Pup Biru

i went to the mozilla donation page and sent a contact request about wanting to financially support firefox but not giving a damn about the rest of the AI and adtech slop that mozilla is doing

here’s the response, for anyone that’s interested

Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback with us. We genuinely value hearing from our supporters, as your insights help us understand what matters most to the Mozilla community.

It’s important to note that the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation are two separate entities within the Mozilla umbrella - Mozilla Corporation is responsible for developing and maintaining Firefox and other software products, and they are continuously working on improving the user experience, including addressing compatibility issues and promoting the browser to a wider audience.

The Mozilla Foundation, on the other hand, focuses on broader internet health and advocacy work. Our mission is to ensure the internet remains open and accessible for everyone, and this includes issues related to privacy, digital rights, and equity. To confirm, the survey that you had received was from the Mozilla Foundation.

With that being said, Firefox is funded by revenue generated through the product rather than donations. At the moment, there is no way for supporters to make a donation that will be designated to the development of Firefox. Have no fear, things are looking good for Firefox’s future and they plan to be around a long time, supporting folks with the most secure browser experience! Continuing to use Firefox, and recommending it to others, is the best way to support this project.

We truly appreciate your concerns about Firefox and their top priorities - We on the Mozilla Foundation strongly believe that issues such as privacy, online safety, and data security are connected to the products and services we all use every day. The work we do in these areas complements Mozilla Corporation’s focus on building better, more secure software like Firefox, and w encourage you to participate in our survey!

If you would like to input some of your thoughts and ideas into our Ideas discussion forum regarding Firefox and other Mozilla products, please visit: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas

We thank you again for reaching out to our Mozilla Foundation Donor Care team, and please let us know if we can support your further!

coober pedy was my best guess too!

that’s pretty much it… with the atproto/ap bridge it becomes a LOT more viable to interact across networks, and thus people can choose to move and use whatever platform they like, and that helps to solve the critical mass problems that we have in the fediverse

absolutely this

youse and torlet

I’m from Australia and I’ve started calling all groups of people yall because it’s gender neutral… very unaustralian term, and I love so much the irony of iconic southern terms being used to support trans activism

the rust devs wanted to CREATE official structure definitions that don’t exist in C so that there was more semantic meaning to the APIs

Their stance is that by using lidar OEMs are hamstringing themselves on solving vision because they are so reliant on it.

i get that… but… vision is kinda shit. why not use all the tools at your disposal? like literally “x ray vision” is something that we see as a super power because it’d be so useful - radar gives us that

vision is an approximation of things like lidar. can you get a depth map out of vision? sure by why not just measure it directly and then you’re not introducing error by your model literally hallucinating

The more sensors you deal with, the more your attention gets divided. You aren’t laser focused on one thing.

kinda but also the last 20% takes 80% of the effort… solving a lot of easy problems with more information will lead to a better short term outcome, and then when you’re getting good results then you can solve from 80% to 85% then 85 to 90 etc across your whole sensor suite

The extra sensors also cost a lot of money

so they though? you can buy hobbyist ultrasonic sensors for literally a couple of bucks, lidar for a few hundred - sure that’s not at the grade that you’d use for cars, but at some point it’s an economies of scale problem. they’re not actually that expensive for a commodity “good enough” sensor package

You might not like the reasons, or their stance

correct - i understand them, but as an engineer it’s just wrong when you’re talking about one of the most dangerous activities that humanity collectively engages in (driving)

What happens when they keep seeing improvements in vision and now radar isn’t needed?

i think this could be the sticking point - i don’t think any extra sensors are needed, just like i don’t think seatbelts or air bags etc are needed… but… they’re helpful and improve the safety of people in and around the car

all the crazy headlines you see about it are idiots in cars being idiots

agree, and i totally think driverless is the way to go - humans are far worse drivers than machines are right now without any improvement

… however, better isn’t perfect, and when it comes to safety simply ignoring tools because of some belief that eventually it’ll be fine is misguided at best, and negligent at worst

If people wanna blame Elon for convincing people to be idiots, sure, you can do that

absolutely that too! their systems aren’t “drives itself no problemo” and that’s how they’re marketing it

i don’t think anyone is relying solely on radar - that’s the point. every sensor we have as fallible in some way (and so, btw, are our eyes - they can’t see through things but radar can in some cases!)

even if you CAN rely solely on vision, why hamstring yourself? with a whole sensor package, the algorithms know when certain sensors are useless - that’s what the training is for… knock 1 out, the others see that it’s in X condition and works around it

if you only have a single sensor (like cameras) then if something happens you have 0 sensors… our eyes are MUCH better at vision than cameras - just the dynamic range alone, let alone the “resolution”… and that’s not even getting into, as others have said, the fact that our brains have had millions of years of evolution to process images.

the technology for vision only just isn’t there yet. that’s just straight up fact. can it be? perhaps, but “perhaps in the future” is not “we should do this now”. that’s called a beta test, and you’re playing with human lives not just UI bugs - and there’s no good reason… just add extra sensors

the large majority of current self driving cars have radar, lidar, ultra sonic, and cameras. their detection sets overlap, and complement each other so they can see a wide array of things that others can’t. focusing on 1 and saying “it doesn’t see X” is a very poor argument when others see those things just fine

you’re not wrong, but also that’s a fantasy with current technology. meanwhile, cars are dangerous heavy hard boxes travelling around at high speed while we “get the technology right”, and that’s unacceptable

2 pass will encode a file once, and store a log of information about what it did… then on the 2nd pass it’ll use that information to better know when it should use more or less bitrate/keyframes - honestly i’m not too sure of the specifics here

now, it’s most often used to keep a file to a particular file size rather than increasing quality per se, but id say keeping a file to a particular size means you’re using the space that you have effectively

looks like with ffmpeg you do need to run it twice - there’s a log option

i mostly export from davinci resolve so i’m not too well versed in ffmpeg flags etc

doing a little more reading it seems the consensus is that spending more time on encoding (ie a higher preset) will likely give a better outcome than 2 pass unless you REALLY care about file size (like the file MUST be less than, but as close to 100mb)

if you’re planning on editing it, you can record in a very high bitrate and re-encode after the fact… yes, re-encoding looses some quality, however you’re likely to end up with a far better video if you record and 2x the h264 bitrate and then re-encode to your final h265 (or av1) bitrate than if you just record straight to h264 at your final bitrate

another note on this: lots of streaming stuff will say to use CBR (constant bitrate), which is true for streaming, however i think probably for re-encode VBR (variable bitrate) with multi-pass encode will give a good trade-off - CBR for live because the encoding software can’t predict what’s coming up, but when you have a known video it can change bitrate up and down because it knows when it’ll need higher bitrate