froh42
@froh42@lemmy.world
- Comment on Mozilla’s Betrayal of Open Source: Google’s Gemini AI is Overwriting Volunteer Work on Support Mozilla 4 days ago:
There’s no way individual donations from ordinary people could match Google’s. They’re also likely to be less reliable.
Thank god. I do really believe all the Google money is actively stifling innovation at Mozilla. The only thing they can’t do is building a better browser than chrome is, for fear of becoming a viable alternative again.
So they use the money for some CEO pay. and weird projects while Firefox further falls from popularity.
I hope for the day Firefox’s market share has dropped to a level tha Google just won’t pay any money anymore for the default search engine deal.
That day - and not one day before - innovation will resume.
- Comment on Mozilla’s Betrayal of Open Source: Google’s Gemini AI is Overwriting Volunteer Work on Support Mozilla 4 days ago:
I did. I rage-signed up for a monthly contribution to the Servo project the last time I read about something Mozilla did.
- Comment on Mozilla’s Betrayal of Open Source: Google’s Gemini AI is Overwriting Volunteer Work on Support Mozilla 4 days ago:
Recently I go fucking annoyed by Mozilla that I rage-contributed (monthly payment) to Servo.
Mozilla is such a shit show.
- Comment on Teachers never forget 1 week ago:
When I was in 7th grade I had the same teacher in Latin that my dad had.
That teacher was really old. It was hard to cheat in a test, as he had extremely crossed eyes and I never was sure where he looked.
- Comment on By technical standards were 3D TVs impressive, Why didn't they catch on back then? 2 weeks ago:
I don’t have a lot of VR experience, but for me being “in” a scene does it for VR, while 3D Glasses are still meh.
Try non-stereoscooic VR by just closing one eye while using your headset - it’s still great. The difference is the one between stereoscopic tvs and normal ones.
- Comment on By technical standards were 3D TVs impressive, Why didn't they catch on back then? 2 weeks ago:
I had a TV that was 3D capable along with a PS3. I think I played 30 minutes of 3D games on that TV before I got a headache from the flickering shutter glasses and then they staid in the drawer below them tv for a year ar or two. Next time I wanted to try the batteries were empty.
I also saw a number of 3D movies in the cinema but it’s more for block busters and after a while it just is “meh”.
It’s a wow effect in the beginning, but in the end it’s just a gimmick.
- Comment on Countdown is starting 2 weeks ago:
Why is everyone ignoring Wham?
- Comment on The moment we've all been waiting for: you now can have targeted ads on your 2k smartfridge 4 weeks ago:
In every fucking commercial for a washing machine someone is in their garden and turns on the machine by wifi. How does the dirty laundry get in?
The only interesting thing might be a notification when it’s done.
- Comment on Russia’s first AI-powered humanoid robot AIDOL collapses during its onstage debut 4 weeks ago:
He drinks a vodka drink
He drinks a vodka drink
He drinks a vodka drink
He drinks a vodka drink
He gets knocked down,
does not get up again
You’re never keep him up again - Comment on Nearly 90% of Windows Games now run on Linux, latest data shows 5 weeks ago:
What about an Emulator like 86box or so? And which game is it?
- Comment on Betrayal 1 month ago:
“Evidence”? What a quaint concept.
- Comment on Let's learn some words in the Finnish language 1 month ago:
As a Bavarian (South of Germany) I agree with the Ch at the start of the word being pronounced like a K (Chiemsee starts with the sound K), but with it depends on the region. I start “China” and “Chemie” with K, but a lot of people start it with “sch” (which sounds like sh in English). But that’s really weird for my ears.
And the father of my ex wife is from Cologne, his “ch” sound quite like “sh” as well. Kirche (church) sounds like Kirsche (cherry) when he says it. Funnily his last name has two “ch”.
- Comment on If AI was all it was cracked up to be, it wouldn't be shoved in your face 24/7 1 month ago:
When coding (my main job since lot of years) I like to use LLMs for brainstorming, reviewing my code for the “quickly visible” errors etc. Oh, and I found out LLMS are not bad explaining query plans and suggesting optimizations for SQL queries in PostgreSQL. I feel the older a technology is (when there’s a lot of reference materials available) the better LLMs are with those topics.
But don’t put them to the task of suggesting something on new tech or creative. They lie without blushing. And in the end you just get a “Good Catch, that can’t really work” for wasting your time.
I think you need to get a feel for what they can and can’t do. In any event all the shit they are being pushed for - that will “go well”. Ah recently, I saw claude or so being able to edit exel sheets. Yep. Combine the most untestable tool guilty of producing tons of false data with LLMs. WHAT COULD GO WRONG!!! Users blindly asking the llm to do stuff in excel and then just betting their companies on the results…
- Comment on If AI was all it was cracked up to be, it wouldn't be shoved in your face 24/7 1 month ago:
LLMs are fucking useful, but there’s not yet a good business model. You can switch to any system at any time, so everyone is trying to forcefeed you their own version of it ro get you hooked. But in the end they’re just annoying the hell out of users.
- Comment on Let's learn some words in the Finnish language 1 month ago:
German is my native language , so yes. It sounds a lot different from what you might think if you can’t speak “ch”. But if you’re American…
- Comment on Let's learn some words in the Finnish language 1 month ago:
Please read this German sentence aloud:
Ich suche den Koch.
(I’m looking for the chef.)
- Comment on How will YOU choose 1 month ago:
Anything else, sir?
- Comment on Mozilla is recruiting beta testers for a free, baked-in Firefox VPN 1 month ago:
Scripting - creating cross page macros, like you now can do with puppeteer etc. Have simple basic programming capabilities. Stuff like that now shows up with “AI” agentic browsers, but that’s too. much. I just want to set up macros, like “go to my timesheet page, click start, enter current time”. On a “Autohotkey for the web” level. (Power users instead of developers)
Tab management - I’m working a lot with jira and other “wonderful” software. What would be nice would be showing multiple tabs at once (like opening several browser windows) , also maybe automatically creating a conceptual “tree” in the tab overview. That would require some configuration (on top of what normal vertical tabs do). For example confluence has a implicit tree, why shouldn’t the tab overview in the browser track that. A lot of web sites are ordered hierarchically. The only tab hierarchichy we currently have in the browser is a “i opened tab b from tab a” hierarchy
History search - not using it is proof it doesn’t fulfill a desire. “Damn I recently was on a site that talked about how the confabulator works without causing wobbles in the swingmode arm” Trying to find that after you did open a few hundred other pages sucks. It would be nice to have positive and negative search terms, have a “near” operator etc. So that would be a full text search engine (which already exists) about pages I have seen in the past.
Granular permissions: I only allow a page to enumerate the fonts it needs to use, not all of them so it can calculate a hash. I want to forbid it from accessing certain domains (Adblockers can currently do that) etc. You may/may not play video. The permission system is in place, but too coarse.
And yes there are privacy containers, but not in a really helpful manner yet. They’d need to integrate with the above permissions, for example so I can put a web page into a jail of its own.
All these aren’t well thought out features, rather I pulled them out of my butt. Still I feel there’s close to no innovation on the usability of a browser and we could need that. We still have the same interaction model as in the 90s with Mosaic - and while (of course) not every idea would work out in a good way, some things would be worth following up on. I’d expect that out of an organization like Mozilla (less so out of commercial browser vendors).
- Comment on Mozilla is recruiting beta testers for a free, baked-in Firefox VPN 1 month ago:
Progressive Web Apps Modern Tab Management Cross Site Scripting (like “Web Macros”) Improved History Search Improved privacy containers (fighting browser fingerprinting) Clearer and more fine granumar permission concepts (like Android, “may this website do xyz”)
that’s just the first that I can think about in the first 30 seconds
Interestingly other than what you say, under the hood improvements still benefit the user, but Mozilla axed the Servo Engine (fortunately that project is still alive, now outside of Mozilla). I think a number of Javascript Apis are lacking in Mozilla compared to Chrome and others.
I almost hate Mozilla as much as I do hate Google, because they are slowly letting Firefox die a death of unpopularity.
But at least they can pay their CEOs a lot of money out of that sweet Google ad revenue.
- Comment on Oppa oppa 1 month ago:
Fortunately in English classes (I learned English at school) we read Macbeth. There’s a lot of layers to Shakespeare - for example a lot of allusions which you’ll only understand when you know about the time it was written in. And our English teacher dragged in a native speaker to help out with conversation, who was a student living in my town.
In German (my native language) however, we were presented a poem without not enough context about the author and had to answer “what’s the meaning of this”. Most of the German teachers I had were boring, lazy or both.
Your literature problem - I had that in German, Thomas Mann’s “Der Tod in Venedig”. Yeah, I as a teenager was so eager to read about the homoerotic thoughts of an older man traveling to Venice and lusting about a young boy. Yes, of course it’s symbolic but - fuuuuck me, really? Do I need to read that.
Mark Twain has written an essay about the “awful German Language” (I don’t agree). Amongst other things he complained about long sentences.
Ha! He know NOTHING! He had not seen the works of Thomas Mann. Thomas Mann must have been hugely intelligent. He managed to write a single sentence that is too long for a single fucking book page. With a random number of subclauses in between. Exploiting all the cleartext encryption mechanisms the German language allows! With the most boring content a teenager in the height of puberty can not relate to.
I still have a visceral hate for Thomas Mann. In my 40s I thought I’d give that book another chance. Nope. Still hate it.
Ah, soon I’m 40 years past school and I still get PTSD about it.
- Comment on Oppa oppa 1 month ago:
No no no.
In school in higher education we had to interpret poems.
I am definitely sure, that neither the author’s opinion or my opinion are relevant. It is only the teacher’s opinion that is relevant.
(Do I need the /s?)
- Comment on It's true... 1 month ago:
I caught something rare once, cutaneous leishmaniosis.
I had to go to a special doctor for tropical medicine associatied to the university.
The doctor asked if I mind, and as I didn’t she called in a couple of students.
“Look, this is a typical lesion of leishmaniosis, the red wall and a sore in the middle…”
Explaining to them, what they’d need to look out for.
- Comment on Commercials seem to be normalizing an unhealthy work-balance more. 1 month ago:
Ah fuck I hate that, when people go to work sick and infect everyone else. (Yes I understand you need to, and it’s not your fault. So I hate your boss.)
The history is interesting, we got health insurance and paid leave in the 1880s from Bismarck. He was trying to appease workers so they won’t flock to the socialist or social democrat parties which were booming at that time. At the same time Bismarck outlawed left wing parties. (It was a stick and carrot approach).
In 1969 we had a bipartisan left - right government (“great coalition”) and they put up to 6 weeks of paid sick leave into. law.
- Comment on When your father is clueless 1 month ago:
My ex-wife and me divorced amicably, so we still talk.
One day, about two years after separtion she called me whether I still had my credit card.
(Typically we pay by payment cards called ec or giro card - but they don’t habe a credit card number, so not usable for ordering something from overseas)
So I said, yes, why. “Uhm, I want to buy something from the US” she answerf with skirting around the topic.
A certain assumption forms in my mind, as she speaks on I’m getting more sure every moment.
I answer: Look, <ex-wife>, don’t try to order the Hitachi Magic Wand from the US. It can’t be imported due to the no-lead-in-electric-devices law. And even if it arrived you 'd need a transformer for plugging it into our 230V system. Just buy one of the knockoffs available on Amazon in Europe
She : “Um (pause), OK”
Some years later my teenage kids found it when they were at her place. They asked her what it was and she said “a microphone”. I swear by my kids, the “it is a microphone” meme happened once in my family in real life. (And of course these teenagers knew what it was).
- Comment on Commercials seem to be normalizing an unhealthy work-balance more. 1 month ago:
Over here in Germany there’s no sick pay when you’re self employed, but there is (by law) when you are an employee.
I had been self employed from my 20s to 50s and am an employee for 6 years now.
I was in hospital last week to get my back fixed and am on sick leave for 4-6 weeks now. It’s still fucking amazing to me, that I can heal up now and will still get my payment into my account end of the month.
Having things like that written into law is amazing.
- Comment on The Console That Wasn’t: How the Commodore 64 Outsold Game Consoles 2 months ago:
I do think software piracy also was a large success factor. When I was 15 there was one major spot in my city where consoles and computers were sold (within a department store!), and people where “swapping” games even before they bought the hardware. I remember at least one of the store clerks having a small side business providing access to disks and tapes you could copy - right on the machines that were shown in store.
And I learned how to copy the C64’s basic rom to ram and mod small things even before I had the machine myself.
All the kids were gathering round the computers, the consoles were less attractive.
- Comment on Firefox is adding profiles to separate your browsing sessions 2 months ago:
Yay, a 25 year old feature with a new UI design.
I’m using FF as my daily driver, but I feel. my hatred for Mozilla soon reaches the level of my hatred for Google.
I do wonder (just in my head, there’s no hint to that in the public) if all that money Google pays to Mozilla somewhere has a no-competition clause which says FF must stay more shitty than Chrome.
I’m not consciously of one Innovation out of Mozilla that made FF a better browser, and a lot of interesting stuff has been canceled.
It’s still an OK browser, but it is like it was 15 years ago. While I watch colleagues using chrome reskins which have great tab management (amazing when you use Jira). Only now that we have LLMs people turn browsers into agents - why the fuck is there no cross - request scripting (go to google, search for this, click on 2nd result…). Yeah we have developer tools like puppeteer for that, but having - say python or js to do so would make people use it more frequently.
Browser history. Ah damn, a day ago I saw a page that explained how to do xx with yy while considering zz. How great some decent browse history would be. (And yes, FF, keep it all, but only when I’m at weirdkinkyporn.com, please just store it for a few hours)
Yeah, so much more things you could do (and the above ideas are just half - baked thoughts).
But Mozilla needa tha sweeet CEO payments. There’s no money for experimental stuff.
About a month ago, I ranted about that with a few friends, afterwards I rage-contributed to the Servo project.
I just wish Google would cut off that Mozilla money, I really believe that would improve competition.
That no-compete agreement is a product of my imagination, but things really feel like that.
Fuck Mozilla.
- Comment on Cooking 2 months ago:
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’mangiate.
Oder so ähnlich, bin kein Italiener.
- Comment on Clock logic 2 months ago:
Because 12 and 60 are great numbers to divide. You can take a half of it, a third and a quarter and still get whole numbers.
Iirc the French did try decimal time at one time, it was not convenient.
- Comment on Clock logic 2 months ago:
Heh thanks for explaining it, I never knew if noon was 12am or 12pm. In German we say “11 in the morning”, “12 o Clock (noon*)” , and “1 o Clock (in the afternoon)”
But typically we don’t say whether it’s am or pm, it’s clear from context if “i need to be in the work meeting at 9”
Clocks, TV listings, my work timesheet read 24h times. We read 15:00 as “three” most of the time.
