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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2020

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  • What in the terms is concerning? They still have the bulk of the language in the old data privacy guarantee as well. This seems like they just got a more circumspect legal department who wants to cover their ass.

    It’s always been the case that Mozilla could decide to just make Firefox suck ass. Again, I’ll be worried when they actually change the terms to something unacceptable.




  • Still Firefox. Every time Mozilla does anything the entire privacy community goes insane. The terms of use they published seem entirely benign, and the only thing anyone can actually point to is the “direction being worrisome”. Well, I’ll get worried when they update the terms to be actually onerous. Everything even possibly annoying can be disabled, and it’s still the only browser engine offering competition against Chrome ruling the web.




  • Last week I accidentally overwrote my configuration.nix file with garbage. If you use NixOS this should fill you with horror. If you don’t, that file contains a description of your entire system – all the packages as well as many settings tweaks to anything from GUI apps to core kernel & systemd options.

    I have now learned my lesson and started using git to track my changes. Tbh, I was naively expecting to be able to roll back to a previous config and pull out my configuration file, but that’s not how it works. Happily I had already split out the most difficult to reproduce sections into their own files (mostly networking stuff), so it wasn’t that catastrophic, but it still turned a few minutes of tinkering into a couple hours of forehead-smacking.





  • I’m not an expert on either codebase but I believe the main driver of complexity with developing a browser engine is the sheer number of standards and how fast they change and multiply. Wikipedia has to update articles and maintain the server backend, which is no small task with such a global and comprehensive website, but Firefox has to do similar things on top of vastly more complex code with much more churn. There’s a reason Mozilla developed Rust as well.







  • In FOSS, community & volunteer made software, yes, there is onus on you as the user to do a bare minimum of effort. You have to meet the developers and the software where it is.

    I very literally said “GUIs are better but harder to implement.” The second half of that sentence is not trivial.

    If you want to customize and tweak things in the guts of a program (like OP does for this discussion), you can actually do it with FOSS applications. But expecting developers to expose every configurable option with a GUI would massively slow down the pace of development. Making them available in config files is a nice compromise between doing all that work and not exposing the option at all, in which case you’d need to actually patch the executable or otherwise modify the source code.

    I’m not discouraging people from working on GUIs. I’m just pointing out the fact that if an app doesn’t expose a setting you want to change, your options are a) complain that the dev hasn’t implemented that, b) change it yourself which would be hugely easier if you looked the documentation, or c) find another app. Saying “the onus isn’t on me” doesn’t work when you don’t pay for the software and the person who wrote it is a volunteer, it just makes you an entitled asshole.