To be completely fair, rising rates of measles prior to 2024 or even 2016 and the general increase in antivaxer sentiment for decades has nothing to do with rfks death by measles being a win for society.

It’s entirely unsurprising, considering people voted for a person who said they were going to put an antivaxer in charge of stopping communicable disease.

It would be a net positive for society if rfk died of measles.

Yeah, but then he’s just … Down there. Poor lake doesn’t deserve that.

And you still manage to miss the point entirely.

Your party is awash in the blood of Gaza’s children.

There’s no American political party that isn’t by the standards of “supporting Israel or didn’t stop them is complicity in genocide”.

your voters continue to support the leaders that make this holocaust possible.

What leaders would those be? Which Democrat in charge of the Senate, house, executive branch or judicial branch is responsible in your eyes? Has having the Democrats hold next to no political power done anything to help?

When your time comes, I wonder how you’ll feel when others point and laugh?

And here’s the biggest misunderstanding of all: you’re entirely misunderstanding why people don’t have sympathy because you’re mad at Democrats. If Democrats overwhelming voted for and supported the genocide of Democrats people would be justifiably unsympathetic when they got what exactly what they voted for. That’s the key part you don’t seem to get. Person wants X to happen. People tell them X will be bad for them. They vote for X. X happens. Person is unhappy X happened. No one feels sympathy for them that X happened.

It’s hard to feel sorry for someone getting precisely what they asked for.

Ignoring your false premise that Democratic candidates were *in favor of genocide", particularly in a way that any other viable candidate wasn’t, and ignoring that Democratic voters weren’t in favor of those policies: you still have the fact that an Americans opinion on how our government should pressure another government to act towards another group is fundamentally different from an Americans opinion on how their government should treat them.

You’re saying Americans should be genocided because what Israel is doing to Palestine is abhorrent.
I’m saying my sympathy for people who get hurt by what they explicitly voted for is limited to voting for them to not be hurt.

“wished on the wrong party” is a funny way of saying “advocated for hatred and oppression”. And you’re leaving out the part where what’s happening to them is what they said they think should happen.

It’s hard to have sympathy for someone being treated how they thought others should be treated.
I do however have enough sympathy that I’ve consistently done everything in my power to keep it from happening to them.

It’s entirely dependent on which parts of the government you’re dealing with. The parts operated by the career civil servants and people who got there by working the job tend to be run perfectly well.
In cases where it’s political appointees following rules and guidelines setup by the aforementioned people, it tends to be… Fine.

It’s the political appointees who actively disregard or are hostile to the civil service who are profoundly incompetent. You know, because they were selected for ideology, not competency.

For some reason that I think is spelled really similar to “traitorous anti American assets and useful idiops” the trump administration has been opposed to. and in favor of making it easier to fire, the civil service, AKA: the competent part.

It’s why you can end up with the parts that work well, like the military, NOAA and others like it wandering around being competent (prior to the current “let’s fire everyone and try to destroy the country” moment), while political appointees accidentally add a reporter to an illegal group chat. It’s the authoritarian impulse to demand orthodoxy and committed belief not just from the people who decide direction, but from the people who make day to day decisions as well.

As a fun aside, it lets you know who was doing the redaction work instead of the people who would normally be responsible for ensuring a smooth release of documents.

It’s a shockingly common source of data leaks. There are some versions with more subtlety, like actually redacting the text but a copy of it remains in the file for version tracking, as a separate layer, or things like that.

PDF is derived from printer control tools, and has a lot of features built in that add flexibility for office document purposes, but can be surprising for people not expecting it.
If you’re working as a team to redact documents you might deliberately use something reversible so that the person checking your work can 1) see what you redacted 2) unredact if they think you shouldn’t have.
Sometimes people also just don’t know there’s actual reaction tools built in.

The part that I’m more surprised by is that whatever process they have for releasing documents didn’t involve passing it through a system of some sort that automatically fixed that sort of thing.

Yup, that’s a good one.

Purely for discussions sake, I’d say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
No freewill or consciousness, but it’s selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances.

It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.

You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.

Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.

The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ if you’re actually interested in donating.

Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.

It’s why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don’t stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.

All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren’t simply being paid by Google.

Their CEO makes more than I think CEOs should earn in general, but the rest of their executives earn relatively normal to low salaries for their roles and the sector.

Non-profit doesn’t mean everyone works for free.

But that’s just saying that instead of using Firefox and not turning on the feature, you’ll use a less maintained version of Firefox where they didn’t enable the feature. I don’t feel like those projects have much value add in the privacy spectrum compared to Firefox, particularly when one of them was owned by an advertising company, and neither of them actually has the resources to maintain or operate a browser in isolation, which is a major concern regarding security and privacy both.

A very vocal portion of the user base, but we don’t actually know what absolute portion cares. I’m personally unlikely to use possible AI features outside translation, but Mozilla has generally done enough that I don’t feel particularly worried they’re going to mess with my privacy or force me to use a feature I don’t want.

For a slightly less dramatic description: the person who’s been in charge of Firefox is now the CEO of Mozilla. In an interview they detailed their vision which includes trying to get money in more ways than just making Google the default search engine, all of which involve growing the user base. He said that ignoring changes in technology doesn’t benefit users or the Internet, and alluded to some previously announced features that are in progress for Firefox, including on device AI tools for things like alttext generation and translation, and upcoming features like an AI browsing window which has more integration with an AI including ones that aren’t on the device depending on what the user selects.
He reiterated that user control of data and privacy remains their biggest selling point, so that has to remain the focus of whatever path they take.

Not necessarily saying our system is wrong, just that the systems being so different can make people confused. :)

The alternatives involve pushing some of the financial costs of driving onto people who create less of these costs

I mean, our current model does that. All insurance does. You pool costs with the expectation that most people won’t need as much as they put in.
A significant amount of our costs are based on statistical, not individual, risks. A 23 year old male is going to be charged more for car insurance regardless of their driving record.

A better system might just be universal car insurance via vehicle registration. Bigger pool, easier to accommodate people who can’t afford adequate coverage, and it better ensures everyone’s cost is covered.
It’s also nice to not have a law forcing people to buy a product from a private company.

I can’t fault people for being confused or frustrated when we also have insurance that’s intended to work as the primary means of payment.

Having our crap tastic excuse for a medical payment system be based in insurance, and then having another mandatory insurance system that’s somehow less helpful is reasonably frustrating.

We’ve actually figured out that that one is basically a “stutter” in your memory encoding system. Consciousness isn’t as continuous as it feels, and so you can get a situation where your memory says it just put some stuff in working memory and consciousness thinks it means your current thoughts or observations. So you end up with a feeling of a past recollection of a current awareness. Because it’s tagged “past” you can’t do anything other than understand it to be in the past, even though you’re actively experiencing it.
A related phenomenon is how you “always” wake up just before the loud noise. Even though you’re asleep you still hear things and process audio. A loud noise happens and your audio processing tells you to wake up. Conscious you wakes up, creating that new memory, and then processes the noise that woke you.

Consciousness is a process that takes place over a duration, not an instant.

Why? The US is where a lot of technology innovation was directed for a lot of the things being discussed here, so it’s kinda limiting to leave them off. Not every US company is bad.
In the os category, it honestly feels odd that they’re going by the distro location, when every alternative they list is based on Linux, which is just as American as firefox.