cabbage

Honestly, the gift part always made the people of Troy look a bit naïve. It would perhaps have made more sense if they paid good money for the latest and greatest gigantic wooden horse made by the finest Greek artisans.

I can’t say I ever really understood what Newsmast is up to, but Channel.org looks pretty nifty. It seems like a good way for organisations consisting of several independent people to get together and present all their federated content in one public channel.

The score was amazing!

I’d rank it up there with the first one - less quirky, but more of a wild ride. My partner preferred the sequel, though she loves both.

I really struggle to understand how anyone could like the original and not like the sequel, unless they only like the old one out of a sense of nostalgia but they’ve actually grown to have their taste change since.

This is something I really loved actually. I never knew where the plot was going to go because there were so many different dynamics going on. At the end everything was tied together, but having so many things in motion made it unpredictable and fun to watch. To me, at least.

I’m sure I’ve seen better comedies, but I really can’t remember when.

I guess it might be relatively low for the sequel to a cult classic made by a famous director and with a star spangled cast. A lot of directors probably wouldn’t limit themselves when they know they don’t have to.

Exactly. Nothing about the original screams blockbuster, and nothing about the new one (except maybe some of the casting) does either. It’s just a really fun and, in my opinion, overall great movie. There’s nothing $50 million could have done to improve upon it. And it is absolutely worth seeing in a cinema.

Except maybe RFK jr, of course.

The hatred is partly fuelled by people in the open source community getting really riled up when they find out some open source projects are developed by organizations that need to earn money and pay their employees, be it Red Hat, Canonical, GNOME, Mozilla, or anything else. Female leadership will tend to push people over the edge.

In addition to the usual rage-fuelled misogyny of open source forums, there is however also valid concern out there. It can be difficult to hear through the noise.

Mozilla’s job listings provide some insight to what many consider to be a red flag for the way forward. To work on FireFox, they are looking for:

• Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Director of Product, Firefox Growth
• Principal Product Manager, Generative AI
• Senior Software Engineer - Layout (CSS and ICU4X Support)
• Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Staff Full-stack Engineer - Generative AI
• Senior Front End Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Staff Software Engineer - Credential Management
• Staff Software Engineer - Release Engineering
• Senior Front-End Software Engineer, New Tab

For fairness I include every position, highlighting in bold the ones I think are likely to do more harm than good. This is not the direction I want FireFox to take, and I believe Mozilla are misguided to try to place themselves as the ethical AI actor. That said I’m not 100% against it all of the time - I do think the local in-browser machine translation feature of newer releases is great. But I don’t think I want much more than that, and even this feature should probably have been an optional plug-in.

There’s also some former empolyees voicing valid concerns.

In short, I think the legitimate criticism boils down to:

1. Buying into the AI hype
2. Flirting with “more ethical” ads and tracking, rather than being unquestionably on the user’s side of just blocking it all
3. Doing too many things nobody asked for, arguably while not paying enough attention to FireFox
4. Appearing distant from the community and unresponsive to its preferences
5. Paying company leadership too much

I don’t really buy into point 3 personally. I use FireFox every day and it’s by far the best browser I have ever had. It never gives me any problems at all, and password sync with Android is really useful. I wish it would support JPG XL, but that’s pretty much it in terms of complaints on my end.

New in this release:

• Separate audio and video streams, so that only one audio track is stored on the server even if there are multiple resolutions for a video, and viewers can choose only to stream audio. You can also do audio-only live streams. Cool.
• Browse subtitles, search them, click on them, read them to a friend
• Better video fetching from Youtube channels, in case you post there first
• Smaller tweaks to improve user experience

Cool stuff.

PS: My favourite way to keep up to date on PeerTube content is to go to Piefed, press the search button, choose “PeerTube” under Instance Software and sort by “Recent first”. It shows content from all PieFed channels subscribed to by PieFed users, so it’s a limited scope, but I still think it’s a nice little feed.

Holy shit. Maybe she’s the one who has been eating all those pets.

The official story is that Meta is worried about being sued by people suddenly seeing their content pushed to some random website without their consent if it’s enabled by default, so they won’t risk enabling it by default. At least not before the fediverse is huge enough that everything you post going everywhere on the internet is the expected behaviour.

Fair enough really. I wouldn’t want to be sued for that either, and they obviously cannot expect Congress to understand… anything.

Love the sound of it! Are you making these on commission or just as a hobby?

I can imagine making bows is an incredibly delicate matter - I don’t have time to fall into the rabbit hole of the history of bowed instruments right now, but I can feel myself slipping!

Judging character and identifying psychopaths are two wildly different skill sets, though arguably one depends on the other.

I’m slowly getting better (more experienced) at identifying psychopaths and narcissists, but holy shit it can be difficult.

That’s beautiful!

Will you make a bow as well? Would it be possible to get a presentation of what it sounds like?

They define decentralisation as an even distribution of users? Or did I get that wrong skimming the paper?

This seems arbitrary. Mastodon is a decentralised network, no matter how big Mastodon.social is. Lemmy is equally decentralised, even though there’s a dominant actor.

The other hubs in the network don’t revolve around mastodon.social/lemmy.world. they connect to each other bilaterally - if the central hubs disappeared over night it wouldn’t affect them all that much.

I think the notion that decentralised networks can’t have hubs of varying sizes is plain wrong, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what decentralized means.

I think they find themselves in a position they didn’t really ask for by being so huge that they’re suddenly defining a lot of things. With that many users depending on your product, change necessarily becomes slower and you have to test things to a whole different level before implementing anything. I kind of see why it can be tricky to make technical changes to their ActivityPub implementation at this point, especially as people are yelling left and right for different and often contradicting features.

Sure, it has some negative consequences, but Mastodon’s success is still only a good thing, and I don’t think there’s any good reason at all to expect bad intent from any of it’s developers.

In other news, I’m getting really tired of all the shit they’re receiving.

Hats off to the EU for funding both this and the recently announced Fediscovery, along with many other Fediverse developments (a personal favourite being Seppo!).

For those unfamiliar, it’s basically money from the European Commission. The Commission, as part of Horizon Europe, has a project called Next Generation Internet (NGI). NGI funds an independent organizatio,n NLnet, which takes the money from its sponsors and funds a variety of projects. NLnet is also sponsored by other actors (at least Switzerland); you can check each individual project funding on their website.

So if you’re a European tax payer, you’re helping create this common good through your taxes. Thanks! :)

Very cool - thanks for the info!

I’ll probably try to get the body from a flea market, or from my dad’s collection of old junk if he’ll let me touch it. But getting some professional help getting the neck right wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.

Very cool!

Do you be have any idea how tolling scraping these data is for the servers?

If this is something you want to keep working on, maybe it could be combined with a sort of Threadiverse fund raiser: we collectively gather funds to cover the cost of scraping (plus some for supporting the threadiverse, ideally), and once we reach the target you release the map based on the newest data and money is distributed proportionally to the different instances.

Maybe it’s a stupid idea, or maybe it would add too much pressure into the equation. But I think it could be fun! :)