They would have had to build that infrastructure. I’m not saying fundraising is easy. But it’s possible as proven by wikipedia. They could have cut Google loose 10 years ago and said "we’re going to use our runway to try to put together a wikimedia foundation style fundraising operation. I don’t think they can do it now because the trust, goodwill and quite frankly, userbase is gone.

What on earth would that do? The poisonous leadership would not use it to improve the browser nor would they start working for donors instead of Google.

My point is that there is a funding model that they could have pursued when they still had goodwill and trust. And my hope is if the government finally puts the boot in with Google, then this current version of mozilla will collapse, the rats will leave the ship and hopefully a good browser will emerge the way firefox emerged from netscape.

It’s the board and the wider leadership who are controlled by Google and intent on destroying Firefox. The current CEO is pretty new, and replaced a heavily criticized CEO that spent years overseeing the decline of Firefox. The new CEO is a former McKinsey consultant.

Daily reminder that Mozilla’s new CEO is a former McKinsey consultant.

Mozilla could have focused on being user-supported through fundraising like Wikipedia. Instead they chose the comfortable path of being funded by their biggest competitor, who is an evil monopoly spyware ad business, which has been compelling Mozilla to kill Firefox and become the badies on the way down.

Man, I’m so glad this shit is illegal on multiple levels in Europe.

In other news: https://midwest.social/post/17142014

He’s a “free-breathing absolutist.” He thinks everyone should have a supply of oxygen except the people he personally doesn’t like.

I quite frankly flat out do not understand why people on the left are so against space exploration suddenly

Ever heard the song “whitey on the moon?”

Setting that aside, exploring space is not the same thing as building a company town for the world’s least mentally stable pregnancy fetishist oligarch in an unworldly cold desert where everyone is sure to die.

Generative AI is just classification engines run in reverse. Classification engines are useful but they’ve been around and making incremental improvements for at least a decade. Also, just like self-driving cars they’ve been writing checks they can’t honor. For instance, legal coding and radiology were supposed to be automated by classification engines a long time ago.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4

Pushers shouldn’t be pushing. The sickness industry is a vile and evil institution that ruins people’s health and cuts up their bodies for profit. That is a leftist position.

As a leftist I think that transsexuals should not be discriminated against. I’m also highly disturbed by the idea of medicalizing everything and turning a sexual identity into an excuse for prescribing dangerous and harsh drugs and body modification surgery. The whole thing feels like an op by the for-profit healthcare industry.

1992 Bill Clinton thought that we should have universal single-payer healthcare. In 2016 Hillary said that would “never, ever, ever happen.”

This is SOP in silicon valley so I’m sure you’re correct.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ

Their new CEO is a McKinsey consultant so this is pretty much guaranteed.

Last recall was also a real recall: to rivet the slipping gas pedal cover down.

The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own.

That is not what the lawsuit is about, and that was not what the plaintiffs or the judge argued. Their argument is that if you can not take a physical copy and digitize it.

If you want a digital copy to lend, you must beg the publisher to allow you to have a digital copy to lend and you must accept their terms. If they don’t want to provide you with a digital lending option as a library, then you can not lend it. If they want to make you use their DRM software you must use it even if it spies on your patrons and charges you per-lending fees, or even “expires” the book after so many loans, or “blacks out” or “embargoes” lending of titles you are supposed to have in your catalog (these are all features of publisher-backed digital lending schemes).

This is depressing as hell and a statement about the time we live in and the corporate overlords who control our lives.

Jimmy McGee made a great video about it last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJoGm8c523M

And before SpaceX the cost to do anything in space was extremely prohibitive.

As opposed to now…

With SpaceX they created re-usable rocket components

Nobody had done that before? Wasn’t the promise that they would do few quick checks, refuel, and send it back up same day?

Before SpaceX the U.S. was reliant on Russia’s soyuz to get us to and from the space station.

Nasa had do use Soyuz because crew dragon was late. SpaceX won the contract then underdelivered a late product. Basically exactly what ULA or Boeing would have done.

Wanna talk about Artemis?