uniqueid

The dev posted this some weeks back, but I found it too off-the-wall to believe. I wish I could go back and append a mea culpa to my old comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500301)

Of the four, I've only ever heard of SeaMonkey before. I'll definitely check them out though.

I'm currently using Brave to reply to this comment because it was already on my drive. I don't like Brave's philosophy and I don't like its proximity to Google. I'm using it as a stop gap till I find something better.

It's going to take me a few weeks of research to pick my new permanent browser. I want something far-removed from Google, but with an active enough developer community that it doesn't fall apart after an OS update or turn out to have a back-door hidden in the code base.

When I was still a Firefox user, I just ended up blocking any domain owned by mozilla. And by 'when I was still a Firefox user' I mean 'until approximately 12 hours ago.' What priorities and values Mozilla has left I don't seem to share.

I'm out!

I don't care how few users Firefox has. I do care that the product has become a pile of garbage. I already tolerate the dumb tab bar, the update nag screen that interrupts my work, the telemetry setting that doesn't actually disable telemetry, the web services I don't want like Pocket, the ads, the memory issues that hobble my machine when I stream video...

I won't move to a browser like Chromium with a connection to Google, but I'm moving to something. I'm done with Firefox.

  Humans can only focus on one thing at a time. So why are we spending money to display multiple things simultaneously?

'Google' is not the most common query on Google, just the most common search result.

The shift in company culture that I am thinking about is about how strongly people react to react to social justice issues, not really the issues themselves.

I think, deep down, Coinbase wants a tough, driven, mercenary workforce. If that's the workforce they get, POC or not, it has downsides.

If a company has a certain number of employees who are sort of flakey, idealistic types, it probably guards against employee turnover, departmental silos, fraud. You want some employees who sometimes do what they think is the right thing, for its own sake, and aren't so career-driven that they undercut others.

I predicted Coinbase would enter a vicious cycle in which the work culture increasingly promotes ass-covering and discourages conscientiousness.

Sometimes people who don't work for, or work with, a company with bad ethics never know better. Other times things get out of hand (like at Enron, Uber, Theranos, etc) and everyone finds out.

It's too early to alter my prediction about Coinbase. A company can thrive for a long time with a gross work environment like that.

Almost! The author is actually a self-described "anarcho-capitalist". He also dresses like Tweedledee for some reason.

Well, that seems perfectly reasonable to me. Just to clarify, I don't think I'm particularly prone to romanticize societies that Europeans colonized.

What changed my view about the world is thinking about the economics.

Take the US, for example. In the popular imagination, the success of America is all about entrepreneurial spirit, etc etc. But the other aspect is... four million square miles of (in a manner of speaking) undeveloped land! Entrepreneurial spirit is great, but literally having more natural resources than you know what to do with (didn't get around to developing California till the 1900s, for example) seems at least as important.

Given the past several centuries were a free-for-all for nations with empires, it doesn't surprise me that the colonized societies, whatever their inherent strengths and weaknesses, wound up in bad shape.

That way of looking at things is mostly wrong, but it is a belief that suited the winners, so it is a wide-spread belief.

I'm not keen to rebut it at much length because my previous comment already leaves the wrong impression: my point is less about the morality of the past few hundred years than the stupidity of the narrative we built around it.

If I did expand on things, I'd list off the usual examples (Conquistadors and gold, Chinese opium trade, slaughter of native Americans, ad nauseum).

I don't know how to make those points without sounding like I'm appealing to emotion. The actual point is that - though the Steven Pinkers and Hans Roslings might disagree - people subject to those conditions clearly are worse-off than before (and than today, compared to the nations who plundered them).

To the original point of the thread, the colonial powers attained such obscene wealth (ie: by stealing gold, oil, farming cotton with slave labor, etc) that even the poorest among us, until the past decade, was rich compared to the rest of the world.

  I sometimes consider the notion that, socially, 
  Western modernity was just reified feudalism: 
  everybody's a lord now!

For most of my life, people in the 'third world' lived in barely imaginable poverty while the rest of the world walked off with oil, lumber, precious metals, gems, historical artifacts, slave labor, etc. I was well out of highschool before I appreciated the connection between the squalor elsewhere, and the four or five previous centuries of pillaging that contributed to it.

That unpleasant state of affairs tempers my ability to feel triumphalist about 'first-world' nations ridding themselves of feudalism.

Either that or we have changed enough that we are now capable of being creative, in terms of both art and theorizing about prehistory. Personally I think it's the latter.

If we were capable of appreciating art 200,000 years ago, we also must have been incredibly lazy. How could well over another 150,000 years pass before we left signs that we were improving our technology? It doesn't make any sense.

Yes. I wrote 'probably' but there are too many unknowns to have much certainty about anything a century from now. For all I know, we'll start lobbing nukes around until the planet is a wasteland.

I personally eat meat, but I suspect very few people will a century from now - not meat from a slaughterhouse anyways.

No, we'll grow meat cheaply in labs, and the companies who produce it won't have much trouble blackening the reputation of real meat. Most people, even today, like to dwell neither on the death of the animals we eat, nor the cleanliness of the factory farms that provide us with our meat.

It probably will appall people in the future that we killed animals just to eat. They won't have first-hand experience of our time. They'll know, on a cerebral level, the technical reasons that fake meat was impractical, but, on an emotional level, our habits will disgust them.

If you're too young to know what OMNI Magazine was, you should do an image search for their covers. They had a similarly futuristic look, albeit more grandiose.

  Every major iOS update adds more functionality that 
  consumes more CPU cycles even in the background. 

The larger issue, in any case, is that Apple prohibits reverting an iPhone to a prior version of iOS.

This inexorably leads users of old devices to one day install that final update that turns their device into a turkey.

At that point the customer buys a new phone, a year or two before they intended, and the old phone, which is too slow to be useful as a back-up device or hand-me-down, goes into a landfill.

  Apple continues to support OS updates on the iPhone 6s, a device released almost 6 years ago

  The Monacelli guy comes across pretty badly 

There are sites like this one that attempt to categorize stories according to left/right bias (of course, there's no way to label the bias of a story that isn't itself biased) https://www.improvethenews.org

That is true, but someone could probably persuade me it's also for the greater good.

  > Duolingo's mission [...] to maximize the time spent on the platform doing pointless tasks

  >> What makes you say that?

Anyone who wanted to optimize quizzes for language-learning would alphabetize the palette, but Duolingo present words in a jumble: learners have to play 'Where's Waldo'.

By creating useless busy-work, such a design provides the illusion of language-learning. There are many other examples (eg: how effective are Duolingo's ubiquitous 'Type what you hear' exercises really?) but the word-palette design is particularly glaring.

Your comment merits a more thoughtful reply than this, but I discussed the same issue here some months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26876186) and it's hard to work up enthusiasm now.

That is not, in any way whatsoever, what I meant. I'm apparently inarticulate, but I like to think I'm not an asshole.

I revised the comment to correct the misquotation.

I'll settle at more than your 'major metros' and fewer than my 'most college towns' — although now that I think those two numbers over, it's probably not that large a delta to begin with ;)

I don't have any statistics, but there may well be fewer brick-and-mortar gay hang-outs today, precisely because the internet has given people other ways to meet.

I'm 'yes, but...' on both those points.

(1) is true, but I was thinking more about the persecution aspect than the community aspect. If being gay made life unbearable in a particular town, it was at least physically possible, if expensive, for a person to cross state-lines and start life fresh. Today people leave a trail that follows them globally and for a lifetime.

In terms of community, (2) is a little more bleak than the reality. I'm guessing in the 1980s, most college towns had at least a gay bar (or cafe, bookshop, whatever), and community formed around it.

My bad. I reread my comment, and I easily can see what it sounded like.