Notices by Jer Warren (nyquildotorg@fedia.social), page 2

@thomasfuchs I was juuuust about to switch to and pay for Kagi, but then they had to partner with Brendan Eich and now I have no plan. Still using Qwant, but it's getting bad.

Q: "How can we monetize man's predilection for yelling and hooting and hollering about things of exactly zero consequence?"

A: "professional sports."

@jalefkowit this made me laugh so much because it was such a an obvious result of the plan to disallow performative unpublishing. Now nobody can unpublish their packages, lol

@jalefkowit every aspect of npm was a mistake and my unpopular opinion is that anyone who uses it should be ashamed. (I'm fun at parties.)

An important reminder: Netscape was meant to be a commercial product, paid for by the users of the product. They had to pivot to it staying free forever when Microsoft made their browser free — because they had the money to outspend Netscape forever and knew they would win.

Then VCs decided to stop giving Netscape money, forcing a sale to AOL, who also were unable to make money with it.

Then came Mozilla, a for-profit entity wrapped in a non-profit trenchcoat. But users still don't pay for the one product that matters — the browser — leaving it up to Google to foot those bills (and pretty much all the other ones too.)

Yet the entire pitch for the continued existence of Mozilla is to protect the internet from Google...

I think there's only one thing that can make Firefox work: convincing users to pay for its continued development.

You don't need a CEO to make one product profitable. Get rid of the entire c-suite. Lean into the "savior of the internet" angle that they play up while fundraising, to make it the entire fucking mission. Let the hundreds of people who are always in my mentions to tell me I'm wrong about whether or not Firefox can ever be "a viable alternative" put their money where their mouths are.

Start charging actual money, that actually goes toward the development of the browser, and then come up with other revenue sources.

And start the whole thing off by tearing up the next yearly $450 million dollar check from Google and telling users they have to contribute.

@thomasfuchs what now?

@evan when jwz brought this up a few months ago he got inundated with "you're describing a blog" which is frustrating.

@funbaker @mce @evan what Evan is asking for: Evan as an individual created a post, which some jerkwad later replies with something offensive and off-topic. Evan the individual wants to be able to remove replies to his post to protect the thousands of other individuals whom are now subjected to it because they wanted to see what Evan had to say.

"Could AI lead to a four-day workweek?" Sure! Just get everyone to start posting on the web that there are only four days in a week, then the AI will believe it to be true. Once the AI believes it's true, everyone else will too.

@thomasfuchs @clive @autumn @vfrmedia @lkanies @sidereal picking up more batteries with hooks like mail on a train

@thomasfuchs I assume it's the same problem, but rounding to one decimal place instead of none

@thomasfuchs Firefish skips displaying a textual percentage altogether, while Elk displays decimals. I think both of these options are better than poor rounding.

@thomasfuchs wait, lol. the decimals don't add up on Elk either, lol

Here’s what Apple really means when it says ‘shot on iPhone’"a great deal of fancy equipment — from drones, gimbals, dollies, industrial set lighting, and other recording accessories — is still required to make iPhone footage look this good"I guess iPhones can't move themselves around autonomously, set up their own lighting 🙄

@feditips@mstdn.social @AmiW@mastodon.online that is Lemur, but it should be the same in at least all Chromium browsers, but I'd be surprised if Firefox didn't do it.

@AmiW@mastodon.online @feditips@mstdn.social if you long-press on the image, the alt text is displayed (truncated) at the top of the menu that appears. You can tap on the truncated text to expand it to read the whole thing.

Former president says he would prefer to die by electrocution in bizarre campaign rant'The former president and frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination delivered the bizarre remarks during a speech in the community of Ottuma. He was pontificating over batteries for electric powered boats while recounting a conversation he claimed to have with a boat manufacturer in South Carolina.'“If I’m sitting down and that boat is going down and I’m on top of a battery and the water starts flooding in, I’m getting concerned, but then I look 10 yards to my left and there’s a shark over there, so I have a choice of electrocution and a shark, you know what I’m going to take? Electrocution,” [the former President] said. “I will take electrocution every single time, do we agree?”

The last few days, I've been seeing a lot of headlines about how science has "finally explained why carrots are orange," which of course reminds me of one of my favorite examples of intentional misinformation spread: that Ally pilots had better night vision than their German foes in WWII because they intentionally included lots of carrots in their diet.

Of course the truth is that the allies had a secret radar tech the Germans didn't know about, and the public campaign to tell citizens to eat more carrots was a ruse.

I've been talking about how AI will directly lead to an Idiocracy (2006) scenario for some time, but today's update to the "can you melt eggs?" saga is as clear an illustration of how as I think it's possible to ever have.

Quora's AI answers made up the melting point of eggs, and then Google picked it up and responded affirmatively that you can indeed melt eggs.

Then people wrote articles about how stupid it is that Google says eggs can melt. Then Google fixes the answer.

Then Google ingests an article about how stupid it is that Google says you can melt eggs, and suddenly Google starts answering affirmatively again that you can melt eggs, citing the article about how stupid Google is for thinking you can melt eggs.