This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Suddenly I'm worried about AI's energy draw. "6 percent of global electricity" is not a small amount of electricity.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Is it really? Seems hard to find out. Anyone have a list of Bluesky servers other than the central one with open signups?

kbal , (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Well, what's a popular server? Are there several big ones? Sorry, but I really don't understand why the answer isn't turning up in web search results.

PS: Are you sure it isn't just people who've done the "set your domain as your handle" thing but even so are still on the central one? Because even if they have made some small progress towards decentralization they absolutely have not gone so far that there isn't still a central one.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Further searching turns up the information that "federated" Bluesky PDS instances are limited to ten user accounts each, and API usage limits which may constrain things further. So that would explain why there aren't any big ones.

So far as I can tell they do all still "federate" through the central server, not directly with each other. So there being not much point in it may also explain why it hasn't caught on.

Almost as bad as Threads, really.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

tl;dr: Here's everything you need to know about the fediverse, assuming you're never going to use it. Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Friendica. Now, back to our regular coverage of all the biggest social companies, including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Reddit, as well as funding and acquisitions of new social startups.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

The problem remains: Who else have they got?

kbal , (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Mark Carney, apparently. I thought he was still Governor of the Bank of England, but he went on to work for Brookfield and Bloomberg and is now being talked about as a likely successor to Trudeau. Perhaps Canada will follow a few years behind the UK. Some seemingly endless years of thorough mismanagement by the increasingly delusional Conservatives, followed by a nominally left-wing party lurching to the right to occupy the conservative but slightly less-insane position the Tories once held.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

They're probably just as dangerous as .com sites.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

I have no data on that. Cheaper and easier to get tlds like .world might be the most dangerous of all.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

... rather than advocating for a two-state solution comprised of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Oh, so those are the two states everyone keeps talking about. Thanks for explaining, National Post!

The contrast illustrated here between the reporting on the least salubrious of the groups angry about Israel committing genocide and the reporting on Canada First, which gets a very brief mention, is certainly interesting.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

That may be a consideration, but what's important in the words of one mozilla employee in that thread is:

the future of the web. We work to push the industry forward and to push for decisions that enable people to shape their own online experience and that help consumers feel empowered and safe online.

Lemmy is a failed Reddit alternative

I first joined Lemmy back during the big Reddit exodus of last year. I like many others wanted an alternative to Reddit, and I thought that this might've been the one. I made two accounts, one on lemmy.world and another on sh.itjust.works, in the June of last year that I used on and off for about 4 months....

kbal , (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

I'd not yet call it failed, but it's not yet fully succeeded either. To my mind, one impediment is something that lemmy.world shares with today's reddit: If you look at the front page it's 99% memes and images. That's the first impression people get, and it probably drives away a lot of people who might want anything else. We need those people to make more text-based communities come alive, if it's to evolve into anything like the old reddit.

I mean obviously there are lots of people who do mostly want to see memes and that's fine, but I think it's getting to the point where it might be useful to have an option that filters out all posts that are just a title and an image.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

If they annoyed everyone in the area, became a public nuisance for a year, and left behind a big mess, well that is a small price to pay for the nation's children finally being saved.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

You should really be more specific. All of them have more content than netflix hulu vudu and prime video combined.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Someone make sure that page is archived. This could end up being the exact moment we hit peak bullshit.

kbal , (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Interesting choice over there to close the issue so quickly rather than asking for more info, although you didn't give them much to go on.

I wonder what was the resolution of the previous problem that frequently caused this sort of thing? Was the error handling improved such that we might reasonably expect the processing to keep going when it hits something it doesn't like, or was it just a quick fix for the one specific thing that happened to be breaking it at the time? Did that one make it to the github tracker?

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

I thought maybe I could help somehow but it turned out I was insufficiently unemployed, for this week at least. Good luck though.

kbal , (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

If they manage to do it by 2029 it will have been roughly one quarter of a century since it became obvious to anyone who cared to look into it that it needed doing.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

first commercial flight on an electric plane

Oh, it's a flight school. Perhaps it's not a scam, then. Places where electric planes might make commercial sense: Pretty much anywhere you could use an unpowered glider.

kbal , (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

It really isn't. Today's unpowered gliders are astoundingly capable compared to anything the Wright brothers lived to see, and that they're not suitable for replacing all of commercial aviation as it exists today should not be taken as a slight against them.

Most of it will need to be replaced by ground-based transport.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

What a joke politics has become. Since the 1990s "protect the children" has become a perennial excuse for absurd legislation that does nothing of the sort, and not one party has learned how to stand firm against the calumnious deceit of the people who habitually abuse it. The Liberals feel confident enough to oppose this bill only because they have their own which is almost as bad.

Strange to think that only a few generations ago Canada was known for "good government."

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Tobacco is the health hazard to children and adults alike, not the flavours added to it. But that's another moral panic.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

If anyone's claiming that any of these things is equivalent to another it isn't me, but marketing campaigns aimed at children (for tobacco and in general) are also something we'd be better off without.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

It's more appealing to everyone, irrespective of age. Wikipedia suggests that it's been popular since the 19th century at latest. It was flavoured cigarillos that were the first tobacco products that tempted me, at a young age but not a child. Later, when I was much old, if pleasingly-flavoured vapes had been unavailable I would've had a much more difficult time quitting the nicotine.

But anyway, it's the misguided notion that enjoying things which taste good is childish that I find offensive. Advocate for banning all tobacco and I can't really say you're wrong to suggest it, but don't fall for that nonsense.

Mozilla Welcomes Anonym: Privacy Preserving Digital Advertising | The Mozilla Blog ( blog.mozilla.org )

Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions....

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Wasn't Mozilla supposed to be looking for a new CEO? Maybe they should get that done before throwing away millions of dollars on acquisitions? Surely the rush to destroy everything by adopting slogans like "data is the fuel that drives performance advertising" can wait for a few more months?

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

As it says there, Laura Chambers was to take the job "for the remainder of this year" in a "transitional period" before a more permanent choice was made.

But I suppose this removes any doubt we might've had about whether she is keen to continue Mitchell Baker's bright idea of turning Firefox into an ad platform. I had harboured some hope that opponents of that idea were the ones who forced the previous CEO out.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

How to free the rest of the web from advertising is not Mozilla's problem. They are not even asking the right questions.

As for how they should deal with finances, in my opinion they should've taken some of the many hundreds millions of dollars they're paid annually in excess of what it costs to maintain a web browser, and used that money to build up an endowment that would suffice to keep them funded for eternity. Mozilla Corp is said to be organized as a for-profit corporation in order to give it freedom from the legal restrictions that govern how non-profits can spend their money, so I don't see why it wouldn't be allowed to do that.

There are of course many other possible ideas. Trying to collect data about Firefox users in order to better target ads at them — while preserving everyone's privacy of course — is fairly close to the worst one I can think of. It thoroughly undermines their brand identity, and will only accelerate the loss of market share. Not being an ad company has until recently been the number one advantage they had over the competition, and they're slowly throwing it away piece by piece. Aside from the considerable technical challenges in actually doing privacy-preserving surveillance advertising, saying "we'll collect data about you for advertising purposes but never invade your privacy" is also practically impossible to convince people of. Nobody without an MBA is buying it, and I don't blame them.

This direction will not be sustainable.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

I haven't seen that happening

They've been talking about it for a while. They took one small step over that line into actually doing it last month.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

If you don't think that's about advertising, then I guess they've managed to sneak "Firefox Suggest" in there without you noticing that its main purpose is to show you ads unless you take the time to find out how to opt out.

"Firefox Suggest results may also include contextual suggestions from the Web and occasional sponsored suggestions from Mozilla's partners, which are also on by default."

They extract sensitive data from the users, but simply promise not to keep it except in anonymized aggregate form. They talk about and acquire a venture that specializes in collecting such data for advertisers but promises to keep to it only in a super-secret encrypted computing enclave. It's the sort of thing Mitchell Baker often talked about wanting to do, in various interviews. They are aiming to turn Firefox into an ad platform.

I imagine they'll probably fail and give up eventually, but who knows how much more damage will have been done by then.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

They cannot aggregate or anonymise the data locally on your device, because that requires combining it with data from other devices. They can only water it down a little, just like google does with Floc or whatever they call it now.

The difference between this and the minor act of selling out that is their main source of income is enormous and seems too obvious to need commenting on. The difference between this and something more comparable such as sponsored links in Pocket is indeed that they are starting to collect audience data to enable it. It's a small start, but it's a major departure from the already somewhat distasteful situation people were accustomed to.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Right, no doubt it's something like that. So in short it's sending information about your web browsing habits to Mozilla so that they can better inform their advertisers of who they'll be reaching with their sponsored url bar suggestions.

Sometimes I forget that there are people who would have no problem with that. But after all, billions of people are happy to use Chrome.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

They want one baseball brand. One football brand. One basketball brand. One twitter. One facebook. One instagram.

Why's everything need to be so complicated, anyway? Can't we just have on sportsballgame and one twitgramface?

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

It used to be on ploob, but season 3 is only on nimbo now.

Mozilla reverses course, re-lists extensions it removed in Russia ( www.osnews.com )

In alignment with our commitment to an open and accessible internet, Mozilla will reinstate previously restricted listings in Russia. Our initial decision to temporarily restrict these listings was made while we considered the regulatory environment in Russia and the potential risk to our community and staff.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Well, they listen to the community when what the community is pointing out is a very obvious mistake which has a very high probability of causing a whole lot of bad press, at least.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Good artists copy. Great artists sabotage free software in order to steal crypto wallets and credit card numbers.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

and . None of this has even been discussed in the run-up to this election.

Increasingly it does look like Europe really is going dark.

Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem

I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as...

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Rule 1: Crushing people with tanks is fine so long as it's our side doing it.

Literal fucking tankies. I wonder if they will ever come to their senses. Oh well, it's not as if there aren't Nazi instances somewhere on fedi as well.

kbal , (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

For those who prefer more sensible units that's 800km² and an average output of 680MW.

China reportedly installed 86GW of new coal-fired power capacity in 2022 and their existing plants ran at a capacity factor ~50%, so this project is the equivalent of something like 1.6% of the coal-burning capacity they added in that year. But it's also a pretty small fraction of all the solar panels they're building.

kbal , (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Coal numbers I used were from S&P Global, and looked plausible enough for a rough estimate, in line with other stuff that turned up in a quick search. I should've said "approved" rather than "installed" in 2022, but that's the kind of pace they've been going at for a while.

You'll find lots of people predicting that total coal use in China will start to decline soon, of course. One of these days they'll be right.

I've decided to switch to Linux Mint, but i have a lot of pirated games. How to play them with all the cracks and stuff in linux?

I have decided to switch to Linux Mint from windows. I don't use computer for work that much. And for my personal use I'm switching to Linux Mint. I have heard a lot about it. So giving it a try. I know about emulating windows in linux to play window games. But how do you use cracks and stuff?? Does emulating also access my 100%...

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

You'll probably want to use Proton. Being based on Wine, it's not an emulator. It's a native Linux implementation of various Windows APIs. One way to do it is Lutris.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

our end goal is to make it available in general browsing for users with screen readers.

So obviously the people working on it know that the appropriate place for this stuff is in the screen reader, and/or in software that is designed for producing web pages. Who made the decision to cram it into the Firefox PDF editor instead, and why? Is anyone actually using that when they want to create a new PDF document? Is it just for PR reasons so they can claim there's AI in Firefox now? To impress us, or to make way for more of the same? What is actually going on Mozilla?

But anyway it's a difficult problem, as the example image suggests. It'll be interesting to see how much progress they make.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

only free as in beer

In other words not free.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Before there was ChatGPT to blame, we had the "50 cent army." The fully automated bullshit generators are a cheaper but also a less effective way to do what was already being done. I expect the real problem is somewhere closer to the design of mass social media and the human weaknesses it has evolved to exploit, not so much the super-human powers of generative AI which have been so greatly exaggerated.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." — Jack Valenti, MPAA president, 1982

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

That's okay, I plan to be reincarnated.

Mozilla Corporation Org Changes to Accelerate our Path to the Future ( blog.mozilla.org )

Over the past few months, we’ve been accelerating our ability to execute outstandingly, make faster decisions, and realize our multi-product ambitions. To help facilitate this, I’m excited to announce an organizational change within the product team. This change will enable us to better develop and scale products at...

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

we’ve been accelerating our ability to execute outstandingly, make faster decisions, and realize our multi-product ambitions.

Next time you wonder why CEOs get paid so much, just think about how rare it must be to find a person with the kind of fortitude it takes to say something like that with a straight face.

Going Dark: The war on encryption is on the rise. Through a shady collaboration between the US and the EU. ( mullvad.net )

Under the slogan ‘Think of the children’, the European Commission tried to introduce total surveillance of all EU citizens. When the scandal was revealed, it turned out that American tech companies and security services had been involved in the bill, generally known as ‘Chat Control’ – and that the whole thing had been...

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • kbinchat
  • All magazines