They’re not good, I admit that. But there is no better at present.

Your choices are Google, Safari (Apple devices and OSes only), or Firefox. It’s as simple as that. Pretending otherwise is living in a fantasy land. There’s no easy road out of here realistically. New browser engines take years (perhaps the better part of a decade at this point) to make and the inherent complications of web standards and their volume means I regard things like Ladybird as a silly meme sucking up nerd and venture capital dollars rather than a serious endeavor.

The effort to build a web browser from scratch today compared to 15 years ago has scaled massively and I think that’s intentional on the part of companies like Google and Microsoft to shut out the competition and to shut out small actors and to control the web for themselves and western governments.

The last decent bits of Firefox are the ones holding back a tidal wave of bad things from coming to destroy the sickly remains of the open web in very quick fashion. Right now I can block ads, I can shut up my browser from phoning home, my browser isn’t made by an ad company, and it’s not made by a company that has a vested interest in completely airtight DRM because they own a video platform and/or are friends with big Hollywood studios (yes they implement DRM, no it’s not done as tightly as Chrome, the fact major streaming platforms restrict it to 720p should show you that).

They’re not the hero we need, but they’re far from the worst villain and when they are gone much as I have criticized them we are going to be fucked because no one can replace them.

The 90s ideals of an open internet that persisted into the 2000s that led to Firefox have vanished, replaced by various grifts that call themselves web 3.0. The illusion the liberal capitalist west was weaving of human rights and freedom which resulted in space for many good things is being clawed back now that their hegemony is under threat.

Frankly I don’t see the EU or China or some large, benevolent, very wealthy organization stepping in to build a new browser that’s privacy respecting, not full of backdoors, not totally in the thrall of the worst corporate interests. And I don’t see Mozilla selling Firefox to some benevolent org. Not in the near term, in 8 years who can say but we’ll spend many horrible years wandering in the wilderness during that and the web will permanently enshittify in ways that Firefox could have at least slowed.

I see two options in the present and they are Firefox somehow managing to continue to exist without completely compromising things to the point that librewolf devs and others give up because the soil is too toxic or it not doing that, collapsing entirely, stuffing itself full of ads and spyware that’s very hard to remove to attempt to stay afloat.

It’s like shrugging at a law gutting union protections and saying “revolution, revolution, revolution” indifferently to the suffering coming down the pipe and the uncertainty when the conditions for what you want to happen aren’t near, when you’re staring down the barrel of worsened oppression and even the potential of salvation is years, a decade away. That’s how I regard people indifferent to Mozilla imploding.

Do I wish there was a way to snatch Firefox away from them? Yes. But there isn’t. In fact if anyone was able to they could right now, it’s opensource and they could just fork and get to work and start making something better. The idea that the void will be filled by good things is “hand of god, hand of the markets” liberal capitalist brained thinking.

Most people don’t give a shit about web privacy, about not seeing ads online, about controlling how websites display, about not having all their data sucked up or about companies pushing evil web standards that take away control and hand it to abusive governments and corporate actors so this isn’t going to lead to some revolutionary push-back, it’s going to lead to the collapse of the last militant hold-out for privacy advocates.

Frankly I see a nightmare scenario where Chrome is bought by a company that takes it closed source (even partially) or buries the spyware and bad things in so deeply they can’t be removed by open source fork maintainers due to the burden while simultaneously Firefox either simply ceases to be developed or enshittifies and deploys its own ads and spying. At that point we’ll have nothing. There aren’t enough nerds who care about privacy to fund a privacy respecting, standards compliant web browser that manages to not be blocked by most websites. As it is if Firefox came out 5 years ago and wasn’t grandfathered in from their good old days of being a big boy player they probably wouldn’t have the sway they have on the internet standards council and would probably be blocked a lot more aggressively.

Should Mozilla be restructured and stop acting in such a lousy fashion? Absolutely. Do I see any way for us random web users to force that? Not at all. It’s a lousy situation but one which can get much, much, much worse.

And with it the open web.

If (and it’s still a big if) Google is forced to sell Chrome they’ll sell it to either Facebook, AltmanAI, Microsoft (lol), or else some shady tech company that has no reason to want to own it but is an even thinner rubber mask for the CIA/FBI/etc.

This is why I’m sure it’ll happen (dooming hard). The US government wants web control and censorship and one big thing standing in the way is the open web Firefox fosters. Kill that off and the rest falls in line for corporate/government surveillance, control, and the end of anonymity and anything resembling free speech to the disliking of the aforementioned parties.

It’s as commonly abused as it is “reclaimed”, in a male-dominated space like this it’s more abused than reclaimed. One could make the same arguments for the n-word and black people reclaiming it, thing is online there’s no way to know who is black, who is a woman, and who is a white man who claims to be a black woman online so he can use words like that and get away with it.

Online moderators are not suited to identifying and organizing a system of n-word and b-word passes to people through verification so we have to assume many, many uses would be in bad faith by people not part of those groups in a potentially hurtful or offensive way.

I want to note I didn’t implement this and have no power over it but I do find it kind of shocking since opening an account here how often people use the b-word online casually and I do not think most of them are women.

Queer and gay I’d say have been completely reclaimed. The last time you saw “gaaay” as an insult in popular culture was probably the 2000s decade in young adult media. Whereas to this year you see new media of some angry man screaming “you b-word” hatefully at a woman being made all the time. Men just know it’s something you call a woman or girl when you’re angry at her, men just know it’s a sexist slur, a softer one that the w-word for promiscuous but one just the same used in anger to attack women. When that stops happening, when it’s not in media when a generation of young men think it’s no longer acceptable even in anger to do that perhaps there might be a point to what you say.

I admit it can make following things confusing at times. I kind of wish it censored it in the form of B<removed> or something to indicate which one it was.

I also agree regexes are not nuanced, I’ve seen false positives based on some pretty obscure ones. But it’s policy set by the admins of this instance so the choice is basically accept it or move to another instance like lemm.ee.

It’s server-side. The b-word (sexist slur against women), r-word (intellectual disability) tend to be the most common caught ones (I’d say 95%) though the f-word against queer people and other more and less obvious racial ones are included as well.

It doesn’t impact swears that aren’t denigrating such as fuck, shit, ass, damn, etc.

If it’s essential you see those words you’d need to create a new account on another instance like lemm.ee or something.

Here I’m still using the separate search box. Why wouldn’t I? Plenty of screen real estate horizontally. Nice to be able to do quick math there though I suppose.

94% of Militia members in the US are foaming at the mouth reactionaries if not open fascists, with many being active or former law enforcement or related to military or intelligence.

Marx of course understood the dictatorship of capital and the nature of revolution as a violent affair. That Mao quote is abused as a thought-terminating cliche to be honest. He is referring to the fact that if you want to change a system systemically you need tools like guns, if you’re going to be a revolutionary, if you’re going to fight imperialists, you need guns. If you’re going to retain your independence against encroachment and attempts at overthrow by capitalist forces, you need guns. But those are largely affairs of the revolution and external defense. Internally Mao absolutely agreed with Marx on political authority and legitimacy of the party through its connection to the workers, which Mao phrased as the Mass Line. So in this way there would be agreement in a sense with Rousseau’s line (and Marx’s) here though there was a lot more to it from Rousseau obviously and I’m not trying to say Mao or Marx’s thought derives from Rousseau at all.

This cartoon is kind of all over the place. For the first 4 panels it features thinkers, philosophers stating how things -should- be run in their thinking to create a society, not necessarily how things were run in their time but how they should be. Then suddenly in the last two panels it goes from proposals for how to structure society to analysis of how society exists or is seen to exist at a given point in time and how its authority is derived.

Whisper is open source and free AI model for transcription. If you’re not comfortable setting it up Audacity has a whisper plugin you can easily add and use.

As to how good it is, it really varies a lot but it is free. You need another plugin to export to a subtitle file.

Edit: Actually the program Subtitleedit (https://www.nikse.dk/) has the ability to run whisper models and you can download them from within the app, also no need for another plug to export so that’s probably the easiest. Once it’s as text you can use the translate menu within SE to translate. You need an API key (paid) for most of the truly good services but you can use basic google translate for free and it should give you the gist of things.

I experienced the exact same thing two days ago. Voyager stopped accepting actions like upvotes/downvotes, logged out and couldn’t log back in until the recent update. Before that it worked fine, daily usage.

Reminder that the US has been a treaty-violator from the beginning of its existence. Breaching numerous treaties with the Native Americans.

Google pays them hundreds of millions annually. That’s not the kind of money you find lying around or can quickly make by spinning up another branded service like a VPN.

Their only realistic hope for getting that kind of money is another search provider and the only ones who are big enough and might pay that I can think of off the top of my head would be:

Bing (Microsoft) who’d probably pay less,

Yandex (people would whine they’re Russian even though they’re a multinational and admittedly they market in the west is pretty weak so their incentive to pay for something like this low unless they’re trying to expand, again they’d likely pay less),

I don’t think there is a third. There are lots of other search engines but few that can afford to casually toss away a few hundred million a year to be set as default on a browser with less than 5% market share. If a third existed it would probably be some Chinese search company trying to break into the western market and again people would whine about their character for geopolitical reasons and accuse Mozilla of being bought by them.

Apple could also afford to do this but they themselves take Google’s money to set Google as a default search engine in safari and are too interested in bundling software with hardware to ever offer something to everyone like that.

They should try and trim costs it’s true. Start with CEO pay (though at 7 million it’s only a small piece of the costs that need to be cut to be safe should they lose this money) and work on through. The problem I think is Mozilla doesn’t consider Firefox the end all, be all of their mission and that’s unfortunate because at this point it’s the only thing they do of any worth. We think of Mozilla as Firefox but they think of Firefox as just another big project that if it gets cut isn’t the end, the CEO will still have their job, there will still be busy-working pretending to be an advocacy body and soliciting money for that despite the fact that Firefox existing is the only reason anyone still cares what they have to say as they’re part of the web development consortium.

There’s no quick and easy way out from their relationship with Google. The government could force a quick divorce but that would lead to Firefox imploding. Assuming that doesn’t happen it’ll be a long, slow slog of a process and I don’t see any easy solutions. They’ve tried branded VPN, they’ve tried things like pocket and fakespot. They don’t have any services they can offer the corporate world which is unfortunate as many companies sustain free public offerings off of charging corporations fees.

This is most likely cached images. For example emojis from your instance or other instances you’ve viewed as well as maybe other images but definitely emojis. Possibly other things like the images in post thumbnails which helps reduce costs by ensuring your instance doesn’t have to re-send you the same images over and over again each time you close the browser.

Lemmy doesn’t generate enough content yet daily that most people who check in twice a day and scroll a bit through pages won’t almost certainly encounter several posts with images they’ve already seen before. I’ve had many cases where just a bit of scrolling brings up 3-4 day old posts I’ve seen before so caching associated images could save in cases like those at least 3-4 transfers of those images per user which adds up for a non-profit no ads service like lemmy.

A good idea. The rule of the law is increasingly a foreign concept to the US, the law of the jungle more favored and hypocrisy a favored way of living.

A dictator would never offer to step down.

Not good logic regardless of whether you think Zelensky is or is not a dictator. A dictator might if the terms he demanded for it were those that both parties of the conflict had already ruled out.

Making an impossible ask is hardly a sign of being reasonable or truly willing to do a thing. If I tell you I’ll give you ten million dollars but only if you can settle the mess in Palestine with the the “israeli” state and the Palestinian people permanently I’m not seriously offering you ten million dollars, my ask is impossible. No one would say it’s a good faith offer on my part.

Trump’s team has acknowledged NATO is not viable and doesn’t even want to commit US troops in the event of a ceasefire (something Russia refuses anyways), preferring it be a Europe problem and Russia categorically will not accept Ukraine in NATO. This is a FACT.

This conflict started over eastward NATO expansion, one of the primary, if not the most primary goals of Russia in their fight is to stop Ukraine from becoming part of NATO and stationing western weapons/troops there near them.

Russia is winning and the support of the US is waning. They are not going to accept having spent all that treasure and blood and taken all these sanctions and in the end not get their primary goal just to get Zelensky to step down for another person who hates Russia.

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at least 12GB of RAM,

Doesn’t exist and frankly not necessary. At present nothing needs this much RAM and I say this as a power user who runs a local media server and is familiar with concepts such as running Plex with remote transcoding on devices such as the Shield. The only things that come close to this much RAM might be recent generation gaming consoles like Xbox or Playstation but they don’t run Android and aren’t built for streaming, remote controls are third party accessories.

Other problems: I’m unaware of any devices even without the high RAM request that exist that fulfill all of those asks. Particularly 4k 120hz seems to be something no one has any interest in putting in a streaming box despite plenty of them having HDMI 2.1. I checked and even Apple TV 4K’s do not support 120hz despite having the right hardware for it.

Fact is commercial streaming services which these devices exist to cater to have no interest in 120fps/hz content, even 60fps with dolby vision is kind of more bandwidth than they like using and they upcharge premiums for it.

Basically your choices are (all these assume giving up the RAM ask):

• Run two devices, one for local streaming of things like games and 120fps content, one for watching streaming services that’s Android TV certified and will get you 4k content from them (at only 60fps). Cost is probably going to be north of $300. You can with this option get a mini-PC and kind of hack together a game streaming solution and if you want you can put 12GB of RAM in it but you won’t need them.
• Buy something that ticks most of the boxes but either give up the ability to stream 4K content from commercial services (because no Android TV certification) OR give up the 120fps demand. If you’re willing to give up the 120hz you might look into the Dune-HD premier 4k pro which has full Android TV support and certification for 4K streaming from all the major services, does 4k 60fps, has very impressive specs for a streaming device (top of the line) and is $200 and you can add an SSD to increase the storage from acceptable 32GB to well over a TB if desired. Otherwise if you’re willing to give up 4K from commercial streaming services and get only 1080p from them they have a few 8K devices that do have support for 120fps but the price doubles and if you want 4k on the major streaming services you’ll need another device.

Other options if you’re willing to give up the 120hz demand would be the Nvidia Shield Pro. As to a remote that controls everything, I believe the Dune-HD remotes do have that capability but honestly your wants are really specific and high end. Most people would use two boxes if they HAD to have all you’ve asked for.

You might also consider waiting to see if Valve does release a streaming device like they’ve teased. If Valve does something like that it might finally be the golden one that has 120hz support though you’re still not going to get 12GB of RAM. But you’re looking at waiting a year at least I think even if that does materialize and it may not.

People got flack for saying Proton is the CIA, Proton is NSA, Proton is a joint five-eyes country intelligence operation despite the convenient timing of their formation and lots of other things.

Maybe they’re not, maybe their CEO is just acting this way.

But consider for a moment if they were. IF they were then all of this would make more sense. The CIA/NSA/etc have a vested interest in discrediting and attacking Chinese technology they have no ability to spy or gather data through. The CIA/NSA could also for example see a point to throwing in publicly with Trump as part of a larger agreed upon push with the tech companies towards reactionary politics, towards what many call fascism or fascism-ish.

My mind is not made up. It’s kind of unknowable. I think they’re suspicious enough to be wary of trusting them but there’s no smoking gun, yet there wasn’t a smoking gun that CryptoAG was a CIA cut-out until some unauthorized leaks nearly a half century after they gained control and use of it. We know they have an interest in subverting encryption, in going fishing among “interesting” targets who might seek to use privacy-conscious services and among dissidents outside the west they may wish to vet and recruit.

True privacy advocates should not be throwing in with the agenda of any regime or bloc, especially those who so trample human and privacy rights as that of the US and co. They should be roundly suspicious of all power.

Not one bit. They’ve shown anyone who cares to look exactly who they are many, many, many times.

Being guilty of killing those two would be sprinkles on top of the mountain of their horrific crimes. It would be interesting only in that people would be more aware of the fact they killed a sitting president, that is that there were and almost certainly are elements in the US government who do not answer to the chain of command, who do not respect the purported institutions of US liberal “democracy”.

Most likely he won’t release anything meaningful. They’ve had decades to prepare a false narrative that looks better and didn’t hesitate to destroy most of the MKUltra documents rather than turn them over.

As a leftist myself (communist)

Very, how do you do fellow kids energy from this comment.

I don’t think I’ve ever interacted with a communist who would be upset about a lack of reactionaries in their spaces, they’d be relieved to have a place free of them and their ignorance and hate.

And the fact you think that “centrists” and “right-wing” are somehow not extremists (but this made up special category of MAGA which by the way is most conservatives in the US and in a lot of the world somehow is) tells me you are politely not really politically literate.

Liberals are reactionary enough in their excuse for genocide, you think for some reason we need space for not only them but the people who want to take away rights from trans people, who want to kill trans kids, who want to make women second class citizens, who are incredibly racist, war-mongering, anti-science, etc?

As much as I align with many of the views expressed here, I wonder if we’re missing out on valuable dialogue and perspective by not having a more diverse range of political opinions represented.

You can get that literally anywhere else offline or online, especially your home instance. You’re not from a leftist instance but from the most reddit-brained, centrist neo-lib instance.

This is false equivalence, the idea that the left is too extreme and needs balancing with the right. Please just accurately identify your politics or don’t bother mentioning them as we can easily guess them from a post like this.

Break me? No. Really depress my mood? Probably no longer having Plex and my media collection. If my hard drives and back-ups all spontaneously combusted right after a trade war drove their prices through the roof x5 or something and I couldn’t afford to replace (and/or couldn’t find any to replace because of shortages) I would be quite sad. Additionally I’ve worked quite hard to curate my collection so losing it entirely in the first place would be depressing because of the amount of work required to rebuild it, encoding, scraping hard to scrape rarities, setting the posters just the way I like them, etc.