- What is this fad on HN right now? All these people are coming out to criticize Firefox (Mozilla really, not Firefox itself) for their bumbling about the past few years, and now there's a backlash to it, like "these entitled users, oh my goodness" as though holding software companies to a standard is somehow a bad thing?
- I also enjoy how WELL most Nintendo games' levels render in browser, because unlike the other two (Sony and Microsoft), their render pipelines are incredibly simple. This of course isn't a complete win, you obviously miss a lot of features of bigger/beefier GPU's like advanced shaders, but at the same time it really draws attention to how the artists developing for those platforms, at least first party, are continuing those traditions of covering a lack of technical ability to, for example, render real caustics in real time, and instead simply make water textures that are so evocative of water that they appear as good as, if not better, then technically superior water effects.
I say this as a slight graphics nerd who loves this shit and plays some games solely to see the visuals they can pull off: I mad respect artists who go the complete other direction, who barely use any "real" graphics tech, to make absolutely beautiful things.
- 110% on all counts.
- > Even when they're trying to do the right thing, they're strangely afraid to commit to doing the right thing when it comes to specifics. They won't say "never" even when it should be easy.
Honestly, and it's hard for me to say this: I've come around. I still use and love Firefox, but emotionally I'm detaching from it, because fundamentally: all the other FOSS I use is an actual, factual, open source project. And Firefox the browser is FOSS, but Firefox the corporation isn't, and the problem is the corporation seems to be in charge, not the project, which means all their priorities are to make money and drive donations, not what's best for the user necessarily. It means all their communications are written in Corporatese, with vague waffling about everything they're asked and non-committal statements because the next quarter might demand they about-face, as they've done numerous times.
I love the browser. I increasingly find myself disillusioned with the business entity that rides on it's back, and frankly wish it would sod off. Take the money they're getting, and give it to the people actually building the product. Defaulting AI features to off costs Firefox absolutely nothing and they still won't do it, because of this irrational FOMO that has gripped the entirety of the executive class in charge of seemingly every business on earth. It's pathetic, and it lacks vision.
- Yeah pretty much. No regulators are batting an eye at the industrial data gathering schemes of Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. and they never have. And the only major social network under real legal scrutiny is TikTok.
The American Government wants to have the cake and eat it too, as per usual. They want to leave the massive column of the economy that is surveillance capitalism intact and operating, and making them money, and they want to make sure those scary communists can't do the same. Unfortunately there isn't really a way to take down one without taking down the other, unless you legally enshrine that only American corporations have a right to spy on Americans. And (at time of comment anyway) they seem to not want to openly say the reason is just naked nationalism/racism.
- I don't want any AI in anything apart from the Copilot app, where the AI that I use is. I don't want it in my IDE. I don't want it in my browser. I don't want it in my messaging client. I don't want it in my email app. I want it in the app, where it is, where I can choose to use it, give it what it needs, and leave at at bloody that.
- > This is definitely a thing, I feel like it's getting better though and stuff like that drops off pretty quickly. But it still doesn't bother me nearly as much as watching the same 30 second TV commercial for the 100th time, I just swipe or scroll past, and overall it's still much better than seeing the lowest common denominator stuff.
I'll second the absolute shit out of that. My only exposure to TV anymore is hotels and I cannot fathom why anyone would spend ANY money on it as a service, let alone what I know cable costs. The ads are so LOUD now and they repeat the same like 4 or 5 of them over and over. Last business trip I could lipsync a Wendy's ad like I'd done it my whole life.
> I hear you, the attention economy is a brave new world, and there will probably be some course corrections. I don't think ads are really the problem though, in some ways everything vying for your attention is an ad now.
See I don't like the term attention economy, I vastly prefer anxiety economy. An attention economy implies at least some kind of give and take, where a user's attention is rewarded rather than simply their lack of it is attempted to be punished. The constant fomenting of FOMO and blatant use of psychological torments does not an amicable relationship make. It makes it feel like a constant back and forth of blows, disabling notifications, muting hashtags, unsubscribing from emails because you simply can't stand the NOISE anymore.
- > This actually strikes me as a good thing. The more we can get big dumb ads out of meatspace and confine everything to devices, the better, in my opinion (though once they figure out targeted ads in public that could suck).
I mean the issue is the billboards aren't going away, they're just costing less and less which means you get ads for shittier products (see aforementioned lawyers, reverse mortgages and other financial scams, dick pills, etc.). If they were getting taken down I'd heartily agree with you.
> I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I get a lot more value out of targeted social media ads than I ever did billboards or TV commercials. They actually...show me niche things that are relevant to my interests, that I didn't know about. It's much closer to the underlying real value of advertising than the Coca-Cola billboard model is.
Perhaps they work for you. I still largely get the experience that after I buy a toilet seat for example on Amazon, Amazon then regularly shows me ads for additional toilet seats, as though I've taken up throne collecting as a hobby or something.
> Also this. It's not dystopian. It's genuinely a better experience than sitting through a single commercial break of a TV show in the 90s (of which I'm sure we all sat through thousands). They blend in. They are easily skippable, they don't dominate near as much of your attention. It's no worse than most of the other stuff competing for your attention.
I mean, I personally loathe the way my attention is constantly being redirected, or attempted to be, by loud inane bullshit. I tolerate it, of course, what other option does one have, but I certainly wouldn't call it a good or healthy thing. I think our society would leap forward 20 years if we pushed the entirety of ad-tech into the ocean.
- I'll try and tackle this one. I think the world is getting more ads because Silicon Valley and it's Anxiety Economy are putting a thumb on the scale.
For the entirety of the 2010's we had SaaS startups invading every space of software, for a healthy mix of better and worse, and all of them (and a number even today) are running the exact same playbook, boiled down to broad terms: burn investor money to build a massive network-effected platform, and then monetize via attention (some combo of ads, user data, audience reach/targeting). The problem is thus: despite all these firms collecting all this data (and tanking their public trust by both abusing it and leaking it constantly) for years and years, we really still only have ads. We have specifically targeted ads, down to downright abusive metrics if you're inclined and lack a soul or sense of ethics, but they are and remain ads. And each time we get a better targeted ad, the ones that are less targeted go down in value. And on and on it has gone.
Now, don't misunderstand, a bunch of these platforms are still perfectly fine business-wise because they simply show an inexpressible, unimaginable number of ads, and even if they earn shit on each one, if you earn a shit amount of money a trillion times, you'll have billions of dollars. However it has meant that the Internet has calcified into those monolith platforms that can operate that way (Facebook, Instagram, Google, the usuals) and everyone else either gets bought by them or they die. There's no middle-ground.
All of that to say: yes, on balance, we have more ads. However the advertising industry in itself has never been in worse shape. It's now dominated by those massive tech companies to an insane degree. Billboards and other such ads, which were once commonplace are now solely the domain of ambulance chasing lawyers and car dealerships. TV ads are no better, production value has tanked, they look cheaper and shittier than ever, and the products are solely geared to the boomers because they're the only ones still watching broadcast TV. Hell many are straight up shitty VHS replays of ads I saw in the fucking 90's, it's wild. We're now seeing AI video and audio dominate there too.
And going back to tech, the platforms stuff more ads into their products than ever and yet, they're less effective than ever. A lot of younger folks I know don't even bother with an ad-blocker, not because they like them, but simply because they've been scrolling past ads since they were shitting in diapers. It's just the background wallpaper of the Internet to them, and that sounds (and is) dystopian, but the problem is nobody notices the background wallpaper, which means despite the saturation, ads get less attention then ever before. And worse still, the folks who don't block cost those ad companies impressions and resources to serve those ads that are being ignored.
So, to bring this back around: the coalition that makes ads "inevitable" isn’t consumers or creators, it's investors and platforms locked into the same anxiety‑economy business model. Cooperative resistance exists (ad‑blockers, subscription models, cultural fatigue), but it’s dwarfed by the sheer scale of capital propping up attention‑monetization. That’s why we see more ads even as they get less effective.
- VSCodium has been my go-to. VS Code was great for a bit but (even long before this) it was already suffering from the cancer that is "being a microsoft product" and it was being bloated to death like everything else they ship, but VSCodium seems to keep enough distance to be immune. Will it stay that way? Who's to say. I hope so though.
- It is neither a conspiracy nor about any Jews, beyond those at the seats of power in Israel. It is the Global North once again fucking with the Global South, for some combination of resources, money, power, or simply because they can and starting forever wars about nothing is a great way to shovel cash into the military industrial complex. That's no conspiracy theory it's simply neo-Colonialism as a concept and it's been at work for longer than my parents have been alive.
I don't speculate on their motivations, I'm not interested. I rarely use the word evil, but I think this qualifies.
- And it's not like there aren't dozens of equally brain-rot apps made my US and EU based companies that people would love to see banned. The only one, out of SHEER COINCIDENCE I'M SUUUURE, actually on the chopping block is the one that promotes a lot of pro-Gaza content.
Like I'm sorry, there is just no debate to be had here. Israel is committing a genocide, confirmed by the UN, recognized by anyone who looks at what's going on there with an even remotely objective eye, and the only social platform on which that message is getting out is facing legal scrutiny in the entire West is TikTok. This doesn't even require a conspiracy board, it's literally three red strings between TikTok, Israel, and the US. Despite worldwide propaganda efforts on the part of every corporate media in existence all screaming that the genocide isn't a genocide, a full 25% of people according to a poll I saw are fully convinced the genocide Israel is committing is in fact a genocide.
This would be fucking pathetic if not for the fact that every organized world entity involved in this utter sham was so incredibly powerful and their influence wasn't borderline inescapable.
- It's not for hardcore use for sure, not a replacement for a proper vacuuming. I use it in my office/part of my basement, it gets the vast majority of stuff up and keeps the cat hair under control.
I don't know that I'd buy another, especially because the new ones creep me out with all the cameras and such, but as long as I can keep this one running, it does a good enough job.
- I am one of those weirdos! I bought a roomba in 2015 and it's still going. Second battery, sixth set of rollers and brush, god knows how many filters. Mine's also a dumb one: no wifi or pathfinding, just boring old "drives around until it smacks into shit" navigation.
I gave it googly eyes in 2017 and named it Harold.
- > Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity.
Point one: higher productivity is not necessarily our goal. I could think of numerous industries that would make the world better if they did less work.
Point two: There's a moral absurdity in taxing the wages earned by labor more heavily than the returns earned by ownership. One is tangible effort, the other is an abstraction backed by law. If anything, taxing capital should be the baseline, because it's the least tied to survival. Historically, when America was at its most broadly prosperous, capital gains and corporate profits were taxed at far higher rates than today.
Point three: AI intensifies that calculus. If AI is deployed by capital to further replace or devalue labor, then taxing only the worker is punishing the displaced while rewarding the displacer. That's pure extraction. If we want social systems to survive, the burden has to fall on the owners of the machines, not the people being replaced by them.
Genuinely one of the largest and most destructive ills of our society right now is that so tremendously more of our shared prosperity as a system is directed to those who do the least to create it.
- Imagine if we could put this kind of innovation to work to solve actual problems and not find ways to bypass people attempting to not have capitalism screaming at them 24/7 to buy things.
- The article also says why they suck:
> Dumb TVs sold today have serious image and sound quality tradeoffs, simply because companies don’t make dumb versions of their high-end models. On the image side, you can expect lower resolutions, sizes, and brightness levels and poorer viewing angles. You also won’t find premium panel technologies like OLED. If you want premium image quality or sound, you’re better off using a smart TV offline. Dumb TVs also usually have shorter (one-year) warranties.
- Yup. Works great. All things equal I'd prefer just not buying a damn Smart TV to begin with, but absent that as a realistic option (every 4K TV I've ever seen is smart) I'll happily settle with them never seeing one byte of Internet.
- No, my existence isn’t contingent on Meta existing. But when a platform with billions of users decides queer content is unwelcome, it erases us from one of the largest public squares in the world, at a time when public squares are at a premium. That’s not the same as "some random company doesn’t carry my stuff."
There's also a difference between not amplifying something and actively suppressing it. Neutral omission is one thing; deliberate censorship is another. When queer content is singled out for removal, it sends a message: you don’t belong here. That's erasure.
History shows us that erasure is rarely neutral. It's part of a continuum: silence leads to exclusion leads to violence. Pretending censorship is harmless ignores the fact that queer people have lived through this cycle many times before, and we're far from alone.
Probably because like 1/4 of the American economy at this point is held up by surveillance capitalism firms like Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. all of whom's bread and butter is violating privacy on an industrial scale, so saying "TikTok is dangerous because it spies on people" is flagrantly hypocritical.
The fact that the big scary Chinese Government can tweak algorithms to elevate content and potentially sway public opinion is a fair criticism and I would agree with it, if not for the fact that the hypothetical situation being used to justify it is America equally openly funding and supporting an ongoing genocide. That barely qualifies as propaganda, that's literally just pointing out what the United States is doing and why it's ethically indefensible, and we could stop doing it tomorrow and utterly defang the aforementioned propaganda. But we don't.
And, lastly, TikTok is not going away. It's simply going to enrich Americans now, instead of the Chinese. A bit. And I'm sure plenty of that money will find it's way back to the Trump administration because our country is corrupt as all hell.
So forgive me if I've just absolutely not one ounce of patience for this bullshit.