May you one day theorize something and 48 years later be photographed with the 27 kilometer large country-spanning machine that confirmed you were right. Awesome photo of Peter Higgs courtesy of the @CMSexperiment at CERN.
So Americans go crazy that the EU enacts thoughtful legislation full of procedures to rein in dominant social media players. EU bad! And this week US comes out with a law that simply bans TikTok if it is still Chinese owned 180 days from now. https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1236363592/biden-tiktok-ban
In other news, Firefox market share appears to be quite substantial in the tech/geek scene (30%-40%), and near zero outside of it. This gets to you 1.5% or so globally. To raise its market share, Firefox needs to mostly gain non-tech users. Keep that in mind when judging their plans. Below, Firefox market share split out for different posts on my site:
@elmine you can't even get tech people to shift from WhatsApp to Signal. The alternative needs to be way way way better, visibly, before anyone changes their ways.
Regarding AI *in* Firefox, this has brought us a built-in translator that does not outsource the work to the cloud. That's amazingly good work. I'd love to see the browser do more of that kind of thing. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/translate/
In 1995 computing pioneer Niklaus Wirth wrote "A Plea for Lean Software". In 2024 it is entirely normal for simple software to be shipped as a 350MB package, or for it to have 1600 dependencies. In appreciation of Wirth's legacy, I wrote a 2024-era Plea for Lean Software, updated for today's computing horrors: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/a-2024-plea-for-lean-software/
@luis_in_brief@sovtechfund Got it. I've often argued here in the EU that we could achieve so much for 1 euro per European/year... But we have to start somewhere.
This blog post comes from deep inside the world of advertising, from people trying to move away from cookies. And along the way offer a VERY rare insight into the dark technology behind advertising and tracking ("hashed offline passbacks", "first and multi-touch attribution"), stuff you almost never read about. https://blog.sentry.io/we-removed-advertising-cookies-heres-what-happened/
One specific thing that changed is that Wirth blamed the software size explosion on "too many features". In his view both developers and users should learn not to do that (still true). These days software has mostly exploded because we ship a whole ass full-fledged browser to create an app that opens a garage door if you press a button.
Typing in a blog on the dire state of software only to find out that Niklaus Wirth already wrote most of it in 1995. Some things have changed since then, but mostly his article is even more true today (in new ways) than it was in 1995. https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf
Europe has no position in "cloud" at all, but (government) initiatives abound to change this. In the post below I argue that AWS & friends are "IKEA clouds", attractive because they offer everything. And no one can compete with IKEA. I also argue that modern clouds are incredibly advanced (like airliners), and that you don't just replicate those either. Instead, Europe might might be better served by a narrower initial ambition: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/taking-the-airbus-to-the-ikea-cloud/