yep! unfortunately we’re fucked if they succeed, and the fascists and those funding them don’t particularly care if the resulting ecosystem is broken nonsense.

ooh finally I’ve got a second podcast to listen to other than BtB

mild booing noises for the guy comparing generative AI with fanfiction, but otherwise this is a statement I wish lots of other companies would make (seriously, coming out strongly against AI and comparing it with NFTs is free PR, how in fuck is this not a common thing?)

third bongrip oh shit im the couch

for them it’s absolutely about gatekeeping and control. keyboard interfaces can be cozy, easy to learn, and accessible — that’s what I aim for on my own computer, but I’ve never released the config because I know I’ve got a long way to go for all 3 (and I need to find a better base distro than NixOS).

hyprland is a fucking terrible keyboard interface. here’s the example config file you’re meant to edit before first launch (good luck if you can’t use a non-graphical editor for accessibility reasons I guess). it’s an awful little inflexible domain-specific language (oh joy, back to the pre-xmonad days where everything complex is a shitty hack), most of the file is dedicated to defining a bunch of shitty animations and graphics, and the keybinding system — the point of a keyboard interface — is threadbare. this is designed by someone who cares very much about how their interface looks in a screenshot and not at all about how it feels to use.

and all of the above is on purpose; if you can’t handle the intentionally regressive shittiness of hyprland, they want you to think it’s a skill issue. we know from the receipts that if you ask any of their core community for help, they’ll call you a slur. but even prospective hyprland lovers can’t stand this early-2000s compiz-brained shit, and that’s why they’re all very excited for omarchy, which is just arch linux bundled with DHH’s hyprland config that you can’t change.

the developers of interfaces like hyprland claim to give you more control over your own computer, but hyprland does that very poorly compared with almost any other modern keyboard interface. the actual control they care about is over the ecosystem. hyprland is one of your only choices for a keyboard interface on Wayland; otherwise, you’re stuck with gnome or KDE or something unmaintained (e: I guess there’s sway? none of these options entice me to be honest) that doesn’t work with any applications cause Wayland is a goddamn mess. that’s a position of power in an isolated subculture, and fascists fucking love that.

the hyprland developers were notoriously kicked out of contributing to FreeDesktop for being too toxic and disrupting the Wayland protocol design process (and I can’t imagine how toxic and disruptive you’d have to be to get kicked out of FreeDesktop of all orgs), and their push for popularity and the appearance of having distro support might be an effort to regain control there. Wayland protocols are an almost ideal way to create intentional incompatibilities and network effects. see also xlibre, which is building a weird fucked up ecosystem around itself even though it’s broken and pointless.

oh yeah totally, open transphobia and fascism is just as bad as being

known for being a tankie with biases of his own

the fuck is wrong with you. this is what centrism does to a motherfucker.

(and for the record, devault’s firmly wedged in my brain as a particularly dramatic neoliberal with a checkered past, but the fucker brings receipts (yes this is the same link in the OP that our guest decided to complain about, go read it because it’s fucking damning))

you’ve seen it from me as “the most toxic part of the Wayland ecosystem, and that’s saying something”

Counterpoint

ew

these are literally least intrusive ads possible and Firefox gets a few pennies from me leaving it active so that I can enjoy the product for free

mozilla has alienated a large number of its supporters by going all-in on LLM horseshit in their browser and anywhere else (MDN) they can shove it, exploitative crap (especially directed inwards towards its own developers, go find some ex-Mozilla postmorts if you want to see some of the nicest people you know get curbstomped by awful management and then fired), and doing a ton of other semi-to-fully fraudulent nonprofit boondoggle shit. they’ve made it clear they don’t want our donations (and plenty of people were donating more than just a few pennies from ads) and they really don’t deserve your advocacy. all Mozilla as a company cares about is the funding they get from Google. everything else is just layered affinity grifts.

Q&A!

what browser do you recommend then

none. we fucked it. once Mozilla dies, and they will die, none of the Gecko forks are realistically in shape to take on browser development on their own. chromium will be the only game in town, and google will use their dominant position to push through crap like browser attestation to secure their deathgrip on the web. ladybird is unserious fascist shit. chromium forks solve nothing. everything else is targeting an early 2000s version of the web’s features, which is good for them.

the only way I can see out of the above is Servo, the ex-Mozilla browser engine that Mozilla did their best to bury after Firefox Quantum, and they’re starved for cash and developers. I’d love if Servo was a workable browser today, but it just isn’t. it’ll take a lot more than a couple of pennies in some grifter’s pocket and the laziest possible advocacy to get it there.

I suspect people that downvoted me above assume I am shilling some commercial browser and just don’t know what LW is

lol no

this thread has broken containment, and the median quality of the discussion has dropped to the point where some rando decided to start a subthread about how it’s not ok to celebrate hitler’s death and also two regulars had an extremely heated fight about who was the most not-mad about the word chat as a noun/pronoun/whatever in English of all fucking things so uhhhh that’s all folks

yeah, it’s weird how many of our visitors came here thinking TechTakes is a news sub

you’re right, I even had Ellis’ Wikipedia page open to re-confirm the allegations but my fingers wanted it to be Gaiman for whatever reason

haha nah time for you to fucking leave

no fucking thanks

oh absolutely, fuck graber and fuck, fuuuuuuck gaiman to hell. i don’t have an inch of trust for either of them.

tho I will say that even here on lemmy, even if it didn’t reach the awfulness of what i quoted, i’ve seen a bunch of clanker memes that were seriously iffy… I wouldn’t qualify those of “serious discussions”

I agree with all of this

but they still matter in the broader ai discourse

and disagree strongly with this. part of the mission of TechTakes and SneerClub is that they must remain a space where marginalized people are welcome, and we know from prior experience that the only way to guarantee that is to ensure that bigots and boosters (and sometimes they’re absolutely the same person — LLMs are fashtech after all) can’t ever control the discourse. I know through association that a lot of moderated AI-critical spaces, writers, and researchers follow a similar mission.

now, unmoderated and ineffectively moderated spaces are absolutely vulnerable to being tuned into fascist pipelines, and inventing slurs is one way they do it (see also “waffles” quickly being picked up as an anti-trans slur on bluesky, which has moderation that’s hostile to its marginalized userbase). if that’s something that’s happening in a popular community and there’s enough examples to show a pattern, then I’d love to have it as a post in TechTakes or as a blog link we can share around the AI-critical community as a warning.

you’ve never posted on our instance before as far as I can tell and I’m pretty sure I didn’t ask you to fucking gatekeep one of our threads and start a shitty little fight that I have to clean up

in every serious (ie not TikTok or any other right-wing or unmoderated hellhole) anti-AI community I know, bigotry gets you banned even if you’re trying to hide it behind nonsense words like a 12 year old

meanwhile the people who seem to have dreamt up the idea that AI critical spaces are full of masked bigotry appear to be mostly Neil Gaiman Warren Ellis (see replies), who has several credible sexual assault allegations leveled against him, and Jay Graber, bluesky’s CEO who deserves no introduction (search mastodon or take a look at bluesky right now if the name’s unfamiliar). I don’t trust either of those people’s judgement as to what harms marginalized people.

that’s a very good post — framing fascism as a supply chain issue helps push back against the rhetoric that software is somehow apolitical by nature, and it’s a good response to the excuses given for the RubyGems takeover

the first post is the ladybird guy personally welcoming one of the main hyprland transphobes to browser development because he landed a PR in ladybird

Brendan Eich is the Brave guy but he was also Mozilla’s CEO (and he’s the guy who invented JavaScript and made it fucking suck) when he got caught making a donation to an anti-LGBT organization and got asked to step down. since then he’s used Brave as a vehicle for cryptocurrencies and LLMs.

Proton’s CEO expressed support for the Republican Party in the US in a public post, and then most likely paid for some shithead to write a medium article unconvincingly arguing that he did nothing of the sort; both the original post and the shitty medium article have been discussed before in the Stubsack.

lunduke is a far-right crank with a long history who’s currently ranting on Twitter about how open source projects need to eliminate all the wokes; FUTO has done free marketing for ladybird in the past and is now doing the same for lunduke

god I hope not, I take sanity damage every time I deep dive these fuckers