GNU’s still here, with tons of users many of which have come to value freedom, with projects like GCC, Emacs, and Guix alive and kicking!
However, while #FreeSoftware production and use has grown by orders of magnitude in that time span, GNU has failed to attract. Chaotic, arrogant, and divisive leadership led the project to be isolated (GFDL vs. Debian anyone?), to lose its dominant position (lack of GCC plugins fueled non-copyleft LLVM), and, worse, to alienate minorities.
"Automated translation of web content is now available to Firefox users! Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine."
I got to see the early demos of this and it is jaws-on-the-floor bonkers wizard magic. Entirely local - and good - translation with no cloud service and like 6MB of storage per language.
@mhoye one great aspect of this is that it's zero-cost for Mozilla, vs the running costs of server-based approaches. I'd still like to see some UI improvements but overall it's fantastic
Sakuma Hidenori sensei's new book "Shugyōsha tachi no Yuishiki Shisō 修行者達の唯識思想" (The Yogācāra Philosophy of Practitioners) published by Shunju-sha, 2023. The study of Yogācāra focusing on "practice" is a theme that Sakuma-sensei has been accumulating for many years, and it is a pleasure to be able to read the result in such a summarized form. https://amzn.to/467ZohG
One thing I miss from back when Sears was a going concern was that you could always get reliable exploded diagrams and part numbers, not just for when you needed to fix things, but for confidence in things like build quality and part choices for your own good.
I was trying to recommend a coffee grinder to somebody just now. I stopped recommending Breville when my own stopped working, and I discovered a worn-down impeller - made of plastic, wearing down _into my goddamn coffee_ - was at fault.
Last week, a journalist working at a major Swedish news desk told me, unprompted "Twitter doesn't have as big a role for us in monitoring news any more."
I wish more people in large orgs understood how much of a burden you put on somebody by sending them a PDF and asking them to fill it out and send it back. The software you are asking people to find and learn is absolutely some of the worst software in the world.
"California's decision to take Big Oil companies to court is a watershed moment in the rapidly expanding legal fight to hold major polluters accountable for decades of climate lies," said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, a group focused on holding fossil fuel companies accountable for their role in driving climate change. https://www.npr.org/2023/09/16/1199974919/california-oil-lawsuit-climate-change "Whether it's fires, droughts, extreme heat, or sea-level rise, Californians have been living in a climate emergency caused by the fossil fuel industry, and now the state is taking decisive action to make those polluters pay," Wiles added. #climate#deception#litigation