bluebarbet

The WHATWG is just the standards committee of the W3C. Both include Mozilla, a nonprofit that makes an open-source browser. It is incorrect to suggest that the web is somehow a private business.

Agreed! I was thinking, "That's funny, I thought Canada's rail company was called ViaRail".

Quite a few of us are more than happy to use software that is "just not as good" as the corporate equivalent.

I'm also disappointed that this forum allows cost-free mindless downvoting, the original sin of toxic social media. Slashdot solved this problem.

The web is controlled by the W3C, a consortium of different stakeholders including Mozilla. It's as close to a public good as we're going to get. I'm disappointed by the self-defeating cynicism in this thread.

On the contrary. In a world of spyware stacks controlled by oligarchic corporations, the web is more indispensable than ever.

>I hate ads too, but you’re going to have to pay for the content somehow.

But this logic is flawed. Suffering through an ad does not "pay for" anything. The only way you can pay for content via advertising is to buy a product or service you wouldn't have bought otherwise (and probably don't need), or to buy product A instead of product B (when product A might in fact be better). Advertising means (1) psychological manipulation and (2) mindless consumption with all its attendant negative externalities. This is what pays for content in the advertising business model. Hence the aversion so many have to it. Hence why invocations of morality in its defense always fall flat.

Advertising itself does not pay for anything.

They might be able to if we could finally find a way to make micropayments work.

In my mental model, Matrix (specifically Element) is decentralized Signal. In other words: a modern encrypted messenger that is protocol-based and so allows users to control their data if they so wish.

If this picture is accurate, then the promised land is only two steps away: (1) make available a reliable default Matrix server for normies who don't care about privacy; (2) polish up the UX of Element.

What am I getting wrong?

>Salon never did, so far as I know.

And for a reason. It's expensive. Only the tiny handful of winners of the digital transition (including The Atlantic) can now afford it.

The Atlantic and the NYT are now quite flush. IMO people should be subscribing to local newspapers instead, to fund local reporting, which is in a dire state.

The profession is journalism. Reporting is a form of journalism. Non-reporter journalists are not just pundits who pontificate. Analysis (based on someone else's reporting) is a form of journalism. Editing and sub-editing are forms of journalism.

It's a superficially reasonable objection that elides the crucial detail: Modern journalism is a profession. It has standards of entry, an established mission (fact-finding, truth-seeking), and a code of ethics. We can choose to be cynical about those constraints, but the fact is that none of them apply to a random person on Youtube or Substack.

Until local LLMs become feasible on my modest hardware, I will be keeping AI tools safely confined to the browser. Never will I grant any kind of admin permission to black-box software that phones home to an oligarchic corporation.

In practice that means Duck.AI and Perplexity.

And the system clipboard.

9 minutes. Was that enough time to read the article?

In fairness, this discussion is about offensive vocabulary.

Just in time for America's ongoing discovery that "liberal" and "conservative" are in fact quite similar ideologies. New insults are called for. I propose "progtard" and "reactard".

Wishful thinking, and a little out of touch. Outside of North America and western Europe, email never became a "forever" technology, because most people got online after its heyday. Here in Europe, social email (along with social SMS) is now almost fully a thing of the past. And even for work and admin, the email address has now been dethroned as primary ID by the phone number. It's not clear where this ends but the direction of travel is unmistakable.

A FOSS alternative is WhoBird, available on F-Droid and pretty good.

This is a silly debate you're both having. Money is not real, and a price is whatever a buyer is willing to pay. Emotions are best spent elsewhere.

>the motivation for people to believe certain things

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias (a cousin)

Nothing to disagree with particularly in what you say. I tend to frame this as divergent values.

Example. 100 illegal immigrants crash a border fence. Someone whose values makes them unbothered by immigration will think: Big deal, it's only 100 people, anyone who worries about that must be racist. The other person will get worked up because even 1 illegal immigrant is an affront to the sanctity of nations and borders. Both sides agree it was 100 people, yet somehow neither can imagine that the other side is sincere in their convictions. This seems quite common.

>There's a term for the phenomenon that I don't recall but there's a trap people fall into where they see themselves as the only one who can see through the lies and everyone else is falling for it.

Possibly "naive realism", which I agree is a major problem, but I don't think I'm guilty of it here. The only premise of my argument, namely that democracy requires a shared understanding of facts, is widely accepted.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naïve_realism_(psychology)

Seems more likely the Lego would get crushed and the tortoise would be none the wiser.

These are thoughts that occur to me too when a safetyist progressive (for want of a better term other than "woke") suggests shutting down information to prevent people seeing the wrong ideas.

But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum. In a free-for-all information landscape (something which did not exist until yesterday), people need to be able to distinguish good information from bad for democracy to survive.

If those countries are in the EU, you have the right to use a bank based in another EU country. The traditional incumbents will likely demand an in-country residential address (in direct contradiction of EU law). Which leaves the internet-only neobanks. I believe the only FOSS-compatible option is Wise, which has a modern web offering and does not even require that you install a native app. I understand N26 does, but it may work with Graphene. By contrast Revolut is a privacy-invading walled garden and should be avoided at all costs.

"Universal" is a massive stretch. What seems more certain is that the many countries where your take is widely shared are less successful than the few countries where it is not.

Dynadot. Over a decade without issues.

Indeed. Personally I would never pay for any service whose name includes the word "cheap" (it's literally why I gave this one a wide berth despite all the breathless recommendations here and elsewhere). Cheapness should never be the declared mission of a business, it should be the incidental by-product.

>Generation [...] Their

Hope for grammar is fast fading, anyway.

Indeed. That video made a impact on me too. Obviously people are trying to "debunk" it, but we can clearly see the challenge the chimp was set and how it aces it. Even gaming out scenarios of intense preparation (i.e. cheating) it's hard to imagine most humans matching the performance shown.

>You can be a strict prescriptionist about it

*prescriptivist