LarryDarrell

I groan whenever I see a Firefox post on the front page.

-"X moved Y pixels making Firefox UNUSABLE! So now I use Brave."

-"Mozilla is run by a bunch of SJW idiots because they ran their CEO off. So now I run Brave." (I had to look into this, as I wasn't paying attention at the time. They picked a new CEO who cared so passionately about removing the right of gay people to get married he even donated his own money to the cause. That was a dumb hill to die on. Now he's an anti-masker who actually runs Brave.)

-"My precious browser workflow was completely dependent on the interaction of 156 distinct XUL extensions so now I use Brave."

-"something, something, Mr. Robot." (that, like everything, you can turn off)

-"Ads in the address bar!" (that, like everything, you can turn off)

-"They take money from Google!" (Hey, free money, since everyone either switches to DGG or were going to use Google anyway.)

There are real criticisms you can make of Firefox/Mozilla. But on the whole, for the general user, none of them are grounds for moving to a Chromium based browser out of spite.

Who exerts the most control over Chromium? Google shareholders or the OSS community? How much Chromium development is done by people not employed by Google or now Microsoft?

Brave/Edge/Vivaldi/Opera are all Google controlled browsers. Just because you can slap your own logo and build a sync system on top of Chromium does not mean they get to have any say in how Chromium consumes the Internet.

Sure, less data gets sent directly to Google. But when Google says[1], Chromium will not allow you to completely block autoplaying videos, it takes years to for the clones add an option to block[2].

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay/ [2] https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/40377/option-to-disable-auto...

I remember re-covering the roof of an apartment building for a slumlord I worked for in college. We ran out of tar, so I had to wait an hour while the boss went to get some more. Sitting for awhile in the shade of the roof access entrance was glorious. We were supposed to drag our exhausted, aching bodies to the basement to "tidy". We didn't because that was absurd.

Now I sit on my ass all day long and write code. I make enough now that I'm in the class of worker that's allowed to slack and pretend I don't. Sometimes I slack and post to Hacker News in the middle of the day. No union needed!

The Cold War propaganda machine messed with a couple of generations' minds. Thatcher aside, I think maybe such propaganda was not as severe in the UK? You guys did have the community building exercise of rebuilding after the war, where in the US we immediately built the suburbs and began our decent into a Cowboy Individualist fever dream.

Here you'll hear the same things over and over:

"My (friend) was working at (someplace) and had to wait (2 hours | half a day) for a Union Electrician to plug in an electrical cord!" (Who cares! You got a free break! Enjoy the time slacking!)

"Unions are corrupt!" (Ignoring the difference of scale of corruption in the corporate world vs a union)

"I am paid because of my productivity! I am a Super-Worker! I resent the people who simply punch the clock at their CAREER." (Here you have wage slaves who were given a salary+perks and have been swindled into thinking that they have common ground with the Capitalist Class. Dividing workers into hierarchical groups is a old and great way to insure against any movement towards solidarity.)

and on and on... but in the US, every argument against any form of worker solidarity you'll see the complete absence of consideration of the abuses and priorities of the Capitalist Class. It's never workers vs ownership over here. It's workers versus the narcissistic individual "Top-Performer" (self-described).

This may be true. Ultimately my personal story is not worth much. I do know that there is a growing community of people who share this story, though. One does not personally need to be affected to notice an uptick in anti-knowledge behavior recently.

The greater point is that if X percent of the population has biases that if fed would lead them to deranged behavior, is it responsible to take advantage of that?

The reasonable discussion of course goes to how big of a number is X. If 100,000 families get destroyed per decade, no big deal in relation to those sweet advertising impressions, I guess. But if FB, YT, Reddit, etc collectively take the mostly hands off approach, does X become big enough to achieve history-book-level harm? Like making [effective representative democracy, pandemic response, ecologic collapse mitigation] impossible.

> 3. Do recommendations drive viewers to increasingly extreme content?

> As I’ve explained, we actively demote low-quality information in recommendations. But we also take the additional step of showing viewers authoritative videos about topics that may interest them. Say I watch a video about the COVID-19 vaccine. In my Up Next panel, I’ll see videos from reputable sources like Vox and Bloomberg Quicktake and won’t see videos that contain misleading information about vaccines (to the extent that our system can detect them).

When my parents watch 30 consecutive videos that mention that you can't trust the mainstream media, what good is suggesting to them a Bloomberg video?

My parents aren't on FB or any other social media. But over the last 10 years they have gone off the deep end after watching more and more insane videos on Youtube. It started with hours of Ron Paul videos. Then Alex Jones videos. Who knows what cretins it offered up after that.

They've stopped talking to me recently. It's because I've gotten the "Kill Shot" after they've explicitly told me not to. I'm apparently going to die from the covid vaccine within the next 6 months to 3 years... On my last phone call, they've told me that 300 old money families (who are all also insane environmentalists) have hatched and are executing a plan to depopulate the planet to 500 million... as told on the "Georgia Guide Stones".

The US Government also has mind-control devices that are convincing people to get the shot. They told me the mind control devices were first used during the Iraq War, because it convinced so much of the Iraqi Army to surrender en masse.

Also, all of our technology comes from the wreckage of crashed UFOs, most famously the Roswell UFO. My Dad thinks I'm naive for not believing this.

Both my parents have college degrees. My Dad has a masters in an engineering field. They were once relatively un-political and rode out the Great Recession without any harm. Maybe they just didn't handle retirement well. But I have a decade of nearly daily emails from them... "Watch this! [youtube link]". When they are gone, I'll have documentation of their decent into madness, with hyperlinks all going to 1 domain. I'm sure YouTube is doing all they can.

I've been using mxroute.com for my business and personal emails for 6 months.

Anecdotal, but my biggest client has said my emails no longer tend to hit his spam folder since I've made the switch.

I think the Startup Processes really gets abused and people default to blame Windows for it. My time to a usable desktop seemed slow until I removed Teams, Steam, Dropbox and some other update utilities from Startup. Now it's pretty much instant.

I remember growing up in the 90s, and in the AOL Instant Messenger profiles of my friends, was commonly the quote: "You have to love yourself before you can love another." Also a lot of DMB song lyrics... it was a different time.

I remember there being a few hopeless kids in high school, but looking back there was also a lot of undiagnosed asperger's and who knows what else.

What I'm really curious about is if the number of Incels is increasing through the years, or if now the underserved mentally ill just have platforms to espouse their misery. The Incel seems to be singularly focused on sex. Companionship, shared interests, mutual respect don't seem to get any daylight in their psyche. I would like to blame the consumption of instant, abundant hard core pornography. But I don't have any data to back that claim up. I'm just thinking of a difference from the 90s (I know porn existed online back then, but come on, everyone was on dial up) versus today.

I know I shouldn't, but this is beautiful. You've taken every low-understanding drunk-uncle anti-union take and have written some true troll poetry.

This historical perspective is so shallow, and your understanding of the motivation of those involved is so one sided that it's hard to think of anything that might let some light in.

I'll try. Years ago Business owners so mistreated their workers that the workers decided to form unions. This was not easy, as nobody was really on the side of the workers. So it made it easy to bash their heads in. It took many years of many people risking and losing their lives and livelihoods until public support turned towards the strikers. Finally places like Ford had to negotiate rather than curbstomp[1].

This was a win. Rather than relying on the arbitrary benevolence of various ownerships, we codified the 40 hour workweek, overtime, vacation days and sick leave among other things.

Then WWII happened, and the US was the only industrialized nation that was left unscathed. That meant the world wanted to buy our products because for the most part, we were the only ones making products at all. This is the beginning and end of a lot of Americans understanding of our economy and our place in the world. It's why Reagan and Trump were successful with the "Let's / Make America Great Again" mantra.

Because we decided to kill ourselves to be anti-communist, we decided to have very favorable trade policies for places we were formerly at war with, like Japan. That meant we rolled out the red carpet for those cheap little imports. Unions had nothing to do with this.

US automakers did not take the foreign competition seriously. They were too busy trying to defend leaded gasoline and trying to destroy Ralph Nader's reputation because he suggested we have seatbelts. Unions had nothing to do with this either.

The 70's happened. The previously decimated world economies were rebuilt and ready to compete. Americans started to buy more stuff from overseas. Oil became scarce. Stupid self-owns by the US Auto manufacturers gave American cars a reputation for being shit. For one thing, they were so damn heavy that components would break faster. A heavy V8 has more stuff to fail than a little inline four. Again, Unions were not the ones designing the cars.

No one in Detroit blames the Unions. Except maybe historically illiterate managers and engineers. I know, I used carry their golf clubs and clean their boats. Everyone else typically blames NAFTA, consumers buying imports, and the management/ownership of the Big 3.

But here we are. Big companies can outsource. Private Equity can pillage. Agriculture and the meat industry can hire migrant workers with little impediment. But unions are bad because once in awhile a manager has to wait because of work-rules. Or every once in awhile a steward will get busted for corruption. Or "there's this guy who shows up drunk and they can't fire him." I know a drunk incompetent guy who can't get fired too. He makes $500k and is a nephew of a billionaire. Every charge in a unions-are-bad screed can usually be turned around right back at the management/ownership class.

...

This article was about the distribution side of Amazon. Not tech. That being said, I program for a living. I get paid pretty well because I don't move fast and I don't break things. Tech professionals need at least a professional guild. But, they think they are special so they will squander the era when they actually have organizing power.

...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Overpass

Chrome, or at least it's rendering engine, has won the World Wide Web. It was able to do this because the company that was the best at monetizing every last packet decided it wanted to own that last endpoint as well.

HTTP is a lost cause. At this point we need new protocols that are designed to be impossible to monetize. From there new browsers can be built. It'll never get to be as big as the WWW, but I think sub-Internets are the best way to ensure the spirit and creativity of the early WWW lives on.

Yes, the mechanism is the same.

However, Facebook has lines that when crossed result in being moderated. Their moderation system is obviously imperfect and a lot of the time they act too late, but it's there.

Parler was courting all the line-crossers with the promise that there would be no such moderation on their platform. That ended with predictable results.

I thought that at first, but I realized that I was biased towards the people I personally know who have been fully consumed into the right-wing conspiracyverse (older boomers who never liked computers until the internet was easy).

Ultimately I think you underestimate many of them. They feel persecuted and righteous and have the ability to follow step-by-step directions.

From what I understand, Parler was bankrolled and designed to do exactly what it was ultimately shutdown for. That is, be a concentrated anger-machine-echo-chamber. I'm not angry at the public corporations that have dropped Parler. I'm angry at the people that created Parler in the first place. It was basically a poison pill designed to test our feelings about free speech, designed to provoke. Mission accomplished, buttheads.

I think we'll see the angry mob go end up at less discoverable, but more robust distributed platforms. Which is a shame, because it means eventually, when I say that you can find me on Mastadon/Scuttlebutt/etc, the average person will say, "Oh, you're on that extremist network?"

The benefit to Facebook/Reddit/Twitter is that while Parler is dominating the discussion, they can start cleaning up their most toxic communities.

Thanks, I'll give it a listen!

Or they were razed 'legally' for an eight lane freeway.

Gig work and all that implies would be more tolerable in the US if we had a universal health care system and worked hard to craft policies to make housing affordable (not an investment).

Until that world comes to pass, the slow but growing movement to treat gig workers as employees will only get bigger and bigger.

I doubt even in 20 years we'll have fully autonomous driving cars in every jurisdiction. If I were Uber or another company who relies on gig work to exist, I would be pouring money into lobbying for universal health care. That would ease the pressure considerably.

My wholly unqualified opinion as forever firefox user:

They are going to push their VPN, Pocket and Lockwise like never before. They are also going to focus on their incubator hoping for a big win.

Firefox the browser will start to stagnate, and in five years or so they'll switch to WebKit.

The focus is now not the browser or the browser engine. It's selling Fix-the-Internet type products that have a dash of security theater baked in.

I can't even imagine how muted the Civil Rights era would have been had the FBI had this power back then.

The optimism comes from a desperate desire not to confront the need for universal healthcare or land reform.

As long as real estate is an investment and health care has a middle man, UBI is just a subsidy for those sectors.

I suspect it's because there isn't much advice to give.

My answer, having checked a few of your boxes... Your lifetime wages are going to be lower than many of your peers. This is unlikely to change. Adjust your worldview accordingly. Don't assume any debt that relies on increasing future earnings to be comfortable.

By all means, keep trying, but stay level headed. Success for most is not always right around the corner. Prior to SV eating the world, the only people that said that we all should be entrepreneurs really just wanted you in their Amway downline.

Society doesn't like to show the magnitude failures out there, or worse, the getting-by'ers. There are a lot of self-conscious IT people in the midwest making $70k/year feeling like failures, when they are the winners of Kokomo, IN.

Read some philosophy. Buy a reliable used car. Look inward for contentment. Try therapy if your shitty childhood and shitty parents made inward a hard place to look.

Add the Oil & Gas Industry to your first list.

I recall Adam Smith not being a fan of landlords.

The company I'm contracting for is flaming out fast. It's sad to see the death spiral in action. It's a shame, because it's the best work I've ever done and I don't know if anyone will ever see it. The software team was 100% remote and they were the best colleagues I've ever had.

It sucks to have graduated in 07, and feel like you've hit your stride in 20.

Health Insurance is not health care.

No one likes their health insurance. They like having health insurance given the horrifying alternative.

No one (except those on the ACA) gets to really "choose" their insurance either. Your employer offers a few plans. Those can change completely based on their whims.

Why would I care if M4A takes away my health insurance? Please, by all means, take it away! I don't care who pays the bills. In the last 10 years, I haven't been able to keep a primary doctor for a stretch longer than 2 years. Every year for the last 5 years, I have to critically look at my own health needs and try to guess as to what plan on the ACA is going to rob me the least. My taxes would have to go up at least $20,000 a year for it to even approach what I'm spending on a plan that I'm terrified that I might actually have to use.

That's an argument for improving the federal government, not accepting the status quo as the natural order of the universe.

So time is a flat circle then?

My main client works in the reservoir exploration space in the Oil&Gas industry. I'm prepared for it, but I can tell that I'm going to have to replace a big chunk of income very soon.

True, but now you are in the No True Scotsman weeds.

Government bailouts have been happening regularly for most of our lifetimes. We are incessantly told the US is a Capitalist country. So in the minds of the average citizen, either bailouts are part of the capitalist system, or the US has never been capitalist.

We're going to see "Modern Capitalism" and "Late Stage Capitalism" thrown around with a lot more frequency as corporations exert their power and we struggle to define what we are seeing.

If we had more consciousness and weren't so confused by 50 years of Cold War brain rot we would just call our age Late Stage Plutocracy or something.

My own personal opinion is that the Great Recession and it's repercussions (inequality, deaths of despair, the hallowing out of middle American economies, the opioid crises, Flint water crises, etc) over last 10+ years have really ramped up a zeitgeist of inevitable doom. I don't really blame anyone in the Midwest for being full of doom and gloom, because for the most part that's all they have known for the last decade.

My other opinion is that more so than racism and actually believing Trump would make America great again, that most of the support that pushed Trump over the edge came from wanting to burn the whole thing down.