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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Ah, I assumed there were some areas where Firefox had been found lacking relative to Chromium browsers.

    For me, the current version of any major browser or fork with consistently applied security updates and capability of running the full version of Ublock Origin is sufficiently secure for my threat model. Given that, and that they all offer the feature set I want, wouldn’t it be reasonable to avoid Chromium browsers because I don’t want to encourage the Chromium monopoly?

    That’s only a small fraction of why I use Firefox, to be fair, but suppose for argument’s sake that I don’t care about MV3 extensions, Firefox Containers, etc… Would be it be so wrong for not wanting there to be a Chromium monopoly to be why I chose Firefox or one of its forks?




  • Sure, but the license is limited to uses that “help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.”

    Not sure how ads would help with that.

    AI? Sure, if an AI solution did those things. But it wouldn’t be them training on your data. This would be them using your data in AI-powered services, whether that be search (especially relevant if Google is mandated to stop paying them to default to Google); automatic categorization of your web browsing to make Containers more streamlined and effective; or even just having a completely opt-in AI assistant chatbot that can access data entered elsewhere in Firefox once you activate it.

    Worst case I suspect whatever they add will be things you can simply turn off in settings. Ideally it would be opt-in, of course, or at least prompted-opt-out and disabled until first use.

    And there are plenty of things that aren’t ad or AI-related that this could apply to. Heck, this could be part of a step to consolidate licenses for other products - VPN, Pocket, email anonymizers, etc. - and to enable deeper integration of those into Firefox.



  • From the feature comparison at https://github.com/meichthys/foss_note_apps only two FOSS apps support handwriting: Joplin (with a plugin) which gets a subjective 6/10 score, and TriliumNext, which gets a subjective 2/10 score. I personally dislike Joplin but many people love it, so I recommend giving it a shot. EDIT: I installed Joplin using the APK from the site and both the handwriting and Excalidraw plugins were “not available on mobile,” so I have to rescind my recommendation. On my iOS device, the plugins didn’t even show up in the search.

    I think TriliumNext is great, but the mobile experience is still lacking (though they are tracking several issues to improve here). There’s no dedicated mobile app but they at least have a PWA. It also needs to be self-hosted, but doing so is straightforward if you’re already using Docker. The handwriting is done via a built-in Excalidraw integration.

    Here are some options not captured in that list:

    Obsidian is not open source, but also has an Excalidraw plugin. I’ve not used it yet but I’ve seen multiple discussions saying that it’s very well done and has additional functionality on top of base Excalidraw. There’s also an open source (MIT) plugin for Obsidian that adds support for handwritten notes. I only use Obsidian on my work computer and haven’t used it either, though I plan to install the Excalidraw plugin Monday.

    StylusLabs Write is FOSS (AGPL 3.0), multiplatform, and has a free Android apk available. Note that the Google Play version has had updates suspended. I just learned about it and don’t know how it otherwise measures up. I’m planning to check it out, though.

    You can use any note app that has Excalidraw support, so long as you don’t need your handwritten text to be OCRed. That means that the following are all options:




  • They put their repo first on the list.

    Right. And are we talking about the list for OBS or of repos in general? I doubt Fedora sets the priority on a package level. And if they don’t, and if there are some other packages in Flathub that are problematic, then it makes sense to prioritize their own repo over them.

    That said, if those problematic packages come from other repositories, or if not but there’s another alternative to putting their repo first that would have prevented unofficial builds from showing up first, but wouldn’t have deprioritized official, verified ones like OBS, then it’s a different story. I haven’t maintained a package on Flathub like the original commenter you replied to but I don’t get the impression that that’s the case.



  • A paid skillful engineer, who doesn’t think it’s important to make that sort of a change and who knows how the system works, will know that, if success is judged solely by “does it work?” then the effort is doomed for failure. Such an engineer will push to have the requirements written clearly and explicitly - “how does it function?” rather than “what are the results?” - which means that unless the person writing the requirements actually understands the solution, said solution will end up having its requirements written such that even if it’s defeated instantly, it will count as a success. It met the specifications, after all.




  • If a communication norm is just about other people’s preferences, why should they change? Who’s to say that other people’s preferences are more important than their own, particularly given that this particular preference is shared by millions of other people.

    If inconsistent use of capitalization actually hinders understanding for some subset of their audience, then that’s a different story. My experience is that people are more likely to be annoyed than to actually have issues understanding all lowercase text. All caps text, on the other hand, is a different matter - and plenty of government and corporate entities are fine putting important text in all caps. But all caps text is a known accessibility issue. When I search for “all lowercase accessibility,” though, all I get is a bunch of results saying to not use all caps text for accessibility reasons.

    If you have sources showing that all lowercase text is an accessibility concern, then you should share them. Heck, you should have led with that. But as it is, your argument ultimately boils down to “someone else should change what they do, that works for them, because it annoys me.”