DoingIsLearning

If rule of law and due process are arbitrarily ignored then the only real difference is time.

Given enough time all can degenerate.

As a European I feel like I have a lot of safety and guarantees.

I also have children and I obviously worry a great deal about what the world will look like when they grow up.

Whatever is happening at the moment has been set in motion in the past 15 years in this slow tectonic movement towards a likely repetition of past history. In that context there seems to be a huge information /misinformation/propaganda/psy ops operation happen under our feet.

The wake up call for me was during the past US presidential campaign. I heard in my social circle (three separate) under 25 yr old males (all raised and living in social-democratic Central Europe) repeating tiktok/instagram talking points, about how Trump "...will be good for 'the economy' ".

In light of past interesting discussion in HN, I ask the question:

How can we as citizens contribute to counter this? And how can governance / intelligence counter act something that now appears unstoppable and entrenched?

> So what do you propose? That your king posts a comment and a troll brigade floods the thread?

Twitter is a broken model you are trying to fix with draconian surveillance.

Politicians/Statesman/ Corporations should not be on my 'social network'. They make a press release with their PR or do an interview and journalists should report on it.

My 'social network' should be my family, friends, neighbours, maybe some local social groups in my city.

This idea of immediate, direct communication from companies and governments is not a workable model with our social fabric.

> In Europe, apart from TGI Fridays, they were never a thing. And they were seen as just simply fast food.

The discussion and the article is US specific, but as general point 'Europe' is a big generalization akin to 'Africa' or 'Asia'.

These places are too heterogenous for blanket statements.

As a point of anecdata between around the 1960's and early 2000's in most mediterranean countries, middle class would indeed sit down for lunch in nearby restaurants for an affordable lunch. Many of these places would serves as cafes during the day and affordable bistro at lunch.

Most either ramped up prices or went bust.

It is either grab a coffee and go or white cloth restaurant prices. The middle ground business model has indeed vanished or really downgraded their offering, in most countries around the mediterranean.

Not really high tech but worth mentioning that some shortwave portable radios (a world radio receiver is an item you should have in your earthquake emergency supplies) have a portable blare out alarm horn function to signal your presence to first responders.

Although it has the obvious limitation that you would have to be within arm's reach of it before you were to be trapped in a collapsing building, and sound can travel sufficiently under rumble.

I remember Steven Spielberg's Extant series kind of made a realistic effort in this direction.

Rather then pretend that the future is the Jetson's they made houses still look like houses, with house interiors that you would recognize today. However there is Future tech still just embedded or hidden away, unless you go into the labs etc.

> it's fine that some things just disappear

The thing about History in general is that we as present time people have a poor intuition of what is valuable historic data for people in a future (long time from now) time.

Today we draw conclusions from graffiti on Roman walls or Babylonian complaint records. Arguably at the time nobody would consider vandalism or customer service records worth preserving for posterity.

The biggest benefit is in bringing legitimacy to preservation efforts and curation of historic records (photos, videos, data, binaries, sources) on the history of the Demoscene.

There is a large chunk of software history prior to pre-cloud services that has died in someone's hard drive, floppy, CD.

Maybe because it was tied to IP or maybe just because they didn't think much about its historic value or didn't see it as ground breaking or note worthy.

Your appealing to authority with a lancet article but the article just concludes that kids don't spend less time on their phones because of the school bans.

Irrespective of brain feedback mechanisms after school it is still a better teaching/learning environment for students to have a device ban during school time.

What kids or parents enable after school is beyond school policies. Nevertheless teachers should be minimally protected in their ability to teach and kids in their ability to learn.

> The key difference is that Europe has actual pensions backed by some sort of government scheme where the current working generation pays into a pool that gets then distributed to the current pensioner generation. That means we don't have trillions of dollars of money that is desperately screaming for the even most minuscule return and is spread so wide across all possible investment asset classes that even a complete collapse of one investment won't wipe out even close enough money to be actually felt by the pensioners.

I disagree with the diagnose, the issue as I see it is that there is indeed more risk averse behaviour in European Investment Banking and VC's.

Also there is not enough competition in banking in Europe it's effectively the same banking group's since the 1800's which again impacts risk behaviour. They can all get very attractive returns with near zero risk in real estate investment.

Anyone in the VC scene in Europe will demand a huge amount of due diligence and large fraction's of the company for moderately small amounts of investment, because they probably struggled a lot more to round that funding.

You either have central European banks ear marking specific loans for R&D/Seeding only or you need to make real estate less attractive to park money into.

For the non-native ESL speakers like me, a 'stoop' is apparently the steps or porch leading up to a building entrance. The lack of an actual stoop further added to my initial confusion with this new word.

Very cool! So often we complain about a lack of community. These guys really show the whole 'be the change you want to see in this world'. I also loved the concept of let's just bring a few extra chairs as an ice breaker.

From the HN guidelines:

- Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

- Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

- Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

@dang the leaking of apoplectic American politics (on both ends of your polarized spectrum) is making HN a lot less interesting for the wider world audience.

Reminder that Russian gas is not a closed topic.

Several European countries are still financing Russia's war economy by buying Russian gas. There is no 100% embargo ... yet.

I see a lot of people discussing this as if we are all running on windmills and nuclear, it is absolutely not the case... yet.

Doesn't that go against the whole "one local, one local external storage, one remote" backup redundancy?

The few investigations following the aftermath of the Panama papers recovered a couple of billion dollars after several years of investigation.

The estimated evasion _in_the_EU_ using these off-shoring vehicles in Panama is around 100 to 200 billion. [0]

The 2023 Defense spending of the entire EU member states was about 270 billion.

What will happen is income taxes will increase for high earners who cannot evade income tax. And the 'super' rich will continue to own nothing on paper.

[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/116947/20170412_panam...

Perhaps you are not familiar with it but you can literally order just about any part in any material online.

Several business that used to print PCB's also do 3d printing at very competitive rates.

I won't advertise names but it's easily found online. You simple upload a stl file, select a material and that's kind of it.

Fair point actually, governance wise the industry partners are probably not a huge expense because they want a seat at the table anyway.

> started the whole movement or whatever you'd call it for this push towards privacy

I don't really like this framing because it makes it sound like if you care for privacy you are some form of fringe advocate.

We should always try to reframe:

Would you be ok with government employees or law enforcement indiscriminately opening your letters? Ask any senior and the answer is a clear no.

So why are we discussing this as if privacy is entirely optional as soon as you change medium from written letters to emails, sms, instant message?

Again not diminishing Firefox's efforts but it's difficult not to compare with other _leaner_ open-source projects.

As an example the Linux foundation [0] had 270M in expenses in 2023. Of which even we aggregate international operations and corporate operations the expenditure is less than 21M in G&A equivalent activities.

[0] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/hubfs/Reports/lf_annualrepor...

I think the point GP is raising is that most of the robotic development in the past several decades has been on Motion Control and Perception through Visual Servoing.

Those are realistically the 'natural' developments in the domain knowledge of Robotics/Computer Science.

However, what GP (I think) is raising is the blind spot that robotics currently has on proprioception and tactile sensing at the end-effector as well as a along the kinematic chain.

As in you can accomplish this with just kinematic position and force feedback and Visual servoing. But if you think of any dexterous primate they will handle an object and perceive texture, compliance, brittleness etc in a much richer way then any state-of-the art robotic end-effector.

Unless you devote significant research to creating miniaturized sensors that give a robot an approximation of the information rich sources in human skin, connective tissue, muscle, joints (tactil sensors, tensile sensor, vibration sensors, Force sensors) that blind spot remains.

Not looking to grind an axe but facts matter in this case.

Let's look at Mozilla's financial statement for 2007 and 2023 [0][1]:

> Expenses

1. Program 'Software Development'

2007: 20.7M | 2023: 260M

2. Management 'General and Administrative' :

2007: 5.1M | 2023: 123M

I am purposefully excluding marketing and fundraising costs. Because arguably you can't get away from those expenses.

Let's ignore inflation and COL and ballooning costs, etc. If we look at just the ratio of expenditure. We have an NPO (on paper at least) that just went from spending a ratio of 4 to 1 between developers and managers to spending a ratio of almost 2 to 1.

I am not familiar with what is typical in American NPO's but I can't help but feel that my money will not be spent on the right stuff.

[0] https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-2007-audi...

[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...

You can also disable ublock on specific 'trusted' domains.

> Sam is liberal, but being a republican is better for business these days. He's more of a survivalist than anything else.

That's a lot of words to say he is a hypocrite.

Seems to be a recurring leadership theme in this new post-civil deglobalization reality.

Useful to bring up that archive.org has done an insane amount of curating and preserving old software that would be gone into oblivion otherwise.

https://archive.org/details/software

National libraries across the world curate books, documents, and other formats but we as Humanity unfortunately are not very good at preserving the software side of History.

My reply is low value for HN but your comment is the literal embodiment of an older meme:

- Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via Alexa! I love the future!

- Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.

P.S. More seriously I agree, we witnessed multiple times over the enshitification that inevitably follows.

Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time.

Much like the post world war civil society, economic and diplomatic development was an exception in Human history.

Assuming the reality we have will remain forever without protection or constant maintenance effort is dangerous.

I pay for Kagi and I would definitely pay for Orion on Linux.

> best summary

From the author of "The origins of Woke", without aiming for ad hominem that sounds like a rather biased source from my European perspective.

I would prefer to watch the whole press conference and make my own conclusions.

How much of a financial effort would it be to have some non-profit take a fork of Icecat and Fennec F-Droid, and just maintain a browser for the actual free world (akin to codeberg for example)?

i.e. if we strip down all the corporate overhead what would be the annual cost of maintaining a European sane version of 'land of the free' Firefox?

> I recommend switching to an alternative browser which is only a browser, like Dillo, Ladybird, or Netsurf.

Did not know any of those alternatives thanks for sharing.

After a quick online search, I see they could work for casual browsing and it's great that they don't rely on Chromium

But do you think these can be a full browser replacement without extension ecosystems like ublock origin et al.?