Hacker News: red_admiral

New comment by red_admiral in "Leaving Mozilla"

red_admiral — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 07:46:10 +0000

I'm going mainly off the OP, but Mozilla connect is the place I'd look:

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message...

New comment by red_admiral in "Leaving Mozilla"

red_admiral — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 07:40:16 +0000

The irony here is that after enough negative user feedback, they did make that one button, as an actual button not a config option. You can still change those options if you want AI but not in the sidebar, for example.

New comment by red_admiral in "Leaving Mozilla"

red_admiral — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 07:31:38 +0000

There's a sort of precedent for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_Bridge

State won't fund your bridge repair? You can always ask the Soviet Union.

New comment by red_admiral in "Leaving Mozilla"

red_admiral — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:43:10 +0000

Oh, I agree - firefox was losing market share long before AI was a thing.

I meant to use that as a recent example of the kind of decisions that Mozilla leadership repeatedly makes, that don't match up what their users want.

New comment by red_admiral in "Leaving Mozilla"

red_admiral — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:24:49 +0000

Hey, we have the evil Microsoft empire :) Or the Apple alternative.

Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.

Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.

New comment by red_admiral in "Leaving Mozilla"

red_admiral — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:18:25 +0000

The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback.

I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.

New comment by red_admiral in "Leaving Mozilla"

red_admiral — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:13:47 +0000

Respect. This is what Firefox could have been.

In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai:

browser.ml.enable, browser.ml.chat.enabled, browser.ml.chat.sidebar, browser.ml.chat.menu, browser.ml.chat.page, extensions.ml.enabled, browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled, browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled, browser.ml.smartAssist.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled, pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload, pdfjs.enableGuessAltText

A bit of community feedback later, and we've got one big "off" button, and me wondering which footgun the executives will shoot themselves with next.

New comment by red_admiral in "Law Enforcement's "Warrior" Problem (2015)"

red_admiral — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:09:31 +0000

Actual military officer (at the time of writing) doesn't thing much of "warrior mindset" even _in the army_: https://angrystaffofficer.com/2016/12/14/stop-calling-us-war...

Worth reading together with the OP article.

New comment by red_admiral in "New privacy frontier: Europe eyes crackdown on smart glasses"

red_admiral — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:59:36 +0000

The EU's tech laws have some good parts and some bad parts. If this goes through, I personally will consider it a very good part.

New comment by red_admiral in "CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers"

red_admiral — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:45:53 +0000

For the state of new cancer-killing drugs and bottlenecks getting them approved, see also the top few posts on https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/archive

The post on AI and and cures for cancer is https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/a-response-to-dario-amo... .

New comment by red_admiral in "Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers"

red_admiral — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 10:39:46 +0000

It feels to me like AI agents should be their own security principals and use access tokens generated speficically for them on the repos or orgs that they need access to. Handing an AI agent an access token "minted" for a human's account feels to me like the new "write the password on a post-it".

New comment by red_admiral in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

red_admiral — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:25:25 +0000

Yes, we've moved from town squares to private parties - whatsapp chats, discord servers, even IRC still exists. (Bluesky is a bit of an exception but they'll need to get enough stable revenue at some point.)

Interestingly, in-person "nerd" events seem to be going just fine - LARP, D&D, board games, historical reenactment, trading card games and tournaments like M:tG, and a lot more.

New comment by red_admiral in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

red_admiral — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:18:42 +0000

Because the BBC now has to justify its licence fee to the government, so they need engagement metrics and all the rest like what proportion of X demographic they're reaching.

Back in the day, both the BBC and universities were funded by the government without the stereotype of a fresh MBA graduate in charge. Back in the day before MOOCs, the BBC produced programmes for the Open University because that was the way to get video content out to the nation.

> puff pieces about the royals

have been on the front page of the tabloids since way before the internet.

New comment by red_admiral in "The EU Open Source Strategy"

red_admiral — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:00:54 +0000

The "legitimate purposes" pre-ticked hidden box on some cookie dialogs, for one.

New comment by red_admiral in "The EU Open Source Strategy"

red_admiral — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:50:24 +0000

So maybe BSD + nice GUI is the solution :)

New comment by red_admiral in "Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight"

red_admiral — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 17:52:40 +0000

Oh you haven't seen the four-part series on iron (https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...) that ended up with parts (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum).

The Helm's Deep series ended up with 8 posts. Well worth reading.

New comment by red_admiral in "GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS"

red_admiral — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:21:47 +0000

They can detain you and ask for an order from a judge: https://reeds.co.uk/insights/i-give-police-phone-pin/ and then you still have the right to consult a lawyer first.

I presume any journalist or competent protest organiser in the UK knows the details better than me, but they can't just stop you on the sidewalk (UK: pavement) and ask you to hand over your PIN on the spot.

I think the "put you in jail" thing is a misunderstanding of the general "police can detain someone suspected of a crime" principle, but then they still need to get a judge to approve them holding you longer than a few* days.

(*) The rules are slightly different for terrorism suspects.

New comment by red_admiral in "GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS"

red_admiral — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:03:34 +0000

There are a lot of media reports that if ICE don't like your face, they can be a bit ... cavalier ... about citizen's rights.

New comment by red_admiral in "GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS"

red_admiral — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:01:24 +0000

Something's off about this one.

Using GOS itself is not a crime, unless you use it to commit crimes.

New comment by red_admiral in "Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight"

red_admiral — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 10:25:22 +0000

That sort of happened in a brief period in mediaeval England when they gave everyone longbows.