Are they even good at gauging general sentiment though?

Bruh if you’re still giving a shit about what any pre-election polls were saying after they’ve repeatedly failed to predict so many elections I don’t know what to tell you.

I said it before he stepped down- America is too misogynist and racist to vote in Harris. Even the economic left. Would Biden have done better? I can’t say. But I do think it’s pretty damning that Harris didn’t even win the popular vote like Biden and Hillary did.

My thought is that it’s revealing the construction and weak points of the death star. It may have been constructed in two hemispheres that were joined together, and that seam might have been the failure point where gassed were released when the internal pressure got too high.

Except then we should see the two hemispheres blow out from each other a bit, which they don’t.

Tragic that someone so old still has to work a drive through to make ends meet

I kept on checking throughout the day yesterday- Verizon’s website said no outages, but istheservicedown showed most of the east coast of the US was down.

I also heard from friends with business class Internet that they were fine.

Ah I just searched for Firefox news and the PPA thing was the only one that came up.

As for firing the executive, I can’t find anything about him being specifically relayed to being open-source anything. Steve Teixeira was their Chief Product Office briefly- he only was hired in 2022 and left the company a few months ago, and prior to that he worked for Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter. So I don’t think this can really be framed as some attack on open-source or privacy. If the allegations are true that they discriminated against him for having cancer that’s shitty of course, but Mozilla has of course claimed that they did not and it’s going to court. They didn’t fire him either- they asked him to take a demotion to Senior VP of Technology Strategy and he chose to leave instead.

Yes Mozilla bought an ad company. They’re called Anonym and their stated goal is to provide an advertising service that can exist profitably without violating privacy. I hate ads- I block as many as I can and I use a pi-hole. I avoid ad-supported services as much as possible. I’m also privileged enough that I can afford to pay for a subscription to a lot of stuff or just buy physical media to rip and store on my own server. But there was a time when I was a broke college student stuck using campus Internet and playing by their rules, so the safest option I could afford was just to watch ads. Ads can be an ethical business model that helps improve the lives of low-income households. For people with legal or ethical concerns about piracy, or additional restrictions on their Internet, or who just lack the technical skill.

It’s certainly fair to keep an eye on Anonym and Mozilla in this regard, but I haven’t seen anything objectionable there yet.

Similar for the Mozilla AI. It seems it’s still in it’s infancy and I’m not a fan of companies jumping on the air bandwagon in general, but at the very least Mozilla has identified the problems with other AI’s and is looking to create a better alternative. If they get caught stealing training data, releasing tools to allow high schoolers to make deep fake revenge porn, tell people to start putting glue in their pizza cheese, or some other crap like that then they should absolutely be criticized for it. But none of that has happened yet that I’m aware of.

I also can’t find exactly what you’re referring to with Russia. The closest thing is that it looks like there were some extensions that were made to work around Russian state censorship. The Russian government passed a law in March banning such workarounds. In response, Mozilla took down 5 extensions, reviewed them, and then decided to reinstate them in June. Not quite ideal, but still seems like reasonable action to me.

It’s fair and a good thing to criticize Mozilla and Firefox. But it seems like you’re trying to spin every single move they make as a sign the sky is falling.

And I also know that there are both states and corporations paying people to go on the Internet and push propaganda. Firrfox has a lot of enemies. You cant just blindly believe every article saying they are succumbing to enshittification.

I’ve seen predictions of Firefox’s downfall for decades. Still waiting for it to happen.

It’s really easy to see the headlines saying things like “Firefox is tracking it’s users and violating their privacy!!!” And panic. But digging into the latest “scandal” (the PPA), it seems like Firefox is behaving pretty reasonably.

One of the main criticisms is that it’s opt-out instead of opt-in. Which… I kind of agree with Mozilla on. 99% of users aren’t going to know or care about this, and the 1% that do are the kind of people who probably would have extensions to disable it or just use some obscure ultra-private browser instead.

I don’t fault NOYB for bringing it up either. It’s good to have organizations like that keeping an eye out for everyone.

But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.

I have dumb TV’s still with the same problem. It’s to communicate that it’s plugged in and receiving power. If the TV isn’t working properly, that’s easy to verify rather than having to worry about the surge protector, outlet, circuit breaker, etc.

The fact that TV’s are “smart” is a whole other issue I could get curmudgeonly about.

But how would you ever know the TV was turned off if it didn’t have a light to tell you?

Weird to use a picture of a child predator in an unrelated meme

Is that the Smilodon?

What are you talking about? It’s not fake maple syrup at all, but 100% real SYRUP, a completely and separate product no one would ever accidentally confuse for maple syrup when they’re in a hurry at the grocery store.

The shows antagonists were a wealthy business man turned politician who wielded the corrupt police force to feed his own power and oppress the common folk. And while his nickname was Boss Hogg, the villain’s canon name was Jefferson Davis Hogg. Pretty literally calling the cops confederate pigs.

Definitely a lot of problematic elements to the show, but there’s some good there too. And I’m sure it influenced a ton of car action sequences for decades.

A few years ago my friend’s father passed away. My friend’s mother continued to live in the house for another year or so. She never worked and had to eventually sell the house and downsize.

My friend had referred to her mother as a hoarder before. I’ve seen the reality TV shows about hoarders. But you don’t really understand just how bad the problem is until you spend several days helping your friend clean out their childhood home for sale, filling up several dumpster bags worth of… Stuff. Apparently the mother has always had some mental health problems and a shopping addiction, but spending over a year alone in that house drove her off the deep end.

We could have opened an entire new Harbor Freight store. There were clothes in sizes I didn’t know existed. My wife casually found a pistol just shoved in a random box. It was madness.

Seriously I’m not sure if you messed something up or if Lemmy is messing up but I can’t read any of that text other than the title

I didn’t realize Canadians measured things in 240p

Are you under the impression that Canada doesn’t use imperial measurements for anything?

Why is this story suddenly getting posted to dozens of communities that in seeing in my feed?

It’s one 73 year old tribal elder who complained that today’s youth don’t respect tradition. This same story has been pre-printed for thousands of years.

Is this an argument that humans did not evolve to eat meat? Because those teeth… Well let’s just say the teeth shown aren’t what you expect from an herbivore now, is it? Put those on a cow and they would look just as strange.

Local pizza places are usually both cheaper and better than chains, at least in every neighborhood I’ve lived in. I think they are better than frozen pizzas, but also about 2x the cost. Both vary from place to place though.

Aldi’s pizzas are my go-to for value. Usually around $6 a pop now (they were $3.29 pre-pandemic). I add extra cheese and toppings to remind myself I’ve made it in life.