“A republic, if you can keep it.”

  • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
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    1 day ago

    I see this sentiment sometimes, but just like with the US Federal government, everyone thinks that what everyone else is working on is superfluous.

    It’s easy to say generally “there’s all this wasted money”.

    Yeah? Where?

    https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/

    I really am curious. I’m not a fan of AI, so I would agree that those seem superfluous – but at the same time, the AI based image summarizer actually sounds cool - and good for accessibility. The translation service is VERY useful, and it is amazing that it runs locally.

    So yeah, I’m curious. What is junk?

    • drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      off the top of my head,

      • Mozilla VPN
      • Mozilla Pocket
      • Llama file (and all the other AI BS like Solo)
      • Didthis was just recently shut down

      and there were other serfvices that I can’t remember right now. And then there is all the money they redirect everywhere else for advocacy and other stuff that I don’t care at all about. If I donate to mozilla, I want to donate to firefox, not some random junk projects.

      • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
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        1 day ago

        Pocket and VPN make money, that would be like firing IRS auditors in the name of efficiency.

        I agree that general purpose AI isn’t really all that interesting, since I don’t think it is going to drive involvement or investment. I also imagine that it doesn’t really cost that much - they don’t have any real products behind it, and they all seem clearly experimental.

        I guess I understand your aversion to contributing to “junk projects”, but if they are junk projects, there isn’t likely to be a ton of investment. Harder to shift the bottom line.

        • Baggins@beehaw.org
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          1 day ago

          Didn’t think anyone would subscribe to Pocket - a good proportion of the links require external subscriptions.

          Sorry, but am not going down that route. Unless you’re telling me all the links to externals become free.

          IIRC I tried a free trial of Premium but still had to subscribe to Medium etc. That put me right off. I might just as well subscribe to Medium and forget about Pocket.