daoismyname

> I reflected on why the referendum had become a footnote in history rather than the trigger for violent conflict

Because all the propaganda around catalan independence is bullshit.

It gas nothing to do with gray hair, which, BTW, are mostly tourists, mostly from UK, people that can afford to travel in autumn and that don't enjoy the same climate, if not much better, of catalonia at their homes (or if they can afford to travel go somewhere else, because they are not old!)

https://www.thenewfederalist.eu/i-have-never-supported-catal...

> Smells to me like major scrapegoating.

cough cough massive severance package cough cough

> were that those employees should have their human rights limited

I repeat it: I don't like Eich, I don't like his opinions, but he never laid off entire dev teams, he used his personal money to support his personal world view, it has nothing to do with what people at Mozilla could or couldn't do.

> You can’t lead effectively if the people you are trying to lead justifiably view you as hostile to them.

Is it better if your righteous new CEO fires you?

> There are other factors at play than managerial incompetence:

I agree there's no single point of failure, but IMO what made Firefox (and Mozilla before it) different was that it was different.

they played catch-up against Chrome with the result that they did not gain new users and lost many of the older ones

I still use Firefox on desktop, but on mobile first they removed the extensions from their mobile browser, then announced they would only support WebExtensions API, removing a ton of features from existing extensions, then they started purging "controversial" extensions (as in controversial in the eyes of Google) from their addons web site, that basically made Firefox a worse Chrome.

The nails in the coffin for me have been laying off the entire devtools, MDN and servo development teams and the ads in the search bar.

All of this started happening soon after Eich left.

I'm not saying Eich alone could save Firefox, he's also a person I dislike on a human level and he's probably more troubles than he's worth for a company, but my opinion is that Firefox "new" mindset post Eich disappointed its true fans that were mainly developers and you don't recover from that.

EDIT: I understand the need to make money, but are Pocket Premium or reselling VPNs the right way for a browser vendor?

Guess which one is better in 2022, Firefox or Brave? (except maybe containers)

Firefox was born in 2002 (under Eich management) as Phoenix, it's kinda obvious that 16 years later (57 is from 2018, Eich left in 2014) it needed a technological upgrade.

In ~2009-2010 Firefox was used by 33% of the web users.

Today it's at ~6%.

I blame management, the alternative is believing Firefox just had bad luck or that developers at Firefox suck (which they do not)

It's what happens when you fire you engineer CEO for his personal opinions (that I disagree with) and replace him with a "company culture" that has nothing to do with engineering, but has the "right" opinions.

open a browser, navigate to https://www.reddit.com/r/tits/, click yes, done!

> the developer can influence the perceived value of their smaller or newer application

by influence you mean "conform"?

> . This is what people who download the app will do, so they’re trying out real scenarios that will happen

let's ban browsers then or chat apps or sharing apps

and why not apps in general that play images and videos and that enable people to send aforementioned images and videos?

you know what? now that I think about it, let's ban the smart (computing) part from iPhone.

but let's not stop there, let's ban the phone part too, because one could always call an hotline or make a booty call...

That's not the interesting part though.

The interesting part is WHY for some people it takes so long that everybody else has to wait.

Imagine being on a high speed train and having to travel at the speed of the slowest train in front or if e-mail were sent using snail mail.

It obviously happens frequently enough that virtually everyone who ever rented a car - even only that one time - noticed it, so why they do not optimize for that?

I used to rent cars very often and I had to wait every single time I went there, it's not really a bias, it's a certainty.

Lately there have been some improvements on that front and a couple of the major rental companies made it almost painless if you are a regular customer, but it's still a lottery most of the times.

> Of course, it's a matter of taste, but GNOME and KDE looked pretty bad back then. If I had the money, I'd definitely preferred NeXTSTEP

can confirm

That's the reason why I was using Window Maker back then

> Could you sit in front of Blender, Microsoft Office, GIMP or Photoshop without previous knowledge of them and do anything at all with them?

yes

they have menus, especially GIMP, the ugliest of them all, but menus are everywhere just a right click away

but anyway you are in a familiar zone: every software is made that way, except, of course, Apple.

the problem with Apple is that they are trying to make every software look like a calendar or contact list application.

that's a pretty low bar for a standard UI and frankly it means they consider their users mentally challenged.

Yeah!

How can we forget new concepts and ideas such as "the Indian Removal Act"?

I think it's the opposite.

If the majority of population lives in rural areas, the prices of big cities have a major impact on the average, skewing it.

But actually people living in the big cities can afford housing more than a person with "rural area" salary can afford the average price, even though they are most likely able to afford the much lower prices in their area.

> The cable-cut might work for a while,

I don't see any crypto zealot laying cables in the ocean to connect Europe and USA

do you really think the army would allow it?

but cutting cables is the nuclear option, I see much more probable that terrorists will try it in the future, because is such a fundamental weakness of the internet right now

a government would simply block crypto traffic

of course they would not literally cut the cables.

they would.block the crypto traffic

> Why would you give someone's random website (or random gofundme) $1k?

for no reason

and I won't do it in the future

listen, smart contracts aren't more secure as other contracts today, that have been read by lawyers and proven in court for decades and still they are not to be trusted in full.

this difference being there are far more lawyers than people who can read and understand a smart contract

you live in the world of wishful thinking (not wanting to think you are deliberately lying) I live in real world where smart contract means nothing, it only works in very small communities where everybody already know and trust each other

> The web is not decentralized today. We are routing vast majority of web traffic through a handful of monopolies that control all forms of monetization

THAT'S NOT THE WEB!

I also reject the claim that they represent the vast majority of the traffic

> No, it's not. It is perfectly okay to sell food to anyone

but it's not OK to sell any kind of food, clothes, or any other product. so I want to know who's selling the food to me.

suppose I buy some food from you and end up in the ER to get my stomach pumped.

Who is responsible?

what's their name and address?

> it is really okay my dude.

can you sell dog meat?

and what makes web3 better since it would allow it with no consequences?

> Google Search isn't a deterministic cryptographic computation engine

so what?

do you really think google is not using every trick in the book to keep their search engine running? (including decentralization)

do you really think that "decentralization" means no downtime, because MAGIC?

> It's a manipulated, censored, monopoly-owned search engine that propels its own products and services to the top.

web3 is THE PRODUCT so some uber rich entity can amass more coins, without any regulation

sounds better to you?

> What's your big idea for dealing with the above?

alternative real platforms, not alternative dream platforms.

GNU Taler IMO is a better option for people looking for anonymity and it works with the current system, not against it.

But, again, there is no money in Taker, no going to the moon, no pump and dump, no get rich quick.

If you were looking for a solution, you'll invest in something more like Taker than web3, and yet...

but seriously, taking a stance against those actions through political means, it has orders of magnitude more chances of success.

because if you think that what's censored today will be tolerated tomorrow because CRYPTO you're delusional.

ANYWAY

you have not answered my question: why would I go through all those lengths to run a web site, while today gitlab pages is free and works as intended?

if you think that the proposition of crypto is (unproven) resistance to censorship, than you should sell the solution to those that have been censored, not to me. why are you selling to the general public something that has no value for the general public (and would cost them more)?

my feeling is that the people who would be interested in it are not the kind of people you would make business with or there's literally no money to be made (I doubt helping Tibetan people is interesting enough for crypto maniacs, they aren't rich and are not interested in making money)...

> It’s worth considering what the value proposition of crypto looks like if you were to find yourself living under an illegitimate authority

The cables where communications pass through are protected by armies

If crypto eventually could pose a threat to those illegitimate authorities, they would give orders to cut the cables and games would be over.

they could also trace them back to your house.

that Web2 VS Web3 schema pretty much summarize what's wrong with the new internet based on brand identities instead of technical merits.

A brief rebuttal:

- Twitter can censor any account or Tweet: yes, but Twitter is not the web, you can host your own tweets, even for free.

- Web3 tweets are better because decentralized: translations -> your thought are going to be forever visible to everybody and not even the author will be able to remove them. Of course any of those new shiny web3 logs can fail and everything can disappear with them.

- Payment services may decide to not allow payments: Web3 payments can do the same. There is nothing that forces me to accept a payment and if that was true, that would be a problem. I __do want__ to refuse payments from criminals and I do wanna know if someone is.

- servers for gig economy may go down. web3 servers can go down as well, they are made of hardware and maintained by people too. If, for example, Uber can't keep their servers running despite their profits depend on them, imagine what would happen if Uber was running on someone else's node who DGAF if they lose money or not...

Now imagine what would happen to me, a completely unknown anonymous individual, with no power.

What happens if something goes wrong and "my income is affected"?

Who is responsible?

Who can I sue in case the SLA in the agreement haven't been guaranteed?

Will "the decentralized network of 1000s of computers" reimburse me?