Vincent

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Vincent ,

I think usually something like that is intended to as a counterweight, to prevent power from centralising.

However, to prevent the scales from tipping too badly, a sufficient majority in parliament can override the veto, and I believe the party that's pushing this (Georgian Dream) has enough seats to be able to do this.

(Caveat: I'm not Georgian, so this is just based on somewhat above average interest in politics and in the country, following my local news.)

Vincent ,

There's a lot in there that'll be hard to achieve (my analysis in Dutch), a bunch of things that were mostly expected and aren't great, and of course a couple of good things too.

Especially considering that the party leaders won't be part of the government, I wonder how long it's going to last. It'll be hard for them to meet the party leaders' demands, and there are also bound to be things that aren't specified in the deal that'll cause friction.

Vincent ,

But Fico is from that party, no? Attacking journalists and what not isn't good, but neither is shooting a politician. Especially if you're supposedly on the side that wants to protect democracy.

Vincent ,

Be careful reaching for the explanation that best matches your preconceived notions though. There are plenty of normal enemies too, and unfortunately, just one of them needs to be crazy enough to do this.

Vincent ,

Even if he did not have support of a big part of the population, the point of democracy is to be able to get rid of them without violence.

Vincent ,

Absolutely, which is why as democracy-loving citizens (which honestly everyone should be), people should strongly protest anything that damages it - in a democratic way, as long as that's possible. And I don't think Slovakia has regressed so badly yet that there are no democratic avenues of resistance anymore.

Vincent ,

including limiting lots of things that worsen the experience for AdBlock Users

That is the Chrome implementation; Firefox doesn't and won't impose those limits.

Vincent ,

I think there's multiple specifications at this point. There's Chrome describing what they're doing unilaterally, and then there's the WebExtension working group that's trying to get alignment among several browsers.

Vincent ,

collecting data about how many times you searched

I don't think this stores how many times you specifically have searched for something - just how many times something has been searched for in general. In other words, nobody will be able to tell anything about you from this data.

(Which is very different from e.g. the data Google collects about you and shares with its partners.)

Vincent ,

So which organisation with many userse serves the needs of their users better without collecting data?

Vincent ,

Hmm, so what user-facing free software is at Firefox's scale? I think Ubuntu has telemetry, for example (though I think they even have fewer users).

Vincent ,

there's no user behaviour tracking

I mean, that depends on how you define user behaviour. It tracks which packages are frequently installed, for example, or how often people install Ubuntu in the first place. All of which I think is pretty legit, in my opinion, since that only involves aggregate user statistics that help prioritise work and detect common problems - but that's essentially what Firefox is doing too.

Debian is a great example of relatively commonly used free software that doesn't really collect data btw.

Vincent ,

From what I read in their blog post, nobody is keeping your search history data. It only tracks how often people in general search for things in specific categories, so nobody will be able to learn anything about you specifically from that data.

Vincent ,

It's technically for profit, but it has a single shareholder: the Foundation. There are no greedy shareholders that can get rich off of that profit.

Of course, employees/board members can be richly compensated, but that's independent of for-/non-profit status.

Vincent ,

That would be a terrible AI.

Vincent ,

I support anonymous telemetry collected by a non-profit that helps protect our freedom. Not big tech.

Vincent ,

I believe there was an experiment making weather data more accessible through the URL bar, e.g. when people start searching for weather there, which could be useful. Presumably, telemetry like this can help determine which of such features to prioritise.

I could indeed also imagine ads, but then not based on keeping a file on you with all your interests and sharing that with advertisers, but by locally choosing between a couple of categories of ads and showing the ones that are related to your current search, without anyone having to know what you're actually searching for.

Vincent ,

I don't get the irony? EU doesn't want European companies to fall over if they're able to produce solar panels at a similar price point and quality as their Chinese competitors, so it blocks foreign subsidies that might have that effect. Seems perfectly consistent to me?

Vincent ,

llamafile also builds on that work, I believe (she's the main contributor): https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile

Vincent ,

Specifically, it's this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courage_the_Cowardly_Dog

Vincent ,

Same. I don't see why people need to argue about it or make a conscious decision about it anyway.

(My distro determined it was ready to use a while ago, so I've been switched over for a long time now. Indeed it's working fine, and I think I hardly even notice the difference.)

Vincent ,

I don't think any of those standards do versions anymore. They just add modules, and then browsers implement them in whatever order.

They could list the individual features, but of course, now you've exposed a huge fingerprinting vector. And that wouldn't even help for bugs, where the browsers would say they implement a feature, but then a bug would still require a browser-specific workaround. And you'd have to have access to it already via the HTTP request headers, because you might need to serve different content in response to it.

UA strings are not pretty, but it's not a simple problem to solve.

Vincent ,

It sounds like the idea was actually the other way around: forcing the rare website that doesn't work with Firefox for Android (which only has a small share of the billion-plus-user Android market) to work.

Vincent ,

Like Kooha?

Also, GNOME comes with a pretty great simple screen recorder by default.

Vincent OP ,

It's open source, so theoretically, yes.

Vincent OP ,

They're showing the native file picker which using XDG desktop portals.

I'm also fairly sure that the "(but of course there are competing standards)" line referred to Flatpak vs. Snap (vs. AppImage).

Vincent OP ,

If they're using a CLA, that would only be used if you want them to merge your code into their codebase. If you're running a fork, that shouldn't be a problem.

Vincent OP ,

Well, you got me to give it a try. The process seemed simple enough, but unfortunately my laptop hangs when I run cargo run --release, so looks like no Zed for me for a while (until someone builds a Flatpak).

Vincent ,

No, I think today is the first I heard about it, and that's only because the European Commission is on Mastodon now.

That said, I did notice my neighbour across the street flying a European flag - but that might as well be for Eurovision.

Vincent ,

Of course the tabs would just come back up next time they open the browser window again. Can't risk losing those precious tabs, there might be an important one among them.

Vincent ,

But then I'll have to take an explicit action to keep my tab! I'd much rather have no action required to save that tab that I'm likely to never visit again.

Vincent ,

Crossing my fingers that someone will step up to create a Flatpak 🤞

Vincent ,

Seriously. Just the distinction between "vows to" and "reserves the right to" is already needlessly incendiary.

Vincent ,

Firefox Relay is open source though, here's the source code: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay-add-on/

And for the server: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/

Also:

While there may not be as many options as for Chromium-based browsers

Many Chromium-based browsers offer no extensions on Android at all?

Vincent ,

The EU interfering directly with domestic politics of member states by for example banning political parties would, safe to say, not be well received.

There's so much you can do below the level of banning political parties though. For example, centralisation of control over media organisations could be combated, local governments could be prevented from interfering with the independence of the judiciary, anti-surveillance measures as you mentioned, etc.

There's definitely the possibility to overstep, but I don't think the line between that and taking literally any action at all is as thin as you mention.

Vincent ,

For sure, but even then the EU needs to go through the democratic process it has in place.

Oh absolutely, I don't think anyone's arguing for sending an army to Hungary or something.

The question is indeed how much can practically be done. However, it's not like Hungary can unilaterally veto everything without consequences - they (or Fidesz specifically, I suppose) still have their own list of things they want to get done, and thus there's room for negotiation.

Vincent ,

To make this work well with the Fediverse, you'd need to be able to specify your own server (e.g. programming.dev), which is under discussion at https://github.com/fedidcg/FedCM/issues/240.

Vincent ,

Oh, I'm not calling for anyone to hold out (well, maybe except until this is widely supported across browsers), just encouraging folks to participate in the experimentation going on in that thread.

Vincent ,

Either that, or it's a joke.

No-so-silent Spring ( files.mastodon.online )

https://mastodon.social/@jensorensen/112352503805738131

VIRTUAL SPRING Woman and man sitting in Adirondack chairs on their back porch as a leaf blower wails in the background REEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Woman: The moment it’s warm enough to enjoy the spring, the leaf blowers start up. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Woman: Not only are they loud, they’re poisoning workers with exhaust, spraying dust, allergens and fecal matter everywhere, and spewing tons of CO2 during a climate emergency. All to blow a few blades of grass off a driveway! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Man: What you need are noise-canceling earbuds and birdsong recordings to re-create the joys of a suburbanized spring. Softer REEEEEEE Woman, wearing earbuds with birds tweeting around head: Ah, the late anthropocene…
ALT
Vincent ,

Alternatively, let the leaves lie - which is beneficial to insects as well. And lets your neighbours enjoy life :)

But a suggestion from the post you're replying to is using an electric one.

Vincent ,

The sheer audacity and arrogance of giving me something for free and not caring* about me.

* "Not caring" presumably means "not doing something about my pet issue", but I'm not going to take the clickbait.

Vincent ,

At some point you reach critical mass, where the majority of the population uses the bicycle as at least one of their modes of transportation, after which improvements to bicycle infrastructure are more widely supported and thus more easily made - which then causes more people to use the bicycle, etc.

That's what happened in the Netherlands a couple of decades ago, and the infrastructure now is wonderful and still getting better.

Vincent ,

Dealing with GNOME users problems all day in the forum, KDE is just better for usability?

It seems not unimaginable that whichever is more popular (/the default) will have more people reporting problems in the forum, regardless of how good it is?

Vincent ,

Hmm, it’s there for me in Nightly. When I look at modified settings in about:config, I do see that browser.bookmarks.editDialog.firstEditField is set to tagsField. I don’t know how that got set, but it sounds like that could control it?

Vincent ,

This is the post to upvote: connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/…/85

Vincent ,

If you want a clean install, go for a carefully curated set of packages, rather than trying to mix and match to create your own selection - that’s bound to result in a Frankenstein installation.

I’m partial to Fedora Silverblue, which is essentially just a single package containing the things you need to have a usable desktop. You can install what you need separately on top of that, but on updates, the whole base gets replaced wholesale - including, which is most relevant to your concerns, removing stuff that is no longer used/needed, rather than having that clog up over time.

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