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Boosted by jwz:
jwz wrote:

@zzt In 1998 leading up to Zero Day I spent *months* trying to get us to do a dual release of (let's say) "HEAD" and also "branch 3.2".

It did not go over well.

Apropos of nothing archive something something org.

Boosted by jwz:
jwz wrote:

@xgranade @zzt There was a beautiful moment when a reporter asked Bill Gates to his face "what core functionality of the Windows operating system is Internet Explorer for Mac?" and he actually started spinning around with smoke coming out of his ears.

Boosted by jwz:
jwz wrote:

@glyph I hate that they have also taken the phrase "model collapse" from us. That should only be used to describe what happens when you party too hard with Duran Duran. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSMbOuNBV0s

Mastodon wrote:

Not sure where to start with Mastodon? Here's some new year coverage from @TechCrunch that provides a great overview. 🫶🏻

Want to learn even more? There's a fantastic community ready to help you level up your Fediverse skills. 🎉

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/01/what-is-mastodon/

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

A few more raven photos from earlier this week. #photos #iceland #bird #birds #raven

Boosted by jwz:
jwz wrote:

@zzt Here's another example, extremely Mozilla-related.

Back in the Triassic, let's say 1996, there were a bunch of puddingheads at my company who wanted to introduce C++ across the Mozilla codebase. Many of us (who were right) said "this is unnecessary and will needlessly destabilize our cross-platform product. No. NFW. Please no...? OMG no...?") and it happened anyway.

Now imagine those same idiots had some press release say "but we will have a C++ kill switch. That customers can turn on."

adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁") wrote:

Already 50 mailboxes on https://message.casa/

Create your own to get your email address and instant messaging account

#xmpp #mailbox #email #smolweb #smolnet #smallweb

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

So, during winter here in Hveragerði steam frosts on the plants in needle-like ice formations when it's cold. I'm guessing this can happen wherever humidity and frost combine, but it gives the plant life next to the river a unique look #photos #iceland #winter

Boosted by jwz:
davidgerard@circumstances.run ("David Gerard") wrote:

@mdavis @firefoxwebdevs

The Firefox AI "kill switch" is not "complicated" except insofar as it's incoherent. it's not "undisclosed nuance" except insofar as it's incoherent.

the "kill switch" doesn't exist.

this is important to keep in mind. once you remember that NONE OF THIS EXISTS, you will realise that every one of the dilemmas you posit is an imaginary problem that follows from incoherent postulates.

e.g. "AI kill switch purists" is not a coherent postulation because the "kill switch" does not exist.

the "kill switch" is a hypothetical proposed in this post:

https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115740500373677782

the "kill switch" is a proposal to satisfy the demand for an opt-in by providing an opt-out. you might think that's a failure to respect the question, and you might even begin to suspect the proposal was in bad faith.

note that Jake, in presenting the kill switch and calling it a kill switch and getting it into all the papers as a kill switch, says he's uncomfortable with the name he's publicised it as. you might think that's oddly incompetent for literally a PR (devrel) person.

the concept as presented imposes multiple false dilemmas.

the LLM stuff should *incredibly obviously* be an extension. this is the purest possible opt-in, despite jake's past attempts to muddy the meaning of "opt-in".

making it an extension is also eminently feasible. There is literally no technical reason it needs to be a browser built-in.

this suggests the reasons are not in any way technical. some person with a name, who has yet to be named, dictated that it would be a built-in. so that's what Mozilla is going with.

why Mozilla went hard AI is entirely unclear. this would have been late 2024? we have no idea who was inspired with this bad idea nor why they were so incredibly keen to force it into the browser.

nor is it clear what Mozilla will do for external LLM services when the AI bubble runs out of venture capital and pops in a year or so, most of the chatbot APIs shut down and whatever remains is 10x the cost at least. but that's a problem for 2027's bonus, not 2026's.

note how the poll provides no option for "no LLM functions built-in to Firefox", in a pathetically transparent attempt to synthesize consent. jake wants to use this poll as evidence of what the user base wants, deliberately leaving out the option he knows directly a lot of them want.

and in conclusion:

1. solve the "kill switch" naming problem by branding it the "brutal and bloody robot murder switch with an option on the executives responsible".
2. make all this shit an extension like they should have a year ago.
3. and your little translator too.

Boosted by jwz:
zzt@mas.to ("[object Object]") wrote:

mozilla: we just don’t know how to satisfy our users’ demands for “no AI”, after all what is AI? translation? spellchecking? TLS? if we start slopcoding features will they demand we disable those too? so many gray areas!

firefox users: if it’s not core browsing functionally make it an add-on that isn’t installed by default. and then consider not writing the add-on if it turns out nobody wants it.

mozilla: I know what I’ll do! I’ll write a poll where one of the options is 🤷, that’ll fix it!

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
zkat@toot.cat ("Kat Marchán 🐈") wrote:

RE: https://toot.cat/@zkat/115850353329435324

My conclusion so far after this really great discussion: We need to stop leaning on licenses almost entirely, and refocus our attention on collective power and collective action.

Organize as developers of Community Software and start finding ways to exert influence on bad actors by having knock-on effects: you misbehave with one project, you get shunned/unsupported/blocked by the entire community.

To do this, we would need to stop acting as isolated islands of individual projects, and more as One Big Faction. We need to talk to each other. We need to make decisions together and have the difficult discussions about what we'll accept and what we won't, and how far we're willing to go to do something about it. There's even opportunity to share and pull resources and time.

Community Software would need to be a big Covenant that we hold ourselves to, that all are welcome into until they threaten the good of what we have built together.

Boosted by jwz:
randahl ("Randahl Fink") wrote:

Important thread: It is not foreigners eating your cats and dogs. It is private equity companies buying up all the vet cliniques, raising prices and forcing families to put down their pets, because treatment would ruin their economy.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115850320786991662

Boosted by jwz:
jwz wrote:

@zzt @jaffathecake @davidgerard @firefoxwebdevs
I'm not here because I'm a dedicated Firefox user. I'm here because:

Attachments:

• video: e4abbfcbd286a18f.mp4

Boosted by jwz:
m0rpk@mastodon.radio ("Richard") wrote:

@firefoxwebdevs The frame of this question is risible.

I am begging you to just make a web browser.

Make it the best browser for the open web. Make it a browser that empowers individuals. Make it a browser that defends users against threats.

Do not make a search engine. Do not make a translation engine. Do not make a webpage summariser. Do not make a front-end for an LLM. Do not make a client-side LLM.

Just. Make. A. Web. Browser.

Please.

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
TheManyVoices ("The Many Voices of Anne Ahlert") wrote:

@catsalad

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕") wrote:

Another voice not from yours truly. More thoughts and responses from listeners about quitting #YouTube.

View them all at
https://chriswere.wales/voicenotes

Attachments:

• audio: A voice not, where I chat about quitting Youtube.

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
HawaiiWorms@mastodon.ie wrote:

If you like books about men who cross their arms, Waterstones in Manchester has a bunch of them

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt ("Natasha 🇪🇺") wrote:

Names for avid readers 📚 by language (more and more, in the replies👇)

English/Dutch: Bookworm / Boekenwurm

Danish: Reading horse (Lesehest)

French: Ink drinker (Buveur d'encre)

German: Read-rat (Leseratte)

Indonesian: Book flea (Kutu buku)

Romanian: Library mouse (Șoarece de bibliotecă)

Norwegian: Reading horse (Lesehest)

Serbian/Polish: Book moth (Knjiški moljac / Mól książkowy)

Greek: Bookeater (βιβλιοφάγος)

Finnish: Reading maggot (Lukutoukka)

Swedish: Read-louse (Läslus)

Vietnamese: Bookwormweevil (Mọt sách)

#books #reading

Boosted by jwz:
tml@mementomori.social ("Tor Lillqvist") wrote:

This is brilliant. https://youtu.be/cSAp9sBzPbc

fribbledom ("muesli") wrote:

Ok, this is an odd one, but I need a recommendation for a really good sandwich maker.

I recently got the Krups FDK451, which got rave reviews all over the net, but I'm fairly disappointed. It wobbles, the trays aren't replaceable, it barely fits large toasts, and the locking latch is made of cheapest plastic.

There's got to be a better product out there?!

db@social.lol ("David Bushell ☕") wrote:

working on a legacy Sass/SCSS + Gulp setup and oh boy has that not aged well

One does not simply "npm install" an old project. One hour to fix compile errors, another two to reproduce the correct CSS, and I still have 100 deprecation warnings

this is why I "no build" and just write CSS today

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
hamishtpb@mewblog.thepolarbear.co.uk ("Hamish The PolarBear") wrote:

Happy @ChrisWere day everyone 🎉🥳🎂

Boosted by ratatui_rs@fosstodon.org ("Ratatui"):
orhun@fosstodon.org ("Orhun Parmaksız 👾") wrote:

Finally we have notebooks in the terminal! 🔥

📓 newt — A cross-language notebook for the terminal

💯 Run Rust, Go, C++, Python & JavaScript cells in a TUI

🚀 Also supports a GUI backed by WASM or locally

🦀 Written in Rust & built with @ratatui_rs

⭐ GitHub: https://github.com/rohanadwankar/newt

#rustlang #ratatui #tui #terminal #notebooks #devtools #opensource

Attachments:

• gifv: d705be604357dfa6.mp4

jwz wrote:

Fascists really are just the pettiest little pissbabies in the world, aren't they?

DOI cracks down on stickers covering Trump's face on national park passes: The Department of the Interior recently updated...
https://jwz.org/b/yk1a

jwz wrote:

"Well, the first ten thousand attempted path traversals on this site didn't work... but maybe the ten thousand first will!"

Boosted by jwz:
staff ("Mastodon.social Staff") wrote:

We plan to disable the "live feeds" of the local and federated timelines on mastodon.social within in the next couple of weeks. They are already disabled on mastodon.online. While these feeds can be useful on smaller, topical or regional servers, they have limited use on larger servers like ours.

The live feeds present all content on the server immediately and essentially pre-moderation, which presents a particularly poor experience to new users finding the fediverse for the first time.

Boosted by jwz:
atomicbird ("Tom Harrington") wrote:

Damn, shots fired at Financial Times. "Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter"

https://www.ft.com/content/ad94db4c-95a0-4c65-bd8d-3b43e1251091?accessToken=zwAGR7kzep9gkdOtlNtMlaBMZdO9jTtD4SUQkQ.MEYCIQCdZajuC9uga-d9b5Z1t0HI2BIcnkVoq98loextLRpCTgIhAPL3rW72aTHBNL%5FlS7s1ONpM2vBgNlBNHDBeGbHkPkZj&sharetype=gift&token=a7473827-0799-4064-9008-bf22b3c99711

jwz wrote:

Today my server is getting slammed by a very wide botnet that is really interested in such hits as

/var/www/jwz/..%2f..%2f..%2f..%2f..%2f..%2f..%2f..%2f..%2f..%2f..%2f..%2f..%2f..%2fetc%2fpasswd/emacs-timeline.html

Not an AI training bot! How quaint! How retro!

It seems to be associated with something called "bxss dot me" and to them I would like to sincerely say, I hate you please die.

lloydmeta ("Lloyd") wrote:

Found some odd behaviour (regression?) in MDC handling in the latest (3.30.5) Quarkus release. If you're using MDC, might want to tread with caution.

https://github.com/quarkusio/quarkus/issues/51808

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

well worth pondering

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/opinion/peace-conflict-war.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.ClA.OK1L.EysjdaXO4i2g&smid=nytcore-ios-share