I’ve been saying this for ages. Even as someone who’s more-or-less against the current implementation of AI, I think people who truly believe in AI should be fighting the hardest against bad uses of it. It gives AI a worse black eye every time something like this happens.

“Only those evil live to see their own likeness in stone.”

It’s not illegal as long as you’re not trying to get it out of circulation, advertise, or pass off one denomination as another. So deface away.

(note: I am not a lawyer, do not believe some random person on the internet)

I’m pretty sure the science says it’s more like 20-30. I know personally, if I try to work more than about 40-ish hours in a week, the time comes out of the following week without me even trying. A task that took two hours in a 45-hour “crunch” week will end up taking three when I don’t have to crunch. And if I keep up the crunch for too long, I start making a lot of mistakes.

I’m mostly just frustrated that the best option has now become merely the lesser evil.

I’m sticking with Gecko for sure. Trying out Waterfox over the weekend on desktop, and Fennec F-Droid on my phone.

Yep. I’m furious at Mozilla right now. But when the Firefox Phone was in development, they were one of the web’s heroes.

The Firefox Phone should’ve been a real contender. I just want a browser in my pocket that takes good pictures and plays podcasts.

I’m not the person you’re replying to, but “weaker locks” feels like something you can make allowances for or work around. “Extra keys” feels like the Damoclean threat that it is.

100%. I can’t decide whether I think the organization being dissolved completely is a good idea or not, but I’m at least open to it.

Sorry, I realized I’m using my personal jargon in public again. When I said “AI,” I meant this overhyped put-it-in-your-mouse garbage. When I’m talking about the actually useful stuff, I usually call it “ML.”

Of course you have no reason to know that or care. My apologies.

Hmm. Maybe. Though then you start pushing that maternal mortality number up; and while, of course they don’t actually care about the lives of these people, they’d probably care that they’re depleting their “breeding stock” (ew).

I’m still gobsmacked by that number, though. 800 million births per year. That’s half all childbearing women pregnant every year; one thing I didn’t think about earlier is, with recovery time, that means that literally every woman would have to be pregnant every other year.

That would utterly torpedo our economy. We’d be basically losing a quarter of the workforce, all at once, and we’d never get them back.

See, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he meant economic growth (though that sort of requires a commensurate birth rate growth, but we can leave that aside for now), but this kind of makes that feel like an unmerited concession.

I think they meant the economy, not population,

About halfway through this research bender, I realized that. But I was having too much fun to stop. I justified it with–there’s really no way to sustain 10% annual economic growth without a 10% annual birth rate. You just have to have those workers, homeowners, economic entities, businesspeople, etc. being born and joining the economy.

but still, quality comment right here.

People who don’t do math are doomed to talk nonsense. And you just used math to showcase the stupidity. Bravo, sir.

You’re very kind. Thank you.

One of my pet peeves is all the people concerned about the birth rate.

We are at a time in the history of the planet where there have never existed as many homo sapiens as there are today, and that record will get broken every day for the next 20-50 years.

That’s part and parcel with our remarkably low death rate, too. In fact, our death rate is so low that our replacement rate could actually go below 2 and the population would still keep growing for a few years. That’s unprecedented through human history.

Of all the times to want a higher birth rate since we have existed as a species, this just ain’t the time where it makes any kind of logical sense.

It definitely isn’t our biggest problem as a species. Either way, honestly; we don’t need to try to make it bigger or smaller.

Overhyped AI is going to fail, and it can’t happen soon enough. The Mozilla leadership really needs to pay attention to that reality.

You really didn’t address the sunk cost problem, but honestly I don’t really care anymore. You think what you want.

The highest population growth rate in recorded human history was sometime between 1965 and 1970, when the population was growing at about 2.1% annually. It’s down around 1.1% now. 10% hasn’t been realistic since we went from 10 humans to 11 humans.

(Note: I go on research benders. This particular rabbit hole (pun intended) became really interesting from a terrifying sci-fi perspective; kind of like a reverse Children of Men. As I wrote it up, it started to feel like an apocalyptic xkcd What If.)

So, think about the sheer numbers–for a 10% growth rate, we’d need more than eight hundred million births per year. There are only 1.9 billion women of childbearing age on Earth, which means that a little under half of every woman between 15 and 49 would need to be pregnant every single year in order to make that target (a little more than that to account for women who aren’t able to be pregnant for whatever reason, a little less than that to account for multiple births, let’s just say those will wash out).

Let’s imagine that this happened this year. Right now, we have about 132 million births annually. That would mean that we’d need about seven times the number of maternity wards, fully staffed. Five years after this unprecedented baby boom, we’d need to begin increasing the number of classrooms worldwide by a factor of 7 as well, which would mean that seven times the number of college students would have to go into education this year. We’d need to massively ramp up food production, probably starting sometime in the late 90s. We’d need to massively scale up infrastructure and housing on a Chinese scale. In 2050, our annual birth rate would equal our 2025 population, meaning we’d be adding an additional everyone who’s here right now every single year.

Interestingly, this would cause a precipitous and sustained spike in our death rate, since 0.2% of women worldwide die during childbirth. This means 1.6 million women dying in childbirth every year between 2025 and 2040 (which almost exactly balances out the number of women coming to childbearing age during those years to replace them), or the first couple months of COVID happening perpetually, but for women in childbearing. Every woman would have, on average, seventeen children by age 49, and if you know 33 women under the age of 49, one of them will die in childbirth.

In 2040, we’d have to start ramping up production again as the ten percent growth rate would begin forcing (because that’s obviously the only way for it to work) half of the 400 million women born in 2025 to start having their own children. Fifteen years later, do it again. Fifteen years later, do it one more time.

But you can probably stop worrying about it by that point. Studies are incredibly mixed on the total carrying capacity of Earth, ranging from 2 billion to 1.024 trillion, but a 10% growth rate would get us to even the most gigantic estimates within 50 years.

At some point, the pendulum begins swinging the other way; whether due to famine, water shortages, pandemics, climate change, or any number of other factors, there will be a huge increase to the global death rate once again. Our population would stabilize at our global carrying capacity; and from that point on, Earth’s line can never go up again without the line going down first.

It’s so patently ludicrous. Just total nonsense.

Edit 1: About halfway through this research bender, I realized that he was probably talking about the economy, not population. But I was having too much fun to stop. I justified it with the fact that there’s really no way to sustain 10% annual economic growth without a 10% annual birth rate. You just have to have those workers, homeowners, economic entities, businesspeople, etc. being born and joining the economy.

But then the OP pointed me toward the actual quote, which honestly makes it sound like he really was talking about population.

Edit 2: Also, this wouldn’t solve any economic problems! In fact, it would cause more. Half all childbearing women pregnant every year, with recovery time, that means that literally every woman would have to be pregnant every other year.

That would utterly torpedo our economy. We’d be basically losing a quarter of the workforce, all at once, and we’d never get them back.

You’re ignoring everything else I said because you don’t agree with one semantic point of a partial response, so here it is again.

Most of the time, a company can’t afford to just not release a product they worked on. They talked about why it didn’t turn out the way they wanted to in the announcement stream (the laws of physics), but assuming they had already done the investment into the R&D to produce the box, they can’t just decide “never mind.” If they do it too much, they go out of business.

EDIT: also, you said “bit by bit” in your original message. You don’t do things bit by bit if you’re not trying to be sneaky.

…yes? It is?

Sorry. It’s not just marketing if you can buy them.

And that means they should?

Of course not! What do you think I’m arguing for? I’m saying that if they were trying to make some kind of sneaky change, they wouldn’t have taken five minutes to talk about it in their big event.

“Aw sorry, we really tried to make something” doesn’t cut it. If you can’t do it, don’t do it. Simple as.

This ignores the realities of running a company. Once you’ve sunk development dollars into a project, you can’t just walk away from it. You have to recoup your investments somehow, or you just end up hemorrhaging money and go out of business and can’t do anything ever again.

How many products that are antithetical to their entire stated purpose do they need to make before you see that as a red flag?

Well it needs to not be a single component in a product that’s a tiny minority of their business, for one thing.

What exactly can you upgrade iteratively?

At the price point, being able to upgrade memory, storage, and motherboard is unique. And I know you say that it’s the “vast majority” of the cost, but I just bought a Framework 13 last month (I know, great timing) and the mainboard was right around half the total cost. So sure, the most expensive single component, but it means that I can upgrade to a better-performing machine in the future for half the price and not need to junk everything else.

Framework laptops just use USB C dongles for everything.

Correct. But honestly, having the swappable I/O is fantastic; over the last five laptops I’ve owned, I’ve only upgraded because I wanted new capabilities once. For the other four, it’s because a component failed; and in two of them it was a USB port, while in a third it was a charging port. Being able to replace those would have extended the lives of those machines substantially.

fewer vendors to buy a dongle from

Actually, they’re open-source (not proprietary). And since they’re USB-C, you could probably just take out the card and plug a dongle right in there if you really needed to (I have not tried this).

Framework: 999 + 399 = 1398 for two generations of a laptop

I’m planning to hold on to this device for a whole lot longer than two generations. If I can, I’d like to hang on to it for 15-20 years. The laptop I upgraded from was five years old or so (and would still be going strong if it didn’t have a port that was about to die and un-upgradeable RAM and storage), and my desktop is 13 years old and still going strong, so this isn’t terribly unreasonable. I would estimate that I’ll end up pouring about $2000, all told, into this laptop over that time period, likely replacing 3-4 laptop purchases and giving me a better machine during that time period.

that assumes that your display and keyboard held up and didn’t need replacing,

Both of which would be cheaper than a new device. A new display is $150 and a new keyboard is $30. I don’t know about the longevity of each component, but based on the research I did it’s definitely not worse than an off-the-shelf machine.

you liked all the default dongles Framework gave you (which is apparently just four USB C ports… to plug into the four USB C ports on the laptop),

There aren’t any defaults. When you spec out your kit, you choose which cards to purchase. Replacing them costs about $10. (EDIT: The USB-C ones cost $10. The other ones are variously priced between $10-40, and then there are some storage expansions that cost more because they’re basically SSD in the expansion card form factor).

and, most importantly, that Framework didn’t change their form factor

They’ve only done that once since they launched, across six updates to the components. When they made that upgrade, they offered a $90 top cover to bring first gen devices up to second gen specs.

(I am not sure if they did for the 16 inch laptops to support the “modular” keyboards).

There’s only been one generation of the 16 inch laptops, and they’ve always had the modular keyboards. The refresh they announced yesterday is just to components, not to chassis.

Every spare dongle or repaired/upgraded part costs money.

Yep, and I’m fine with that because it means that I can spec it out the way I want; I don’t have to pay for I/O that I’ll never use. My old laptop had an SD card reader and a DisplayPort output; I literally never used either. The one I had before it had a SATA connector on the external I/O, and a couple of other pieces of nonsense that I didn’t want or need. Actually, thinking back, I don’t know if I’ve ever owned a laptop (until this one) where I actually used all of the ports.

And I don’t really fault them too much for not letting you actually swap CPUs since that was basically something only the sickest of sickos did

Yeah, I think swappable CPUs on a laptop are a thing of the past. I hope I’m wrong, but I just don’t see it coming back.

I do worry that this just encourages people to hoard parts

I DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM

I CAN STOP WHENEVER I WANT TO