Have you ever called a place and got the annoying automated answering voice? Have you ever sent an email to someone and got a boilerplate response? How did that make you feel?

Words aren’t math. They are how humans communicate. When you read/hear them, knowing they didn’t come from a human, they’re hollow.

It’s the facade of communication, because you’re not actually communicating to a human being. You’re using voice commands to control a computer. Asking an AI a question and getting a response is functionally no different than entering 2+2 in a calculator and getting 4 when you hit =.

If we get to a point humanity no longer recognizes or cares about that difference, we’ll be in an extremely dark place.

There’s this extremely cringe “museum” that OpenAI effectively paid for where they have all these AI exhibits, and one of them involves a phone you can pick up and talk to an AI generated Mr Rogers. This was done without the knowledge or consent of Fred Roger’s widow or family. They took his voice and his words, contorted and strung them up with software, and made them dance.

The man that spent decades teaching and entertaining children with puppets had now been turned into one, without his consent.

The women behind this place goes around trying to sell AI to museum professionals in the form of seminars and such. She had the audacity to say “When I’m feeling down, I just pick up the phone, and let Mr Rogers cheer me up.” to a room full of museum professionals whose entire job is to honestly interpret and represent history and the dead, and the never, ever, put words in their mouth.

She got chewed apart in the QandA. It was glorious.

What are you even talking about? The story is about the use of AI to recreate a dead person and create a fake interview.

There’s really no reason to go scrambling for an alternative, it’s a temporary problem.

Fennec being a version behind for over a month because the dev was absent wouldn’t normally be that big a deal if not for the vulnerability being discovered.

You’re about to get ripped to shreds for daring to suggest the odds of anything actually happening to someone on a recently discontinued operating system are not dramatically higher as long as the user has basic use cases and basic tech literacy.

The article doesn’t need to explicitly state that, because it’s a simple comparison to make.

its not an issue unless you have a 20 year old computer.

Plenty of computers have been made without TPMs in the last 10 years, as well as built by people who have no need for one, or else they simply disabled it.

The article states;

Without Secure Boot or a TPM, though, installing these upgrades in place is more difficult. Trying to run an upgrade install from within Windows just means the system will yell at you about the things your PC is missing. Booting from a USB drive that has been doctored to overlook the requirements will help you do a clean install, but it will delete all your existing files and apps.

If you’re running into this problem and still want to try an upgrade install, there’s one more workaround you can try.

Download an ISO for the version of Windows 11 you want to install, and then either make a USB install drive or simply mount the ISO file in Windows by double-clicking it.

Open a Command Prompt window as Administrator and navigate to whatever drive letter the Windows install media is using. Usually that will be D: or E:, depending on what drives you have installed in your system; type the drive letter and colon into the command prompt window and press Enter.

Type setup.exe /product server

That is objectively not much different than the majority of Linux installs in terms of what you’re having to do just for an upgrade. That’s the point the person above was making. You can’t click a button, you have downloaded an image, mount it, and run through a setup.

You want to talk “smug”, yet you’re the one being triggered enough by seeing Linux mentioned in a perfectly valid comparison to the point you have to hop on your soapbox about “why Linux has a bad reputation”.

And feel like an idiot when Windows 10 support inevitably gets extended in a year anyway.

Honestly, just wait a little bit, both Fennec and Mull will get it sorted soon and you’ll see an update. If the vulnerability is worrying you that much, I’d honestly just download the standard Firefox APK for the time being and use it while waiting on Mull to update on fdroid. It likely won’t be more than a couple days.

The only reason the Fennec devs haven’t announced this is that they’ve been moving but they’re basically working on the same things to get it back on F Droid.

Cool.

But I’m not adding another method of updating apps just for the browser. F-Droid is where my non-play store apps live and update from, and I’d like to keep it that way.

Yep, it’s this. Annoying change, but from what I was reading, perfectly solvable with a little time. Unfortunately the dev was moving house, so they fell a version behind at the worst possible moment, but they’re aware of the issue. I’m not too concerned.

Had it not been for FDroid’s warning, I wouldn’t have even realized Fennec was a version behind (now 2). Normally it’s not that big a deal.

What they’ve done in the past has earned them trust, but it is irrelevant to what they intend to do in the future. Bitwarden is growing company, not the scrappy little open source app they once were.

In 2022, a private equity firm injected 100m into Bitwarden. From that point forward, users are rightfully going to scrutinize any action they take because it’s 2024 and the tech space is a hellscape of enshitification and acquisitions, thanks in part to VC money. We’ve seen this story play out too many times to assume there’s nothing to worry about.

So yes, people are going to be suspicious. That’s not irrational.

I know this is a completely separate thing, but something about the current redesign they’re pushing is making me very uneasy, as well. It feels very much like corporate focus-grouped, iOS chasing crap, i.e not at all interested in the type of power user and FOSS types that initially embraced it.

Moreover, when someone asked for compact mode (again, as people have been asking for it from the beta for at least a year now), the response was some of the most PR shit I’ve seen from a FOSS developer.

They legitimately defined something as basic as compact mode as a “power user” thing that they’re “considering”. And routinely reinforced how much they “value” power users, whole also suggesting their robust search function.

A bunch of people had to demand the Android Beta app restore Quick Tile functionality because the dev team got in their heads it wasn’t necessary to have a manual trigger for auto-fill.

Just feels like a lot of disconnect coming from the development side and its not inspiring confidence.

The problem is there are many things you can’t disable, remove, or alter, and that will continue to get worse over time.

Just because some bullshit is listed in Winaero Tweaker or whatever as an option to disable doesn’t mean all the bullshit in the system is listed there.

But will those methods even survive future updates?

The greater point is, the pattern is very clear with Microsoft and windows, and it will continue to get worse, and your options will continue to shrink. It would be better to just put any effort towards learning to use Linux and escaping the ecosystem rather than continually trying to find the ever-decreasing bits of freedom you can extract from Windows.

Photoshop/Illustrator will only ever get ported if enough people have already made the move that Adobe can’t afford to ignore Linux any longer.

I disagree. They have a strong enough hold on the industry they can resist moving to Linux and it will have the affect of choking Linux’s growth.

Moreover, there’s no way in hell Adobe ever allows their subscription bullshit on a platform that gives the user as much control as Linux. They won’t touch Linux until they can be guaranteed no one will be able to alter or interfere with how their software operates (oppressively).

The issue with Linux going forward is software in general is all moving towards a more locked down, gatekeeping model. The iOS philosophy is infecting every space, from Android to Windows. Linux stands in opposition to that type of control over the user’s system, and therefore tech companies won’t develop for it if the trend continues.

I don’t expect but also won’t be surprised if it ends up being a Windows XP situation where they extend support for Windows 10 several times.

They absolutely will, and they’re planning on this, they’re just not going to announce the true EOL date. The deadline will scare people into upgrading, then they’ll start extending it.

Security.

They want everything to be managed by Windows because they’re managing Windows themselves from Azure or Intune or whatever.

Corporate IT around the country is basically being instructed that the best and only viable security policies are the ones Microsoft writes, which also just so happen to involve all of their products exclusively. Insurance companies are starting to demand compliance with Microsoft’s security recommendations. It’s going to keep getting worse, and even though there should be heavy regulation on this monopoly, there won’t be.

Probably, but the activation of it would be stringent.

The issue with any Windows OS going forward, no matter what version, is that Microsoft detests local desktop computing now, and so much of it is being ejected to the cloud. That includes all the various methods of managing it for enterprise customers. They’re slowly working towards the Apple model where the OS basically can’t live in isolation. If it touches the internet, it will phone home and kill itself if told to.