Imagine if normal engineering did that. Engineers invent a "blobby" thing that glues things together. It has amazing properties that increase productivity but sometimes it just stops working for some reason and comes off. It's totally random and because of how blobby is produced there is no way to tell when it's going to work or not, contrary to the typical material. Anyway we're going to use blobby to build everything from schools, to bridges, to airplanes now.
>an error of translation from natural language to formal language
Really? Programming languages are all formal languages, which means all human-made errors in algorithms wouldn't be "bugs" anymore. Some projects even categorize typos as bugs, so that's a unusually strict definition of "bug" in my opinion.
Sure, I guess you can understand what I said that way, but that's not what I meant. I wasn't thinking about the implementation, but the specifications.
Read again the quote I was refering to if you need better context to understand my comment.
If you have good formal specifications, you should be able to produce the corresponding code. Any error in that phase should be considered a bug, and yes, a typo should fit that category, if it makes the code deviate from the specs.
But an error in the step of translating the requirements (usually explained in natural language) to specifications (usually described formally) isn't a bug, it's a translation error.
Why it feels like "this year will be the year of Linux desktop" didn't sound absurd enough for you so you went and upgraded the idea to "HL3 will be a Linux exclusive."
Firefox has this ability to separate cookies etc into different partitions, and users can make use of this feature by opening tabs in different containers. Many times when I use profiles in other browsers what I really want is container tabs.
That combined with sideberry makes Firefox the superior one when I was checking if Vivaldi was worth switching to.
That was also my story and I abandoned containers that time. But it turns out to be more about bad default UI.
The game changer is Sideberry. It makes manually managed container tabs almost effortless. Instead of messing with auto rules, you would:
- Set default containers for each pane;
- Use shortcuts to open new sibling/child tab in the same container;
- Save/restore tabs as bookmarks keeping their containers.
It’s still not perfect UI, but in reality covers all the use cases where I’d reach for a container.
It’s just so much peaceful to know that I won’t accidentally tie anything to the google account, while still have gmail open in that cyan backgrounded tab just a ctrl-tab away.
>Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
I've tried Firefox before. I prefer Vivaldi, because it provides more convenience.
I can't actually tell you what Firefox does or where all that money is going to. It looks exactly like Chrome with negligible changes.
The critical problem, it seems, is that Firefox thinks people care about "privacy" only to the extent of being shown personalized ads. Literally nothing else matters. This feels to me like a recurring issue in technology, where an issue that users may have doesn't exist in the way they interact with the world, but only as a specific definition that can be measured or that be analyzed from a compliance perspective.
I have multiple profiles in Chrome and Vivaldi that let me switch between professional accounts and private accounts. That sounds like privacy to me, and I'd wager that for most people on the planet this is far more useful than the ability to avoid being shown ads for a thing you have already bought just because of tracking cookies. Why Firefox doesn't have this feature?
Vivaldi lets me subscribe to websites via RSS so I don't need to create an account to subscribe to things. That sounds like privacy to me. And I even have notes built into the browser. I don't use these today, but I used to use them when Vivaldi was called Opera. Firefox seems to have neither of these features. Again, I feel the need to ask, what features does Firefox actually have?
Maybe this is a "hot take" for Firefox developers, but if you want people to use your web browser maybe you should try offering functionality that other browsers don't offer? Yes, you can run some extensions that don't work on Chrome anymore, but that's not even a functionality of the browser. That is third-party. It quite literally depends on third-party developers bothering to develop extensions for a web browser that has a 2% market when they could instead use that time to develop extensions for Chrome or even Vivaldi.
If the only reason you want me to use Firefox is so that I don't use Chrome, that just doesn't feel very compelling.
Splitters make more sense to me since different things should be categorized differently.
However, I believe a major problem in modern computing is when the splitter becomes an "abstraction-splitter."
For example, take the mouse. The mouse is used to control the mouse cursor, and that's very easy to understand. But we also have other devices that can control the mouse cursor, such as the stylus and touchscreen devices.
A lumper would just say that all these types of devices are "mouses" since they behave the same way mouses do, while a splitter would come up with some stupid term like "pointing devices" and then further split it into "precise pointing devices" and "coarse pointing devices" ensuring that nobody has absolutely no idea what they are talking about.
As modern hardware and software keeps getting built on piles and piles of abstractions, I feel this problem keeps getting worse.
Doesn't it make sense to use words that mean what you're using them to mean?
By your logic I could use the term "apple" to describe apples, oranges, limes, and all other fruit because they all behave in much the same ways that apples do. But that's silly because there are differences between apples and oranges [citation needed]. If you want to describe both apples and oranges, the word for that is "fruit", not "apple".
Using a touchscreen is less precise than using a mouse. If the user is using a touchscreen, buttons need to be bigger to accommodate for the user's lack of input precision. So doesn't it make sense to distinguish between mice and touchscreens? If all you care about is "thing that acts like a mouse", the word for that is "pointing device", not "mouse".
The point is that it's simpler to understand what something is by analogy (a touchscreen is a mouse) than by abstraction (a mouse is a pointing device; a touchscreen is also a pointing device), since you need a third, abstracting concept to do the latter.
Refusing to pay a ransom and instead giving the money to the "ennemies" of the attackers isn't "virtue signaling" (as someone already commented: it's a "fuck you" to the attackers).
In french we call that a "pied de nez". "Turning the table" / "Poetic justice" / "Adding insult to injury" would all be more correct than "virtue signalling".
If there was no attacker and the company gave half a mil out of nowhere to a security company (or a charity) and boasted publicly about it, that would be virtue signalling.
But refusing to pay the ransom and giving the exact same amount to security researchers is just a big, giant, middle finger.
If they wanted to meaningfully give a middle finger to the attackers they’d be spending the money lobbying for a ransomware payments ban, not throwing away money by giving it to universities that have a plenty of money and will probably do absolutely nothing to reduce ransomware attacks in the foreseeable future.
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