Luke

Right! It’s definitely fulfilling the purpose OP stated here in this post, as long as that’s what you’re using it for. I’m just pointing out that it doesn’t do the other things it claims to do in the readme for the repo, so that’s something to be aware of.

This seems like a valuable utility for concealing writing style, though I feel like the provided example fails to illustrate the rest of the stated goal of the project, which is to “prevent biases, ensuring that the content is judged solely on its merits rather than on preconceived notions about the writer” and “enhance objectivity, allowing ideas to be received more universally”.

The example given is:

You: This is a demo of TextCloak!!!

Model: “Hey, I just wanted to share something cool with you guys. Check out this thing called TextCloak - it’s pretty neat!”

The model here is injecting bias that wasn’t present in the input (claims it is cool and neat) and adds pointlessly gendered words (you guys) and changes the tone drastically (from a more technical tone to a playful social-media style). These kinds of changes and additions are actually increasing the likelihood that a reader will form preconceived notions about the writer. (In this case, the writer ends up sounding socially frivolous and oblivious compared to the already neutral input text.)

This tool would be significantly more useful if it detected and preserved the tone and informational intent of input text.

Next up: Discord!

I think you underestimate how oblivious many users are when it comes to using software.

Your statement did leave some wiggle room to quibble over what exactly “very popular” means, though I don’t see how popularity is a useful metric when we’re talking about free software which doesn’t rely on user purchases for revenue. Ultimately it comes down to how funding the development of each software is accomplished, and whether that can be done effectively without selling out.

However, if we must compare funding strategies based on popularity, then we can. I’m not sure where you got your usage numbers from, but I’ll use your percentage to normalize for the number of employees paid through the funding strategies of both examples to compare the effectiveness of the approaches:

• Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation together have roughly 840 employees as of 2020 (the latest numbers available on Wikipedia). I’m not sure how they split up who does what for developing the software, but I seriously doubt the vast majority of those 840 employees are developers.
• Blender Foundation has a team of 31 people (as of 2022). Most of them are developers/engineers/designers directly involved with improving the software.

For purposes of discussion, I’ll assume that you are correct that Blender has 2% of the popularity of Firefox. Normalizing that for comparison, 2% of 840 Mozilla employees is 16.8 employees (round down because you can’t have 0.8 of a person).

In other words, if Firefox were only 2% as popular as it is now (thus making it equally as popular as you say Blender is), Mozilla would be paying 16 developers with it’s funding strategy.

Conversely, Blender is able to pay 31 developers using their funding strategy. This means that, even when accounting for popularity, Blender’s funding strategy is 2x more effective than Mozilla’s at paying developers to work on their software.

Again, I don’t agree that popularity is an important metric to compare here, but even when we do so, it’s clear that it is entirely possible to fund software without resorting to tired old capitalistic funding models that result in the increasingly objectionable violations of user privacy that Mozilla engages in lately. They could choose to do things differently, and we ought not to excuse them for their failure of imagination about how to fund their business more ethically. Especially when perfectly workable alternative funding models are right there in public view for anyone to emulate.

it’s simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation

Please don’t excuse unethical and exploitative behavior by pretending that it’s unavoidable.

There are examples of other funding models available; for example, what the Blender Foundation does. It turns out, if a FOSS effort focuses on their community, makes users feel involved and important, asks in good faith for contributions and suggestions, treats people with respect, maintains funding and organizational transparency, and has consistent ethical standards… it can work out very well for them. No selling out required. No data harvesting required. No shady deals with Google required.

AdGuard has a list of trusted DNS providers, which seems like a good source. Many of the ones in that list are free as well.

No idea if this is a useful suggestion, but I saw it spoken of in another thread about CAD software: there’s a free and open source plugin called BlenderBIM that is apparently a decent option.

I think you need to take a break and get some perspective.

Besides, the Twitter link was already posted by the OP, why would it need to be posted again?

KDE Connect should fit the bill; despite the name, you don’t need to be using KDE (or Linux even) since there are clients for every major OS, even mobile.

Among many other cool features, it lets you easily and simply just send a file from one device directly to another on your local network. I use it all the time to send photos from my phone to my desktop without plugging anything in, for example.

I don’t even have an EV and I have to see the ads on the chargers because they’re in front of the store I’m walking into. So far, I’ve only noticed that at grocery stores, but it’s annoying.

AFAIK, those codes don’t need to be kept private, but I think they only do that verification once, so you can probably just delete the file at this point. (After all, you can also use a TXT record to store the verification code for a domain with Google, and those are definitely not private; anyone can dig your domain’s TXT records.)

If you’re into Paint.NET, check out Pinta; it’s basically Paint.NET (inspired by it) but open source and works on all 3 major OS’s.

You don’t see how a corporate entity like Google is related to capitalism? What exactly do you think capitalism means?

Not in the US.

I’d be careful of making sweeping statements about 3.7m square miles of land from your doorstep in LA.

I’m in the US too, and here in Atlanta I use Organic Maps frequently to find specific street addresses. It works quite well. I would agree with the other responses here suggesting that maybe you could contribute some data to OSM for the areas you encounter that are missing street numbers. You’ll be helping yourself and others!

Something like this would be cool for ublock origin too, with a sound pinging whenever an ad is blocked; could be fun.

This looks interesting, but I don’t understand what it’s for. I read through the readme, but came out none the wiser. What exactly is a compose sequence?

There are other instances for both piped and invidious aside from the ones linked above. I believe the intended usage involves you finding the instance closest to you in terms of network, which may not be those specific instances linked above.

Mouse gestures, synchronising my settings across 2 PCs and an android phone, shortcuts to different searchers etc. Plus it would need to be visually customisable

It sounds like perhaps you haven’t looked into Firefox for a while, because out of the box it does all of the things you listed, except for gestures. There are multiple popular plugins that provide Firefox gestures easily. I’m not sure what visual customizations you’re referring to, but Firefox also has had support for themes for ages now.

Alternatively, you could pay money for a solution from a reputable company with support.

and run the possibly even greater risk that it’ll fuck something up, since you probably can’t even look at their source