The hatred is partly fuelled by people in the open source community getting really riled up when they find out some open source projects are developed by organizations that need to earn money and pay their employees, be it Red Hat, Canonical, GNOME, Mozilla, or anything else. Female leadership will tend to push people over the edge.

In addition to the usual rage-fuelled misogyny of open source forums, there is however also valid concern out there. It can be difficult to hear through the noise.

Mozilla’s job listings provide some insight to what many consider to be a red flag for the way forward. To work on FireFox, they are looking for:

• Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Director of Product, Firefox Growth
• Principal Product Manager, Generative AI
• Senior Software Engineer - Layout (CSS and ICU4X Support)
• Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Staff Full-stack Engineer - Generative AI
• Senior Front End Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Staff Software Engineer - Credential Management
• Staff Software Engineer - Release Engineering
• Senior Front-End Software Engineer, New Tab

For fairness I include every position, highlighting in bold the ones I think are likely to do more harm than good. This is not the direction I want FireFox to take, and I believe Mozilla are misguided to try to place themselves as the ethical AI actor. That said I’m not 100% against it all of the time - I do think the local in-browser machine translation feature of newer releases is great. But I don’t think I want much more than that, and even this feature should probably have been an optional plug-in.

There’s also some former empolyees voicing valid concerns.

In short, I think the legitimate criticism boils down to:

1. Buying into the AI hype
2. Flirting with “more ethical” ads and tracking, rather than being unquestionably on the user’s side of just blocking it all
3. Doing too many things nobody asked for, arguably while not paying enough attention to FireFox
4. Appearing distant from the community and unresponsive to its preferences
5. Paying company leadership too much

I don’t really buy into point 3 personally. I use FireFox every day and it’s by far the best browser I have ever had. It never gives me any problems at all, and password sync with Android is really useful. I wish it would support JPG XL, but that’s pretty much it in terms of complaints on my end.

New in this release:

• Separate audio and video streams, so that only one audio track is stored on the server even if there are multiple resolutions for a video, and viewers can choose only to stream audio. You can also do audio-only live streams. Cool.
• Browse subtitles, search them, click on them, read them to a friend
• Better video fetching from Youtube channels, in case you post there first
• Smaller tweaks to improve user experience

Cool stuff.

PS: My favourite way to keep up to date on PeerTube content is to go to Piefed, press the search button, choose “PeerTube” under Instance Software and sort by “Recent first”. It shows content from all PieFed channels subscribed to by PieFed users, so it’s a limited scope, but I still think it’s a nice little feed.

It’s the Lemmy developers, who run Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad.ml, who decided not to promote Lemmy.world on their “about Lemmy” website. This is completely unrelated to the admins of Lemmy.world. :)

Not of Lemmy.world, where you are writing from. And I’m not even writing you from Lemmy. :)

The developers of the platform are not in control over what it’s used for. Which is what’s neat about these place.

Most people are fine. All social media has some bad eggs - admittedly FOSS/GNU/Linux communities are prone to attract a specific breed of them. But they can generally be ignored pretty easily.

Yeah, for sure. Doing something great doesn’t shield you from also making some really shitty decisions or holding some god-awful positions.

I just think it’s good to keep a nuance of language. Too many open source developers burn out, and a hostile community is listed as one of the reasons too often. There will always be disagreements, and there are valid ways of voicing it, but one should never forget that there is humans on the other side and remain kind. :)

The devs are working hard providing a public service that they make available for everyone. And the product they’ve developed is pretty impressive, in spite of its shortcomings.

They hold some opinions I disagree with pretty strongly, and I’m not a fan of every decision they make. But they’re creating a truly common good, and for that they deserve praise. From a technical perspective, they have created something completely new that serves thousands of users and constitutes a system of huge complexity. They very much do not suck.

Anyone who thinks any person maintaining an open source project “sucks” should feel free to fork the project, fix whatever they’re not happy with, and maintain the repository and handle commits and all the shit that goes down in managing a large open source project. After dedicating all this time to people, some random ingrate will inevitably disagree with some minor decision they’ve made and decide that they “suck”.

Yeah. If they pushed it to the bottom of the list, or even removed them from the list but kept the user count, I could kind of understand it. But censoring them completely for being too successful seems like shooting yourself in the foot.

Lemmy.world is doing great and I’m happy for it and all that, but… 20 000 monthly active users does not exactly make them a tech giant that needs to be kept in check just yet. Ideally, instances of 20 000 active users should be quite normal at some point, and having stress tested the software before then should, one assumes, be a good thing.

Wall-E had people ordering liquid fast food on their iPads and having it immediately delivered by drone. So fast food on a space station, but not a conventional restaurant experience i guess.

Thank you so much for the thorough response!

It seems it’s easier to deal with the firmware from a Windows machine, so I’ll deal with that back in the office next week.

If that doesn’t help I’ll take it out of the case again and see what’s up. I don’t have a soldering iron yet, but if it’s an obvious problem this might be what pushes me over the edge. :)

I guess we could compare it to ageing. People clearly get more fragile when they get older, and more likely to die from all causes. The common flu or falling in the stairs suddenly pose huge risks once you’re 90.

Smoking has a similar effect on you as ageing, except that it’s reversible.

The problem with Pine is of course that they don’t even try to deliver on software, so their products are only available for end users if the community has made robust software.

Then again, Purism has also struggled to deliver on their promises. A phone made for Android but embraced by the Linux community is probably the easiest way to go.

Haha, yeah - the deonthology hating child in my example came across as a little more reasonable than I perhaps wanted it to.

That said, I’m kind of a fan, even though I agree it’s morally bankrupt. Most of my moral thinking revolves around making up excuses for Kant.

Sounds like just about the kind of argument a filthy literate like yourself would make.

I think a big part of the problem is that liberalism dates back to the 17th century, and western civilisation is kind of built on top of it.

As a result it could fit pretty much anywhere on the political spectrum. I consider myself pretty leftist, but of course I’m a fucking liberal. I take issue with inheritance and I believe in taxing billionaires out of existence, but that’s completely consistent with liberalism. And so is disagreeing with me.

I guess a central thing about liberalism is refusing patriarchalism, which would explain why the stalinists and the trumpists alike get upset by it.

As a non-American with political science training, I think this is key to why I have found this particularly baffling.

It’s like if you were having a casual conversation about pretty much anything and some overgrown child suddenly jumps in and starts screaming you’re a filthy deontologist. Like, uhm, sure, but I’m not sure how that’s relevant, and I also somehow doubt you know what that word means.

I mean… yeah, probably. John Locke is influential as fuck.

I have seen people argue that they will never vote for Harris, because she’s just part of the same rotten establishment etc etc. Mostly from the same people who use liberal as a slur. They seem to be very loud around here.

I might be ignorant though. Have anyone established/respected in the circles around Sanders/the Squad used the term “liberal” in a similar sense? Or is it mostly by faceless folks online?

So when self-proclaimed leftists use as a slur it’s not even in relation to support for private property rights?

I guess, if you’re a proper communist, you could use liberal as a category of leftists who don’t want to abolish property rights. As for the far right crowd, it could be a slur for anyone who doesn’t want to abolish all other rights.

If a self-proclaimed “part of the Democratic coalition” is dismissing whatever arguments you make by weirdly comparing you to John Locke as a slur, chances are they are they are not, in fact, part of the Democratic coalition. The fact that they are borrowing their slurs from the conventional fascists should be telling enough.

They might even share employer.