It can be more than superficial. If you’re restoring files from your old PC to your new one, it could make a mess of things if the user account is in a different path. Probably not a lot of people write scripts for their windows PC, but those could break.

Sure it would be a janky restore or janky script if it was explicitly specifying the path of the home directory instead of the environment variable. But environment variables have been janky in the past on windows, so it’s best to just keep the paths as consistent as possible when migrating to a new system.

Kinda shit they just wouldn’t prompt you for what you want your home director called tho.

Also, LOL at your email address.

you told me to doubt the tings I read on the internet. Id I didn’t doubt what you’re saying, that would be contrarian.

Yeah right? I have a VPN to prevent Google (amongst many others) from having too much of my data.

Ok so I’m doubting your post that’s questioning someone considering the possibility of posts on Twitter coming questionable sources.

But how do I know you aren’t manipulating me with what you’re saying?

I’m not the guy you replied to, but MS fonts are kinda free to download. Not free enough they can just put them into a package but there’s a defined method for downloading them. Most distros have a package that will automatically do this. On Debian it’s ttf-mscorefonts-installer which will download the fonts and install them when it gets to the configuration part of the package install. You can probably search for a similar package for your distro.

But there were probably benefits like if you work hard they might give you your passport back. Maybe.

Apparenlty telling your customers to go fuck themselves isn’t a good business strategy.

That works for satellites in a Geostationary orbit, but Starlink satellites are in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO). While LEO is in space there are a tiny amount of atmospheric particles there which creates a tiny amount of drag. Things in LEO will come back down eventually.

Hmm… seems Vladimir Putin doesn’t like ChatGPT enough to have his sock puppet write some negative comments about it.

Eh… an organization will generally just comply with any law at first. Senior leadership would have to approve of not conforming to a law, so there would be meetings and deliberations on it. Considerations need to made about the safety of the employees and that kind of thing.

The extensions were only blocked for a week. So it’s not fair to claim Mozilla was licking Russia’s boot.

From the article:

The browser extensions, which are hosted on the Mozilla store, were made unavailable in the Land of Putin on or around June 8 after a request by the Russian government and its internet censorship agency, Roskomnadzor.

or to enable Russia to interfere with the extensions’ code for their own ends?

Well for the extensions that are open source it is possible for Russia to meddle with the code, but they’d have to get past code review. But this is concern for anything open source not just Mozilla stuff. It’s rare that something gets bad gets into an open source project, but it did happen a few months ago with ssh. Didn’t get past testing and required someone to work on open source projects for years before they got a level of trust to get something pulled into main source tree. So it’s basically the equivalent of getting a job at a company for years just to put malware into some proprietary software. Which could also happen, but if there’s a good code review process it shouldn’t happen.

Excepting those kind of weird scenarios, unless they’re extensions made by a Russian company that Moscow control over, then no, the extensions wouldn’t have been fiddled with by the Russian government. And if they were extensions the Russian government had the ability to change, they wouldn’t be trying to ban them.

What impact? You mean having Russians use a browser that allows the state to spy on them? If someone goes to prison for using Firefox to post something critical of the government, is that the impact Mozilla wants to have?

At a certain point you have to say “if the government of an authoritarian makes it illegal to use our browser because we aren’t going along with them spying on their citizens then so be it.”

It’s debatable at what point a software company becomes morally complicit with the oppression done by an authoritarian government. But it seems to me the wisest choice is to say “this is our software, take it or leave it.”

Maybe get a beret? But will it look weird if I wear a beret with my Che Guevara t-shirt?

Same here. Also I sometimes think about these kinds of things when I’m off the clock too. I don’t want to but you can’t exactly tell your brain to stop thinking about work stuff at 5pm. Sometimes I’m just watching TV or whatever and a thought about how to solve a work problem pops into my head.

To me it says more about how bad the management is at a company that has to resort to try to detecting mouse jigglers. Do they know so little about what the employees do that they don’t simply notice that work isn’t getting done if an employee isn’t actually working?

The fur covers their ears to prevent the screams of the people they’re mauling from damaging their eardrums.

Oh… Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft.

A friend of mine tried one of their “special offers” he nearly got himself lobotomized!

I Vaguely recall that in the dystopian world depicted in the Max Headroom TV series it was illegal to turn off TVs. It felt bonkers to me when I was a kid, but now it doesn’t seem too far off.

Yeah the Air Canada case probably isn’t a big indicator on where the legal system will end up on this. The guy was entitled to some money if he submitted the request on time, but the reason he didn’t was because the chatbot gave the wrong information. It’s the kind of case that shouldn’t have gotten to a courtroom, because come on, you’re supposed to give him the money any it’s just some paperwork screwup caused by your chatbot that created this whole problem.

In terms of someone someone getting sick because they put glue on their pizza because google’s AI told them to… we’ll have to see. They may do the thing where “a reasonable person should know that the things an AI says isn’t always fact” which will probably hold water if google keeps a disclaimer on their AI generated results.

It’s kinda weird that soon there will be only white people on products and on the jerseys of sports teams.

Are we sure that we’re happy about this outcome?