edraferi

Technical writing should be clear and concise. Always try to convey your core idea as directly as possible.

Here are some resources I find useful for this:

http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/

I’m intrigued by https://www.grammarly.com/ but it sends everything you write to their cloud service, which is completely unacceptable to me. If I can’t use the tool for proprietary and private writing, it’s useless.

Regularly consulting reference materials and editing your work are hallmarks of a good writer. It enables continuous improvement.

For what it’s worth, I think your examples are nuanced questions about fairly sophisticated terms. I look up similar things all the time, and I am a native English speaker, have a first-class education, and write regularly for my day job.

Don’t sell yourself short!

I tried to think of a good synonym (“differently abled” “visually challenged”) but nothing really felt right.

I think the phrasing itself is problematic because it describes some people as broken or less than whole. That puts the emphasis on something wrong with a person rather than something wrong with the system.

Better to talk about the system: “this makes the site less accessible.” Because really, that’s the issue. It’s what you have control over and where the problem lies. Software engineers can change a websites but not the people using them. People should expect websites to accommodate their needs, not the other way around.

Respect is the core principle here. Respect your users and enable them to come as they are. Don’t place the focus on their weaknesses, regardless of what those are or why they have appeared. Focus on how you can build a system that’s accessible to everyone.

Is it possible to explicitly host a colony of non-stinging bees to keep away stinging varieties?

I have family members who are terrified of bees. Don’t want someone to step on a bee and get stung, etc

> The basics are missing by default

Absolutely. I really want to see advanced AI/ML tools developed to address THIS problem. Don’t make me solve the data before I use ML, give me ML to fix my data!

That’s hard though, because data chaos is unbounded and computers are still dumb. I think there’s still tons of room for improvement though.

Why not? Is it always self-hosted?

Oh that’s pretty cool. I’ll try that.

I just assumed that this behavior would apply to everything once I turned sync on, and then was disappointed when it didn’t work. I had no idea it was an optional feature.

I guess it doesn’t fit the key-value paradigm, but this feature would be a lot more discoverable if there was a “sync?” Attribute next to each about:config item.

Interesting. I haven’t noticed any performance impact. I’m using it on fairly beefy general-purpose machines though.

Maybe you could work around this by using separate search and address bars? Then you can search before tab and container creation happens. Not gonna help for standard direct navigation though.

Cool, I’ll dig into this.

Would be helpful if the Firefox store made it clear if extensions support this. Also, why do some first-party extensions ignore it??

Also: there are other things sync still misses, like config.

I’d be interested to see an analysis of how it compares to Chrome sync. I don’t think Chrome necessarily has a better solution for extension preference syncing, but I only missed it once I went all-in on Firefox containers.

Edit: replied to wrong comment

Yeah this is exactly the problem.

Have you tried the Temporary Containers[0] add-on? It has an “Automatic Mode” that makes links open into fresh containers by default. Then you can create rules to dial that back as needed for usability.

I use this in concert with the Multi-Account Containers[1] Add-on. I create names containers for things where I need persistence (“work” “personal” “LinkedIn”) and then everything else is isolated by default.

The main challenges are:

1) I have complex rules defining a whitelist on Temporary Containers. I have to sync this manually with setting import/export because Firefox Sync doesn’t handle this for you

2) Multi-Account Containers doesn’t expose its settings AT ALL, so I’m constantly hitting unnecessary “always open site.com in Personal container?” modals.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

I had the same experience. Switched to Chrome from Firefox years ago, tried and was disappointed by the initial Quantum release, tried Firefox again with the “Chrome is killing uBlock Origin” announcement, very pleased this time.

My main gripe with Firefox at the moment is Sync. It just doesn’t sync everything you need. My Firefox profile is highly customized, with a lot of extensions that all have their own complex config. Sync will keep the actual extensions synced, but not their settings. You have to rely on manual import/export features provided by the extensions themselves. Some first party extensions (eg Containers) don’t even give you that option.

You can get some of that by syncing your profile folder directly, but it’s very fragile. It hasn’t played nice with the generic folder syncing tools I’ve tried.

I think this is painful because Firefox really encourages customization, and it’s really useful! I just don’t want to have to keep track of that customization on every device. I trust Firefox Sync’s security model and want to do more with it.

This is a very well-written postmortem. It’s clear enough that a non-technical customer effected by the outage could understand the explanation, at least at a high level. It’s also detailed enough that a technical person can trace the root cause to a buggy garbage collector in format transformation function. The whole thing uses clear language with a bare minimum of jargon. Nice work!

That’s exactly the problem though. Post-Soviet states money-bombing our politics out from underneath us. We know where that leads and don’t want it at all. Unfortunately they’re good at it so it’s taking time to vote our way out of the mess.

What a weird limitation. Keeps spam down, maybe.

Ugh

Not censorship, context. Censorship is disrespectful of the reader; it assumes the authority knows better. Context is respectful; it assumes you will make the best decision (for you) when you have all the relevant information.

So don’t delete the fake video. Put a big red exclamation mark next to it that says “this video has been substantially manipulated. Contents may not be genuine.”

Also: while viewers and producers both deserve the same respect, producers can forfeit theirs by consistently failing to respect their viewers. A consistent pattern of intentional deception should earn a shadow ban.

I’ve never heard of this before. Any good place to learn more?

Firefox splits the functionality of Chrome profiles into two different things:

Profiles contain all your settings, history, bookmarks, themes, sync settings, etc. They’re stored in a folder on disk. It’s kinda a hassle to switch between them.

Containers isolate cookies (and other stuff?) within a single tab or group of tabs. It lets you run a specific website or set of websites in isolation from your other browsing activity. This has security benefits, but is also great for logging into the same service with multiple accounts simultaneously.

I was initially annoyed by Firefox profiles because they’re clunkier than Chrome accounts, but was very happy when I figured out that Firefox Containers gave me the isolation benefits I was actually looking for, with some real improvements over Chrome.

Similar to Privacy Badger?

https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

When I first tried to switch to from Chrome to Firefox, I got frustrated by the different approaches to user profiles, but multi-containers fixed it for me.

Chrome makes it easy to switch profiles/accounts with the account button in the top right, but Firefox profile management is clunky. You have to choose on startup and can’t launch a window with a different profile from the browser itself.

Next time I tried, I found Multi-containers! It’s EXACTLY what I was trying to do with Chrome Profiles (isolate cookies per persona) and it improves on Chrome in a couple ways:

- lighter than Chrome profiles, very fast to create new containers

- Not tied to a google account

- multiple containers in the same window

- Domain-specific rules make sure you don’t cross-contaminate containers accidentally

- Profile stuff like History and bookmarks is shared across containers and securely synced with client side encryption by default.

You can also get a REAL win for privacy by adding the Temporary Containers extension [0]. This lets you create arbitrarily many containers. It defaults to being an option (right click -> open in temp container) but can be set much more aggressively. I have it create a new temporary container every time I move to a new domain. Amazing.

That DOES require some manual configuration to avoid breaking complex products like Office365. I created a huge regex that identifies Office365 domains and triggers a whitelist with less aggressive isolation. Still, not too much more work than running uBlock Origin with 3rd party resources disabled by default.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

uBlock Origin, same as anywhere else.

https://safari-extensions.apple.com/details/?id=com.el1t.uBl...

Incorrect. While the Trump administration is more enthusiastic about aggressive intervention in commerce in general, the recent sanctions are the culmination of over a decade of bad behavior by Huawei, recognized by many countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei

Heh I remember that. Pretty sure it used the classic “force an army of grad students to manually review everything “ approach

It’s all about ownership and agency. If a company gathers this data, does this analysis, and uses it for their own reasons without giving the monitored people a say - that’s a distopian nightmare. BUT as GP describes, it’s a tool within your control, helping you improve your life. That’s ok with me.

God I hope that works

There are some tools that focus on this “fuzzy deduplication” problem:

Senzing https://senzing.com/

Tamr https://www.tamr.com/

I don’t think it’s fair to make a blanket statement like that, at least in the US where the local police system is hyper-fragmented. There more police-community relationships than there are police + communities, so there’s a ton of variation.

Annecdote: I’m very happy with the local police in my community.

There are of course correlations and general trends that can be observed. In recent years there’s been a lot of attention on the disproportionate rate of police shootings involving racial minorities. That’s a problem. But it’s not an all police departments by all communities by all times problem.

I want to see a power user OS. Something designed for humans who need to analyze huge amounts of data in arbitrary ways. Something that knows how to work with cloud resources to profile new data sources, simplifying the whole ETL challenge. With great APIs at the program level, so I can always pull datasets between apps, use the best app for the job, and automate everything I need to do twice.