Then that’s very concerning, because IIRC that is actually Mozilla’s largest funding source and losing that could easily threaten Firefox.

Government prosecutors had argued during the trial that Google illegally monopolized control over the internet search market, spending tens of billions of dollars each year on contracts to providers such as Apple and Samsung in order to become the default search engine on their devices. Justice department lawyers accused Google of using its dominant market position – they alleged the company controls about 90% of the US search market – to crowd out rivals and boost its own advertising revenues.

Does this mean that their deal with Mozilla was ruled to be an antitrust violation?

I’m currently rebuilding my math foundation and part of that process was tracking down high quality educational resources with passionate instructors, rigor, and entertainment factor (because I want stuff to recommend to parents). I did eventually find something that was better than what I got in grade school, but I have to say that the Pythagorean Theorem just isn’t going to be as interesting as social media feeds and entertainment products custom tailored to my preferences. No teacher is realistically going to be able to compete with the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry for attention and tech companies are abusing psychology research to make their shit as addictive as possible. It’s not the biggest problem with the US educational system, but it is one of many, so I’m down with restricting smartphone access at schools.

Based on my interactions with teachers, the administrative class that runs these schools are cowards who don’t want to deal with angry parents, nor the liability if the phones get confiscated and then stolen/damaged. There’s also a lot of parents who want to text their kids during the school day and get mad when they can’t. A lot of teachers have given up since the higher ups won’t back them up. This happened around 2015 or so, when smartphones became ubiquitous.

Firefox has been great since Quantum released. They finally fixed the performance issues and it’s still more flexible in what it can do than the Chromium browsers.

I’d say that the Indie game experience can still match that. Doesn’t have to be old titles.

Any organization that’s forced to pursue endless growth is going to end up enshittifying eventually, because there’s only so much innovation and wow factor that you can do to make a product appealing before you hit a talent/demographic/creativity limit. Not to mention that infrastructure and operating costs are massive when you hit that level of scaling and that needs to be funded somehow. Eventually they’ll be forced to start extracting more value out of their existing userbase to keep the revenue growth going. Going IPO is mostly just a telegraph for how things are going behind the scenes.

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture.

Something that has become very apparent to me over the past year of migrating away from the big 6 sites into the dark forest is that, no honestly, the internet isn’t that; the big 6 sites are that. Places like Neocities still exist and have lots of traffic and you can go there and have an interesting time. I’ve encountered more cultural diversity on the Fediverse than I had in the past decade of using Reddit. There’s still cool stuff and interesting communities; it’s just hard to find because search engines are increasingly useless. We need better discoverability; if we fix that, then we’re golden.

Well if it’s any consolation, the Fediverse is basically the spiritual successor to that time period on the internet: now with interesting tech improvements.

It’s a trade off that we’ll probably have to take unless we want to deanonymize the internet.

We’re probably lucky that AI spammers haven’t discovered the Fediverse yet, but if the Fediverse does actually become big enough for mainstream use, we’ll see Twitter level reaction spam in no time, and no amount of CAPTCHAs will be able to stop it.

I was thinking about this the other day. We might have to move to a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances at some point.

There will probably be mounting pressure to deanonymize the internet, like with what we’re seeing via age verification legislation in various places.

Funnily enough, I was just talking about this with someone a few days ago. I’ve definitely retreated into my fair share of dark forests to escape the spam, bots, and astroturfing. I do wonder if the Fediverse gets popular enough, if we’ll have to retreat into a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances. It definitely feels like anything that’s open and accessible (and anonymous) is just asking to get turned into a steaming dumpsterfire at this point.

TFW even the vending machine is spying on you. We really gotta make it mandatory to use “dumb” devices in public.

Finally, pokemon taken to its logical conclusion.

Perhaps we need a federated search engine - one you can add custom algorithms to…

Well, something that can be done is having search engines that grab from a wide variety of sources. The go-to FOSS example of this would be SearXNG, so if someone is interested in a project like that, then this would be a good starting point.

I agree with the author for the most part, but I don’t think it’s just “us.” I would say that discoverability in general is just a lot worse now due to SEO gentrification and search engines facing enshittification. There’s still cool projects like Neocities around, but if it weren’t for networking I’d have no idea they exist. When I type “build a website” into DuckDuckGo and StartPage, I just get links to squarespace, wix, godaddy, and a few listicles. In order to curate cool stuff, you have to be able to find it first; have new tools popped up that facilitate this? What are the new heuristics for discovery?

I put my boomers on Fedora with GNOME a couple years ago and there hasn’t been any issues with that. Especially now that a lot of stuff that used to be desktop apps has moved to the browser, it’s more viable than ever.

Clearly the wizards at Nintendo know something about optimizing games for the Switch that others don’t.

Could someone share this information with GameFreak? The beats shouldn’t drop as hard as the FPS.

This comment chain is superb discourse to start off today’s internetting with.

It’s just Twitter run by the old CEO. There’s some promises that it’s going to be decentralized at some point, but no real motion towards that yet AFAIK. Anyone on the Fediverse should just pick Firefish or Mastodon over it.

Mozilla has been a big advocate for a decentralized web for awhile now. Joining the Fediverse seems like a natural move for them; honestly surprised they didn’t do it sooner.

I’ve been enjoying Piped for awhile now; it actually shows me a feed that’s exclusively my subscriptions and has SponsorBlock built in.

Yep, instead of it being a playground to have fun and community, it’s a Very Serious Thing^TM where everyone is either striving for that cash or trying to produce domestic terrorists. It’s so shit.

Build a checker for AI-generated content too please!

I know it’s not what you want to hear, but you should really learn JS first and then go through the handbook you linked to learn TS. As you’ve noticed, the majority of the resources for TypeScript will assume that you’re already proficient with JS and you’ll have an easier time with the ecosystem if you take that approach.

1. Mozilla’s goals for the web line up quite nicely with my own.
2. The performance is good for what I want.
3. The extension API is more powerful than Chrome’s.
4. Outside of the Apple ecosystem, it’s the last major alternative to the Chrome skins.
5. It isn’t actively trying to cripple adblockers.

I had a feeling this was going to happen when I saw that there were authors namedropping libgen while going after the AI people. Might wanna get all your last minute downloads out of the way now before the service gets disrupted.

I prefer strong static typing for the most part. I find it difficult to mentally model code when it’s not clear what exactly is being passed to functions and whatnot. Can also use them to help ensure code correctness. TypeScript has been a welcome addition to my projects over the years and honestly I want them to implement more functionality like pattern matching expressions.

Back when Chrome was the new kid on the block and people were switching to it from Firefox, Chrome gapped Firefox super hard performance-wise pre-Quantum/e10s. Firefox was still a single-threaded browser that would lock up if a tab had particularly nasty JS. The extensions also broke all the time because while XUL extensions could do anything, even tie into the actual browser frame, that was a maintenance nightmare that made it difficult to change anything and even harder to parallelize.

In the post-Quantum era here in 2023, you’re definitely right that there’s no real reason to switch from Firefox to Chrome. The practical performance gap has been closed, the extension system has stabilized and offers more functionality than Chrome’s implementation, it’s not actively trying to sabotage adblockers and anti-tracking measures, and is just all around better about privacy. It’s time to call the powerusers and techies home.

Firefox gang rise up!

Here’s a cheap Sandisk one and here’s a cheap Sony one. I’d probably just install foobar2000 on your phone though. They also sell USB CD drives that you can pick up for cheap. I’m sure there’s plenty of Android apps that can rip CDs.

Half of the videos they recommend to me are things I’ve already watched. Sometimes there’ll just be blank slots like they couldn’t find any content to recommend. It’s so shit now.

Yeah, I’ve also been returning somewhat to how I used the internet before modern social media (and it has been nicer).

I’m getting the feeling that within the next five years I’m going to be abandoning YouTube and just living without video content going forward.

About time. I’ve been using well-federated Firefish instances to do my searching because that platform supports that feature, but now I won’t have to anymore.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps has gorgeous art. The Luma Pools area is my personal favorite.

I wonder if we’ll ever see people who know what they’re doing legislate this stuff. This is just pathetic. They couldn’t even hit the right target.

You know, it’s wild that poorly reviewing a GPU cooler can lead to stuff like this coming out.

But why? Nintendo controllers are already pretty small.