fixermark

It's an interesting take. For me, I felt BotW was a return to the original form: the first game clearly had a path of progression in mind, but didn't technically stop you from picking up (or refraining from picking up) the wooden sword and tooling around on Death Mountain right from the start if you wanted (granted, you couldn't actually challenge Ganon unless you did beat all 8 dungeons, unlike BotW).

As of approximately Ocarina of Time (if not Zelda 2), Zelda games have been a lot more "on rails" in the sense of a well-defined path of progression that is difficult to break (generally because of the need for some artifact or some plot-point to develop that opens the next path point). BotW gave me a clear directional hint (key for modern game design; we're well past the point where most players lack patience for "Here you are; I won't explain the rules; try not to die" game design), but if I wanted to ignore the hint and go run off into the sunset or try to rodeo a Lynel in my shorts with three hearts, I could.

By "not technically possible," I meant specifically that no government can cause new BTC to manifest into existence. The scenario you're describing is (government mandated and legally enforced) loss insurance, which is the system I observed hasn't (to my knowledge) organically manifested yet.

I haven't personally encountered this phenomenon. Can you give an example of an established standard that breaks on Chrome but FF / Safari handle?

It's often the case that this works fine. When you get into corner cases (i.e. if you try to stretch what animation APIs can do or you start to need to care deeply about the performance constraints of flex layout), you start to need to care about how the browsers actually work.

... but you can (and I'd argue in a lot of cases, looking around at the overly-complicated sites on the web, should) write a lot of fully functional web pages by keeping to the standard and trusting it's good enough. We are no longer in the bad old days where IE and other browsers deviated significantly---most of the browsers today adhere closely to the spec, and in the places they don't, it's often more like one browser handles a nasty corner case better than another because the browser built an optimization in for a critical path your page layout cares about.

"Wait for them to do so" is an answer that guarantees your team will get passed over in favor of a team that brought a working product to market today, to solve real problems real users have.

This point of view is as ignorant of reality as the grammarians that say Webster's English is the only true English. Every standard is a three-edged sword: the spec, the intent behind the spec, and the practical application of the spec in the real world (which all-too-often, unfortunately, includes things like "Yeah, that's what the spec says, but then scammers realized you could exploit that to use people's browsers to mine Bitcoin or something, so no browser actually does that").

A web developer codes against real machines, not the imagined, idealized, and non-existent machines the specs describe.

Is there any bad blood left over from the days that Mozilla supported the antitrust suit against MS?

You'd think a business would do whatever maximized value and ignore past negative interactions, but businesses are made of people.

> If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship

A great step Firefox could take in this space is improving the transparency and performance auditing of its own engine. Debugging rendering performance issues between browsers is still an absolute nightmare. If Firefox can provide a better developer experience than Chrome, it might increase the likelihood that web developers would use FF as their first-choice development platform for simplicity and utility of tools. If it doesn't, it may still decrease the odds that when faced with a nasty performance bug, developers will throw up their hands and say "Chrome does it right; I guess FF still just sucks for performance in this corner case."

FF has been making impressive strides in this space, but their toolchain still feels clunky and slow relative to Chrome Developer Tools.

Correction: BTC is an attempt to make digital stuff that behaves as much as possible like physical gold.

Cash is a fiat currency and reproducible infinitely by the controlling government. The point of gold (as a money medium) is that it self-regulates the amount in circulation by being a tangible material in finite supply with cost associated in seeking more. This model has significant benefits and drawbacks (and, it's probably worth noting, its drawbacks are what led to the fiat model most countries use today).

There's a significant difference between Bitcoin and cash, which is that the worst-case scenario for loss of your cash is the government in control of it just prints more and gives it to you (in effect, distributing the cost of your loss among everyone who holds that currency). This is not technically possible with Bitcoin, and AFAIK no system has grown up organically yet to provide some kind of "loss insurance" in the form of keeping some BTC in reserve for making victims whole.

With respect, what you linked to is a conspiracy theory that the ME is used in ways other than explicitly stated by Intel and unsupported by any evidence other than allegation.

Interesting. Can you provide a source?

My snarky answer is "Google vs. DDG's usage numbers," but a more serious answer is that yes, that'd be a possibility (but I'd sadly put it on the low end of probable outcomes given what we know about both the stickiness of existing social networks vs. newcomers and how much concern for privacy users actually tend to demonstrate).

If it helps the understanding, it's worth remembering that life outside the Matrix was a hardscrabble garbage existence---so much so that a character was willing to kill to get back in.

I think it's absolutely a datapoint considered by any organization that is trying to build a comprehensive profile of citizens to catch people like this before they hurt anyone.

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/20/696470366/arrested-coast-guar...

This story immediately becomes more interesting if an advertiser figures out a way to exfiltrate Facebook's graph of who it thnks Nazis are.

... but in general, the ad networks are architected to make that kind of exfiltration as difficult as possible, since it violates the privacy constraints users assume.

In the specific context of Facebook ad targeting, reports and investigations concluded that it was used as a propaganda channel in the US by foreign national agents attempting to tip the scales in the US Presidential election in 2016. "Why is that a bad thing" or "Why is that Facebook's problem" is a reasonable question, but it won't be seen as popular in the US if Facebook accepts those questions publicly as its business attitude.

Worth noting: the article's headline is one of those tricky situations where the summary isn't wrong, but should probably include more information.

FB allows advertisers to target at specific topics, and they've been blacklisting objectionable categories. But the blacklisting appears to be manual, so while "nazi" isn't a micro-targeting category, things like Josef Mengele and a white supremacist punk band are.

Manually keeping up with and out-thinking objectionable content keywords is a perpetual arms race. If FB wants to win it that way, they'll have to invest pretty hard in that space if they don't want a story like this every quarter.

How does Libertarian "vote with your wallet" theory deal with essential products?

... it's just that in the marketplace of ad channels for advertisers to invest their budget in, that network loses out to networks with targeted ads.

Email never stopped existing.

The libertarian answer to this would seem to then be "Excellent; now anti-fascist organizations have an optimized channel to get their message to those people."

That's a personal choice you are welcome to make. I have a Google Home Mini sitting on the shelf behind my head right now, and it really doesn't bother me.

(... in fact, I tend to think about it in just the opposite way: if I'm ever murdered in my home, I want the cops to be able to subpoena Google to get evidence on who the killer was. It's nice to have a system watching my back all the time).

When a person hires a personal assistant, the person doesn't generally turn around and accuse the assistant of spying on them because the assistant listens too attentively.

I think you're assuming anticapitalist values in a game played by capitalists with venture capital.

This isn't an aberration; it's the goal. Startup companies are group-funded technology incubators that, if they succeed, are consumed by larger technology holding and aggregation companies.

Those companies accepting these offers is often the goal-state of creating the company in the first place.

This is the flow of the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem.

Tesla has a suite of sensors installed that are not currently used because they intend to solve the self-driving car problem with them in the not-too-distant future.

Nintendo released multiple generations of consoles in the US with expansion ports for peripherals that ended up not making market sense to bring to the US.

If there's one thing we've learned from post-Snowden world, it's that most people don't care enough to dodge the surveillance because most people didn't respond by voluntarily throwing out all their computing devices, smartphones, ISP service plans, etc.

It's an excellent open question. I'd argue that relative to training it out of humans, we have a glimmer of hope of building algorithms that avoid racial bias because you can always bust an algorithm open and "examine its entrails," and the same can't be done with human thinking.

... but it's not categorically, definitely better, just more likely to be so.

I believe the article clarifies that this system (much like its sibling, DNA database mining) is used to narrow the search space so that traditional (and comparatively more expensive) sleuthing can find the evidence needed for a conviction. The dragnet is, in a sense, more ruling people out than ruling people in.