Disagree, XUL was a dead end that either needed shooting behind the bike shed or it’d have taken Mozilla down with it inevitably. It froze their internal architecture to a design that didn’t care about multicore or modern security. Switching to a proper extension api (it didn’t matter if it was chromes or their own, only that they are willing to make their own decisions, like in manifest v3).

That said, I suspect the real death blow was when they killed servo, that project was their distant salvation, a chance to genuinely outcompete technologically and direct where browsers need to go next. I too hope I’m wrong and they can figure out a path forward, but they’ve shown little ambition from the top, so I’m not holding my breath.

Edit: you could argue that the solution to XUL should have been an upgrade to modern design rather than death, but that would have just been an expensive temporary reprieve, the world doesn’t stop changing, it was always going to be slow to correct to whatever direction they needed to go next (and meanwhile every extension dev would be screaming murder every time they killed some braindead api designed 20 years ago).

Bits are also a unit of information from information theory. In that context they are relevant for anything that processes information, regardless of methodology, you can convert analogue signals into bits just fine.

They didn’t “build” their business model on it so much as “clung desperately onto the only lifeline in existence to avoid drowning in debt”.

There really isn’t a plan b, it’s not like they’re refusing to switch to the obviously better business models out there that could replace their search money. There just aren’t many business models that can maintain the development costs of a web browser and engine.

At least they were banned from using AI screening for 5 years.

I’d hope breaking a court order would result in the kind of punishments they would actually fear.

Yeah, it sounds like a normal lesson plan with ai fairy dust sprinkled on top as a marketing gimmick.

I’m no audiophile either, I don’t care what profile it’s in in normal mode, but everything is instantly a disaster in headset mode.

I know AirPods have some non standard support to escape the Bluetooth mess on apple hardware.

I want a headset that works on windows, my phone, and mac, which means I’m stuck with standard support, which basically means I’m stuffed.

Sorry for linking to the alien, but see this discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/44sxms/bluetooth_headset_goes_to_low_audio_quality_when/?rdt=57825

As I understand it, standard Bluetooth cannot support quality audio and microphone.

That said, lots of phones and headsets secretly support non standard profiles if you use the right hardware together, but at that point you can’t know if you’re going to get quality with your setup unless someone’s tested it thoroughly and half the time reviewers are either deaf or lying

I just want a headset that doesn’t descend into hissing at me in mono over a crackly 1940s phoneline whenever I dare to use the microphone.

I disagree, they are not talking about the online low trust sources that will indeed undergo massive changes, they’re talking about organisations with chains of trust, and they make a compelling case that they won’t be affected as much.

Not that you’re wrong either, but your points don’t really apply to their scenario. People who built their career in photography will have t more to lose, and more opportunity to be discovered, so they really don’t want to play silly games when a single proven fake would end their career for good. It’ll happen no doubt, but it’ll be rare and big news, a great embarrassment for everyone involved.

Online discourse, random photos from events, anything without that chain of trust (or where the “chain of trust” is built by people who don’t actually care), that’s where this is a game changer.

All they have to do is convince some of the scientists to peer review each other’s work for free and theres no longer any significant difference between their scam and the OG journal scam.

Soon: “Open source software or pirated copies of photoshop only”

Reasoning is obviously useful, not convinced it’s required to be a good driver. In fact most driving decisions must be done rapidly, I doubt humans can be described as “reasoning” when we’re just reacting to events. Decisions that take long enough could be handed to a human (“should we rush for the ferry, or divert for the bridge?”). It’s only the middling bit between where we will maintain this big advantage (“that truck ahead is bouncing around, I don’t like how the load is secured so I’m going to back off”). that’s a big advantage, but how much of our time is spent with our minds fully focused and engaged anyway? Once we’re on autopilot, is there much reasoning going on?

Not that I think this will be quick, I expect at least another couple of decades before self driving cars can even start to compete with us outside of specific curated situations. And once they do they’ll continue to fuck up royally whenever the situation is weird and outside their training, causing big news stories. The key question will be whether they can compete with humans on average by outperforming us in quick responses and in consistently not getting distracted/tired/drunk.

They don’t have to be any good, they just have to be significantly better than humans. Right now they’re… probably about average, there’s plenty of drunk or stupid humans bringing the average down.

It’s true that isn’t good enough, unlike humans, self driving cars are will be judged together, so people will focus on their dumbest antics, but once their average is significantly better than human average, that will start to overrule the individual examples.

Tldr: in this “revolution” we get to play the part of the horses from the Industrial Revolution.

The last revolution made more and better jobs for horses at the start. Then it made less and zero jobs for horses. This one could be the same for humans.

Ok, apart from human rights, workers rights, rebalancing funds to poorer regions, free trade, free movement, a voice at the table, straight bananas, peace in Europe, and endless examples of consumer rights, what has the EU done for us?!

As dumb as this comment is, you’ve just guaranteed that I’ll never forget the name of this problem, so thanks for that

I agree with you and Alexa, but you can always say “five past six” to avoid the [zer]o if it’s bothering you.

I remember on a German exchange at school the German student could not handle “oh” sounds in phone numbers at all. So it might be tricky for non native speakers (though I think they made more of a fuss from anger at how stupid English is than out of genuine confusion…)

Yes, especially right now. To be fair that’s mostly because solar is doing great as far as scale goes right now. Nuclear has near zero scale and lost all experience, so it’s more expensive than ever.

Yes, but also literally every industry starts that way. Start small and scale up. Nuclear’s special because we did it once and then almost completely stopped building them globally for so long that the capability faded away.

The tech shifted in the meantime, so even the knowledge that was preserved is for designs we wouldn’t want to build today.

It’s a weird situation.

Yup, it’s hard to predict what the mix will look like, but 100% solar would be a very costly solution for sure.

I used to be very pro nuclear, and I still think it could have been a big piece of the puzzle, but I do worry we’ve missed the boat, it could’ve been the first wave of decarbonisation 20 (or more) years ago, I’m not sure how well it can compete growing from almost nothing now with the renewables eating all the easy money. nuclear plants need to run 100% to be successful, and renewables have dropped a bomb on the concept of baseline demand. Maybe as we kill gas we’ll have to start giving massive bonuses to on demand power that isn’t pumping co2, but the absolute lid on that market is the price of storage, which is high enough now, but will drop, it’s unclear how long the gap for nuclear will exist there.

Certainly willing to be wrong though, there’s lots of unknowns with nuclear, quite possibly it could be multiple times cheaper if only we’d invest into it properly.