hendrik

Depends on country, if you’re a company or doing it for profit and if you do additional stuff like sending emails.

If you’re doing it for fun and are in the USA, you don’t need to do anything.

If you’re a company you should add the fine print. Add copyright notices, trademark claims, terms and conditions, disclaimers…

If you’re sending out newsletters you need to make sure people can unsubscribe.

If you’re in the EU you might need a whole imprint, privacy policy, handle user data properly…

Also Soundcloud, T-Mobile, yes Spotify … A lot of open source projects are based in Europe: Gitlab, Mastodon, Peertube, Mobilizon, a few Linux distributions, LibreOffice… I think at least the Free Software and libre culture world is pretty active, here.

Plus aside from consumer facing software, the tech sector also exports a lot of engineering. There is German wielded train tracks all around the world, car parts, Airbus (planes), tools, logistics software and robotics, companies like SAP do lots of behind the scenes stuff…

(And half the internet giants weren’t even founded in arbitrary places in the USA, but more or less just in California (Google, Apple, eBay, PayPal) the other half is more spread over the country, like Microsoft: New Mexico, Amazon: Washington, Facebook: Massachusetts if I’m not mistaken.)

Lol. Yeah I get it. Though I still think the rich companies dictate a lot of things. They do a lot of lobbying and paying people to make sure it’s not them who funds the majority of the country, they choose how much you pay for medication and everyday items, they choose to spy on everyone on the internet. Make you buy things you don’t need, make housing prices subject to speculation. Make everyone addicted to their phone and spend like several hours a day with it. Separate society into filter bubbles. I think a lot of these things aren’t liked by the people. Or are extremely unhealthy. Yet, they are a thing and never change. I think because some people will this into existance. Sure, they’re far from being almighty. But it’s enough control they have over everyone already.

And I think as they can use the internet as a tool for their interests (which had ultimately been invented to connect people), they could as well do the same with AI. I mean they train those models and choose in which ways they’re biased. What the can and can not talk about. If that’s paired with the surveillance tech, that’s already inside of each smart TV, smart appliance or Alexa… It’ll be kind of a dystopian scifi movie where someone else watches your steps all day, uses that to manipulate people… some kind of puppet master whom the bots really work for.

I’m really unsure. Sure, almost everything can be hacked. But does that really have an effect on the broader picture? Everytime I see some major hack, the next day it’s business as usual and everything keeps working as it used to.

Is there a recommended, shiny RSS reader for Linux and Android? Which I want to try?

Or the people who own the robots and dictate their programming (/control them). That would be my concern. Unless they’re sentient and make decisions completely on their own, they can be used to oppress people to other people’s wishes. As it’s the case with all (modern) technology. And currently AI isn’t shaped by the people, but by a rich minority and big tech companies. And I see some issues with that, specifically, in the near future.

Plus, both happens. I had content being georestricted and my access being blocked due to companies not bothering with European cookie popups. Similar to how porn sites now block southern US states. And sometimes companies just go with the stricter law and implement things so it caters for different audiences, disregarding if they could be more lax with one country.

Sure, they’re being regulated in other countries. I guess in the EU for example, it’s the Digital Services Act and other legislation which mandate moderation, cutting down on hate and disinformation. They’d need to be sanctioned if they don’t comply. Or leave the market if they don’t like the law…

So how are we going to find you? And what do you want to tell me? Or is this just intended to waste my time at this point?

I’d say do a teaser once you have a rough schedule ready. And maybe something to show off. And stick to the truth. If you say people can find you, that has to be correct.

no links, no hashtags
if you want to find us
you will

I don’t think so. Neither of the terms turns up anything useful on Google.

Well if it can replace senior software engineers… Wouldn’t it also be able to do almost all of the other jobs? Or are you referring to some specific future where AI advances massively, but robotics does not and handymen are still safe?

I’d say if all humans are unemployed, society would change massively. We can’t really tell how that’d work. But if machines / AI do all jobs, get food on the table… I don’t really know what other people would be doing. I think I’d relax and pursue a few hobbies and interests. Or it’d be some dystopia where humankind is oppressed by the machines and I’d fight for the resistance.

But regardless… In a world like that, money wouldn’t work the way it does now. Neither would salaries for labor mean anything.

What’s anti-power user about developing this extension?

My argument against that extension is just that it takes money and developer hours to program it. Resources that are taken away from other (more useful) things.

And I like some of the Mozilla products very much. And I think as a company, they’re not too well off. They have a limited amount of money and developers. They can now choose to invest that time in useful things, or things that attract money, or start 500 random side-projects. But then they can’t complain if that takes away from like Thunderbird and the translation tool I would like to see some attention given to.

I’m not opposed to this addon, I just don’t think it’s a wise decision to invest the limited resources in that.

I wholeheartedly agree with the rest of your comment. Linux has come a great way since then. But that means people have put in a lot of work to polish things. Directly opposed to what happens here, starting more half-baked projects and adding features, without polishing the existing ones and making them more useful or attractive to regular people.

I wish I could agree, but I don’t think I can. By that logic, Mozilla could as well stop developing their browser. It has dropped to a marketshare to like 2.5% by somewhat official statistics, maybe about 5% if we’re generous. That’s less than the ratio of Linux users. So I’d argue it’s for tinkerers, too. Seems people aren’t educating themselves, downloading Firefox, installing and configuring it either. I don’t really know what to make of this argument.

But it’s not my main point, anyways. It’s been more than a year since the translation feature got added officially to the browser. They’ve promised to add more languages from the start. But we’ve only seen small changes since then, like how you can select text. Ultimately, that translation project is from 2022. I doubt they’re actually working on it. I think it’s a shame. We’d need some good AI tools.

My point is, we already have several local LLM tools and chatbots. This is just yet another one (which isn’t ever there yet). I think you could as well use ollama for that.

While for example I still need to use Google Translate because Mozilla has a completely local translation tool for some time already. It’s just they promised to add more languages, but they don’t do it. Instead they use their time to get yet another addon to the prototype stage.

And you should try it. The (AI) translation is really good. It just needs a bit more polish and like 5 more languages… That’d help people massively. And it’s also in demand, I heard Reddit and a few other platforms have added translation as well. If you want to help people and offer privacy, I’d argue you focus on that. And this would be something useful.

Summarization however, is not useful. I get people use it anyways. I just hope they have a look at the quality of the results. Because all I’ve seen are summaries that are between misleading and wrong. And that’s by the market leading products like ChatGPT and Claude… I’m not here to dictate people’s life. But they should be aware of it to make an informed decision. I think it’s sad that Mozilla just has shiny advertising online for a product that has quite some caveats and is unlikely to ever work well. And I think misinformation is a big issue of today’s world. It’s marginally better to generate it while respecting people’s privacy. Yes. But I’m not sure if that makes it a good thing.

And please continue working on the browser, the translation, Thunderbird and the dozens of other useful Mozilla projects. I think unless Mozilla has infinite money and developer resources, they should focus on products that work well for their users.

We discussed this briefly a few days ago. No one understands why Mozilla likes to waste their time and money on random sideprojects that nobody likes or asked for… Instead of something useful, or the things lots of people ask them to do.

And summarization is among the worst things you can do with LLMs. I’m not against AI, but they’re really not good at this specific thing. I’m not sure if people will use it anyways, but I think this project is a waste of resources.