We have modern architecture crumbling already less than 100 years after it has been built. I know engineering is about tradeoffs but we should also acknowledge that, as a society, we are so much used to put direct economic cost as the main and sometimes only metric.
You would be very unhappy if you had to live in a house as built 100 years ago. Back then electric lights were rare. even if you had them the wiring wasn't up to running modern life. my house is only 50 years old and it shows signs of the major remodel 30 years ago, and there are still a lot of things that a newer house would all do different that I sometimes miss.
I've lived in a 100 year old house and and in a brand new house, they both had issues. That also both had advantages too.
Oddly the older house had a better designed kitchen. Our lives change over time and our housing has to adjust to that too.
> The original text implied Brave special cases ads on their search partner’s page - they don’t. Brave blocks third party ads on all websites by default, regardless of any partnership, and offers an additional aggressive mode that blocks first party ads as well. Waterfox’s approach of allowing text ads on the default search partner page is our own decision for sustainability,
I would like to stress on the last sentence:
Waterfox’s approach of allowing text ads on the default search partner page is our own decision for sustainability
So basically they are permitting ads from their paying partners.
I think that's an unfair framing. No one is paying Waterfox to allow ads - it's a revenue share from the default search engine (which I've always been transparent about)[1], same as every other independent browser that has a search partner. It's not an "acceptable ads" programme where advertisers pay to be whitelisted.
On the Cookie Banner Reduction page[1] the section titled "Turn Cookie Banner Reduction on or off" talks about settings which don't exist (at least in the latest portable version 6.6.7 from Portapps.io). There is no option to block cookie banners in all windows.
Well, the default search engine is definitely your business partner, no? So they are getting a different tratment: default search engine (like in most other browsers, nothing fancy here) and their ads in their SERP are not blocked - at least by default - by the embedded ad-blocking engine of WaterFox. Isn't that correct? Happy to stand corrected, if it's the case.
Yes, that's correct. Startpage is the default search partner, and their search ads aren't blocked by default. Users can enable blocking on that page too with a single toggle in settings. That's why I laid it all out in this post, to let users know - it's about keeping Waterfox sustainable (paying bills, putting food on the table) as it's my only source of income currently.
I've mentioned in another comment, that I've tried other ways such as with subscription paid services, but unfortunately there's nowhere near enough traction for it to be sustainable.
Also bare in mind Waterfox currently comes with nothing, so this is just an extra layer of protection.
>I think that's an unfair framing. No one is paying Waterfox to allow ads
...
>Yes, that's correct. Startpage is the default search partner, and their search ads aren't blocked by default.
The framing seems fair to me. Certainly not more unfair than those who criticize Firefox for having a search deal that defaults to Google while allowing the user to change it (which some people do)
The distinction I'm drawing is between a revenue share from a search partnership and something like an acceptable ads programme where individual advertisers pay to bypass the blocker - those are different things.
"For how it works in practice: by default, text ads will remain visible on our default search partner’s page - currently Startpage. The idea is that this is what will keep the lights on."
Which is still miles above Firefox (Win11/x64, 149.0, EU), where you have to untick everying from "Suggestions from Firefox" to "Trending search suggestions" to "allow personalised extension recommendations" to "Recommended stories" and "sponsored shortcuts" on the home screen, because [1]https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-suggest?as=u&ut...
> We partner with adMarketplace, Yelp and AccuWeather to provide sponsored suggestions that enhance your browsing experience with helpful, context-based information.
And if you leave Firefox for a while you get the "welcome back" bar that lets you ... uninstall ublock with one click before you've realised it.
Waterfox has text ads on the default search page based on your search query, not based on tracking you [2]. And it's really easy to turn off.
> On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has shifted once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was actually a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a feeling of being misled.
The spirit of the famous - cited in the TFA as well - quote "great artists steal" is exactly that. If you don't know that the inspiration came from somewhere and believe that what an artist did was created in a vacuum, you will certainly think much higher of said artist.
An enthusiast in the hobby space is by definition someone willing to pour much more money that someone else not that enthusiast in whichever hobby we are talking about.
Well, and also has a bunch of money, not just willing. I guess locally we don't really have that difference, as two other commentators here went by, that's why I had to update my local understanding of "enthusiast". Usually we use it for how engaged/interested a person is, regardless of how much money they can or are willing to use.
Learned something new today at least, so that's cool :)
Yes, when tech gear is sold as 'enthusiast' gear, it is almost invariably the most expensive non-professional tier of equipment. That is roughly the common understanding: Expensive and focused on features more than security required for public use; while remaining within reach of at least some individuals, not only corporations.
I think that the "issue" around otel is that instrumentation is easy and free (as both in beer and freedom) but then for the dashboarding part is where there are literally tens of different SaaS solutions, all more or less involved with the OTel development itself, that want you to use their solution (and pay $$$ for it). And even if you can go a loooong way with a self-hosted Grafana + Tempo, even Grafana Labs are putting more and more new features behind the Grafana Cloud subscription model.
Yeah. The auto dashboard stuff Grafana cloud is doing nowadays is cool (even if it's just Greg in engineering department writing heuristics), but I can't help but feel pissed that the oss dashboards for otel on Grafanas website aren't even up to date.
I use Grafana because it has value for me both at work and for hobby, but it's becoming more painful to use Grafana for hobby so I agree with your point
> For the better part of two decades, consumers lived in a golden age of tech. Memory got cheaper, storage increased in capacity and hardware got faster and absurdly affordable.
I got my first PC circa 1992 (a 2nd hand IBM PS/2, 80286 processor with 2MB RAM and 30MB HDD) and the "golden age" was already there. We are well over 40 years of almost uninterrupted "pay less for more performances" in the home/personal computing space, and that's because that space started around 50 years ago. There was some fluctuation (remember the earthquake affecting HDD prices a few years ago?) but demand was there and manufacturing tech became more efficient.
The actual important change is that for most consumer uses, the perf improvements stopped to make sense already what, over 10 years ago?
Do you mean for hardware? Because a big chunk of that imo is how unnecessarily demanding software has become in the last 10 years, largely due to the web.
Yes, I mean that HW which is 10 years old is perfectly capable to do the job nowadays. This is absolutely true for PCs/laptops and could also be for smartphones if it the software support worked like in the x86 world.
In Spain (but I think in every EU country) you must go through legal inspection and certification if you do modify your car. And most of the aftermarket mods people install are totally illegal and would not pass that exam. I mean changes like putting a spoiler, lowering the height from ground etc
"Engineers sometimes exhibit an arrogance that they can do everyone else’s job,"
This rings so many bells that it feels like some Buddhist festival.
Apply the same approach to QA, Operations, and anything outside the actual product development: when this arrogance was shared between bosses and developers, all good on their side.
Now with the AI, the arrogance is staying only on the bosses' side, and we have developers freaking out.
A good QA actually does the work that product managers should but don't, in terms of understanding actual users and checking the feature delivered matches actual user ask.
But I've worked at places with a whole spectrum of coverage in roles spanning Product Mgrs, Project Mgrs, BAs, QAs, production support level 1, production support level 2, etc. The one constant is whatever is missing or understaffed just ends up getting done by engineers.
Testing, on-call, Jira managing, requirements gathering with users, analysis, etc... all falls on to engineering. Then management gets even more wound up about dev productivity/velocity, etc.
But, as someone who’s agile and adaptable, I can do any job. That doesn’t mean I can do them all simultaneously. It doesn’t mean I can be the full-time loan officer and the full-time app developer.
Can I do your job? Yep. Can I also, at the same time, be the engineer that optimizes the IT systems? No - one of these jobs will suffer.
Give me the chance to understand your job, and I’ll replace as much of it as possible with code to do the same thing. But what it won’t do is have good judgement. It will make decisions on actual data - accurate data, erroneous data, it doesn’t care.
I think this is an interesting place to put “AI” - can it take input in the form of data and historical decisions, and come to a new decision from recent data? The same decision a human would?
Aside: it has become an interesting personal experiment to stop being obviously ironic and see how people read what I’ve written. The voting is telling.
I didn't "vote" but there aren't many clues in your comment suggesting it's satire. It is a mainstream presentation of a mainstream point of view, how would anybody distinguish between you believing it earnestly and you mocking it?
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