A cause for conCERN

Honestly, the red dot is larger than I’d have guessed, and I would’ve expected the 40% to be a bit larger itself.

Still not livable, though, with a population density of around 61.243 people per square kilometer, which is only 25% more than the current highest population density present in the world (Croix-des-Bouquets City, Tahiti). The gross area of the dot (c. 2221 km2) is incomparable with the area of the record-setting city (2 km2), but is comparable to Karachi (2147 km2).

Of course it’s the owner that loses out. Maybe he even has to attend the funeral!

Imagine how much that must cost!

How exactly do you expect every single privacy “enthusiast” to inspect source code?

A privacy “enthusiast” is not the same as a privacy “expert”. And even then, a “privacy expert” doesn’t need to be a genius programmer - or even one at all - they can be lawyers, historians or journalists.

Knowing how to code is hard. Knowing reading someone else’s code is even harder. Vetting code for security is even harder than that.

Not to mention the fact that the Firefox source is enormus, dwarfing kernel.org, a huge project with an incredible amount of contributors.

Expecting every privacy “expert” to be able to fully understand every single line of code in a project is divorced from reality. Expecting it from anyone merely interested in it is asinine.

Not even a genius security researcher would be capable of vetting the source of something as giant as Firefox on their own. Sure, it’s a great passion project which many have taken up and learned many things from it, but it just isn’t practical for literally anyone.

The Open source community is just that - a community. And any good community sticks together. A deeply rooted interst of this community is to spread its message and accomplishments to everyone, “experts”, “enthusiast” or “neither” alike.

Any community benefits most from active members who wish it good. It also benefits from members being varied, and thus able to give their own, unique perspective on community issues. As I said, many privacy experts aren’t security experts, but rather people of a legal, journalist and historic background. Some are vloggers. Nothing wrong with that.

If the community is healthy, things will balance out. The vloggers, bloggers and Mastodon posters’ backlash (among others) would force Mozilla to capitulate on the issue, or create a fork if the situation asks for.

Just as believing in a deity gives you a 50% chance of salvation.

It ain’t plain if it’s with butter

Now Benjamin and Jackson are already common. I assume 100k and 401(k) will enter the mix too. Maybe even Doge and Bitcoin. I assume Bit is already the name of a not insignificant number of individuals. .

They don’t need the data perpetually to train their AI. Just dump it once into the black box and be done with it - no need to save it for even a second. Of course, if they want to train and re-train, and perhaps build ad profiles, that’s a different matter.

I don’t know where they got their quote from, since, historically, democracy has almost always died in broad fucking daylight.

Dark mode can be recreated using extensions, although the colors most likely won’t be as legible as “native support”.

I don’t see why a similar extrnsion couldn’t change the timezones of clocks.

Additionally, I don’t see why the server should bother with either (pragmatically) - Dark mode is just a CSS switch and timezones could be flagged to be “localized” by the browser. No need for extra bandwidth or computing power on the server end, and the overhead would be very low (a few more lines of CSS sent).

Of course, I know why they bother - Ad networks do a lot more than “just” show ads, and most websites also like to gobble any data they can.

The brain is, basically, a think-machine, even though it’s “just” a lump of meat. The brain tries to make sense of stuff and piece everything together “logically”.

Oftentimes the braim makes stuff up - your brain is very good at lying. Take for example vision - the eyes contain a relatively hole in the retina, yet you see a perfectly clear image. This is the “intended” purpose, but the core mechanism bywhich this is done is much more deeply rooted into the brain’s main “function” - it’s one of the core things the brain does. Its “thinking” is very malleable.

This can cause smaller “misinterpretations” of reality: Here’s a personal example: when my grandfather died, I periodically saw his reflection in the front door of his house. It would be visible only for a second, and then disaopear almost immidiately. I had to be moving relatively fast for it to appear, and couldn’t cause it to appear at will. 15 years later, I noticed it was actually my reflection, but since it was only visible in the exact same spot, from a certain angle, only in the evenings, with the porch lamp on and on a wood-textured PVC door, it took me that much time to piece all the puzlle pieces together and deduce the root cause. Me not having to visit his house all that often certsinly didn’t help the situation.

The other is plain hallucination: Take arthritis. You have pain which is proven not to be caused by anything external. Your nerves just send the “pain signals”, and you feel pain.

Additionally, sinesthesia isn’t just something someone either has or doesn’t, but it’s a spectrum, and, all the senses are in fact connected on a quite deep level.

What you describe definately falls somewhere on this “misinterpretarion-hallucination” spectrum. Maybe there was nothing to smell, yet you felt you smelled something, caused fully by your unconscious influenced by past experiences. Or maybe there was a totally different smell that got turned into this smell, but you couldn’t pick it out - as is the case with my grandfather and I.

This spectum can also be taken as the “physical-psychological” (cause) spectrum.

Maybe it’s a one-off thing for you, or maybe it’s a chain of conditions that’ll get fullfilled again every now and then. There’s most likely a logical explanation since the brain is inherently a logical machine, but chances are it’s not. There are just too many variables at play as far as outside factors go.

Checked the site quickly and didn’t find the information, but judging by the top-level comment, they don’t charge you if you want to use their cloud service, but if you want to “unlock” the ability to use someone else’s.

TANGO HOTEL ALFA TANGO INDIA PAPA ALFA INDIA SIERRA SIERRA TANGO INDIA LIMA LIMA BRAVO ECHO TANGO TANGO ECHO ROMEO TANGO HOTEL ALFA NOVEMBER TANGO HOTEL INDIA SIERRA INDIA PAPA ALFA

Question about the years if someone knows: is “years hence” a fancy british way of saying “years in the future” or is it some antiquated large non-SI unit of time since I find any of the species described in shorter timeframes, the Vacuumorph beimg an egregious example (“200 years hence”) very hard to imagine “evolving” only 200 years in the future, even with the 90s outlook on technology (since it seems they said these earlier examples at least are engineered species in the book).

Historically, I have a vague memory of knowing the fact that some places did actually do that, although I should check.

Honestly, I’m fine with Google being the default search engine (since they pay a lot for the priviledge and it’s trivial to remove). What I acrually have a problem with is Firefox using Google Firebase for analytics and Google whatever for “safe search” queries, etc. These are a lot more hidden, which I find borderline malicious. With the search engine you at least get the notification of “fuck I’m on Google” whenever you search for something, so it doesn’t do all that much harm since it’s very opaque, unlike having to refer people to ffprofiles to purge google completely.

On that note - if you want to get rid of Google from Firefox as much as possible visit ffprofiles. It has it all nicely explained. You just tick some boxes and apply the profile as per the ~5-step instructions. You’ll be done in less than 20 minutes.

Probably “dumb” in the sense it doesm’t actively spy on you. Which is a god-awful definition of dumb.

Personally, I’d go with non-malicious, shortened to non-mal which basically loops back to “normal”.

Yup. There are like 3 types of rulers: normal (a stick), foldable (this) and those retractable metallic strips.

Sticks are usually either 15 or 30 cm, while the foldables are literally always 2m.

The coils are the most ubiquitous, but I orefer the foldavles for most things since they tend to fall undet their own weight when measuring longer distances. These sre either 2 or 5 m I think.

Sorry for being pedantic, but those foldable work rulers are exactly 2 m long (at least in MetricLandia), which is, incidentally, the span of IQ values (0-200).

So yeah, it literally can be mapped one-to-one to a (common type of) ruler.

When your job suddenly rolls out G-Workspace or Office Online without you knowing and you come to work to a Google account with all your personal data, already out of your control, is it really a choice?

Have a job or your data. The stakes are becoming increasingly high.

“If it’s useful, just use them” is an option, in some circumstances. In some, unfortunately, that doesn’t apply. Is keeping your job a “convenience”?

Don’t mean to attack you personally, just want to share my thoughts on the level erosion of privacy to Big Tech.