Rekall Incorporated

It’s like global malnutrition/hunger, it’s not that we don’t have enough food (I believe total global calorie per capita per day output might be significantly above the recommended 2,500 or so calories); it’s the distribution where the problem lies.

Those are very different things though.

And one can argue that how people imagine the end of the world is probably shaped works of art/media.

This is nothing compared to their enablement of the Rohingya genocide. In terms of less horrific, but still impactful crimes their recent premeditated promotion of scams to gain revenue on commissions ($16 B in a year) is also worth mentioning.

But the enablement of the Rohingya genocide really does make one wonder if exceptions need to be made with respect to state use of capital punishment (which I generally do not support, but I can see the need for exceptions such high treason during war and crimes against humanity).

Their growth segment is services and services have been taking an increasing share of total revenues (even with record iPhone sales).

That’s where they’ll be focused on, so prepare for mode ads and data collection.

It’s too much of a low hanging fruit for governmental overreach.

I would argue this framing is at the root cause of the such initiatives.

The government even in flawed democracies (and not only in democracies) is generally a representation of the attitude of the people. Governmental overreach stems from the behaviour and beliefs of the adult population.

If a median representation of the population supports oligarchs, you’ll get oligarch programs under the guise of “think about the children” initiatives. Polemics about “small government” aren’t going to help.

I stand by what I said. I will let people read my comment in this thread and our comments in this post (there are multiple threads that are relevant):

https://piefed.social/c/opensource/p/1952631/waterfox-to-integrate-brave-adblock-engine-with-search-ads-enabled-by-default

Let people make up their own minds.

Just curious, what exactly do you mean by SRA in context of this thread?

I don’t necessarily think joining some sort of community/mutual aid organization is a bad thing. Based on research of global protest movements (disclaimer: I am not well versed on this topic outside of my region, albeit there is a lot to cover in our region), generally the highest success rates are for mass scale movements where the regime starts to feel they are losing control. Security services rank and file start to wonder if the leadership are going to bail on them and whether it is worth it to risk their lives fighting their own fellow citizens.

One way to get to that point is a strong network of community organizations that are not subject to the regime political structures (I would include the US Democratic party in this category) or malign business community influence (definitely almost all large US corporations who are part of the oligarchic regime and also giant list of wannabe oligarch types).

The often cited number is 10% of the population engaging in regular protests (with the implication being that a much larger % of the working age population supports the goals of the protest movement). Although from memory, the researchers did say that a single % doesn’t really account for a given “situation on the ground”, more of a general trend. Which makes a lot of sense.

Violent resistance was cited as having mixed results for a variety of reasons and tended to have much more unpredictable and drawn out dynamics.

From my time living the US, I also didn’t find the local polemics around gun ownership to be convincing or productive (i.e. irrespective of your position on gun ownership, a reasonable argument can be made that in the US context there are other factors at play with respect to the perceptions around gun ownership).

Then there is the practical consideration. What has the US implementation of gun ownership achieved in terms of specifics?

At last a useful comment thread about the actual functionality in question.

While I am not moving back to reddit, Threadiverse is just terrible on any nuanced conversations on modern ML tools and approaches.

The tech is not the issue here. It has legitimate use cases and it is here to stay (this is not a blockchain pump and dump scheme ala Web 3.0). The issue here are American tech companies and broader support for crime/corruption in US society (as of today, doesn’t mean that this can’t/won’t change in 20-30 years). We need truly independent open source systems and tools.

I am aware OpenWebUI is based in San Francisco and Mozilla Foundation is based in the US. I am always on the lookout for alternatives.

Keep in mind that that there is a strong likelihood that XLE is a demagogue and is dedicated to shitting up any mozilla/Firefox/TB thread with lies and gross exaggerations that function as lies. XLE almost certainly does not use Firefox or Thunderbird (it wouldn’t make sense considering their posting history).

XLE claimed that “Firefox is bursting at the seams with ads.” This is clearly not true.

As an example they cited “sponsored search suggestions”, which to my mind isn’t a big deal and can easily be disabled. For the sake of transparency, I will note that I’ve never got them and it seems I can’t enable them even if I wanted to (likely due to my region?)

XLE also claimed that the on-hover sponsorship notice for the Firefox weather widget as an example of “Firefox bursting at the seam with ads.” I haven’t used the default new tab page in a decade plus, so maybe this impacts how I see things. From my perspective, an on-hover sponsorship notice for optional widgets is a misleading example for their claims.

You can make up your own mind and read our conversation here: https://piefed.social/comment/10831188

P.S. I am not saying you shouldn’t cancel your donation. I’ve donated to Mozilla Foundation before and cancelled, so I would be a hypocrite for defending donations to MF.

I also have a more hard-line position on MF; they’ve turned into a shitty, corrupt American tech company imitation. All open source foundations based in the US are suspect by definition (including Linux foundation, Debian foundation etc.) as US society is in a state where it is extremely unlikely that crime and corruption will be addressed in the next 20 years (I’ve lived in the US for several years, as well as other countries across NA, Europe and Asia).

But that doesn’t mean you should trust an individual like XLE, who muddies the water with bombastic BS, while at the same time defending Brave; an American criminal gang that was caught re-writing referral URLs for their own financial benefit.

Why not get either a DIY Raspberry Pi type media player/server or if you need other streaming subscriptions a licensed Android TV box.

I don’t think they are lying in the technical sense, it all depends on what they define as “sandbox/continenment” and the nature of their prompts and output.

That being said, the AI Doom is well known propaganda technique used by those who stand to benefit from the hype.

The EV demand changes reflect the population that is currently looking for a new car (have the money and are willing to buy) and people were previously “on the margin”, those who weren’t looking to buy a car immediately (more like sometime in the next 6-18 months), but due to fuel price changes they have now moved into the first group.

I honestly can’t formulate what I think about US/Israeli’s mass scale assault on Iran. I don’t support it, but the alleged religious dictatorship is a fucking embarrassment for modern society. And it doesn’t seem the regime will end, but who knows. They unfortunately might even come out stronger after active combat is over.

It may well turn into an invasion, but Trump is too much of a coward deep down and lacks attachment to anything real to make tough choices (even if they are bad and disasterous)

He is all about fucking around and acting out. I don’t think he has the capability to have a strong belief or commitment about anything (his love for himself notwithstanding).

Israel would only agree to send Americans to do the dirty work and get killed as living shields for targeted Israeli special forces attacks. But I don’t see them choosing a path to any measure of risk to try and absolutely maximize the likelihood of the end of pig feet kissing theocratic dectatorship.

On one hand, I am really happy that Khamenei got killed in an air strike in his own compound. Shit stain had it coming, my only regret is that his turd son didn’t get turned into mince meat two weeks before Khamenei. But at least he achieved the cosmic balance by reincarnating into a pig turd that keeps coming out of a pigs asshole; he has become part of the circle of life, a very special part. I says this as an atheist.

It’s been a while since I was contact with Iranians from Iran, but I am willing to be bet many in Iran also share my views on Khamenei, if not my colourful language.

One could say, well at last the American oligarch got a taste of reality; I don’t get that impression and I don’t think anyone is seriously saying that. Their perspective is probably more along the lines of extreme weather in far away country adding two to six basis points of negative sentiment to T2.3 adjusted revenue forecast for a period for 6 to 9 months. Microsoft valuation is defacto nominal, $400 B valuation gain one year $1.1 B loss another 6 weeks.

They own Red Hat and IIRC, it’s their fastest growing (if not largest) business unit.

“Our roles: All Global Engineering roles will evolve. The focus will shift from ‘AI as a tool used on occasion’ to ‘AI automation as a way to scale the delivery of value to customers.’ Our associates’ skillsets will grow as they become proficient in these tools.”

The “scale the delivery of value to customer” phrase is a massive red flag, it means they have no fucking clue what they are doing. If they did, they would be more clear about their thinking and reasoning and not use PR speak.

They do provide some more specifics that are quoted later in the article, but it still sounds like they haven’t really thought this through:

The next few paragraphs of the memo are oddly repetitive. First, it says: “To lead in this era, we must evolve our operating model. The gap we face today isn’t just technical – it’s organizational. Today, we are beginning our transition to an Agentic Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) to transform how Global Engineering and Products deliver.”

“‘All-in’ product scope: We aren’t looking for a single scrum team to experiment in a vacuum. To avoid bottlenecks, we will move entire products or sub-products to this model simultaneously.” Scrum is a reference to the Agile development model, about which The Register’s Rupert Goodwins expressed reservations back in 2024.

That’s a fair point.

Still, I think for the median user interested in customisation, a fully vibe coded front end may be overkill.

Why do you need “vibe coding” for UI/UX customisation?

Why can’t you have a regular app that has customisation features (can even use LLM or ML tech)?

I am hardly anti-AI and I’ve vibe coded some small elements of my work projects (very simple modules with extremely clear input -output requirements in a domain I have a lot of business experience in), but this seems like AI for the sake of AI (or hype and PR associated with what is marketed as AI).

Funnily enough “The Gods Themselves” themselves is my favorite Asimov novel. It’s very memorable. Doesn’t feel like an Asimov novel.

I would honestly go with “The Caves of Steel” as a “benchmark” Asimov experience, the first novel in the Robot series.

If you want to go for something a little bit outside of the Robot / Foundation series (and you’ve already read or reread “The Gods Themselves”), I would go for “The End of Eternity”.

I hate that too.

I didn’t know that the “The Man in the High Castle” (supposed to be based on a novel by Philip K. Dick) show was just about the setting and they came up with their own story. I was so pissed off after watching the first episode.

I was actually wondering why they even went with “The Man in the High Castle” since it’s a strange and superficially depressing novel (even by the standards of PKD). There are much better choices for a series or a movie based on PKD’s work.

That’s why I didn’t bother with the Foundation series (I am a big Asimov fan). I don’t mind a re-interpretation of a literary work, but it has to be creative and mind bending while conceptually (and philosophically?) engaging with the themes from the literary work.

I use LLMs for work (low priority stuff to save time on search or things that I know I will be validate later in the process) and I can’t stand the writing style and the constant attempts to bring in adjacent unrelated topics (I’ve been able to tone down the cute language and bombastic delivery style in Gemini’s configuration).

It’s like Excel trying to chat with me when I am working with a pivot table or transforming data in PowerQuery.