Note that Firefox does bake in some telemetry by default, which needs to be manually disabled, but if you don’t want to deal with that you have LibreWolf! (Zen is another good one if you like vertical tabs)

And still having Manifest V2 support and not supporting a monopoly is always good!

There are much bigger concerns for Chrome for most people I guess (removal of Manifest V2 support, Google spyware, excessive RAM usage, monopoly, etc.)

I thunk the main problem is how it’s forced on everyone, whether they like it or not. Rounded corners should be an option, some people like their boxier corners!

I personally like the Nova design, BUT I know lots of people hate it and prefer the old one, so it really sucks that it’s buried in about:config. I feel like boxy vs rounded should be a toggle, you know! If they eventually drop the about:config, maybe LibreWolf or other forks will continue to have the option for the old design (?)

I promise it’s not an advertisement! I just like the purple mouse that uses AAs :D

I don’t think the specific brand is important, there’s probably lots of identical ones by various alphabet soup brands

COSMIC is kind of neat though, it’s not for everyone, but it’s always good to have another option! A lot of the customisation options are really nice, I’ll always be a KDE Plasma person, but I can see the appeal of it.

Perhaps in this case, you are Wesley.

It’s kind of neat that they are going for it as well as an SBC (easier for developers to work with) and a more affordable and accessible device (the Motorola Edge 30)

They are supporting devices deemed obsolete by manufacturers and are working towards making your phone last longer, I would say that’s pretty environmentally conscious. The “eco” TLD makes sense, I think, when you look at their goals.

Hey, that’s pretty neat! It looks like the name is based off a rock structure in Italy, representing stability :D

It’s also nice that it’s easier to pronounce for non-native English speakers (or as a matter of fact, non-English speakers!)

The new .eco URL is also interesting, from what I can tell it’s operated by a Canadian company called “Big Room”, and to register, you need to pledge that you will support positive change for the planet and you need to be transparent about your actions that could affect the environment.

We’ve already seem sites with the .org TLD get struck down by the U.S. government (e.g. Autistici/Inventati getting sanctioned as a “global terrorist organisation” for providing email and blog hosting services to “far-left antifascist terrorists”), so moving away from that is probably a good thing.

Fair enough. Good luck then!

It’s not that “AI” is incorrect, more that it’s way too broad. It’s like how “leftism” is used to group social democracies, totalitarian dictatorships, and anarchism together, even though they are vastly different ideologies. For an example that is not based on politics, it’s like how you need more information than just “fiction” and “non-fiction” to pick a book to read.

Good point on the cost of running a local model, but more efficient models exist that can run on memory capacities more typical for regular people (think 8-16GB of RAM). It doesn’t help that all the memory has been bought out for the data centres…

To separate the weeds from the worms, I would avoid the term “AI” since it has devolved into a buzzword that’s stuck on everything.

I think that if somebody has made a useful open-source project using LLMs, they shouldn’t be criticised solely for that reason. If the code produced is ass and isn’t reviewed, is hard to contribute to, and there is negligence, that would be a valid criticism. I also despise the use of the privacy nightmare of commercial LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.). If are to use LLMs, please use a local model. For you, your project, and your wallet’s sake. That’s my position on LLMs.

I trust that you are doing your due diligence in keeping your code relatively clean, and hope that your project will succeed! I personally do not use LLMs for my projects, they do not fit my usecase, probably not for most people actually. But I can see the value of having an LLM do menial tasks, as long as the code is properly reviewed and checked.

Generative models belong in the deepest circle in hell. They steal the work of creatives, are awful in the trifecta of morality, ethics, and legality, and are mainly used by scam artists (see: deepfakes) and misinformation campaigns. Nobody should use these, even if it’s a local model.

Also, a bit off-topic, but you might have heard of all the “AI has solved (big problem in science)” or “AI proved (big maths thing)” headlines, but note that these are NOT your LLMs, and certainly not any kind of generative model. They use predictive models (sometimes the papers mention “deep learning” too) that are trained on a specific set of data to do a specific task, and most of the actual science and maths is done by humans. These models certainly won’t replace scientists or mathematicians, like the Big Tech companies want you to believe, but they are a valuable tool when it comes to doing menial tasks repeatedly. That’s what computers are best at, after all!

Also, please don’t use LLMs for simple questions. Aside from the ethical, legal, and environmental concerns of LLMs, they also tend to be wrong more often than not, and when they are right, there is lots of word soup because the chatbot needs to act like it’s a smartass, to put it bluntly, because its job is to market itself and push you towards subscriptions. Try to avoid LLMs wherever you can, it’s almost always better to search it yourself. Don’t offload thinking to a chatbot, it’s not very good at it!

The only usecase where LLMs could have an application is translation. I have a friend who doesn’t understand English very well, so they use a chatbot to translate things into their native language, and it’s really helpful for that. Of course, it can get stuff wrong, but for non-critical stuff, it’s kind of neat! That avoids the question of the insane water and power usage involved in training these models, as well as the disregard of the rights of artists and creators by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. I believe my friend uses a local model, so there’s that.

I personally don’t use LLMs, they’re more trouble than anything in my opinion.

Have you ever had any experience with Scratch? It’s an awesome tool to learn basic programming concepts like loops, conditions, etc. I played around with it in my early years, but even if you’re older, it’s still fun to mess around with the blocks to make weird programs. I particularly loved the “remix” functionality, it lets you see the structure of other people’s projects and you can tweak them (and thus learn about how it works!)

After my years of doing Scratch, I moved on to Python, and it is probably the easiest programming language to learn (depending on how you define that, e.g. HTML), code is very human readable and unfamiliar symbols are avoided for the most part

W3Schools has a lot of good Python guides, and there are SO MANY good programming tutorials online. Back in my day, I learnt Python by reading a good book (and it was an awesome book), but resources to learn programming have never been more plentiful!

My advice is to work on a simple project, could be a small game (with or without PyGame), or maybe a useful tool that you want to make, lay out what you want it to do, and along the way when you don’t know something, search it up online (W3Schools, forums, video guides, docs, whatever) and figure out how to do it. Practice doesn’t make you perfect, but more practice does. Does that make sense? Not really, but definitely try your best!