Yep. It’s part of their mating ritual. You can learn more about it at c/fuckcars.

Someone still had to make the decision to put all of these elements together in one characters.

Considering that both were designed with the same historical period and location in mind, that’s not surprising. But the hood? And parkour? That can’t also be a coincidence, can it?

Microsoft is working very hard at getting into this data game. Don’t think they won’t try making similar deals.

Are we looking at a future where we need a search engine to tell us which search engine to use for your queries?

Ah, I see. Though I would call this manipulative, not dishonest.

entities that seems honest are the most secretly dishonest

It’s the converse. By definition, dishonest entities (that are good at what they do) will appear honest.

Definitions aside, let’s go back to my original argument. To rephrase it a bit: A transparently manipulative entity is better than a deceptive and manipulative entity. So why protest the added transparency and not the manipulation?

I think I’m missing an important part of your argument here. What are they doing that you consider to be dishonest?

Worse than what they’ve been doing for the last decade? It seems to me like this is a better state of things because it’s clearly a lot of money for one big purchase, so you know immediately that it’s not something you can afford. Better transparency, so less manipulative.

This is a problem with the add-on store, not the browser. Do the forks have their own add-on stores? Or do they just use the same one that Mozilla provides? To the best of my knowledge, the only forks that have their own stores are the ones that wouldn’t be able to use Firefox plugins anyway (e.g. Palemoon).

I feel like if anything has the right to be ridiculously expensive, it’s art.

• It’s not a necessity for survival.
• It’s not a necessity to live a fulfilling life.
• There’s so much else available to us that can fulfill the same purpose that are cheap/free.
• A one time $435 cost feels a lot more expensive than lots of small purchases adding up to the same amount, meaning this is more likely to be purchased exclusively by people who can actually afford it, unlike the latter which can trick people into spending more than they can afford.
• It funds free entertainment for everyone who don’t have the ability to pay.

What’s the downside?

I don’t think forking Firefox is going to change what you see in the add-on store. You would need someone to run their own store. Or just install the plugin manually.

I have no interest in this game, so I wouldn’t know how it actually affects gameplay. But do you not agree that this is shitty business practice? You have a game. Sell the game. If you want microtransactions, then produce extra art or something and sell that. You can even make the case that separating out parts of the game into various DLCs on launch is acceptable. You’re at least charging for something of value that you created.

Implementing anti-cheat costs resources and makes the end result strictly worse. Now you want people to pay you to undo that? That’s creating negative value. We want the economy to run on people creating positive value.

I think a more apt comparison is if you’re renting out a place where every light switch is three-way with one switch near the light it controls and another in a closet with all the other light switches. You can control the ones in the closet for free, but the ones in a reasonable location are pay-per-use. The problem isn’t that the features aren’t available for free. It’s that they poured resources into deliberately making things worse, then they charge you to undo that. Literally creating negative value.

Responding to your first two paragraphs:

The enjoyability of a piece of art isn’t independent of the creator. I will only speak for myself since I don’t know other people’s experiences. When you see something that tickles the happy part of your brain, part of that emotional response is in knowing that there’s another person out there who probably felt that way and wanted to share those feeling with you. In experiencing those emotions, you also experience a connection with another human being. The knowledge that you’re not alone and someone else out there has experienced the same thing. I wouldn’t read through the credits because I don’t care who that person is. I just care that this person existed. When you look at AI generated work and it just feels empty despite the surface beauty, this is the missing piece. It’s the human connection.

Well, Chrome OS is a thing.

too

Funny that you say that. I always get the low end phones so I don’t expect much performance-wise. I didn’t even know it was possible for me to have a reasonable mobile web browsing experience because Chrome was always so awfully laggy while also making everything else lag and I didn’t expect Firefox to be any different. Then I actually tried it, and holy shit the internet actually works. Not only that, I can’t even tell that I’m browsing on a shitty low end phone.

Why haven’t we seen any of that happening?

I don’t understand what you mean by “The Chinese Room has already been surpassed by LLMs”. It’s not a test that can be surpassed. It’s just a thought experiment.

In any case, you do bring up a good point. Perhaps this understanding is in the organization of the information. So if you have a Chinese room where all the query-response pairs are in arbitrary orders, then maybe you wouldn’t consider that to be understanding. But if you have the data organized such that similar queries/responses are close to each other and this person in the room doing the answering can make mistakes such as accidentally copying out the response next to the correct response and still make sense, then maybe we can consider this system to have better understanding.

Needing to click to play a video is a Firefox feature, and it’s been there for ages already. It doesn’t allow any audio to play until you interact with the page.

How does shutting down fix the problem of the computer not sleeping properly?