• 9 Posts
  • 659 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • You can always keep Chromium installed for the odd site that doesn’t work in Firefox (my daily driver). I do web development and test in every browser and I almost never encounter sites or features that don’t work in FF. The only one I can recall is something in the Azure Portal, probably because Microsoft wants you using Edge.

    Typically, Safari is the laggard and any developer worth their salt would make sure their site works on iPad and iPhone. When a new web standard is released, usually Chromium supports it first but even then, not always. And web developers usually don’t use features that aren’t implemented across the board yet. I know I go to caniuse.com before I use something fresh out the oven.



  • Scam attempts. This may be better elsewhere but in the U.S., every phone call I get is either a scam attempt or my mom (who is old enough that I worry about her getting elder scammed like when my grandma paid a stupid amount for silver coins).

    I’ve never gotten scammed (except small stuff like carnival games or whatever) but if I were president I’d make ending scams — even false advertising ones — my top priority. You’ll be able to pick up a call from and unknown number after my first 100 days: that’s my promise to the people of America.


  • And, yet, in that time, consumers paid more for telecommunication services and basically the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills. Bell Labs being a success story doesn’t mean Ma Bell shouldn’t have been broken up.

    If consumers are paying extra to a monopoly anyway, just fund university labs and non-university research agencies (which we do). We have dozens of equivalents to Bell Labs. There’s no reason to rely on monopolists for innovation.


  • The open source project is fine. It’s in no way perfect but it powers a shocking percentage of the world’s web sites. It’s showing its age, is bloated, and has constant security issues but if you know how to use it, it gets the job done.

    Lately, the CEO of Wordpress.com — who also heads the Wordpress.org foundation for the open source project — went after a popular hosting service claiming they were basically making billions and contributing nothing to the open source project. But from the outside, he went about it in a very aggressive and seemingly irrational way.



  • I like to watch sports and, other than soccer, the ads are relentless and so repetitive. When there’s a tournament or playoff, companies will make one annoying ad and show it seemingly every commercial break. Currently, in the U.S. we have a major election so there’s the most vile political ads shown hundreds of times. Those are definitely the worst but online sports betting also recently became legal in many states and their ads are the 2nd worst after political ones in terms of being so dishonest, they should be illegal.

    In terms of other type of ads, I hate 99% of outdoor ads. Billboards are literally made to distract you while driving and now they have electronic ones that change even at busy interchanges. If they didn’t already exist and you proposed the idea of putting distracting shit next to busy highways, people would think you were a sociopath.

    I relentlessly avoid ads on the web and on streaming services. If I find a service useful, I don’t mind paying to get rid of them. But you can’t really avoid the ones during live TV events or on a road to where you have to drive. (A long time ago, I had a TiVo where the remote had a skip 30 seconds button. That was amazing. Internet wasn’t ubiquitous yet so I could record something live, start watching in the middle, and skip all the ads. I was like a kung fu master with that button. I learned exactly how many times to tap for each type of commercial break.)



  • As a practical matter, this is less concerning to me than data breaches like the Equifax one where my social security number and everything else were compromised. I can think of ways 23 And Me data can be misused but, aside from police (who could get the data anyway), most of them are kind of theoretical or contingent on technological developments.

    Like, 23 And Me data going to the highest bidder is obviously disturbing but I’m not sure it’s an immediate danger in the same way as all our SSN’s being sold on the dark web. I’d rather nationalize credit reporting agencies than the unprofitable ancestry report company.



  • It might be as close to a perfect game as it gets. I love that you can turn off the HUD and it’s still completely playable. Nintendo is one of the few companies that puts so much care into their open world that you can just explore and talk to people and get all the information you need to complete the game.

    For modern games, I also love Nier: Automata and Horizon Zero Dawn for the complex stories and creativity but Breath of the Wild is just so perfectly executed. It’s sort of like classic Pixar movies where it might be rated G but still manages to appeal to adults.