"get offended" is just what the clickbait news cycle made of it. It was based on the post at [1], and this is all it said:

> We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our “theory of the mind” that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other

[1] https://snscratchpad.com/posts/looking-ahead-2026/

Are you sure you have the correct reference?

I think everyone else is relating to

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-bans-...

When a CEO says "We need to get beyond the arguments of X" it is universally a polite, PR-scrubbed way of saying, "Please stop talking about X, it is hurting our business" which is how the media interpreted it.

Interestingly that seems to be in response to [1], which might indeed be the trigger for this.

[1] https://doublepulsar.com/microsoft-vibing-capturing-screensh...

Heh, looks like it's not in its own training data: https://flipbook.page/n/d739a0bbc3664ba2aad331c90fef7406

Yes, but that service is running locally.

It's more like criticising a criminal when they are helping some grandma across the street, thereby treating them more harshly than the criminals that don't do that.

(Also known as the "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics": https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/ethics/2015-06-24-jai-theco... )

I think "No, this was not funded by donations".

Took me a bit to find, so here's it quoted:

> Thunderbolt is funded through a dedicated investment from Mozilla and is being developed by a separate team focused on enterprise AI products, distinct from Thunderbird’s donation-supported consumer product work.

Looks like still a bit early for me, but if you add an RSS feed to your blog, I would at least be reminded to check it out again later :)

That was a different user who wrote that.

Yeah, I didn't mean them specifically, more a general "you".

Ah fair enough.

That's basically how you could describe what happened. Those competent people are using Mozilla's infrastructure and trademarks, but otherwise running on donations.

Then how come everything they've done in the last 10 years has been garbage?

I'm not a Thunderbird user myself, and obviously everyone's experiences are different, but I've seen lots of people happy with Thunderbird's development. And just the fact that they've ensured that k9mail is still maintained seems like an objective win, even if it's now called Thunderbird. Exchange support is also something I've been hearing people wish for in non-Outlook email clients in general for ages.

  > just the fact that they've ensured that k9mail is still maintained seems like an objective win, even if it's now called Thunderbird.

Not if you liked k9 and wanted it to not get turned into trash. It's just a matter of time. Personally I'd rather see k9 not maintained - it works perfectly well and has for ages - than see it ruined by mozilla like everything else.

k9mail's developer called it a day, so this is still strictly the better outcome. If you want an unmaintained version, why not just install the old version?

That is indeed extremely likely to happen

calling it garbage seems kinda harsh, but I think they are moving more to using a javascript rendering method instead of xul. I remember reading about it a while back. I don't really like it either and one of the first updates from back then broke a lot of UI that had been working ok. I am not really sure what the problems are with working with xul though, but I think firefox moved off it a long time ago too. I feel like thunderbird's user base is more the type to want to use thunderbird because it runs like a local first desktop style app as an alternative to using a web interface to their email. At least that's what I like about it.

  > they are moving more to using a javascript rendering method instead of xul

Yeah, that's what I said: garbage.

  > I am not really sure what the problems are with working with xul though

I'm sure they'll yell "for teh securitah!" in a bunch of vague fearmongering, just like they did with firefox. But the #1 and #2 problems are that it's not shiny and new and the CADT brigade[1] only knows javascript.

  > I think firefox moved off it a long time ago too

I wouldn't call it "a long time ago", but I guess that depends on your perspective.

And that's the moment when firefox became garbage - just another chrome-alike, except slower and more resource-hungry. It had been getting worse for a decade prior to that, but dropping xul and breaking a ton of my extensions and customisability was the (large) straw that broke the camel's back. Sound familiar yet?

  > I feel like thunderbird's user base is more the type to want to use thunderbird because it runs like a local first desktop style app as an alternative to using a web interface to their email. At least that's what I like about it.

Exactly. Which is why moving their UI to a worse, javascript-powered, uncustomisable, web-alike trash UI is a bad thing. And a big part of why everything they've done in the last ~10 years has been garbage. And why I'll almost certainly be switching to something that isn't thunderbird next time I'm forced to upgrade it.

(forgive my tone, nothing against you, I just get emotional when morons take an excellent piece of software I've been using for decades and turn it into broken, unusable trash)

[1] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html