stop the decline for a few years there. In 2024 after the recent string of nonsensical decisions it’s down to 158 million.

Mozilla 2012: We’re winning the browser war and saving the web. You’re welcome.

Mozilla 2017: Competing with Chrome is hard. What if we break all existing extensions and never let people replace them all?

Mozilla 2021: Through inclusiveness and the power of positive thinking we will facilitate leadership towards in-depth studies of what we can do to improve social media.

Mozilla 2024: Running a small mastodon instance is just too hard, we give up.

Do you remember the first time you were aroused by language?

I do! Hadn’t thought about it in at least twenty years. Thanks for the reminder, creepy chatbot that inspired this post. Thinking that an LLM could develop “its own sense of desire” was naive and seems ridiculous today, but I suppose their intentions were honorable as well as erotic.