Every time there's news from Mozilla we see a lot of takes around here along the lines of: they're clueless, their heads are in the sand, they don't know their userbase.
Alternative interpretation: We're looking at another case very much like Bluesky - a corporation with somewhat-openwashed branding which knows exactly who their userbase is, hates it, and wants a different one.
The rationale is clear enough; the browser is just a massive opportunity for datamining. The "AI" startups can only dream of controlling a browser with even the marketshare of Firefox. In that light, it's no use having a userbase of technically competent, privacy-aware dissidents who can work around the extractive dark patterns. Let's face it people, we're not profitable to surveillance capitalism
Lightning fast and privacy-friendly, Kavita is a self‑hosted digital library for EPUB, PDF, comics and manga — with built‑in readers (single, double page, and webtoon mode), OPDS, and rich metadata. Install and share your server in minutes.
Like Plex but for books/comics!
Quill OS is an open-source, fully-functional standalone OS for Rakuten Kobo's eReaders.
If you run an organisation of any kind (non-profits, businesses, clubs etc), this guide is aimed at helping you get the most out of being on Mastodon and the Fediverse. The Fedi works a bit differently to social networks you may be used to, and has some unique advantages as well as unique challenges.
As an alternative to depending on Facebook and Instagram, perhaps!
“I felt like Jason and the mods cared more about Claude than the welcoming community they built. Considering Jason is the owner of the server, I wouldn't trust him to be able to put the community first before putting AI first,” ML told 404 Media.
(Need free account to read full article or else here: https://archive.is/Ypur6)
Turn your ListenBrainz, Last.fm, or Navidrome listening history into a shareable poster with your top artists, tracks, listening time, and favourite genre from the last 12 months.
Super cute and fun! A good alternative to the Spotify wrapped things.
A thorough set-up for organizing trip data, useful for keeping track of hotels, flights, sightseeing, etc. Uses quite a lot of community plugins.
Simple setup guide and asset files from https://daily-tarot.squarespace.com for adding a random tarot pull to your Obsidian daily note :)
Definitely adding this to my e-grimoire.
There is a tedious point that advocates of AI art will periodically articulate to the effect of AI rendering art accessible to more people—ones lacking in time or ability to otherwise produce it. The response to this is generally that the time and labor involved is fundamental to art. But even more fundamental is the thought involved. At the end of the day what defines art is the existence of intention behind it—the fact that some consciousness experienced thoughts that it subsequently tried to communicate. Without that there’s simply lines on paper, splotches of color, and noise. At the risk of tautology, meaning exists because people mean things. Nobody else is going to do that work for us. If we don’t do it, really, what’s the fucking point?
Oooooo, I'm gonna try this!
I like the idea of having a Homepage note that links out to things. I'm currently setting up my vault and figuring out what I want to track and HOW to track it, and I'm making use of Bookmarks a lot (and bases). But a Homepage/dashboard/whatever makes sense, too...
Guide to using markdown to write stuff! A good reference to look back on.
The issues and harms surrounding emerging technologies are especially concerning given the lack of regulation in the tech industry generally, and the tendency of productivity-increasing technology to further concentrate power in the hands of the few. This reading group will explore these risks and engage with how they work in the hopes of better organizing to protect the rights of workers and individuals. The goal is to have a better understanding of the costs (data, carbon, human labor) and risks (misinformation, unpredictability, bias) of making these machines, as well as limitations in what they can learn about the world primarily through data scraped from the internet.
Excellent book list if you're interested in the topic(s).
This is a small app I created to track the books I’ve read, inspired by similar book trackers made by other people.
I really like this design! It's easy to look through and has good info, and links to a separate book page with a review/notes. Source code is here: https://github.com/alexwlchan/books.alexwlchan.net
Meshtastic® is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!
Very cool!
Talk by Moxie Marlinspike at the 36th Chaos Communication Congress.
Considerations for distributed and decentralized technologies from the perspective of a product that many would like to see decentralize.
From 2019 so a little old now in tech terms.
I want to emphasise here that I am replanting a) articles that I originally wrote and published; and b) only in cases where the original article has either disappeared from the web or is currently in a neglected state on the original site. This is about saving heritage web pages. It's also about reclaiming something that is important to me, but clearly is not important to the current operator of my old site.
This is a cute idea! Wordpress has some plugins that shows old posts based on date; I have "On This Day (by Room 34)" installed but I haven't had the blog for a year yet so there's nothing to replant, ha.
Fediverse servers work like this: servers only really notice accounts from other servers if someone on your server follows or interacts with them.
The reason servers work like this because of resources. If servers had to keep a copy of every post from millions of users on thousands of Fediverse servers in the world, server running costs would become prohibitively expensive (and most of those posts would probably never be read by anyone on your server anyway).
I'd always wondered this-- the instance I use is fairly small, so most of the time accounts look blank to me when I first viewed them!
Appends udm=14 to the Google search URL to instruct Google to only return the Web results. There is even an extension and website built specifically for this use case. This is suitable for user who would like to have a clean search results without the clutter from Knowledge Graph, Local Results, Related Questions and etc. Now, there are others udm=x than just 14. I have been doing some searching and compile all of them here.
Save this to a custom search string in Firefox/whatever browser and you can automatically use it to search for things in Google without the AI nonsense coming up.