- I know many people actually care about beauty. In fact, with the same amount of bugs, the users of the most beautiful software will actually report it's less buggy.
The problem is when someone makes appearances more important than being useful.
But I want to give this project the benefit of the doubt.
How do you know it was one of the developers who wrote this? Maybe they hired someone to create the site and the content. Granted, the site is in the repo and you can see who committed the assets. But that still doesn't tell you who originally wrote it.
You're suggesting one of the developers went through all the trouble to create a browser, then allowed someone to add assets to the repo without the developer reviewing them first?
I'm suggesting that you don't know who wrote the content. You don't know the developers wrote it. And if a non-developer wrote it, then that person probably isn't going to commit the content to a repo.
The first sentence in the first paragraph on the website is "beautifully designed". Clearly the creator wants to bring to our attention that they spent a lot of time designing the visual aspects of this browser. And from the looks of things, this is indeed true. The browser does look very beautiful.
But... this is literally form over function.
Browsers should be like car tyres. Only after you have selected for your functional use case and requirements, do you filter for visual aesthetics.
If google decides that they don’t want to fund Mozilla anymore, then these Firefox derivatives fall as well. I don’t really see the zen team (or other ff forks) hiring the FF devs that are making 6 figures at Mozilla.
If Firefox decides to deeply ingrain some DRM standard, there’s a high likelihood that it’ll be included in downstream browsers like this one, unless they are privacy nuts like librewolf.
We need entirely new browsers that are more than window dressing on top of existing ones.
Remember what happened to Thunderbird, though. Mozilla dropped it, and it got better. There are good reasons to think that Mozilla - the corporate entity - is cancer.
T'bird is owned and run by a for-profit company called MZLA.
That company is owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation but Mozilla does not own, run, operate, or control Thunderbird.
Comparison: Pret a Manger, the fancy sandwich chain, is part-owned by Mcdonald's. But you can't buy a Big Mac in Pret, and you can't buy a Pret fancy noodle salad in McDonald's.
How is Nim for cli scripting? I tend to use Bash for simple scripts, and Python once I need more than one command line argument. I've been looking for a compelling case to try out Nim.
It's Python-like, but it compiles, so you get a stand alone exec like go, that you can copy on other machines without having to provide an interpretter.
It's better than bash for anything longer than 5 lines, works on Windows and Unix and has a lean syntax.
Now I would use Python for scripting, especially since uv and hatch have inline deps support now, so it's a blast.
But OP is looking for something new, so I list things he may enjoy learning, in a context that would make it enjoyable to learn.
When making small Nim programs for the CLI, https://github.com/c-blake/cligen makes for a pretty simple API (just 1 line of code) that gets you nice CLI syntax, color auto-generated help messages, etc.
No, people look at what NASA was able to accomplish during the 1960s and compare it to now, and wonder how the level of competence can be so drastically lower now vs. then. NASA was not infallible during the 1960s, but the level of engineering competence was much higher.
You think a telescope that launched over a decade late and cost 10x the budget is a mark of "high competence"? I don't think being a useful science tool is enough.
What's the other telescope you have in mind?
And those two free telescopes from NRO are still sitting idle. One of them is supposed to finally launch after 15 years, though apparently it's in such a complex and high budget mission it might not be saving any money to use it there.
The combined Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs cost around $30 billion in then year dollars, which equates to about $300 billion in today's dollars. That's an average of about $25 billion a year over 12 years. That's about the same as what is being spent per year on NASA now.
NASA was doing plenty of unmanned missions during the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo years: the Explorer, Pioneer, Echo, Ranger, Telstar, Mariner, Lunar Explorer, and Surveyor programs all had multiple missions in that time period. So no, I don't buy the argument that NASA has to spread its budget over many more missions now as compared to then.
Many of those you mentioned are still part of the goal of getting a human on the moon. That's like saying Starliner's Demo flights don't count as human-rated because they were uncrewed. About a one third to one half of NASA's budget is dedicated to exploration and space operations which is a better comparison for what you're driving at. The rest is spread across science, aeronautics, environmental, educational outreach, and other goals.
> Many of those you mentioned are still part of the goal of getting a human on the moon.
Some of them were for getting more detailed information about the Moon prior to sending the Apollo missions there. But most of them were general solar system exploration.
> That's like saying Starliner's Demo flights don't count as human-rated because they were uncrewed.
No, it isn't. The counterpart in the 1960s to these missions would be the uncrewed flights of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft that were done prior to the first crewed missions. I did not include those in the unmanned missions I listed.
Everybody wants a benevolent dictator to take care of things for them until they are victims of power abuse for an edge case they didn't predict yet was inevitable.
It doesn't even have to be an edge case. Many people support horrible things seemingly under the assumption that the government that changes control every 4-12 years will never change again.
Maybe it's rational on some level; if you manage to give the people you prefer limitless power while they rule, maybe they'll become powerful enough to end elections.
edit: of course Moraes did the same for Bolsonaro as for Lula. Some people's ideologies rest mainly on their hatred of the general population, not a preference for the rule of any particular party.
Exactly. I am seeing a trend of people shriek about censorship free social media or censorship free LLMs or whatever else. Initially it made me think they are just so conditioned to be controlled and ‘guided’ by an authoritarian power that they can’t help but call for reduced individual freedoms. But actually I think it is simply that they are personally aligned with the current ‘benevolent dictatorships’ because they see it as giving their tribe power. But if they were victims of the abuse - meaning the people they seek to control/censor/suppress - they would absolutely not hold this view.
I downvoted it because it's untrue. As the article says, his coconspirators got 30 and 31 months respectively, which is much lower than New Zealand's mandatory minimum of 120 months for murder. (I would have responded directly, but in my experience commenters who start talking about things like "powerful people getting more power" aren't generally interested in a discussion about whether the claims they make are true.)
Yeah but he got a _decade_ of _world-wide_ man chase and legal arm wrestling.
That's 2 orders of magnitude up the resources invested.
And not even for stealing in the case of Mega, but for assumed money people would have paid to IP owners if the service hadn't existed. Which is a premise pirates have been debunking for years.
When I used mega, I didn't have the money for the content. Today I pay for netflix and steam games.
- I feel more passion from the author.
- I value the pride they show in their work.
- I know many people actually care about beauty. In fact, with the same amount of bugs, the users of the most beautiful software will actually report it's less buggy.
The problem is when someone makes appearances more important than being useful.
But I want to give this project the benefit of the doubt.
We need more browser diversity.