I don’t think Mozilla running a Mastodon server is losing focus. The ethos of Mozilla and the Fediverse have a lot of overlap, and Mozilla should desire to have a foot in it.

An official Mastodon server is also a useful platform for marketing and outreach. In contrast an organisation claiming to be all about privacy and open source retreating from a social media platform that embodies those is not a good look.

High energy bills and misinformation about energy saving seems to be causing some odd behaviour here in the UK.

I have relatives who go round turning off every device and appliance at night, despite the negligible power draw they have in standby. Another will only charge their phone at night during cheaper the electricity rate - but runs the tumble dryer during the day.

I also often hear stories about people fearing electronic devices will catch fire if left on standby over night. Which may well be a risk for charging a dodgy Chinese e-bike but probably not for a home router.

I think the difference here is that medical reference material is based on long process of proven research. It can be trusted as a reliable source of information.

AI tools however are so new they haven’t faced anything like the same level of scrutiny. For now they can’t be considered reliable, and their use should be kept within proper medical trials until we understand them better.

Yes human error will also always be an issue, but putting that on top of the currently shaky foundations of AI only compounds the problem.

The challenge for Ladybird and other independent browser projects is the enormous size and scope required of modern browsers, which is also still growing. Web browsers are now probably second only to operating systems in complexity in the personal computing space.

Plus even if they do reach technical maturity, they still have to convince people to use it. That’s not been going very well for Mozilla, and they already have a working browser.

Safari is more energy efficient on macOS compared to other browsers.

But like it or not the (artificial) hold Safari has over the iOS/iPadOS ecosystem is the only thing stopping a complete Google hegemony over the web browser market.

Mozilla is circling the drain and the few nascent new browser projects are years away from technical maturity and may never establish any meaningful market share anyway.

But it will make it a nicer day out for tourists.

Isn’t that what Oxford Street is, more or less a tourist attraction? I don’t imagine many people going for their weekly shop.

You’re never lonely with all your Demodex friends.

Yet another reminder that “the cloud” is really just “someone else’s computer”. The end users of cloud based products are controlled by “someone else’s” rules and whims.

Kids have been watching plenty of brain melting videos before AI came along too.

If you want kid’s brains to stay nice and firm don’t let them be raised by a tablet.

SEO has been a plague in search engines for almost as long as they have existed. Unfortunately combatting it is an endless cat and mouse game, as there will always be some who will devise new ways to game the system. With how commercialised the web has become there’s enormous incentive to do so.

I’m also not convinced Google has much intention of really fixing it. They already have a monopoly on search, and as an advertising company are unlikely to want to upset the big media companies exploiting their search engine.

So a supposedly cutting edge $3500 device plus an additional $300 dongle gets a wired connection speed from the year 2000. USB 2 is 24 years old

Welcome to the future folks.

So now Windows bloat is extending to the physical keyboard itself.

Looking at the Microsoft blog post they haven't said exactly how they want keyboard layouts to change. So on a full size keyboard this could be either new key entirely, or replace an existing (and arguably more useful) key.