The hell is with all these comments?

Mozilla is far from perfect but god damn the degree of hatred and mirth some people have is entirely disproportionate to anything they’ve actually done, and completely irrespective of the good they actually do.

It’s got the same energy as leftist purity testing, where there is no “net good”, only perfection and villains to be spat on.

The point is the client presumably paid for it for their users, who are their customers, but they have no idea what those users want.

I was gonna say, clients aren’t the only ones.

Feels like a lot of developers and especially UX designers have a bad habit of disappearing up their own asshole nowadays.

People seriously need to start pushing back on the word “secure” being used as a blanket excuse for every restriction.

It feels like every time that word is used, no one is willing to call out the fact that user freedom is equally as important and it’s a lazy, disrespectful developer who won’t take that into account by finding ways to maintain both.

You’re talking about laws. They’re talking about the IRS.

The IRS doesn’t make the laws. They’re an agency like any other, and a very important one.

if you fuck it up, you go to jail

No, no you don’t. This is an actual child’s understanding of how it works.

If you fuck up they often don’t even notice unless it’s substantial, otherwise they just send you a notice. You have to be willfully refusing to pay taxes for a while, repeatedly, before you’re in trouble (tax evasion) or commiting actual tax fraud.

Why would the IRS send you to jail for making mistakes on your taxes? Where taxes are now paying for your incarceration, and you can’t work to make the income to pay taxes.

Strictly speaking, tax filling software, even the free ones, have simplified it all so much that for people who have a single source of income from work and not a lot of tax forms to collect (most Americans), it’s pretty trivial. Maybe 30-60 minutes, once a year.

Less than ideal but far from the grueling, soul sucking work I was told would plague my adult life when I was a kid.

That’s why the IRS is finally doing their own online filling system. No more making Americans shell out for software, so everyone gets a nice, simple tax season.

That’s just for free tax filling software, i.e. a government sponsored TurboTax alternative. And that was definitely needed.

What they’re talking about is not having to actually do the filling at all, or at least only having to file in certain cases. The government pays for employees that look at your stuff, says “that’s the amount”, and asks you to confirm.

Granted, with the way tax filing software has advanced, and how simple the vast majority of people’s filings are going to be, the difference is not very substantial anymore. The majority of people just need to click through the screens and answer the questions, so it takes a little time but it’s hardly a true hassle.

The reason it’s been like this in the US for so long is because of the heavy lobbying to keep software like that proprietary and the system complicated enough that people need to use it.

But it’s also been because of decades of conservative bullshit refusing to fund the IRS to the degree that they could provide the services that other countries get. IRS literally could not and cannot afford the manpower to handle the taxes of every American for us. Software lets them circumvent that.

Vote for people who will increase funding to the IRS so they can manage all this.

The reason it’s been like this for so long is because they don’t have the manpower or (until recently) the technology to handle the sheer numbers. Lobbying from TurboTax and shit also played a big part, but even without that, they straight up can’t afford to do all this when they’ve been strangled of funding from decades of conservative legislation.

The fact that an entire generation thinks the only proper way to install software is through an app store is absolutely terrible. Talk about a boon for the gatekeepers, Apple and Google did a bang up job training them to trust no one else.

Did you turn off Play Protect?

And yeah, when we set these barcode scanners up, unfortunately it made me appreciate Intune’s Android management tools. I despise Microsoft and Google, but Microsoft won that round of “Who do I hate the least right now?”

At this point, even that would be preferable.

Your right, any open platform will be bastardized eventually, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a need for “resets”.

There is no perfect platform for escaping it, because the market forces will always adapt and assimilate. The only true escape is to keep moving.

That’s why it’s important for users to be hermit crabs, and move to the next thing, no matter how janky, because they will at least be able to influence it positively and have a relatively open platform for a number of years. Then the cycle repeats.

If propping up Linux phones will get us the open platform we need, even if only temporarily, we should do it.

The issue I think is that the current trends in all consumer software are increasingly user hostile, and the major platforms are creating ecosystems to support this. It’s become the norm now to be able to directly control the usage of the software on consumer devices. Apple has normalized this, Google and Microsoft followed.

At what point will developers refuse to even create software for a system that doesn’t allow them that control?

Look at how many developers out there absolutely jerk themselves raw at the idea they should be able to compel users to update to continue using their software. Look at how many believe the modern security culture fallacy that handcuffing users and throwing away the key is the only way to protect them.

It’s a development culture issue. Respecting user control of their own device is no longer in vogue.

It could be, but combine the color looking very much like Apple’s space grey, the slimness of it, particularly how slim the lid is versus the body, and what looks like the MacBook’s classic black, rounded rubber stoppers on the bottom, I think it’s safe to say that’s meant to be an MacBook.

Also certain MacBook models tried to go to a single USB C port about a decade ago, and it was on the corner like that.

Fair enough.

And let’s be real, you at least need a degree of tech savvy to deal with the inevitable issues that will come up. Even on the simplest distro.

I’m seeing a lot more of these MSN, “Microsoft Start” links lately. You can’t even get to the original article through this trashy page or read the whole thing without downloading an app. It’s like AMP links but significantly worse.

I don’t know where people are getting these, but please stop giving Microsoft clicks by sharing them. Link directly to the article.

https://metro.co.uk/2024/09/08/esas-salsa-satellite-will-plummet-back-earth-this-evening-21568170/

We learn by reading copyrighted material.

We are human beings. The comparison is false on it’s face because what you all are calling AI isn’t in any conceivable way comparable to the complexity and versatility of a human mind, yet you continue to spit this lie out, over and over again, trying to play it up like it’s Data from Star Trek.

This model isn’t “learning” anything in any way that is even remotely like how humans learn. You are deliberately simplifying the complexity of the human brain to make that comparison.

Moreover, human beings make their own choices, they aren’t actual tools.

They pointed a tool at copyrighted works and told it to copy, do some math, and regurgitate it. What the AI “does” is not relevant, what the people that programmed it told it to do with that copyrighted information is what matters.

There is no intelligence here except theirs. There is no intent here except theirs.

This many chiefs (not rank-and-file, chiefs), putting this much effort into breaking Navy protocol, together, is crazy. And for what? Memes?

I know deployment at sea can be boring but Jesus fucking Christ, read a damn book or something.

I’m shocked I had to come down this far to find this.

They’re talking about bots, but that doesn’t in any way sound abnormal. People downvote comments like that all the time for their own satisfaction.

For example, imagine a post where three users comment:

One posts a heated stream of idiocy, falsehoods, and outright nastiness, thinly veiled bigotry and other garbage. Paragraphs of it, all poorly written.

Another is some basic comment not saying anything of any real consequence. Completely mundane to the point no one has upvoted it, but it is perfectly harmless.

The final is a comment with some meat on it and something to add to the conversation, but unfortunately they arrived too late to the thread. No one saw it, so no one upvoted it.

Without downvotes, all three of these comments are treated exactly the same.

I get downvotes can suck sometimes but they’re a valuable aspect to this system and removing them does not make the place better.

I’d argue what people need to do if these things are genuinely bothering them is turn off the scores entirely and learn to live without them. It’s better for your mental health.