5
I'm fucking enraged man. I hope we can regulate these assholes.
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Privacy
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There is a very easy solution. Don't buy apple.
That's not a solution. It's a way for you to avoid the problem. It does nothing to help the millions of people who are already deeply invested in the Apple ecosystem.
That is the solution though, always has been. Vote with your wallet.
voting with your wallet doesn't work when most people would buy anyway (whether it's because they're ignorant, trapped to do so, etc)
The minority of people that actually care and know about privacy and software freedom is just a tiny statistic in Apple's perspective, so voting with your wallet doesn't work.
"My actions mean nothing because everyone else won't do it" is exactly what everyone else is thinking.
You're making excuses. Be the change you know should happen. Don't be a sheep.
Don't buy puffa jackets. Seriously. They're fucking everywhere now. Don't do it, you don't need it, they're cheap and overpriced.
I'm already taking actions, but I do it with the understanding that it won't make much of a difference.
I'm sorry to break your bubble but most people just don't care. They want their computer to play a video off the internet, and don't care how long that takes as long as it works. Maybe they'll care about things in the specific interests they have, but they won't care about computers, software, and libre software.
We, people that care about software freedom are a minority and we need to accept that. And the only way to get things done when you're in the minority is to borrow power from the majority, e.g. by passing legislation.
Most people not caring isn't a concern of mine. Apple being wealthy isn't a concern of mine. What concerns me is that the products I use flourish and develop in ways that I like. I don't use Apple, so I don't particularly care about them - I just watch the drama from the sidelines.
You're not bursting my bubble in any way, but you are being a little pretentious.
Yeah, let's ignore the entire history of labor, environmental, safety, and product regulations, and believe everything is the way it is because of our dogmatic free market feefees.
free market works when the market is actually free.
As soon as entry costs are introduced into the market, the free market falls apart.
Think of the costs of building factories, rnd, lawyers, etc.
Lol for a moment there I thought I was going off the rails with my puffa jacket rant above, but your segway into "free market feefees" is far more unhinged.
Honestly, Mozilla doesn't even have the resources to maintain a proper WebKit-based version of Firefox on iPadOS, when a large amount of the work is handled for them by Apple. (See, for example, the fact that it still does not support multiple windows, a feature that has been available since 2019.) It would seem a mistake for them to try taking on a much larger load of work when they can't handle what they've already taken on.
It's not like they'd develop a new engine for iOS. They already have one which can now be used for iOS as well -- but not everywhere.
how do I de-apple my iPhone?
Direct a heat gun at the area right below the camera for 10min or so. The demon should be gone.
I like how just about everyone I who’s looked at this is basically like, “fuck apple”.
There are a few fanboys, but they are way less common than usual.
I’m hoping Apple picks up on this and reverses course.
They won't care, they have the consumerist crowd locked down. The crowd that buys dozens of Stanley Tumblers so they have one that matches any outfit. There might be more of us who care than there used to be, but the average iPhone buyer doesn't care and Apple knows it.
I mean, I’ll take a stab at speaking for Apple fans, and in fact developers. (I’m an ex-employee.)
There are a lot of things we like about the user experience on their platforms, and we appreciate their general interest in privacy while not engaging in the dirty data mining / advertising business of Google and Microsoft. There is a polish on their platforms that is best in class.
But I don’t believe any of us actually support the App Store lockdown situation. It’s probably the biggest black mark on their record. I think they got it right on macOS, requiring the binaries to be notarised (signed digitally) in such a way that malware can be blacklisted. This is a useful security feature. But developers are free to distribute however they want and third party stores like SetApp and Steam coexist happily with the App Store.
100% of their arguments about keeping the App Store as the sole distribution chain are bullshit because macOS is the proof. It’s pure rent-seeking behaviour.
There is a polish on their platforms that is best in class
As someone who was an Android user and tried switching to an iPhone, I see lots of weird bugs and behaviors I never had with Android. Sure, the OS is slightly better, and rarely crashes, but everything else is a little bit worse.
Literally every Google app is better than Apple's. Be it Google maps, keyboard, mail, calendar, etc. But because they aren't made for iPhone, there's all kinds of little bugs, mostly visual/UI related.
And then there's all these nonsensical decisions that make my life harder. Hotspot can't run with wifi on, you can't record your calls (very useful when talking to banks, government, etc.), can't even arrange the icons in "home" screen to fixed locations or make them smaller.
I finally figured out that when Apple fans talk about polish, they just mean it looks pretty and feels high-end. Which, sure, I can concede that. But that's not what I actually care about.
Anyway, rant over, sorry to take it out on you!
So hear me out. What if we took $6.9M out of the CEO bonus and dropped the Mozilla AI project?
Maybe that would be enough to hire a maintainer or two for Firefox iOS port?
Maybe that could work?
I don't know, just an idea. Crazy.
I don't know what you coul have against mozilla ai?
Mozilla: ignores years of customer complaints and requests
Mozilla: creates new product nobody asked for
Fans: "What's wrong with Product?"
Mozilla: ignores years of customer complaints and requests
Are these customers donating, or purchasing mozilla products or services so that mozilla doesn't have to rely on google's donations?
Mozilla: creates new product nobody asked for
https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho
Nearly 10k and 400 stars on those respective repos.
A way to run a large language model on any operating system, in any OS, in a simple, local, and privacy respecting manner?
For linux we have docker, but Windows users were starving for a good way to do this, and even on linux, removing the step of configuring docker (or other container runtimes) to work with nvidia, is nice.
And it's still FOSS stuff they aren't being paid for, currently. But there are plenty of ways to monetize this.
Here's an easy one: tie in the the vpn service they have to allow you to access the web ui of the computer running the llamafile remotely. Configure something like end to end encryption or or nat traversal (so not even mozilla can sniff the traffic), and you end up with a private LLM you can access remotely.
With this, maybe they can afford some actual development on firefox, without having to rely on google money.
Are these customers donating, or purchasing mozilla products or services so that mozilla doesn't have to rely on google's donations?
I'm confused what you're trying to say here.
Are you saying that Google has more of a right to dictate what Mozilla does because Google gives Mozilla the most money?
Are you saying Google told Mozilla to work on things other than Firefox with the money they were given?
Why bring up Google at all?
Telemitry is way more useful than you think, because the loudest are not always right. Same for donations.
Mozilla has a budget of around 200 mil for software development, so the 7 mil are probably not enough. Not defending the high pay though.
Also, AI Integration into browsers could very well be a deciding factor for mainstream users when choosing a browser. So having some expertise around e.g. running LLMs privacy preserving on client hardware for page summarisation could pay off. Llamafile for example, is something cool coming from the Mozilla AI stuff.
Firefox is the only browser with local website translation. Literally the extension is the only app on Android that does that.
page summarisation
I see a future where the journalist gives the LLM two sentences and asks it to spit out a 2000 word article out of that.
The user then asks the LLM to Tl;Dr the article down to the two core sentences.
Same probably for business email. Jane goes "send an email to Joe saying no." The LLM goes "dear joe.. we appreciate.... your valuable conteibution.. unfortunately at this time... cannot consider... looking forward... thanks for .... whatever". Joe then clicks the "summarise" button and gets "Jane says no".
Amazing how far we've come.
The same with resumes. Using a LLM to write a resume and cover letter out of key facts, sending it, turning it back into key facts around the applicant.
My wife has an iPad and one of the things I hate the most is that you can't install adblock extensions into Firefox on it like you can on Android. Which is a thing that has made using the browser on the phone wayyyy more enjoyable.
I use DNS level blocking for blocking ads on iOS devices.
Yeah not comparable. There is so much cosmetic blocking and also many sites will just load ads from the same domain.