Some details. One of the major players doing the tar pit strategy is Cloudflare. They’re a giant in networking and infrastructure, and they use AI (more traditional, nit LLMs) ubiquitously to detect bots. So it is an arms race, but one where both sides have massive incentives.

Making nonsense is indeed detectable, but that misunderstands the purpose: economics. Scraping bots are used because they’re a cheap way to get training data. If you make a non zero portion of training data poisonous you’d have to spend increasingly many resources to filter it out. The better the nonsense, the harder to detect. Cloudflare is known it use small LLMs to generate the nonsense, hence requiring systems at least that complex to differentiate it.

So in short the tar pit with garbage data actually decreases the average value of scraped data for bots that ignore do not scrape instructions.

The comments from that article are some of the most vitriolic I’ve ever seen on a technical issue. Goes to prove the maintainer’s point though.

Some are good for a laugh though, like assertions that Rust in the kernel is a Microsoft sabotage op or LLVM is for grifters and thieves.

FOSS in general needs better means of financial support. While the software is free and libre, developer time is not, and ultimately they gotta eat and pay bills. I hope they get positive results and don’t catch much unnecessary flak.

Well this is a tremendous step in the wrong direction. The economic problem is the ad supported model in the first place, no matter how it’s run. This is the same thing Google does, they keep user data to themselves and sell the ad placement. So now Mozilla has the same economic incentives as Google. Unfathomably bad move.

If you read carefully this is actually very similar to the Steam news. I doubt Valve or GOG care, but generally the games are “sold” by the publisher as non transferable licenses for you to play them. So the part that matters isn’t up to them.

A major caveat I’ve noticed some people misunderstand: it’s corporate CLAs that are problematic. The Apache Foundation also requires contributors sign a CLA, but it’s to provide a legal fail safe and a way to update to say Apache 3.0 if need be one day. Apache’s non profit, open source mission aligns with respecting the rights of contributors and the community. Corporations, on the other hand, not so much.

Have you used it recently? Previous versions I would’ve agreed, but 5.0 was a huge improvement. If I didn’t know, I’d likely have assumed it to be a native feature.

I’ll take a look at Vivaldi’s approach though, I’ve heard good things about those features previously.

If you want vertical tabs with the ability to organize them in trees I suggest the Sideberry extension. It legitimately makes me nervous that the functionality would ever go away, it improves my productivity so much.

You can bookmark trees, collapse them, search them, load/unload them manually, I could go on. It makes it easy to organize dozens or hundreds of tabs. I have some trees for emails, news, forums, projects, etc. When I’m done just fold it up: the top tab bar can hide tabs that aren’t in the active tree you’re using, so you can still navigate the tabs normally.

GNOME always seemed like an odd choice considering how little customization is available. It feels like a prescriptive approach, you will use your computer the way GNOME feels is appropriate, whereas KDE tries to accommodate however you want to use your computer.

3 or 4 years, including on Nvidia machines. I’ll admit it took fiddling to get working awhile ago. Nowadays I use my desktops AMD iGPU as the main display driver and offload the rendering to the Nvidia card for intense programs or games, best of both worlds.

This is almost entirely misdirected. The success of Wikipedia is from its human structures, the technical structure is close to meaningless. To propose a serious alternative you’d have to approach it from a social direction, how are you going to build a moderation incentive structures that forces your ideal outcomes?

Federation isn’t a magic bullet for moderation, alone it creates fractal moderation problems.