People have ALWAYS wanted to make better tools. Did we need to improve our arrowheads and spears every generation? No, we could have kept the same designs as long as they got the job done.
But humans are pretty unique. We will spend significantly more time testing and improving our tools for only a minor improvement. Because we are not doing it for only ourselves. We are doing it for the knowledge of future generations.
Closed source software and profit driven economic models go AGAINST human nature. It is human to plant trees for which you will never live to enjoy the shade of.
There is no major company that allows tools to be written that fill this human connection in building something solely for the purpose of building a good tool to make our lives easier and better.
It should be common sense, but while it’s not, this kind of comment is refreshing like a breeze on the nape
Aw. Thanks. I honestly think there is tons of potential for Linux nerds to understand the problems with capitalist modes of production because of their direct exposure to its massive contradictions.
I mean, when I worked for Cisco and they sold the exact same hardware as an “upgrade” to older hardware I saw this first hand.
We literally had sections in the code that would check the EEPROM for a flag to enable the upgrade through software. Literally the same hardware with a single bit in the EEPROM being swapped from a 1 to a 0. So we could sell the same hardware twice.
If that doesn’t make you realize something is fundamentally wrong with how software is used under capitalist modes of production. Well, nothing will.
shoutout to ffmpeg!
Maybe some day I can read that without adding an R
What if I told you all of these ventures were profitable?
Being profitable so you can continue to exist does not mean you are motivated by profit.
This is the same argument as “you hate capitalism but you participate in it.”
Being profitable so you can continue to exist does not mean you are motivated by profit.
I mean… it definitely plays a large factor. The idea that these organizations aren’t profit-maximizing is very different than claiming they’re net negative or hobbyist endeavors.
This is the same argument as “you hate capitalism but you participate in it.”
“We live in a capitalist society and must play by its rules” is merely an observation of the status quo.
I would more compare it to the complaint about a number of socialist states - China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela - that wildly outperform their expectations despite flying in the face of Chicago School orthodoxy. “Well, but they’re cheating!” is an allegation made regularly.
Western AI data scrapping companies love to get mad at Chinese AI data scrapping companies for scrapping their data, for instance. American MIC love to bemoan foreign investment in cheap, efficient deterrents. American biotech companies are firmly committed to keeping anything developed in Cuba out of the hands of the American public.
The biggest selling point of capitalism is innovation.
That’s why nothing was ever invented before capitalism.
Which makes some wonder how capitalism was invented.
But they are communists and should be shot for questioning the wisdom of the system.
What came first? The innovator or the capitalist??
So why is Mozilla shoving AI garbage nobody asked for into Firefox? I seriously doubt that their severely overpaid execs don’t have some kind of profit incentive.
At least they listened to users and made it easy to turn off. Still not acceptable, but at least something.
It’s so that they get goog money
Because they also want to entice new users or appeal to users that for some reason do want that feature. More users means more money and despite being non-profit, people do enjoy having more money. They’re not immune. Which is why we need to pull the reigns back every now and then.
Mozilla exec compensation aside (relative to other tech CEOs it is pretty low) the reason they do this is because they are trying to make money in some way that isn’t the Google search box.
The other thing to consider is that even though a lot of people around here and AI skeptics loads is the general public are not and use it everyday and don’t think twice.
I swear the Firefox users have no perspective whenever this stuff comes up.
It’s always “why don’t they just work on the browser” or " I would pay for just the browser" ( they won’t, and even if they did most won’t and it won’t be enough)
Web browsers don’t make money. It’s why only chrome basically exists and that’s a cost center to support Google’s Internet ad hegemony and they spend billions a year on it.
I am watching ladybird and hoping they manage to coalesce the required amount of support to get something off the ground and keep it there.
Firefox isn’t used by the “general public”. The general public doesn’t give a shit about open-source or which corporate logo is stamped on their copy of Chromium. Many won’t even look past Edge, and the rest will likely use Chrome because everyone does already.
No, Firefox is used by the enthusiasts who care about not using Chromium; about actively choosing control over convenience. Now Mozilla Corp is pissing off that same audience by doing what Google does – shoving AI up everything. To date, every decision regarding AI has met with pushback from their own userbase. Being the lesser evil does not grant them a free pass for every boneheaded decision.
If they need cash, they can fire that fuckwit of a CEO, roll the savings back into their engineers and products, and go on a funding campaign promising to actually improve their products like Mozilla
OrgFoundation did with Thunderbird.I guarantee you that most Firefox users do not feel the level of emotions that you do on these issues, either about the AI prompt sidebar or the CEO’s salary. They also don’t use Firefox to spite Google. They use it because they think it’s better than Chromium.
You’re unhappy with Firefox? Easy fork. Off you go. Want to convince me to be mad too? Okay, make your case, but don’t just assume that I’d just have to be mad if I just knew that there’s gasp an AI sidebar that I can use if I want to.
Web browsers don’t make money. It’s why only chrome basically exists and that’s a cost center to support Google’s Internet ad hegemony and they spend billions a year on it.
Yep. Well, I don’t necessarily agree it started exclusively for the ads, but they definitely wanted to create something that they control. Microsoft Edge and Opera switching to Chromium just means Google has more soft control on how the web operates. (Even saying “soft” there is pretty generous.) A majority of browsers are Chromium forks. Google can control how the web operates because of it.
But to your point though, thwarting ad blocking is a huge part of it now. The manifest V3 changes (which severely limited what sorts of ad blocking extensions could do) came the same year they listed ad blocking as a significant risk to their revenue in their shareholder statement. Which, I just wanna mention for folks who might not be keeping up with this as much, isn’t some sort of conspiratorial statement. It’s a public document because they’re a publicly traded company.
It really should be LibreWolf up there instead
The image says “making”, not “rebranding”.
They made high quality software…
Until they got a profit incentive.They actually pay their employees.
???
Of course they do.
I don’t see your point.
The Mozilla Foundation is non-profit, but the Mozilla Corporation is for-profit.
I don’t understand economics but why does there have to always be profit? If someone made devices that last 50 years they would go bankrupt? Make it make sense.
Funny you should mention that! The Phoebus cartel formed in 1924 by major light bulb manufacturers, because they were at a point where they were producing light bulbs that could last for decades, and they realized that this would kill their profits because nobody would buy bulbs because they lasted so long, so they made rules to deliberately make the bulbs fail after about 1,000 hours and fined members for making bulbs that lasted too long, effectively creating the concept of planned obsolescence as a business model.
See? Capitalism promotes innovation! In how to profit!
They don’t want some profit, or even sustainable profit. They want all the profit, and always more this quarter than the previous.
I do understand that if somebody created something that is cheap, lasts forever and there’s a limited (non infinite) need for it, they would eventually stop selling. That’s why they need to make things last less, or invent excuses to make you buy a new one.
runaway infinite consumption at all costs … aka … cancer
The capitalist imperative is: make as much profit as you can as fast as you can.
The fastest way to make as much profit as you can is not to create the best possible product. Sure, that’ll get you far enough- but in capitalism there is never “enough”. For instance, you could use the capital you amassed to buy up all the competition and create a monopoly and hike prices to whatever you like because people will have no choice but to buy it from you, especially if it’s something essential like food, energy, housing, or what have you.
Of course, monopolies are illegal. Not because capitalism says so, but because society says so, in order to contain capitalism, which would otherwise consume society even faster than it already does!
Monopolies are just one ugly example, there are other ways of making super much profit super fast. Like, stealing! That, too, is illegal, because it goes against the very concept of living in a society, which itself is predicated on the idea that we are stronger and better and happier when we come together and pool our resources.
Alas, I wax verbose.
So basically what it all comes down to is competition and not just greed like most people believe. If you don’t make more money than the competition, you will fail. That’s why companies keep getting bought out all the time, they lost this game. Most people have no idea just how many companies they know are owned by bigger ones they may not know. The whole thing is conglomerating like the T-1000 after it had been shattered and melted. So rabid profit chasing is a matter of survival.
That is precisely correct, capitalism is in some sense like a story, I don’t remember who wrote it, in which human scientists ask a semi-omnipotent AI to answer some question, and the AI decides that in order to solve it, it needs to transform all the matter in the solar system into an even greater AI, and calmly treats human extinction as an irrelevant side effect.
“Maximize profit forever” is a bad algorithm if the goal is to sustain a thriving human society. It has no goal state. Just more, forever. Capitalism is fundamentally flawed in its core design and central idea, that somehow, by creating ever more “wealth”, everyone gets richer as a whole, while not taking into account the societal effects of some getting vastly richer than others, compounding over time unto infinity.
I could go on. But capitalism is a fundamentally broken idea that will implode on itself as a matter of causation as it plays out over time, it is logically and physically incapable of sustaining itself. We are seeing the late stage effects of it play out before our eyes right now.
Seriously though, thanks to all the FOSS developers out there. I try to donate $5 to $20 where I can, but I k ow that far from what they all deserve!
Where is FreeCad in this one? I’ve started using it after buying a 3d printer, and it’s awesome what that piece of software lets me create.
Shoutout to openscad!
Got any links to learning? Ive gotten pretty far in fusion360 but am trying to transition and found f360 let’s me be too lazy or sketch centric/doesn’t require parametric rules
Check out MangoJelly on YouTube. The guy has hundreds of tutorials for FreeCAD and they’re great
Thank you!!
Ive found it useful to search for a freecad tutorial for any object on YouTube and follow it, making an actual thing. Even if that thing is not of use to me, I learn from building it and use those concepts in what I want to build.
MangoJelly Solutions on YouTube
Freecad requires very different approach to design than fusion, try not to assume how things work
Also Deltahedra.
It’s got OpenOffice in it. This picture must be ancient.
I wonder if it changed much in the last year. The assembly implementation is what’s holding me back. Well, that and staring at cad all day at work already.
Freecad is my first cad experience, so I have no idea what I’m missing out on. That said, try the 1.1rc3 there’s a lot of changes between 1 and 1.1
definitely a goated application on linux by now. I’ve just started using it, and holy cow, it’s way more capable than I thought it was. 1.0 was a blessing!
I csme in here to see if anyone cared for FreeCAD and yup, here I see you. Love it. And it’s better than many proprietary softwares I have tried (edited to remove the names), I mean in terms of hobby creation at least. I am trying so as to master it and create professional level CAD drawings. It’s light weight, so beautifully intutive and that it runs smoothly on one of my ancient PCs with 2GB RAM, intel Pentium processor running Windows 7. It’s truly awesome. So many add ons, leaves one spoilt for choices.
Also LibreCAD for 2D.
Blender is far better than anyone not-in-the-know would expect.
VLC does much more than just play videos, but the user interface inexplicably hides most of the functionality. Also, they’ve vehemently claimed for many years that it’s impractical to provide backward frame-by-frame stepping, but Celluloid does it just fine.
GIMP and Inkscape keep improving, with GIMP being the better of the two. GIMP should just copy Photoshop’s interface as closely as possible. There’s no shame in that, and Photoshop does many things better. Most users coming to GIMP are coming from Photoshop. (Yes, I’m using PhotoGIMP, but that really doesn’t do much to help.)
I’ve used Photoshop professionally for 20 years and GIMP for about 3 and, to be fair, both of their default interfaces have have their pros and cons. After spending the 2/3 hours it takes to become proficient in one after being used to the other, the comparison mostly comes down to other things e.g availability of tools, raw performance, enshittification etc.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some things that annoy me about GIMP (like any software), but I’ll be recommending versions 3.0 onwards over Photoshop every time. Adjusting to the interface is easily worth it.
Also, they’ve vehemently claimed for many years that it’s impractical to provide backward frame-by-frame stepping, but Celluloid does it just fine.
Ah, so that’s not just me, is it? That’s bugged me for a long time. I was so happy when I discovered SM Player could do it.
What are some of the other functionalities of VLC?
Pretty sure you can convert videos with vlc and watch iptv
It can display video streams, my work uses it to display security cameras so shipping knows when a truck is coming.
The Audacity!
Will they get away with it? Vee’ll see.
I’ll go home now, HEY DON’T PUSH ME
In May 2021, after the project was acquired by Muse Group,[58] there was a draft proposal to add opt-in telemetry to the code to record application usage. Some users responded negatively, with accusations of turning Audacity into spyware.[59] The company reversed course, falling back to error/crash reporting and optional update checking instead.[60] Another controversy in July 2021[61] resulted from a change to the privacy policy which said that although personal data was stored on servers in the European Economic Area, the program would “occasionally [be] required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA”.[62] That July, the Audacity team apologized for the changes to the privacy policy and removed mention of the data storage provision which was added “out of an abundance of caution”.[61]
Awwww… :(
Hey at least they removed mentioning it in the TOS!
Yeyyy!.. :)
…:(
required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA
Which most probably means that if you report a bug, you send them data about your installation and whatever additional data you include, like the email to contact you.
Lawyers keep stepping on this rake time and again when writing terms and policies.
Boredom mostly, if their lazy bosses worked them more then they wouldn’t have time to be productive at home.
/s
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There is a reason for profits spend a fortune on marketing.
Tux, FF and VLC have been dailies in my life for over a decade. Many MANY thanks to them, and to ALL those pipple.
(At least) Half of the contributions to the projects you have there are for-profit. To sell hardware, to sell support licenses, to sell ads, etc.
