It’s not a blob the client is definitely open source, not sure about the server software but you’re not running that. It’s an extension like any other, just that it comes bundled with the default install and doesn’t use the usual extension enable/disable UI: Go to about:config, set extensions.pocket.enabled to false. It’s going to stay that way, this isn’t microsoft which likes to “fix” your settings.

There’s a subscription if you want and they’re also earning some money off referrals. In 2022 they made ~80m dollars off all those side hustles, should probably be 100m by now. Selling the default search engine spot is still the biggest number, about 500m. And they have a piggy bank of over a billion.

During the google money years the ROI on Firefox was so mind-bogglingly high it would’ve been insanity to drop it all into the browser: It couldn’t possibly have soaked up the sheer amount of resources.

Meanwhile, yes they did sink a large amount of resources into it in a way a profit-driven company never would have: They designed a whole fucking new programming language to get proper concurrency into the thing. Rust is, in a very real way, a language to write browsers in. That’s its purpose. And then they set the language free because, among other things, you can’t make money with it.

Sure, lots of those investments tanked. But OTOH you have stuff like pocket which makes money and could probably keep the lights on by itself. If everything but pocket were to fail Mozilla absolutely would have to downsize, would definitely have to scale back its charity spending, rely more on the FLOSS community to actually write code, but it’d continue with the same kind of force as say Blender, which wouldn’t be what it is without its paid staff (both coders and artists) and sidle-hustles (commercial support, training, and cloud services, mostly. Oh, t-shirts and mugs. Don’t forget t-shirts and mugs).

I guess overall the gripe I have with the “Mozilla should invest more in Firefox” chorus is that it implies “Do you want Mozilla to be way smaller and less capable of shaping the web than it currently is”. People have no sense of the scale of Mozilla, think that it’s running on donations etc.

Servo isn’t dead it’s just on slow burn. Also, under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation Europe. As far as Mozilla is concerned it has served its purpose: Prototype stuff that then got included in Firefox to get rid of a quite large amount of technical debt.

The long and short of it is: Firefox is supposed to make money for Mozilla’s charitable causes. It’s not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

Mozilla doesn’t exist to fund Firefox. Firefox exists to fund Mozilla. It’s been that since the very fucking beginning: Mozilla is a general internet charity that makes money with a browser. It’s always been that way. It never has been any different. I may have to repeat myself: The purpose of Mozilla isn’t to fund Firefox the purpose of Firefox is to be a money-maker for Mozilla’s charitable causes.

I didn’t jump into anything I started the discussion. You did not participate, and still aren’t. Re-stating your premise is not an argument, you could’ve left it at “dude IDGAF what you say get off my back” from the start.

Done discussing? You didn’t even start.

Again: But what if it isn’t butthurt, but actual strategic consideration. You’re refusing to consider people having any motive but that which you assume them to have at first impression, presumably the one out of which you would go for such a mode of action. But other people aren’t you, and very well might choose their actions based on completely different principles. Who are you to tell them that they are wrong? “But muh they’re butthurt” is not an answer to that question, you’re only restating your premise.

Ok I’ll bite: You disapprove of the method of protest they chose, but how can you be sure of their underlying emotional/rational motives? As analogy, consider workers: They have the option to protest in front of the HQ, or they have the option to strike, and keep scabs out. Would you say that workers choosing the latter are “childish little entitled pussies”, after all, that’s a denial of service attack, or would you say that it is possible, in at least principle, that those kinds of attacks represent a well-considered strategic choice?

If such rationale is possible, how can you be sure that whoever launched the DDOS did act out of childish emotion, instead of cold-blooded calculation? You, we, can still disapprove of the use of violence in this case (because, say, proportionality) but that’s a consideration orthogonal as to whether we’re talking about adult or puerile behaviour.

That all being said, can you now understand why leading with that kind of language might not get the best reaction, and is sub-optimal when it comes to you expressing your condemnation of DDOS attacks, or convincing anyone else of that stance. It lacks consideration.

The onus isn’t on them to cater to everyone. If it can’t be used using Linux, deal with it like a grown up and find something else to do.

You went far beyond “ddos’ers are silly boogers”, which I agreed with, but delegitimised critique of Rockstar in general: You told Linux gamers to stop playing: “Find something else to do”. Don’t motte and bailey now.

Your words, they get interpreted. In specific contexts. Failing to acknowledge that those contexts can differ from whatever the context is in the privacy of your own mind is a failure of both theory of mind and communication on your part and, going out on half a limb here, probably the reason why everyone around you seems so hostile. Read the room. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you are right because what you say is met with hostility, rather, work towards having what you think is right accepted with gratitude. For starters, don’t go on tirades – which starting an argument with “butthurt little pussy” definitely is no matter how correct your assessment of the situation may or may not be. Develop tact.

Is there, in your mind, any situation in which any consumer can ever legitimately complain about the practices of any business, or is it all whining?

The onus isn’t on them to cater to everyone.

Gazillions of people have been playing on Linux, in particular on the Steam Deck, for ages. Those are paying customers. They pulled the plug on that without warning and without need, technical or otherwise, people are pissed. Depending on jurisdiction, Rockstar might be in for at least refunds.

I don’t condone ddos’ing either and what I also don’t condone is you saying “oh the only reason people are pissed is because they can’t cheat”. Now that is, if I’m charitable, ignorant, and allthewhile you have the gall to accuse others of arrogance. Nuanced my ass to be that you’d first have to acknowledge basic contextual facts about the matter. Getting downvoted is also not “the ignorant sheeple not understanding your brilliance”. Get your head out of your arse and look in the mirror.

Just to explain the completely warranted deluge of downvotes to you: Using Linux doesn’t mean that you’re cheating and the anti-cheat solution they’re using has Linux support, they simply opted to not enable it. I’m not in the loop when it comes to GTAV but usually cheating software isn’t even available for Linux.

Would have to buy new board and RAM, not really worth it performance-wise, at least not for me. Some day, yes, but that day hasn’t come and will definitely be after a GPU upgrade.

Memory chips have had an utterly fickle market ever since there’s been memory chips, companies in that business are still in that business because they learned how to deal with the swings. If micron can survive (and they will) then so will Samsung whose memory chip business has the whole conglomerate to fall back onto.

And it would be so easy to make a big splash in the market by having a phone where the camera doesn’t protrude out of the back.

The limit on Moore’s Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.

The reason why those economic limits exist is because we’re reaching the limit of what’s physically possible. Fabs are still squeezing more transistors into less space, for now, but the cost per transistor hasn’t fallen for some time, IIRC about 10nm thereabouts is still the most economical node. Things just get difficult and exponentially fickle the smaller you get, and at some point there’s going to be a wall. Of note currently we’re talking more about things like backside power delivery than actually shrinking anything. Die-on-die packaging and stuff.

Long story short: Node shrinks aren’t the low-hanging fruit any more. Haven’t been since the end of planar transistors (if it had been possible to just shrink back then they wouldn’t have engineered FinFETs) but it’s really been taking up speed with the start of the EUV era. Finer and finer pitches don’t really matter if you have to have more and more lithography/etching/coating steps because the structures you’re building are getting more and more involved in the z axis, every additional step costs additional machine time. On the upside, newer production lines could spit out older nodes at pretty much printing press speed.

About the only AI company currently alive that I’m sure will survive is CivitAI. Huggingface probably, too. Both are, in the end, in the datacenter business. Huggingface has exposure to VC BS in their client base, they might be in trouble if a significant number suddenly go belly-up but if they have any sense they’ll simply not overextend. And, well, they, too, can switch to cat pictures.

Yep that’s what nvidia marketing seems to be calling their denoiser nowadays. Gods spare us marketing departments.

Tensor cores have nothing to do with raytracing. They’re cut-down GPU cores specialising in tensor operations (hence the name) and nothing else. Raytracing is accelerated by RT cores, doing BVH traversal operations and ray intersections, the tensor cores are in there to run a denoiser to turn the noisy mess that real-time RT produces into something that’s, well, not messy. Upscaling, essentially, the only difference between denoising and upscaling is that in upscaling the noise is all square.

And judging by how AMD has done this stuff before nope they won’t do separate cores, but make sure that the ordinary cores can do all that stuff well.