You are awfully correct. One of its messages was "Things to do today: die". And yes, LLMs have brought the same message.

That is not how I perceived it. The last released version had some really nasty JavaScript flaws and Netscape did not fix them. That left Internet Explorer as the only viable alternative.

It was really a shame, as Netscape sort of invented the modern internet, with encryption, sessions and their cookies, etc. Netscape had a brilliant team of programmers that really knew what they were talking about. But at some point the Netscape organization just gave up.

This is known as Wilhoits Law.

Firefox started as an alternative to Internet Explorer, after Netscape killed itself. Those two browsers were busy fighting the browser wars, where each would add a new non-standard feature every month to lure away people from the competition. That was the ugly side of competition.

Then came Firefox, which adhered to the HTML standard and the new related standards (like CSS). That gained traction very fast, as web developers loved it, and sometimes even made websites that were hostile to the non-standard browsers. Google Chrome came along, and Google understood that their browser should be standards compliant too. In the early days of Chrome, if Google wanted to add new features, they did this via the standards committees.

Then, Firefox got bought, sorry, sponsored by Google, and rapidly turned to shit, so people ran away screaming to Chrome.

Somehow, Mozilla still thinks they are independent while doing everything what Google wants them to.

To make a long story short, Internet Explorer died, and almost everything is now Chrome or Chrome-based. There no longer is any competition.

If there is any country in the world who must fear the implications of mandatory ID papers, it should be the UK.

It takes a very special mental illness to call that "free". Especially coming from a country that literally kills people based on metadata.

Neither is it an "industry". It's a craft, and always has been. In fact, most IT project failures are due to the fact that the work is managed like a conveyor-belt factory instead of the workshop of a craftsman.

I always call the new plug the TSB-C. We had a Universal Serial Bus, but the new plug is at best a Temporary Serial Bus.

You might want to check flying-whales. I can't see a working prototype yet, but they have designed an airship just for that.

Social media are more alive than democracy. In fact, social media play an important role in the decline of democracy.

If the choice is between that and cleaning up AI hallucination garbage, you'd be surprised.

On the contrary. China invested a lot in electric vehicles, while western car makers continued lobbying the politicians that anti-pollution laws would "harm the industry".

But the situation is also different politically. The right-wing western politicians believe that government "is only in the way" of a functioning market, while China believes the government is part of the market. So China not only subsidized electric vehicles and their development (*), they also bought the vehicles that were produced for public transport and local taxi services.

So while western car makers are still whining that they are hurt and keep on pulling the trigger of their foot-gun, China actually supported their industry forward instead of backward.

(*) The subsidies were given with the conditions that the batteries were made in China, so even foreign companies like Tesla profited from it.

I did not know 2nd hand Boeing 747s were that cheap nowadays. Or was that law not meant to "correct" the Qatar "tip"?

I was more thinking about Hex. It is so analog that it is even an analogy to a computer.

You mean the ones that are still there? Everyone I know who was on GitHub is moving to Codeberg or is already there. GitHub is enshittifying so hard that everyone is jumping ship.