The first Deus Ex

It would only take a handful of dedicated zionists to kick up a fuss to create the debate.

I think there’s an important caveat here. Yes, it’s not a democracy, but I don’t think stirring up a fuss is as easy as citing various wiki editing policies and starting arguments. If you invoke them frivolously you aren’t going to succeed at making edits.

Do we think Vance is stupid enough to not understand that NATO primarily benefits the US?

Right, regardless of any broader foreign policy view, Vance should at least understand it in purely cynical terms for bargaining leverage.

But I think blindly grappling toward tariffs and no NATO is part of the instinct for attacking liberalism and neoliberalism in a big hot tangled mess of reactionary instincts rather than an intentional road to a different vision.

This is completely insane revisionist history. The TPP was in fact ripe for ratification, with full support of American ratification from its international partners, but was logjammed in the United States due to a Republican Senate.

The reformed TPP is similar to the original one and only exists to work around the loss of U.S. as a participant. And the U.S. never rejoined. There’s a grain of truth to the thing about farmers, at least, but good gravy, this is otherwise pretty nuts.

You can’t for a number of reasons. As other people have said this catastrophically underestimates the complexity of maintaining a code base for a browser.

they’re often 3–5 years behind other browsers in implementing new web standards

I don’t even think that’s remotely true. My understanding is that it’s on the order of a few months to a year, and it relates to things that are negligible to the average end user. They are edge case things like experimental 3d rendering. The most significant one I can think of is Webp, but they resisted adoption for principled reasons relating to Google’s control over that format and aggressive pushing of it, which is a good thing not a bad thing, and an important example of how rushing to adopt new standards it’s not necessarily just a sign of browser health but also an anti-competitive practice intentionally pushed by companies that have money to throw around for that purpose.

They wouldn’t be at the mercy of anything. That’s…how open source works.

That’s how Chromium works.

Anyone can see the source, but it doesn’t mean that anyone’s code makes it into Chromium, because Google picks and chooses. Chromium has a “reviewer pool” of Google developers doing all the picking and choosing. Getting into the reviewer pool takes months to years of building up a contribution history and being vetted by the Google team.

They’re completely at the mercy of how Google integrates things like DRM, or web standards that Google wants to push, like a deeply integrated into the browser and actively maintained with little to no alternative. The engineering overhead of sustaining and increasingly complex fork of Chromium is unsustainable and unless you have the development capability to compete, Google controls the destiny of any chromium browser.

You’re right about the fact that building an engine is hard, but Socraticly speaking, then why are there so many blink-based browsers and so few gecko-based ones? The answer is because blink is easy to embed in a new project and gecko isn’t.

Okay, that’s an interesting point. I mean, there are forks galore of Firefox so I’m not entirely sure I understand. But certainly chromium-based browsers have been getting more traction.

But wasn’t the original point something about how hard it is to make a browser?

And if I have this right you’re suggesting that it would be achievable for Firefox to make an accessible browser tool kit but they’re not due to ulterior motives?

I’m not sure I understand that, either in terms of motive or just impractical terms what it is you think they’re doing to make it hard to develop.

Hold on, why are we talking about this like it’s something that’s not happening? There’s all kinds of forks of Firefox.

Mozilla does not look any reliable

People keep saying this, but why? Because if it’s anything like what people have been saying in these Lemmy threads, good god.

Found the one sane comment in this entire thread.

Google may or may not stop paying Mozilla as part of the antitrust scrutiny. I have no idea if there’s actual reporting to this effect, or any form of legal analysis suggesting this is the most plausible outcome. If anything, antitrust scrutiny might lead to this funding being more secure and more robust.

So this might not happen, but this whole threads carrying on like it’s a fait accompli.

VLC I would say

The CEO is like slightly more than 1% of their annual revenue.

What things that matter have insufficient engineering resources at the moment?

Yeah I don’t understand juxtaposing these as though it’s one or the other.

I mean, not that they are ones for nuance, but I don’t think present day Russia has anything to do with communism.

I hope the Russians get out of it as it has hurt them the most.