Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

Mozilla built an AI kill switch into Firefox after its users demanded one. Only 1% have used it. Another 3% turned off some AI features selectively. The rest left everything on. CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo says the point is not the percentage but the choice.

Every generation of computing believes the interface it loves will last forever. It never does. I saw information move from floppy disks to BBSs, from BBSs to the Web, from the Web to Flash, from Flash back to open standards, from websites to mobile apps, and now from search engines to AI chat interfaces. The Web will not vanish overnight, but the Web as we know it, the open place where people search, click, read, browse, publish, and discover, is already being replaced by something more convenient, more centralized, and much harder to escape.

It turns out that a _very_ long HDMI cable, a Steam Controller 2 and Bazzite on a second drive was all I needed to get a comfortable couch gaming experience.

Since miniaturization hasn’t advanced far enough to hide chips and batteries inside normal-looking frames, all of them have those thick rims. They bring to mind the late Shelley Berman’s glasses as Larry David’s father in Curb your enthusiasm.

Over the past few months I’ve been exploring what I think of as the agentic web stack — the emerging intersection of artificial intelligence with the open web. As part of that exploration, I built a small experiment for my personal website: an AI chatbot called Ask Ricmac. Its purpose is simple: instead of searching my site manually, a visitor can ask a question and receive an AI-generated answer based on the articles I’ve written over the years.

Simple RTSP (streaming image) server for the ESP32CAM. Easy configuration and monitoring through the web interface.

Display your OpenClaw / Clawdbot / MoltBot AI assistant's activity on a portable e-ink display in real-time using a Clawdbot skill.

Made an anonymous confession board that lives in your terminal. Go ahead and post your confession 🫶🏼

Probably the same issue using Fedora-KDE-Desktop-Live-43-1.6.x86_64.iso , using a nvidia card too (not sure if related). slitherer is crashing. I edited /usr/libexec/anaconda/webui-desktop: line 172: to DEFAULT_BROWSER_CMD=firefox and I was able to complete the installation. If there is interest in solving the bug, I can run the installer again to get the exact hardware info and stack/core dump for slitherer.

Workarounds Don’t start the installer (or quit it if you started it already). Start terminal (Konsole in KDE) and edit a config file: sudo nano /etc/anaconda/profile.d/fedora.conf Find this part: # The default browser for the Web UI. webui_web_engine = slitherer and change it to: # The default browser for the Web UI. webui_web_engine = firefox Close the editor (Ctrl+X → Y → Enter), and run the installer, either from a desktop launcher, or from a terminal: liveinst The installer should no longer crash when using drop-down lists.

I had this exact issue attempting to install Fedora 44 KDE live ISO on an older laptop with a GeForce GTX 970 GPU. I resolved it by forcing Anaconda to use Firefox instead of Slitherer. I can confirm that Firefox was the selected default browser, but for some reason the indicated variable doesn’t seem to work Instead of editing /usr/libexec/anaconda/webui-desktop I changed the following line inside /etc/anaconda/profile.d/fedora.conf: webui_web_engine = slitherer to webui_web_engine = firefox this allowed me to start Anaconda GUI normally and proceed with installing Fedora 44.