Notices by [object Object] (zzt@mas.to)

@firefoxwebdevs I blew up somewhat over you calling your users confused and playing fuckfuck games with the meaning of opt-in, so as an apology I’ve made a small donation to the future of the web

https://servo.org/sponsorship/

@firefoxwebdevs @SamatSattarov so your definition of opt-in includes enabling a bunch of browser.ml about:config settings after updates, including all the ones I’ve already disabled, just in case I change my mind and want my browser to be full of absolute horseshit?

that’s fucking worthless and I’d tell you to feel ashamed that this dark pattern crap is what you think constitutes consent, but let’s be real: you’re a PR mouthpiece for an AI corporation and are incapable of shame.

@firefoxwebdevs @SamatSattarov “why are you being so mean, we’re developers too” be fucking serious. Firefox is fucking cooked and so’s the web and you’re giving me PR language from an Oops! Not Actually Official! account and expecting me to not notice I’m talking to a salesperson under the employ of a millionaire who only recently told me and the rest of the Firefox userbase to personally go fuck ourselves

@firefoxwebdevs @SamatSattarov and while we’re here

I know it’s very popular among PR fuckfaces to claim that your justifiably angry users are confused as a way to control the discussion.

none of us are confused. all of us know a dark pattern when we see it. plenty of us have had to implement them for our dickhead employers. none of us want our consent violated by a browser we’ve previously done advocacy for. no, you don’t get to dictate what a consent violation looks like for your users.

if you’re selling a linux-specific laptop that can’t reliably suspend or hibernate at all in linux and drains its own battery fast in sleep, no you aren’t

if you’re selling a tinkerer’s laptop that’s fucking miserable to tinker with, you haven’t made a tinkerer’s laptop

if the postmortem is that your laptop is off the market and its community is dead because of the above problems, you’ve failed and should be ashamed

this is a post about the pinebook pro, but it applies to the pinephone too

@foone I have an odd level of nostalgia for the entire type of 90s guy who worked at electronics stores and refused to sell products he didn’t like, so buying like a boxed copy of Slackware became a weird negotiation with someone with Windows Opinions

GNU GIMP (1998): we can’t change our terrible fucking name, we’ve had it for years. imagine the confusion. imagine the work.

the Coq theorem prover (1989): we’re Rocq now because we got tired of the joke and we trust you’re too busy doing mathematics to give a shit

and I’m just gonna preempt the Atwood fans on this one

“are you seriously going to complain that he did a good deed”

yeah. cause when your wealthy friend hands you a fistful of pages of information that might be incorrect or dangerous and acts like he’s solved all your problems without putting any effort or resources into it, that’s kind of really fucking insulting

actually no, tell me this

what the fuck could have been on that printout that jeff’s friend didn’t already know just from having to survive while unhoused? how in fuck would boy genius millionaire Jeff Atwood know if any of the information’s inaccurate or dangerous?

unhoused people aren’t fucking stupid. they know damn well how to get online if they need to. they need resources and material help. but nah, bare minimum effort from jeff so he can post about it online later

jesus christ jeff. this is “I went online and printed off some resources for you about how to stop being unhoused! you’re welcome!” but you then went on to use the encounter to promote slop machines to your audience

please can we stop acting like these neoliberal birthday boys have any idea how to solve problems? jeff’s altruism ends when the tax breaks and the marketing end. that’s why his millionaire ass couldn’t give his “friend” access to a couch or a mailbox. https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror/115279844443067032

how could I forget

- a non-working web browser moving to a proprietary language that only supports macs, which appears to exist purely to divert funding away from Servo
- a working chromium fork whose only business purpose is to push slop extruders and a scam cryptocurrency
- slop extruders
- cryptocurrencies

why not embrace fashtech! they’ve got:
- terrible Fisher-Price CSS
- the most toxic part of the Wayland ecosystem, and that’s saying something
- the worst part of the X11 ecosystem, and that’s saying something
- suckless tools and they all fucking suck
- corporate control over the packages you wrote, for your own protection
- distributed functional programming that doesn’t function or distribute

it’s fucked how every time I use a tool that calls itself opinionated, the opinions are always some annoying dev’s terrible defaults that they want to make into an industry standard and not anything of value, like how transphobes can fuck off forever

if your priorities include dictating code formatting and exclude keeping bigots out of your project, your priorities are fucked

@afeinman I think that might be exactly it — these weirdos like the aesthetics of purity because they’re fascists, but can’t design a working system for the life of them. patient zero for this was most likely Curtis Yarvin and Urbit — a purely functional (except for all the parts where it isn’t) globally distributed system that was modeled on feudalism and doesn’t work

@leon_p_smith @demallien he’s also gone back and tried to redact a bunch of it, of course — @davidgerard and I dug up the original version of the urbit spec where he’s explicit about its global addressing model being an attempt at implementing neoreaction in software, and I can link the thread if you’re morbidly curious

a weird impediment to releasing my lambda calculus work is I know exactly who’s going to clap first and loudest and that’s why the work’s going to be extremely queer and extremely political

I feel like a chihuahua complaining about small yappy dogs, but why in the fuck is an obsession with lambda calculus such a red flag now

(this isn’t a subtoot about any of the CS researchers I follow that do good work in lambda calculus, but their fans have an above average probability of being weird fascist freaks)

(also a note to the lambda calculus fans who aren’t weird fascist freaks: yes I know, me too, see also the joke about chihuahuas complaining about small yappy dogs above)

@davidgerard I can never escape the fact that Sir Mix-a-Lot directs the viewer’s attention towards butts in the same way that Dr Robotnik directs Sonic’s attention towards the robot that will end him

@davidgerard I’ve written about this in detail before but:

- any email participant using proton’s LLM writing assistant Scribe silently exposes potentially the entire cleartext of the email thread to Proton, who can easily silently log it as they do for all other law enforcement requests for metadata (their no-logs policy is legally worthless, and they overcomply in any case)
- everything sent to Lumo including shared Drive files is decrypted and exists as cleartext on Proton’s end

courtesy of @davidgerard, Proton is now the only privacy vendor I know of that vibe codes its apps:

> In the single most damning thing I can say about Proton in 2025, the Proton GitHub repository has a “cursorrules” file. They’re vibe-coding their public systems. Much secure!

I am once again begging anyone who will listen to get off of Proton as soon as reasonably possible, and to avoid their new (terrible) apps in any case. https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/114961415946154957