yelloworangefog

I really don’t think feeding more money to their flagrantly incompetent and greedy management right now is at all the best course of action if you want to see them do well. The absolute best thing you can hope for that the public backlash to their recent decisions is strong enough to manifest a financial incentive for those in charge at moz to reconsider their business strategy. By encouraging others to donate, you’re essentially rewarding this behavior and reaffirming that this strategy is financially lucrative for them.

This tactic of elevating your pet issue by linking it to a hypothetical catastrophe seems a bit unserious.

I definitely have to agree. Seeing papers with such blatantly clickbaity sounding titles gain a lot of traction is pretty disheartening.

I think you're being needlessly confrontational and defensive. There's no need to make personal accusations about my ability to do research.

I think you're massively exaggerating the stability of running unsupported versions of Android on old devices.

and literally any 10 year old android phone can run not just the latest security patches but even the latest android.

Not in my experience. Some models work decently, others have major stability issues.

I'm sorry, but cloud based speech recognition in itself would already be a red flag, even if Mozilla was doing it in-house. Outsourcing it to Google though? I feel like a company as ostensibly privacy-focused as Mozilla should really know better by now...

Ah, my bad...

Frankly I don't think Intel's track record affords them the privilege of having good faith be assumed with something like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I find it somewhat absurd that this idea of Trump refusing to concede to Biden is gaining so much traction in the public discourse.

I believe a much more dangerous and practical concern that nobody in the mainstream media seems willing to write about is that of the mass rioting and senseless violence which will inevitably occur if Trump wins. I'm guessing it will be orders of magnitude worse than what happened when he won in 2016, due to the elevated state of civil unrest we're experiencing. Not to mention the horrible effect it will have on the Covid situation.

Of course, I wouldn't expect a publication as consistently disreputable and biased as Buzzfeed News to even acknowledge such a possibility.

I'm not German, but I'm in favor of reducing light pollution in general. I like being able to at least kinda see the night sky.

Ah, 1999.

Thanks, that's good advice. I do oftentimes get arrogant and overestimate my ability, when I get the game dev itch. As with anything, there are some things you can only learn from experience. I think I have a pretty good amount of experience in the "playing games" department, but I sometimes erroneously assume that it will directly translate into my ability to make a good game. I can't count the number of times I've spent like a week straight working on a game project I'm passionate about, only to be met with the sobering realization that I've set my sights too high. You're absolutely right that I'll be more likely to make a good game if I set out to make ten of them. I need to get better at planning projects I'll actually be able to finish.

although games also lost their luster for me on the intervening years...

Yeah. I still like writing small games from time to time, mainly just to serve as programming exercises or for fun if I'm bored. I had to accept at some point that I don't have the wide variety of skills needed to make my any of my dream games on my own (and also the time commitment to make a whole game by yourself can be insane). If I were to make a serious effort to do so, I'm pretty sure I would just be disappointed and feel as though I'd wasted my time because the final product wouldn't live up to my fantasy. To realistically do it, I'd need to either sacrifice a lot of creative control by collaborating with people, or wait until I've eventually acquired enough skill in the areas of art and music et cetera to pull it off by myself.

That all rings pretty true for me. I wasn't a fan of math as a kid, or anything I associated with school really. I got into programming through Game Maker, because video games were something I legitimately cared about and liked. It pretty much changed my life and gave me something to aspire to.

Now that I've grown up, my primary interests lie in virtually all aspects of computer science, and I no longer consider making games to be much more than a hobby and passion project to spend my free time on. I only wish I'd have had a mentor of some kind in the world of CS, so that I could have gotten into it earlier in my childhood. Major props to you for being an awesome uncle :)

People need to be really careful when sharing papers like these and repeating their conclusions without the appropriate disclaimers. That's always the case, and especially during a time when so many people are unable to consult their doctors and resorting to self-medicating based on hearsay and overconfidence in their own ability to interpret scientific papers.

To be clear, I'm not saying vitamin D deficiency in relation to Covid mortality isn't a valid line of inquiry for the health community to take their research in. But from what I can tell, this is far outside the authors' areas of expertise.

I'd say this kind of thing in particular has the potentially to be even more dangerous than irresponsibly discussing the effects of something like hydroxychloroquine, because so many people don't realize how dangerous vitamins and other such 'natural' remedies can be when taken without the supervision of a medical professional.

And if you still insist on having an app, you should be using a third party one anyway. The official one is simply not a good experience in my opinion.

Although now that I think of it, maybe that's not such a good idea if you're using Android, given the lack of moderation on Google Play. I don't know what the third party Twitter app ecosystem is like on there, but I'd be cautious and meticulously vet the developer of any app you're considering trying.

A couple of the less debilitating yet still somewhat annoying downsides I've found:

If you have the "restore previous session" option enabled and have grown accustomed to Firefox remembering all the windows you had open before, you may find it annoying that it no longer remembers the size of your windows; it just puts them to the default size. Although now that I think of it, this might possibly be specific to the X11/Linux version, as other window systems might handle window size in such a way that it's not affected by this.

Also, if you like having websites automatically detect if your system uses a dark color scheme and adjust their CSS accordingly, that no longer works. Again, speaking from an X11/Linux perspective here.

Once a social platform is around long enough, it becomes the thing that old people use (since its original users grow older with it)

I think this is true, but it's worth also considering the factor of how well a platform is able to keep its users segregated into their own echo chambers wherein they feel as though the platform as a whole meets their standard of what is hip and cool

Take Instagram for example. Ten years on from its inception, it's still very, very popular with 18-24 year olds isn't it? Simultaneously though, as I'm sure many Americans with a ~45 year old mother will be able to attest to, it somehow maintains very strong popularity with middle aged women too.

My idea as to how it maintains its general appeal while catering to these two disparate audiences is that its software mechanisms are carefully designed to keep both audiences separated from each other. Consequently both feel as though it's 'their' platform.

It seems that when a social media platform fails to build an intergenerational iron curtain like this, you end up with something like Facebook, where both generations gravitate away from the platform.

I admit I could be completely off the mark here though, and applying my personal experience more broadly than I should.

I seem to remember reading something about a year ago about uBlock Origin being a security concern (like harvesting user data or something). Am I misremembering?

I'm really happy to be using Firefox again. I had abandoned it in favor of Chrome around 2014 because of how sluggish it had been getting. They really got it together with the quantum update though in my opinion. It still gets outperformed by Chrome (especially in the javascript department), but it's not a big enough difference to be a deal breaker for me, and I like feeling like I'm doing my small part to help combat Chrome's growing monopoly.

Anecdotally I can say this has been the case for me. Particularly when the lockdown first started. I think it’s because my daily routine changed dramatically all of a sudden. I had friends tell me they experienced the same thing.

The fine (and others like it) is a meaningless gesture. Unless companies like twitter start getting fined in amounts that aren’t pocket change to them, there is literally no incentive to change their abusive behavior. They make enough from abusing their users and absconding with their data to pay these paltry fines a hundred times over in most cases.

I leave my Adblock off for youtube a fair bit of the time. Not for any sense of ethical responsibility to help content creators, but because of how entertaining I find their failed attempts to target me. The ads are so bad, they’re oftentimes literal scams. I go out of my way to engage with the bad ads so I’ll get more like them. Luckily screwing with the ad algorithm doesn’t seem to have too great an effect on the video recommendation algorithm.

I had 1Password recommended to me by a friend, but the lack of Linux support was a deal breaker.

Now I've settled pretty comfortably into a different password manager. Even if the Linux port of 1P gets up to feature parity with the other versions, I don't see much of a practical reason to hassle with bothering to try it.

Granted I could be wrong. The long track record of 1P is definitely a plus. And maybe they have enough nice features to make it worth it. It's definitely a harder sell for me now though than it would have been if Linux had been a first class citizen when I was first choosing a password manager.

A courtesy not afforded to the largely not-rich, not-white general prison population.

This claim seems to be unsubstantiated and in fact blatantly false... Please take the care to do cursory research on the situation before blindly stoking the race flame. That kind of thing is the very last thing we need in the public discourse right now.