@santiago
True, people were greeting Google with open arms in hopes that it would help strip Microsoft of their market dominance, not realizing they were falling into a new trap, probably even more cunning than the old one. In the end Google just took MS' place and some realized it all too late.
But I remain positive, we have lots of decentralized alternatives now and Gemini gives me lots of old Web vibes, having enough content to not feel like a ghost town.
@Hyolobrika
It works fine at the moment — because I have unfollowed a lot of people and re-followed them from this one, I'm using it as archive-only at the moment.
If I start using it more or less regularly — people start following me there and at more that a hundred active followers it becomes unusable.
I'm looking for a better solution. Problem is, unless you self-host, with fediblock-happy crowd you can never be sure who blocks whom and will you be able to talk to some people tomorrow 😩
@santiago
I have an old ThinkPad T43 from about the same era (early to mid 2000s) and I can use Matrix chats, I can read emails, I can browse Gemini and even the Web (without all the fluff, using w3m), listen to music and watch videos at 720p and even low-complexity 1080p ones, I can code using vim, it even runs Quake3 more or less well…
Just start Firefox, open 4-5 tabs of "modern" web — and the machine becomes unusable 😂
@santiago
Yes, and TenFourFox was never exactly stellar in terms of performance, it feels sluggish even on my PowerMac G5 Dual.
I used to be able to make music — including recording a couple of instruments at 48 kHz applying effects in real-time on my PowerPC Mac Mini, now I doubt I would be able to even read the news using a more or less modern browser on that machine.
The Web is one of the worst offenders when it comes to making machines obsolete.
Sorry for this mess, friends 😣
I should making an account on an instance that doesn't have such a short character limit.
@Hyolobrika
But there sure were earlier precedents — such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky's case in the very beginning of Putin's rise to power. I wanted to elaborate on it further in our other thread — the one about Lithium in Mexico, but my reply got too long and I wasn't even close to finishing my thought,, so I decided not to post it 🤭
@Hyolobrika
Back to our days — it *used* to be an overstatement, although companies leaving Russia being forced to transfer their assets to new owners for a morsel of their real value was close enough to that already, but now we have an excellent case in point: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-exiled-journalist-his-wife-are-extremist-group-2024-07-03/
Your family gets declared an extremist group and gets stripped of all property, pretty neat, huh?
@Hyolobrika
In any case — this is why the Soviet "socialist" system fell into the right soil: people weren't used to owning anything, no such *tradition* — and now they didn't own a thing again, not much changed. Those who did — wealthy peasants "kulaks" and remnants of old noblety were declared enemies and were stripped of all property, either jailed or exiled (sounds familiar? 😅).
@Hyolobrika
Richard Pipes (who is considered a major Russophobe by Russian authorities) has a theory about why Russia is this way and lack of private property is the core problem.
Sure — not only Russia had absolute monarchy, but it didn't last that long anywhere in Europe. In part, it was the reason why Russian Empire ceased to exist: these reforms were long overdue and it, among other things, was the reason for serious political crisis.
@Hyolobrika
It's not about socialism — it never really existed in Russia… ever. Not for everyone, but even for the privileged class, part of what the Decembrists were fighting for was constitution — to limit the absolute monarchy. You go against the Tsar (state) — you lose everything. Even physical punishment for the nobles wasn't out of the question in those times.
@iska
Sterilising strays is humane — cellar of an average block of flats in big cities is littered with dead kittens who never manage to get out, some die of wounds they get from encounters with other animals such as stray dogs — before they learn to fight or evade them by climbing trees, some become roadkill… 😿
I find them never getting born preferrable to dying this way.
@kravietz @maniamakash @tml
Whether those are formally private enterprises or controlled by a state-approved officials, only matters to those who care about semantics more than they do about the essence — they are the ones who are supposed to get fooled by the newspeak. War isn't as bad if we call it "special military operation", right? 😉
@kravietz @maniamakash @tml
There was a time of turbulence, but now it's back to the way it was before, I find the term "state capitalism" itself part of the newspeak that was common in USSR. We all know that these "private" companies aren't independent entities — go against the state and you might get exiled, jailed or even assassinated. There are no economic liberties and as we can clearly see now — no private property either (which never really existed in Russia).
@kravietz @maniamakash @tml
I sometimes use the term "former Eastern Bloc countries": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc
Which is I think correct and I find it useful — to indicate that the countries economic system transitioned away from what it was in times of the USSR.
And I use ex-Soviet sometimes when speaking about countries which were part of USSR formerly.
Neither can be applied to Yugoslavia though.
And yes, of course you can't say "post" about Russia itself — as it never transitioned away.
@gabrielesvelto
That was a joke — I may not always like the architectural changes in FF, but I have to admit, it's really well optimized the way it is now — to the point that it performs better than Palemoon, which was forked before FF got Electrolysis (I think🤔), even on anemic machines with single-core 32-bit CPUs, such as old Thinkpad T43 with Pentium-M that I have.
Even with no SMP or SMT Firefox might get slow, but remains responsive, while Palemoon fails to even redraw its UI at times.
@adiz @newt
And I'm pretty sure that's exactly what would have happened — trivial to implement, had he not taken his usual "bullying the one I don't agree with into submission stance".
He's not wrong about a lot of things — he's just poor at handling real people and sadly, he's not the only one like that 😩
@adiz @newt
It's not about favicons per se — I can see what he's coming at, getting an extra request with every page request when it comes to something as minimal as Gemini does make a difference and this is a valid concern.
It could've be handled differently, e.g. requesting favicon.txt only when you're adding the page to bookmarks — makes perfect sense as you don't see the favicon anywhere else.
@gabrielesvelto
> Firefox can easily reach 150 active threads
Bring back the option to turn e10s off 😂
It's always tempting to allocate objects on the stack, but there's a good reason why you shouldn't allocate large ones if you care about your application's memory footprint: the stack space you use is used forever, even if you don't need it anymore.
Now you might be wondering, wait a sec, I thought that stack variables are freed when they go out of scope, right? Well, yes and no. Let's talk about this. 🧵 1/8
@theorytoe
For fucks sake, why did the phone replace "right" with "didn't"?! 🤬
None
Just in case: DMs/PMs simply don't exist on this instance as concept — don't use them, use the other instance if you absolutely have to, or send an email to any address at m0xEE.Net or .Com or .Org, but I prefer keep most communication public.