You haven’t heard about the Brave ads that let you slowly accumulate tokens that you can then use to tip creators or websites? I’m not saying it was a good plan, or an ethical plan, but it was… You know, something.
Unlike what Mozilla did, Brave didn’t enable this by default, but they heavily marketed it as a feature.
If Mozilla implemented some kind of tipping system, that could be interesting. Apparently, such a system already could exist under GNU Taler too.
Would you look at that, privacy preserving advertisement!
Let’s take it one step further and go really crazy with a/b testing
<a href="company_url/campaign1"><img src="funny_picture.gif"></a>
<a href="company_url/campaign2"><img src="different_picture.gif"></a>
User-unique gets collected, and then the user-unique data sent to a remote server.
Only on the remote server will this data be aggregated, or so Mozilla says.
I think a big part of the problem is that they didn’t show anyone a notification or an onboarding dialog or whatever about this feature, when it got introduced.
Right. Not only didn’t they notify anybody, but they took to Reddit to defend the decision not to notify anybody:
we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.
Which is strange, because Mozilla has no problem with popups in general.
Private, for-profit, and let’s not forget antagonistic to the GDPR.
Sounds like you have too stable of a temperament to be a Lemmy server admin to me. Just wait until I tell you what I know about the guy who built a server just to downvote someone else on here, the one platform where downvotes don’t matter.
This is not a bit. I found someone who did that.
I’ve seen the back end, you’re correct
Just like on Facebook, when you delete a comment on Lemmy it gets stuck with a “deleted” flag that’s possible to undo on some clients, including the official one last time I did it.
To be fair, your incredulity is totally understandable. I think we should fix Lemmy too.
Disney’s fighting AI by using the 4D chess method of figuring out how to use it in their movies
Something that appears more human is more likely to elicit them sending their private data. And that data is then sold, obviously without consent, and used however the buyers feel.
Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data…
– Vladimir Prelovac, CEO of Kagi AI and Search
Remember Replika, the AI chatbot that sexually harassed minors and SA victims, and (allegedly) repeated the contents of other people’s messages verbatim?
It might not be as mind-rotting as TikTok but it’s not good.
True with the first part, I dropped “in China” because that’s not a helpful qualifier. I was thinking of how the FreedomPhone was using Umidigi hardware, but that never made it into my post.
Besides, Pine itself (which is pretty good) is based in Hong Kong and manufactures phones in China.
I had no idea about Fair… That’s pretty funny. They say they pay their workers extra, but not directly where the workers are. I read about their “European design” first
Most phone companies that lack a brand name are white label, pumped out en masse so somebody like Rob Braxman can stick a logo on it.
Would not recommend.
Even the reputable companies that use cheap off-the-shelf parts will announce themselves. See: Pine.
Disclaimer: my opinion
AI seems like a bit of a nothing burger in terms of interesting stories. We have stories, sure, but it’s still just generative trained things.
The biggest quantum computing story I saw was about iMessage implementing it, which was also a gateway to discovering Signal already had.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37571919
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39453660
(Signal’s response to iMessage)
https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/111975543824684264
I probably have no business with this question because I don’t use MacOS (much), but I’ve noticed a few things.
Updates are free, but because they only support so many years of hardware, you’ll have to eventually replace your old Mac with a new one.
Security updates are actually really important.
“Eventually” probably means a Mac will continue getting 6-7 years of support after it’s produced, not when you buy it. And Apple tends to sell models for a while.
Example: if you buy a brand new 2021 MacBook Pro, expect 3 years of support.
Macs introduced between 2009 and 2015 could expect to receive seven or eight years of macOS updates—that is, new major versions with new features, like Ventura or Sonoma—plus another two years of security-only updates that fix vulnerabilities and keep Safari up to date. Macs released in 2016 and 2017 are only receiving about six years’ worth of macOS updates, plus another two years of security updates. That’s about a two-year drop, compared to most Macs released between 2009 and 2013.
MacOS users do get more free first-party (Apple-made) apps with more accolades than typical Windows users do. But the third party landscape has less selection and more price tags than Windows alternatives; a smaller platform means there will be fewer developers, after all.
The App Store on MacOS works similarly to the Windows (or really any other) one. That means apps can be free, paid, have monthly subscriptions, or be removed by either Apple or the developer at any time, for almost any reason, with probably no recourse for you.
Apple has been super scummy about their iOS app store, but their desktop app store is totally optional and thus not as scummy.
The open source community is actually pretty decent about porting their software to MacOS. It’s popular for developers
LibreOffice does work on Macs.
As does VirtualBox for emulation. There are probably better emulation solutions for Macs, but I haven’t recently looked… Parallels used to be a big deal, and Windows compatibility has always been important to some extent.
I started out in Ikiwiki and migrated to DokuWiki. Growing pains aside, it was good but only because I had a decent bit of software running the server for me.
I would definitely prefer something that didn’t need a server though
A common use case for SyncThing is keeping a password file up to date between, say, your PC and your phone. It’ll even work remotely, thanks to the presence of relays.
(The downsides include pretty heavy battery usage )
This might be stretching the definition of “common” and “torrenting,” but BitTorrent created BitTorrent Sync with similar tech for personal file synchronization. It was later rebranded Resilio and still exists today.
An open-source alternative that works in a similar fashion, SyncThing, also exists.
All those points are about how one server communicates with itself. Federation doesn’t factor into it
You’re 100% right about Brave being scummy.
And I hope my point didn’t come across as a defensd of Brave, but rather, “how is it that Mozilla is doing this thing in a worse way than a company that is infamously disreputable?”