I haven’t noticed a website outright blocking Firefox in a while, in part because Firefox devs are staying on top of it with overriding a lot of site blocks. The issue I run into the most is reduced video quality in Google Meet in Firefox, so I switch to Safari or Chromium when I need to do calls there.

Chromium builds don’t have built-in automatic updates, and they’re missing DRM and some other proprietary components that are important. I’ve seen some community-maintained builds with varying update methods, but they don’t seem as well-supported as relying on Google/Microsoft/Vivaldi/whatever.

I used desktop Linux as my daily driver for years, I am aware it exists.

Yes, I suggested Vivaldi in the article.

LibreWolf doesn’t help me with websites that refuse to work properly on Firefox’s engine. I mentioned in the article that Firefox is already my daily web browser, but I’ve been looking for a good backup Chromium browser for that and other reasons.

I don’t think he is talking about specifically businesses, though, because he also talks about Gemini replacing Google Assistant, which only matters in consumer products (Assistant was never an enterprise product). It’s more like he’s moving the goalposts mid-statement.

If the models are more efficient, the tasks that still need a server will get the same result at a lower cost. OpenAI can also pivot to building more local models and license them to device makers, if it wants.

The finances of big tech companies isn’t really relevant anyway, except to point out that Ed Zitron’s arguments are not based in reality. Whether or not investors are getting stiffed, the bad outcomes of AI would still be bad, and the good outcomes would still be good.

I wrote the article, Ed said that in the linked blog post: “There Is No Real AI Adoption, Nor Is There Any Significant Revenue - As I wrote earlier in the year, there is really no significant adoption of generative AI services or products.”

There is a pretty clear path to profitability, or at least much lower losses. A lot more phones, tablets, computers, etc now have GPUs or other hardware optimized for running small LLMs/SLMs, and both the large and small LLMs/SLMs are becoming more efficient. With both of those those happening, a lot of the current uses for AI will move to on-device processing (this is already a thing with Apple Intelligence and Gemini Nano), and the tasks that still need a cloud server will be more efficient and consume less power.

I wouldn’t really trust Ed Zitron’s math analysis when he gets a very simple thing like “there is no real AI adoption” plainly wrong. The financials of OpenAI and other AI-heavy companies are murky, but most tech startups run at a loss for a long time before they either turn a profit or get acquired. It took Uber over a decade to stop losing money every quarter.

OpenAI keeps getting more funding capital because (A) venture capital guys are pretty dumb, and (B) they can easily ramp up advertisements once the free money runs out. Microsoft has already experimented with ads and sponsored products in chatbot messages, ChatGPT will probably do something like that.

Nice, I’ll add that to the to-do list.

Yeah, some Rust code from Servo was integrated a few years ago as the article explains, mainly the CSS engine.

Not really, even the cheap phones have large screens now. There’s no correlation anymore between price and screen size, the cheap phones just have lower quality panels.

Seemingly only in Japan, though.

Yeah it would be nice to get Movies Anywhere or something fully on board. All the movie studios are sitting on 3D movies already, they just need to make the app(s).

The exact same services? Did YouTube exist in the 1980s?

The Mozilla FUD where I said I like Firefox and pointed out how many of the projects continued in some form after Mozilla ended them?

Friendly reminder that we have already identified and largely fixed a climate change problem, the depletion of the Ozone layer, and we can fix other problems too:

The Montreal Protocol is considered the most successful international environmental agreement to date. Following the bans on ozone-depleting chemicals, the UN projects that under the current regulations the ozone layer will completely regenerate by 2045, thirty years earlier than previously predicted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

A $600 PC with a dedicated graphics card is probably going to have a worse CPU than an M2 or M3 Mini, and probably no Thunderbolt. You would only be cross-shopping a PC like that with a Mac Mini if you were thinking of graphically-demanding productivity work, like video editing or Blender. If it’s for gaming then the Mac wouldn’t be in the running at all.

Ghost managed hosting gets more expensive as you get more subscribers, I don’t think Patreon does. You also have to set up the payments processor yourself (usually Stripe), and if you self-host, you need to set up an email service like Mailchimp. Ghost also has much more basic community features than Patreon, and doesn’t do per-user RSS feeds, so stuff like subscriber-only podcasts are more difficult.

The M2 Mac Mini is $599, or $499 if you can get the education discount. There is not a (new) Windows PC in that price range that has the same performance (especially performance-per-watt) and Thunderbolt 4. The M1 MacBook Air is getting a bit old, but it’s on sale for $600-700 pretty often and will knock the socks off most PCs in that price range, especially in build quality.

Apple’s pricing gets ridiculous when you try spec’ing up with certain memory or storage upgrades, sure, and most internal upgrades are a no-go. The base models of most of their computers are incredibly competitive, though.